In 2018, The Pink Stuff was more than just a household cleaning product with a cute name. The ‘miracle cleaning paste’, as it claimed on each container, was sold by just two retail chains in Britain. At a factory near Birmingham, The Pink Stuff line ran for about two hours each month. That was enough.
“It was a multi-use brand,” said Henrik Pade, CEO of Star Brands, the company behind the product. “But nobody used it.”
In fact, The Pink Stuff—which is, yes, pink bubblegum—had some fans. One of them was Sophie Hinchliffe, then a 28-year-old hairdresser in Essex, about 30 miles east of London. Mrs Hinchliffe had found out about The Pink Stuff on Instagram, of course, and had started posting daily videos to her then-new account, @mrshinchhome. All the videos were snippets of her ongoing campaign to expose the house she had just moved into with her husband.
It was Mrs. Hinch, as she called herself, using a toothbrush to scrub the grout in her bathroom. Here she polished her candlesticks. If it was stained, The Pink Stuff would clean it, she told her small but growing audience. Don’t buy new tiles, he advised. Spend 99 pence and restore the old ones. He also recommended other brands. Pink Stuff was just a favorite.
“Hinchers,” as her devotees were soon christened, found something meditative and satisfying in watching a chatty, glamorous, yet respectable woman clear away the dirt. And these people weren’t just chumps. They were asking the cleaning chief for product advice.
When “hinching” became a verb – defined as “to clean vigorously” – in Britain, the Pink Stuff’s days of obscurity were over. Stores that carried it found customers waiting for carts to come by to get all the small tubs they needed. Or more.
“I said, ‘What have you guys been doing?’ I can’t catch any!” Ms. Hinchliffe said in a video interview. “Then The Pink Stuff got in touch and said, ‘Do you want us to send you some?’ And that’s when I learned about the whole world of influencers.”
Ms Hinchliffe, who has 4.8 million followers on Instagram, never took to TikTok – “I struggle to keep up with a platform,” she explained – but The Pink Stuff did. Pink Stuff-related videos have been viewed more than two billion times on TikTok, Star Brands says.
The Viral Bump
Pink Stuff brings together a patchwork of once-obscure products that have been transformed by the internet and TikTok in particular. It’s a roster that includes the Hoan Bagel Guillotine, the Stanley tumbler, and Carhartt beanies, to name just three. However, the increases in sales achieved through online fame can be fleeting. Just because a new product is getting on the viral train — look, it’s the Dash Mini Waffle Maker! — doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there.
According to Star Brands, which began tracking online mentions of The Pink Stuff a year and a half ago, the hashtags are consistently seen by about 20 million people each week. Sales have quadrupled since 2018 to about $125 million a year, a modest amount compared to giants in this space like Clorox, which has annual revenue of more than $7 billion. But nobody at the company’s headquarters in Leeds thought that figure was possible a few years ago. The factory now runs three Pink Stuff lines, around the clock, with a workforce that has more than doubled. The product is now sold in 55 countries and is available at Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon.
“We don’t spend money on traditional advertising,” Mr. Pade said. “It’s completely viral. Which is a bit scary because we have no control over our brand message.”
Marketing experts say this puts The Pink Stuff in a precarious position. When the fortunes of a previously unknown product are built by social media, they are at the mercy of forces that can be monitored but not managed.
“The goal should be belief, not idealism,” said Marina Cooley, professor of the practice of marketing at Emory University. “Virality is dangerous because it’s fleeting, it doesn’t stick. People get excited from the first interaction and then look for the next viral thing.”
The original version of The Pink Stuff was released in 1931. It was as pink as it is today, but carried a decidedly less glamorous name, Chemico Bath and Household Cleaner, and came in a gray glass jar. Until 1948, it was packaged in a pink tin, although it wasn’t until 1995 that the manufacturer fully leaned on the color of the product, adopting its current name. New owners took over Star Brands in 2018, hoping to breathe new life into some cleaning products. They soon hired the brand’s first social media guru, but the sales needle barely moved until the Ms. Hinch phenomenon began. The company didn’t approach her until after she had developed a following. (They offered her the product for free, but didn’t pay her for her endorsement.) The whole thing was a fluke. “You can’t plan to go viral,” Mr. Pade said.
Welcome to #CleanTok
As TikTok grew in popularity, Pink Stuff hashtags became part of #CleanTok, or videos offering tips, tricks and hacks for hygiene enthusiasts. For several years, it has been one of the most durable positions on the platform. To date, there have been approximately 110 billion global views of #CleanTok videos, far ahead of #BeautyTok, with 78 billion global views, according to data provided by TikTok to Unilever.
A typical #CleanTok video features a so-called “cleanfluencer”—some with more than a million followers—working over a sink, pan, or floor, with a specific cleaner and a specific brush. There are usually before and after images, making these little vignettes a cross between a commercial and an episode of “Law & Order.” They begin with chaos and end with a verdict.
“People find it very soothing,” said Lori Williamson, a cleaner who lives in Toronto and recently garnered more than a million views on a video of herself cleaning a hair dryer. “Others say it’s motivation.”
She has collaborated with 20 brands, though not The Pink Stuff. He found out after Ms. Hinch introduced it, but before Star Brands ramped up production, which it did in 2020, and bought a North American distributor, which it did last year.
“It cost $24 to get it,” Ms Williamson said. “I was so upset.” (It’s now $4.99 on Amazon and is carried in about 30,000 stores worldwide.)
How well does The Pink Stuff work? The vast majority of #CleanTok videos are triumphant stories — pink stuff defeats every surface in a bathroom, pink stuff revives a sneaker. Someone in the comments section always asks the same question: Do pink things have a name?
There are also Pink Stuff mishaps, such as pots that remain covered in baked-on dirt. One woman warned that The Pink Stuff did not fix scratches on her car, which it is not designed to do.
Wirecutter, a consumer review site owned by The New York Times Company, tested The Pink Stuff and concluded that it was good, but overdone.
A happy ending
Ms Hinchliffe started posting videos to manage her anxiety and help her connect with others, like herself, who were more comfortable at home than mingling with strangers.
“If I started getting anxious or panicking for no reason, I’d get my mop, or I’d get my Hoover or my cloth and I’d put on the music and be done with it. ” he said. “And I would find that I was no longer focusing on what I was worried about.”
With her fame, came Penguin Random House. Her debut, Hinch Yourself Happy from 2019, was the first of a handful of books to reach No.1 on The Sunday Times best-seller list. They also called brands. Ms. Hinchliffe is now working with Procter & Gamble to create versions of Mrs. cleaning products. Hinch. Once a year, he travels to the company’s offices in Brussels and perfects their scents. Today, she lives in a five-bedroom farmhouse with her husband and children, along with a dog, chickens and alpacas.
An upbeat ending is harder to predict for The Pink Stuff. It’s no longer up to Ms. Hinch, but if the goal is to create a product that lasts, Star Brands has some work ahead of it, said Professor Cooley of Emory University.
“It doesn’t sound like there’s an adult in the room, leading the worship,” he said. “There needs to be someone dictating a communications strategy – working with influencers, working with retailers.”
Four years ago, when Gen Zers discovered Vaseline, he noted, Unilever created a handful of new versions of the 152-year-old Vaseline, such as Gluta-Hya Vaseline, which it touted as 10 times “more glowy” for skin. from vitamin C. In other words, the company was catering to the new crowd.
Star Brands’ Mr. Pade says The Pink Stuff works with influencers, but there’s no point in trying to control them. The tub’s design has been tweaked a bit, and the company operates a four-person social media team to monitor hashtags and produce in-house posts. Otherwise, The Pink Stuff entourage drives itself. Brand advocates can spot sponsored content a mile away, Mr. Pade said, and they don’t like it.
“Interest will wane at some stage because the popularity of cleaning will be overtaken by sex or drugs,” he predicted. “But once people hear about The Pink Stuff through social media, they try it.”
The sound is produced by Tally Abecassis.
