Soap Companies and Washer Companies

[northwesty]

Hi Gang,

I was just looking through a 1949 Kenmore Laundry appliance booklet – I was a little disappointed because my machine was only on the front cover / no mention inside – but I noticed that about the first half of the book is really trying to get me to buy RINSO and LUX soap. I also noticed in my Westinghouse booklet that they are pushing ALL. Did other automatic washing machine companies have corporate deals with other soap manufacturers? Is this just corporate “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine?” My wandering mind is just curious.

 

[jeb]

westinghouse/ all

As I understand it the Westinghouse company developed All laundry detergent for there front loaders-(regular detergents did not work well because of the suding) All originally was a "no" sudsing detergent but housewifes complaint that they didn't like not haveing any suds so it went to a "low" sudsing formula

 

[pulsatron]

recommended detergents.

I do recall many years ago here in Australia, Simpson washing machines recommended what was then called "Square deal Surf" which was of course the precluder to modern Surf,Fisher and Paykel recently have started recommending Omo and for many,many years manufacturers of front loaders have recommended Omomatic,indeed if you look at a box of Omomatic,you will see the names of quite a few manufacturers on it,I also believe that Maytag were recommending Dynamo for their machines.
I am not sure if these companies are doing deals, I suspect it is just a bit of corporate backscratching as you mention.

 

[jamiel]

These are pretty clearly promotional tie-ins which are governed more by a contract between the soap company and the washer co.

P&G and Tide pretty much locked up the automatic washer space except for frontloaders, which went with All (which was part of Monsanto until about 1957, when they sold it off to Lever Brothers---too expensive to sell when that was your only product...AstroTurf was another 15 years away!). Monsanto had developed the low-foaming surfactants which worked well in the f/l, and it allowed Lever to dominate a small subset of the detergent market (i.e. controlled suds)...so Lever dominated controlled suds and liquid (Wisk) and was an also-ran in heavy duty powders (Rinso), P&G dominated heavy duty powders (Tide/Cheer), and Colgate-Palmolive only had Fab until mid-60s when they did Cold Power and cornered that side of the market.

 

[northwesty]

Thanks Jamie and everyone else for the information

If that is the same Monsanto as that synthetic bovine growth hormone and nutra-sweet, they have been busy. Didn't know they did soap too.

 

[brisnat81]

The HE F&P

Which is the Australian Oasis/Cabrio, has a cover over the soap dispensor advising to use OMO Matic (HE) ONLY. Most Frontloaders in AU in the 70's and 80's also only recommended OMO Matic.

Dishwashers have always been the big one with reccomendations, with most always comming with a box of Finish inside.

There was one hooked up in a department store which is very unusal in AU. I could power it up, and get it to spin etc.

Its in a huge cabinet compared to most AU machines.