By Natasha Khan | Photography by Brian Kaiser for WSJ
MASON, Ohio -- As the nation's dominant purveyor of laundry detergent, Procter & Gamble knows full well that consumers have strong feelings about their wash.
Every time P&G pushes out a new product, it is making a calculated gamble, and the stakes are highest with its crown jewel -- Tide detergent. So when one of the company's top research-and-development executives and its scientists took their latest concoction -- a detergent "tile" called Tide evo -- to its fabric-care sales and marketing team, there was plenty of skepticism.
It had taken years to persuade consumers to switch to Tide pods. Why roll the dice again? What would differentiate it?
That's when "the arrows started flying," recalled Victor Aguilar, who oversees the company's $2 billion in annual R&D spending, referring to the yearslong back-and-forth to turn the new technology into a salable product.
P&G is the biggest consumer-goods company in the world. Its brands -- including Downy fabric softener, Pampers diapers and Charmin toilet paper -- are often the best-known products in their categories. The company has a mantra, taught to every new hire: If anyone is going to disrupt a sector we compete in, it better be us.
Fabric and home care generated 36% of P&G's $84 billion in revenue in 2025, and Tide's signature orange dominates the laundry aisle. P&G controls about 60% of the U.S. laundry-detergent market, and Tide close to 40%, according to Nielsen data analyzed by Citigroup.
For many Americans, the smell they associate with clean laundry is the smell of Tide. So P&G wasn't going to release the next iteration -- the Tide tile -- until it had made it the best it could. That took more than a decade.
Executives at rival companies have expressed bewilderment at the resulting product -- a flexible 3-inch white square made of detergent fibers that feels like a pad of fabric.
They are confused by the shape and surprised by the price. A box of Tide evo can cost almost twice as much as a tub of Tide pods, and can be far more expensive than store-brand liquid detergent. But they are watching closely to see how consumers react.
The decision to create Tide tiles dates back to just after the launch of Tide pods in 2012. That was when Lee Ellen Drechsler, a top R&D executive, stood at a whiteboard with two of the company's most accomplished scientists: paper-towel pioneer Paul Trokhan and dish-soap innovator Mark Sivik.
Trokhan had invented the microregions in P&G's Bounty paper towels that put the soft parts in close proximity to the strong parts, and Sivik the cleaning polymer technology that helps Dawn dish soap remove oil. Their mission that day was to come up with a new format of Tide detergent with improved features, such as stronger cleaning and better odor removal.
Part of the impetus was a limitation of the new Tide pods. Most pods have three chambers, each holding a mix of chemicals. When a pod dissolves in the wash cycle, the chemicals mix and activate. If P&G wanted to add more features, it wasn't feasible to add many more chambers because the pod would become too big.
"We said, let's look into the future -- what are people going to be doing?" Drechsler recalled.
Athleisure wear and other clothes made from synthetic fabrics were becoming more popular. Such fabrics are hydrophobic, or water hating, similar to grease and oils. Odor removal for such textiles is more complicated than for natural fibers like cotton.
The new Tide also would have to work better in cold water than existing products. The company was expecting that as energy costs rose, more Americans would pivot to using the cold wash -- which turned out to be true.
Also, washing machines were getting bigger, which meant larger loads and more soil to remove. Many larger machines don't have an agitator in the drum, instead relying on the tumbling action of clothing, detergent and water to clean. More cleaning power would be required for each load.
Drechsler kept thinking about the weight of Tide's existing offerings. She wanted to make something that would be much lighter to bring home from the grocery store. And packaging the product in a smaller format and a paperboard box would appeal to environmentally conscious shoppers, potentially bringing in new customers who had shied away from the bulky liquid detergent or the pods in plastic jugs.
Soap opera
P&G's strategy of disrupting itself was embraced by William Cooper Procter, grandson of one of the company's founders, who ran P&G from 1907 to 1930. P&G archivist Greg McCoy said Procter reasoned: "If anybody's going to replace the soap business, it had better be Procter & Gamble. Our competition is working hard to do it, so we absolutely need to be the ones to get there first."
Before Tide was introduced in 1946, P&G already had two big detergent brands -- Duz and Oxydol. As the development of what would become Tide gained speed, McCoy said, then-Chief Executive Richard R. Deupree was told that if Tide was introduced to the market, it might hurt sales of those two brands. Deupree's response: Go ahead.
The introduction of Tide laundry powder drastically reduced the time needed to scrub and soak clothes, and it didn't leave a film of soap common with products in that era. The company's earnings tripled over the next decade.
Close to 40 years later, liquid Tide offered better dissolvability and improved technology to wash grease and oil stains. When pods were introduced about 30 years after that, after decades of challenges in introducing single-unit doses, many Americans changed formats again.
Aguilar, P&G's chief R&D and innovation executive, has been with P&G for close to 40 years. Part of his team's job is to come up with technologies that reinvent the way consumers use their products.
"If we were in the chocolate business, we wouldn't simply make a low-sugar option," he said, but invent a "cocoa chewable gummy they never thought was possible."
Consumer products, Aguilar said, evolve on an S-curve -- a cycle of introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Many products peak at about 14 years, he said, so it is important to keep coming up with innovations for the market even when existing products are selling well.
Many of P&G's most disruptive innovations, including Crest Whitestrips and Zevo insect traps, came out of its sprawling R&D campus in Mason, Ohio, not far from company headquarters in Cincinnati.
There are labs for safety tests and rooms for consumer testing. Some have laundry machines. There are a row of showers where researchers behind two-way mirrors can watch people -- clad in bathing suits -- clean themselves, observing how they use soap or shampoo, how they react to the suds or how many pumps they take from a pump-top bottle.
Such consumer-testing, the company said, has helped it meet needs that consumers might not even know to articulate. Company researchers, it said, have identified more than 50 steps a person goes through when washing a load of laundry.
"This is a category where everyone has a point of view," said Marchoe Northern, president of the company's North American fabric-care division, referring to consumers. "What their clothes look like, what they smell like, how they feel on their skin. So at a dinner party, I never have a hard time talking to people about what I do for a living."
After years of research and experimentation, P&G researchers led by Drechsler, Trokhan and Sivik were closing in on a formulation that checked off many of the items they had written on the whiteboard in their first meeting.
The tile that they landed on has six layers of brighteners, soaps and stain and odor fighters that activate and interact with each other only when they get wet. It works well in cold water. It takes up less space than any previous Tide product.
Will it sell?
"So," said Drechsler, "it was time to tell the fabric-care team."
That's what P&G calls the sales and marketing team responsible for pitching laundry products to consumers. That team was skeptical. There was a lot of back-and-forth about what was needed to differentiate the product.
Various teams across divisions would gather at the Mason facility to debate the product around a giant bench at what they call the Shop, where designers make prototypes of products and their packaging.
One designer wanted to make two corners of the tile more curved, to guide consumers toward an easy pickup. Engineers would question the feasibility of mass-producing such a design. Among the ideas shot down: selling the tiles in Pringles-like containers, because it would be hard to get the last tile.
Then there was the all-important smell. Tide aficionados are deeply loyal to the scent of the detergent, so that had to come through in the tiles. P&G called in its master perfumers, who landed on a formulation that is more concentrated and longer lasting than earlier Tide products.
Eventually, everyone got on board. All they needed was a name. They picked "evo," a name that performed well in focus groups.
In March 2024, about a decade after that initial meeting around the whiteboard, the tiles went into test markets in Colorado. P&G is currently rolling them out widely, getting them on the shelves of major retailers like Walmart and Target, and in all 50 states. P&G hasn't broken out sales figures for the new product.
The company is also looking to apply the tile format to other products. It already sells Olay waterless face wash "melts" and water-activated shampoo and conditioner.
P&G's researchers and marketing teams know that shoppers are fickle. Even visibly small differences in packaging, dispensing and performance can tank millions in sales surprisingly quickly. It is now up to the company's massive marketing arm to convince Americans that Tide evo is better -- and worth the premium price.
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June 21, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
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