Washington - The cheerful room packed with babies and watchful grownups could be a day care centre anywhere – except for the lab-coated researchers sticking plastic tubes into toddlers’ nappies.
This is Procter & Gamble’s baby-care research centre at its Cincinnati headquarters, one of five similar facilities around the world. Here researchers are pushing the boundaries of nappy science and style.
In this experiment, they’re injecting warm saline at precise “pee points” in the nappy, which differ for boys and girls, and then weighing the nappy to determine absorbency.
The research is designed to protect the Pampers brand, P&G’s biggest, and maintain a technological edge over generic nappy makers and Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies.
“We’re trying to build a nappy that is zero leakage, ultimate dryness, ultimate comfort, with an underwear-like fit,” said Al Maingot, who oversees baby-care research from Singapore.
While birth rates have slowed in the US, developing markets in Asia and Latin America are generating millions of new baby bottoms a year. Only 11 percent of total nappy sales came from the US last year, according to Euromonitor, and through 2018 the firm forecasts 7.5 percent sales growth there, compared with 44.8 percent in the Asia-Pacific region.
The disposable nappy has come a long way since 1961, when it was created by a P&G engineer tired of cleaning his grandson’s cloth nappies.
The company replaced pins with tape fasteners in the 1970s and added absorbent gel in 1986.
In 2010, P&G introduced Dry Max Pampers, dubbed the biggest nappy innovation in 25 years because they were 20 percent thinner and twice as absorbent as before. It’s nothing like the bulging packages of yesteryear, more like a pair of padded underwear.
For all of P&G’s advances, branded nappies have lost ground in the US to generic brands, often sold at a discount.
Their nappy share has marched upward in the past decade, to 18.6 percent last year, according to researcher Euromonitor International.
Although its share has declined, Huggies has been the leading brand in North America over the past decade, followed by Pampers. P&G has the leading market share when you combine Pampers and its Luvs brand.
“It’s a very, very competitive category,” said Donny Chi, an analyst with Euromonitor.
Competition from rivals is hardly P&G’s only challenge. Parents can be finicky, especially if they believe the latest version of Pampers isn’t as good as the last or may be hurting their child.
Not long after Dry Max nappies went on sale, parents convinced that they were causing rashes and chemical burns took to blogs and Facebook demanding that P&G recall them. The company denied the claims, and US regulators eventually declared the nappies safe.
The Pampers brand is critical for P&G because it connects the larger company to moms, the “core consumer”, said Virginia Morris of Daymon Worldwide, a product-development and brand consulting firm. If moms are happy with their babies’ nappies, the halo effect may benefit P&G’s other products, Morris said.
So P&G is constantly souping up nappies with softer fabrics, snugger leg bands and sleeker shapes to persuade parents to pay up. Since the recession, P&G has managed to hold on to its 35 percent global market share and raise prices.
P&G and Kimberly-Clark continue to the lead the industry in the US, Morris said, because many parents would rather pay the brand premium than take a chance on generic nappies.
P&G’s breadth of products and categories gives it an advantage over rivals because divisions borrow technology from each other. Pampers use mesh found in feminine-care products, while the disposable absorbent fabric used in Pampers has showed up in the Swiffer line of mops.
Each year, researchers conduct more than two dozen studies, interview 9 000 mothers and log hundreds of hours of interviews and baby-centre observations.
Researchers watch how babies move, sit and fall. They measure urine’s “gush volume” and drop metal weights on wet and soiled nappies to see how they stand up.
They make adjustments constantly. Newborns have looser stools than older babies. So last year P&G adjusted the so-called poop zone and added absorbent material to small-size Swaddlers nappies.
P&G’s baby-care division is a patent factory. About 5 000 have been granted or are pending. One is for so-called curly fibres, rotini-like strands of cellulose that wick liquid away from babies’ skin faster than typical straight materials. The curly fibres, now used in all Pampers nappies, make the nappies feel drier to the touch and are more absorbent.
To make sure the fibres are consistent, Nancy Myers spends her days peering into a scanning electron microscope at a packed jumble of wavy strands magnified 20 000 times. Are the molecules the right size to let air in and keep liquid from oozing out? Are any fibres damaged? Dirty?
If there are problems, the nappy goes back to the drawing board in the company’s 1 858m2 prototype laboratory, where workers assemble new models by hand.
If a caregiver down the hall at the baby centre has a suggestion, maybe for a wider fastener or a lower leg cuff, the people in the prototype lab will mock up a version. The lab churns out 150 000 models a year, most for nappies that won’t come to market for up to a decade, and only after hundreds of versions, said Aaron Seitz, the lab’s director.
Down the hall from Myers and her microscopes, David Maltbie is watching 3D virtual babies on a screen that runs the width of the room, checking their virtual nappies for flaws.
As a faux infant pees, Maltbie monitors how the liquid disperses through the nappy. Is it leaking? Puddling somewhere? If he spots recurring problems, he reports them to the researchers.
Then it’s back to the drawing board. Again.
Because babies come in so many shapes and sizes, Seitz says “fitting a nappy is like trying to fit a snowflake”. – Bloomberg News