If you’re enjoying the soft feeling of your jeans or
shirt against your skin at the moment, the odds are
good that you owe a debt of gratitude to a woman
named Audrey Gaiser. She wasn’t an inventor or an
executive or a marketer, but something better than
all three: She was an inspiration.
In 1965, Audrey and her husband Conrad
lived on the top two floors of a duplex apartment
building. The washing machines were down in the
basement, leaving Mrs. Gaiser to watch the clock
and then dash down the stairs at the end of the
wash cycle so she could add the fabric softener
(more than likely Procter & Gamble’s Downy
brand, which hit the market in 1960).
“Today, 80% of the washing machines have
rinse drawers—but back then, nobody did,”
explained Nate Lawton, P&G’s brand director of
fabric care. “So you had to open the machine and
catch the rinse cycle.”
While this drama was unfolding, Conrad Gaiser
watched his wife with increasing concern and then
finally decided to help. By giving Audrey a break
by doing the laundry himself? No, of course not.
Instead, Mr. Gaiser fetched some flannel from
the sewing basket and doused it with some liquid
fabric softener, then tossed it in the dryer to see
what would happen. Incredibly enough, it worked
nearly as well as the liquid softener.
In 1968, Gaiser secured U.S. Patent No.
3,442,692 for his dryer sheets, which he called
Tumble Puffs. Seeing the opportunity, P&G bought
the rights from him, tweaked a few things and
introduced the result in 1972: Bounce.
Today, Americans spend some $400 million
on dryer sheets—which both soften clothes and
neutralize static—and a whopping 90% of the
market belongs to Lever Brothers’ Snuggle and
P&G’s Bounce, though the latter is the dominant
brand and has essentially become synonymous
with the category. The sheets are so widespread
and easy to use that most of us give little
thought to how they actually work: Fabrics that
tumble around in the dryer build up electrons
by rubbing together, creating static cling when
the positive and negative surfaces fuse to one
another. By bouncing around inside the machine’s
drum (that’s how the product got to be called
what it is), Bounce neutralizes those charges
with a coating of a chemical called dipalmethyl
hydroxyethylammoinum methosulfate. Meanwhile,
ordinary fatty acids provide the softening effect.
But the softening and antistatic effects,
desirable as they are, might actually be the runner-
up reasons why so many people use the brand.
Softer clothes are less likely to need to be ironed,
Lawton explained, and ironing “is the second most
hated chore behind cleaning the toilet. So dryer
sheets allow [consumers] not to have to worry.”
That’s a lot of benefits crammed into a
simple sheet you just throw into the machine.
So, thanks Audrey.
Soft Sell Americans were already acquainted with fabric softeners
well before Bounce came along, but it was liquids, not sheets, that did
the softening. Before most Americans had access to electric dryers,
laundered garments dried by hanging outdoors on a clothes line.
But air-drying left cottons hard as plywood. Early fabric softeners
addressed the problem with tallow or olive oil, but chemical compounds
improved results and Procter & Gamble’s Downy, introduced in 1961,
made their use widespread. The fabric softener category remains
large—it’s valued at some $1.3 billion—though younger Americans
don’t appear to use as much of the stuff as their parents did. Part of the
problem is fear of chemicals, but another factor is simple economics: a
load of laundry is simply cheaper if you leave the softener out.Bounce caught shoppers’ eyes with
the groovy typeface and colors of
the 1970s (1), though the product’s
roots were in the previous decade
when Conrad Gaiser invented a
dryer sheet he called Tumble Puffs
to help out his laundry-laden wife
Audrey (2). Gaiser soon sold his
patent (3) to P&G, which introduced
the newly named Bounce to the
market in 1972 (4). Since its
introduction, Bounce has launched
many product extensions, including
a formula aimed specifically at
loosening pet fur from clothing (5).ADWEEK® | MARCH 16, 2020 55
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