The Clorox Story: $500 to $130 billion

“World-changing ideas generally evolve over time as slow hunches rather than sudden breakthroughs.”

In 1913, 5 guys in San Francisco each invested $100 to launch a liquid chlorine-based solution… The Ultimate Story of Product-Market-Fit.

A miner, lawyer, banker, bookkeeper, and a coal purveyor. The company was called Electro-Alkaline Company and their goal was to bring disinfectants to the dirty world of manufacturing plants and factories.

In hindsight, a liquid-based chlorine solution was a great product. It cleaned well, was stored conveniently in bottles, and was relatively inexpensive. But over the first 3 years, sales were dismal as Electro-Alkaline Company was mainly focused on targeting large corporations and factories.

The public didn’t know much about liquid bleach in 1913, but they were about to. 3 years after launching the company in 1916, founding investor William Murray took over the company as general manager. However, it wasn’t Murray’s efforts that would eventually position Clorox as America’s top home cleaning product — it was his wife, Annie Murray.

The Pivot

With a garage-full of inventory and dismal sales, Annie packaged her husband’s liquid bleach into 15-ounce sample bottles and gave them away at their family-owned grocery store in downtown Oakland. Word got out about Murray’s secret cleaning solution, and almost immediately she had housewives flooding the grocery store to buy more.

By 1917, the Electro-Alkaline Company began shipping Clorox bleach to the East Coast via the Panama Canal. On May 28, 1928, the company went public on the San Francisco stock exchange and changed its name to Clorox Chemical Company.

And, as they say, “The rest is history.”

Product Market Fit - Is it a Product or a Solution?

The Clorox journey is the ultimate story of product-market-fit. There’s a lot of smart people building really effective products. But more times than not, their products are just products.

A great product can create a great business only when it solves a problem that a lot of people deal with.

For the Electro-Alkaline Company, they created a product that was really great at solving a number of different problems. But they positioned their product as the top cleaning solution for factories and corporations, until Annie Murray realized households may be a more applicable (and much larger) market for liquid bleach.

From there, the rest is history. Clorox is now a $130 billion business and you can find one of their 50+ products in the cleaning aisle of any grocery or convenience store throughout America. A fun story about the power of pivoting to achieve Product-Market Fit without adding unnecessary complexity.

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