For Akronites, a bit of local pride swells as they travel the world and see Purell soap or hand-sanitizer dispensers in airports and businesses, knowing the product has deep roots in the city.
GOJO Industries, the Akron-maker and inventor of Purell, has now expanded to two new categories — surface disinfecting and sanitizing spray products for the business to business market and consumer-branded Purell soap.
The sanitizing sprays come in three varieties — a food service surface sanitizer that is formulated to require no rinse, a health care surface disinfectant designed to disinfect for some viruses in 30 seconds and a professional surface disinfectant for offices and schools that GOJO says will kill 99.99 percent of germs on surfaces.
The patented sprays are the only products in the market that have a formula with alcohol as its only active ingredient instead of bleach or other products, said Jessica McCoy, GOJO’s healthy places and digital demand activation business development vice president and general manager.
So is it possible that GOJO’s new Purell Surface Sprays are its “next big thing” since inventing Purell instant hand sanitation?
Company officials are a bit coy in answering, but only because they hint that there’s more to come.
“We are extremely excited about Purell Surface Spray and believe it can be market-making — helping our customers manage germs without tradeoffs — just like our Instant Hand Sanitizer did when we invented it in 1988. At the same time, our Surface Spray is one of many examples of innovations like this in our very full pipeline. Innovation is our life blood at GOJO,” said Carey Jaros, GOJO’s chief strategy officer.
The new sprays launched in September and are available in what GOJO calls the “away from home category,” such as offices, hospitals and schools, or not available to consumers in retail stores. Consumers, however, can get the products through online retailers such as Amazon.com and Staples.com.
The sprays are a long time in the making. The company declared its intent in 2007 to try to expand beyond hand hygiene.
“It wasn’t until 2½ years ago that we got really serious and focused. That’s when we felt that we understood enough of the market and had a technology that we were ready to really go down that path. That’s how we ruminate,” said Jaros.
Patient entrepreneurs
Being a privately owned family business gives the latitude to take time to be “patient” in discovering the right product, said GOJO Chairman and CEO Joe Kanfer, whose late uncle and aunt founded the company in 1946 based on a product they invented to clean rubber factory workers’ hands.
Purell was created in 1988 and didn’t turn a profit until 1997 when it was launched in the consumer market, said Kanfer.
“I think in most public companies, I would have been fired,” Kanfer joked. “Being private, we can take a longer-term view. When you are developing innovative products and solutions, you have a long curve of invention and creation and you also have a long term of adoption. We have to take something the market has never seen before. It takes a certain amount of patient capital.”
Kanfer said the company is excited “that a number of our innovations have really made a difference. We don’t know the exact numbers, but we know the introduction of hand sanitation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives a year. That’s the proudest thing in my lifetime. Pride that it has actually made a difference. It’s nice not to get the flu, but nicer to save a life in a hospital.”
The company has what it calls its “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”: to bring well-being to more than 1 billion users a day. The number is now in the hundreds of millions worldwide.
“The bottom line is we want to bring total solutions to our customers and our customers vary widely — from hospitals to food processing to food service to schools and universities, factories and the consumers,” said Kanfer.
The company is a leader in business-to-business solutions, and it is often from that market that its customers ask GOJO to tackle problems that may lead to new products in both the business market and consumer market, he said.
Sustainability goals
But the company isn’t look for the quickest way to get a product to market. Instead it takes its goals on sustainability — socially, environmentally and economically — very seriously, said Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, vice chair of GOJO and the eldest and only of Joe Kanfer’s four children who works directly with GOJO. Other family members are involved in the Kanfer Family Enterprise and its businesses and philanthropies, of which GOJO is the largest piece.
In 2015, GOJO announced a challenging sustainability goal: it would cut its chemical footprint in half, becoming the first company to publicly declare it would reduce the amount of chemicals it uses.
“We set the bar really high,” said Kanfer Ronick. “We did that because it was part of our role. We were breaking new territories.”
When it comes to new innovations, like the Purell Surface Sprays, “there’s a lot of ‘me-too’ products out there. We probably could have put a Purell product out there and done well in the market,” she said. “It wouldn’t have lived up to our core values.”
You don’t make soaps?
Another new product for GOJO is a line of Purell soaps available in the consumer retail market.
But ironically, in company research, GOJO found 72 percent of people “not only thought we already had a soap, but they liked our soap,” said Jaros. “That’s a very clear message that this is a space people expect us to play.”
The company has long had its GOJO-branded soap in the business market, but there was not a Purell-branded soap.
So the company focused on coming up with a Purell soap for its customers. It has launched Purell Healthy Soap, which company officials said is built on its Purell brand and cleans and nourishes.
The company’s scientists worked on what would work with the biology of the skin to not only clean, but moisturize, said Srini Venkatesh, chief science officer and vice president. GOJO also has come out with a line of Purell Advanced Hand Sanitizer Nourishing with the extra moisturizing elements. (The soaps can be purchased locally at Giant Eagle, RiteAid, Discount Drug Mart and also at Amazon.com, with more stores being added. The nourishing hand sanitizer is not in wide distribution, yet but is available through online retailers, such as Amazon and Staples.)
“Internally, we call (Healthy Soap) Purell 1.0,” said Venkatesh. “We’re not done here. We have a road map for soaps in the future.”
Currently there are three varieties in the Healthy Soap line: Clean and Fresh, Fresh Botanicals and Soothing Cucumber, but don’t look to GOJO coming out with enough varieties and decorative canisters to compete with national retail chains.
“Soap is a serious hygiene product. We aren’t in the business of just coming up with pretty smelly soaps. We are coming up with a soap to clean hands and making their hands healthier,” said Jaros.
Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ and see all her stories at www.ohio.com/betty