A GLOBAL TOILET-PAPER SHORTAGE HAS BROKEN AMERICAN CULTURAL TABOOS, BUT WITH SUDDEN GROWTH COMES NEW HAZARDS
April 18, 2020 12:00 am ET by Christopher Mims via the Wall Street Journal
Jason Ojalvo, CEO of direct-to-consumer bidet company Tushy, knew that America’s backsides couldn’t wait. Watching demand skyrocket on his online sales dashboard as America’s great toilet-paper crisis of 2020 left store shelves bare and shoppers panicking, he decided to take drastic measures to guarantee ongoing supply.
He would ship bidets directly from China by air.
It wasn’t exactly the Berlin airlift, but if Americans ever adopt bidets en masse, scholars may some day view it as a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. bathroom habits.
In the midst of a global pandemic, relatively inexpensive add-on bidets—widespread in many parts of the world but never popular in the U.S.—are experiencing a hyperaccelerated transition through the life cycle of a new direct-to-consumer fad. Suddenly these bidet companies are approaching their “Casper Moment,” when a fad becomes a new consumer-goods category, epitomized by a handful of companies. This draws the attention of competitors as well as consumers—and requires tough choices about how best to take advantage of demand that may prove fleeting.
“We’re having the cultural moment that we spent the past five years preparing for and we’re not going to blow it,” says Mr. Ojalvo, who previously spent nearly a decade at Amazon’s Audible unit.
Launched in relative obscurity, bidet specialists including Tushy and Omigo spent investor cash on customer acquisition through targeted advertising on Instagram, Facebook, Google and Amazon. It’s the classic direct-to-consumer playbook, popularized by Casper, Allbirds and Dollar Shave Club: simple product, sophisticated marketing.
‘We’re having the cultural moment that we spent the past five years preparing for and we’re not going to blow it.’
— Jason Ojalvo, CEO of Tushy
Casper, for anyone who missed it, became the avatar of a nationwide turn toward buying mattresses online, something unthinkable before Americans realized that the kind made from foam could be rolled up and shipped and, for many people, worked as well as the bulky versions sold in showrooms. Investors once had high hopes for the company, but ongoing losses going into its public offering led to a lackluster IPO.
Bidet companies might also find that sudden growth in demand doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term success. They have already started to encounter the headwinds that come with mass adoption, including the potential entry of big retailers, and competition from cheap Chinese knockoffs on Amazon.
For tens of thousands of Americans, including my household, the time for a bidet has arrived. At about the moment I found myself, as part of my preparation for obeying a stay-at-home order, filling a shopping cart with toilet paper, a bidet suddenly made a whole lot of sense. I had never tried one, and its operation was a mystery to me. But members of my household had been aggressively targeted by online advertising for it in the past, leading to a discussion about whether it would work for a house that included a crew of high-spirited kids.
The French invented the bidet in the 1600s, as a way to freshen up without taking a full bath. In 1980, the Japanese company Toto released the modern, add-on bidet toilet seat, an invention on par in the bidet business with the iPhone in terms of the debt owed to it by all subsequent designs. Toto then introduced the bidet seat to the U.S. in 1990 and domestic competitors began offering alternatives by the early 2000s.
Toilet paper became scares after many people emptied stores in a panic in March. A customer in Wheaton Md., reached for one of the last packages in a Giant store this week.
Spikes in sales of bidets could have long-term implications for the entire toilet-paper industry, says Svetlana Uduslivaia, head of home and tech research at Euromonitor. Research suggests that households that adopt them reduce their toilet-paper consumption by up to 75%, she adds. In Japan, 80% of households with two or more people have bidets, but it took decades for the country to reach that level of adoption.
Market penetration of bidets in the U.S. is in the single digits. Historically, that may be because Americans associated them with bordellos, sexuality and other matters that seemed vaguely scandalous and French. But demand began spiking in early March. On March 8, Chicago-based BioBidet, which was incorporated in 2008, got an unprecedented 4,000 orders for its entry-level SlimEdge bidet attachment on Amazon alone. Almost immediately, BioBidet ordered more than 50,000 more bidets from its suppliers in East Asia, says senior marketing director James Amburgey.
In San Francisco, Brondell, founded in 2003, saw sales growth throughout March that put it a year ahead of where it had projected it would be before the crisis, says Steve Scheer, president of Brondell. The company’s online offerings are almost completely sold out.
Kohler, the Wisconsin-based plumbing, bathroom and kitchen giant, saw bidet orders increase eight times compared with a year ago in March, says a spokeswoman.
Two-year-old Omigo, newest of the online-only bidet startups, experienced a 12-fold increase in daily sales on March 12, says Tom Lotrecchiano, its co-founder. The company is now sold out entirely of its two models of bidet attachments and is quickly running through its stock of much pricier bidet toilet seats. Reorders are on the way, but “we’re scrambling,” says Mr. Lotrecchiano.
Tushy realized in the second week in March that if sales through Amazon and its own website maintained their pace, the company would be completely out of bidets by the weekend. By that Thursday, sales were 10 times normal. Mr. Ojalvo, along with company founder Miki Agrawal, formerly of reusable period underwear company Thinx, examined their supply chain to figure out how they could keep up with demand.
That was when they chose to start shipping their bidets on planes.
That meant shipping costs would be three times what they had been spending before. The Tushy team immediately put designers on the task of shrinking the packaging for their bidets to limit the damage. Airfreight is usually reserved for the smallest, highest-value items, like iPhones. But trans-Pacific passage in a shipping container can take 30 days, and Tushy couldn’t wait.
Companies like Brondell, BioBidet and Kohler, built in an age dominated by traditional retail, have simply run out online. But Omigo and Tushy, having always been direct-to-consumer, are able to manipulate their online advertising spend in order to address shortages.
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For Omigo,that’s meant giving up on what could easily be three to four times the volume of orders the company is currently shipping, says Mr. Lotrecchiano. The company’s leaders decided to keep Omigo’s ad spend steady rather than increase it to capture surging interest because it would lead to too many disappointed customers as wait times stretch out, adds Mr. Lotrecchiano.
Tushy, by contrast, first zeroed out its online advertising budget for a few days, and then began bringing it up again slowly, deciding that the crisis has created so much interest that it no longer needs as many targeted ads on giant platforms like Amazon, Google and Facebook as before the crisis. Where before Tushy might spend a big chunk of the $79 price for its entry-level bidet on advertising—direct-to-consumer companies often spend a third of revenue on marketing—it has been able to redirect that money to its higher shipping costs, says Mr. Ojalvo.
Airfreight costs are still squeezing Tushy’s margins, but the company’s leaders have decided that, because people who buy their products tend to become bidet evangelists, every one they can get into customer’s hands now will lead to more sales in the future.
Booming demand for bidets hasn’t gone unnoticed by the direct-to-consumer sellers on Amazon’s marketplace. As of this writing, the add-on bidet Amazon has designated as “Best Seller” is from an outfit called Tibbers Home, which has no easily findable web presence outside of its Amazon seller page. One model of Tibbers Bidet costs $124 and ships free to Prime members. A bidet listed as the same make and model costs $33, including shipping, on the bargain shopping marketplace Wish, where goods often come directly from manufacturers in China and can take weeks to arrive.
U.S. makers of bidets I talked to decry the quality of inexpensive models direct from China, of which there are an endless variety. But the kind of bare-bones add-on bidets sold by all of these companies vary little in their design. All are slim enough to be installed underneath an existing toilet seat in about 10 minutes, and consist of a hose that attaches to a toilet’s water supply, a valve to control water pressure and a nozzle that sprays water. That’s about it.
‘Our competitor is toilet paper.’
— Mr. Ojalvo
The simplicity of these add-on bidets is one way they are similar to mattresses, another category that was “disrupted” by upstarts that capitalized on a straightforward and inexpensive technology. For mattresses, it was the replacement of bulky springs with high-density foam. Mattress startups made what is one of the cheapest and most abundant forms of plastic on earth more appealing mainly through clever marketing.
The low barriers to entry for companies offering basic bidets, plus the spike in demand, are reasons Omigo’s Mr. Lotrecchiano is convinced we’ll see major retailers release their own house-brand bidets in the next six months—just as happened in direct-to-consumer mattresses, where Walmart created a subbrand as its answer to Casper mattresses.
Paradoxically, the functional equivalence of all these bidets is one reason Tushy could come out ahead in the end, fulfilling its leaders’ aspirations to make it the Casper of its category. By focusing on aesthetics, the company hopes to position itself as the hip alternative to stodgy, traditional bidets. “People care about design, especially if you live in a small place in New York City and you want to look at things that feel good,” says Ms. Agrawal.
For now, the biggest barrier for all of these companies remains Americans’ historical reluctance to use a bidet at all. “Our competitor is toilet paper,” says Mr. Ojalvo.
It took some getting used to, but eventually everyone in my own household, including the kids, figured out how to use our new bidet. We’re now using a fraction of the toilet paper we once did, and the thought of ever going back to plain old toilet paper is about as appealing as cleaning my hands with a dry paper towel instead of soap and water.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
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