Unilever’s Persil ties up with laundry app as it tries to get ahead of changing consumer behaviour

Similarities to its tie-up with ZipJet have been drawn to its recent acquisition of the Dollar Shave Club, a subscription service for shaving products.

While ZipJet’s co-founder and managing director Lorenzo Franzi stresses to The Drum that the two deals are different, at its heart the ambition is the same. Unilever is desperately looking to foster loyalty for its products among millenials by means beyond marketing. However, it admits that trying to “re-educate” brand managers to think like this is either impossible or “takes so long the market would have moved on.” Buying into a company that has already done so is considerably easier and faster.

“When you look at more mature on-demand industries – like car-sharing or taxi hailing world – leading players are investing or setting up their own and you see that consumer behaviours are changing across industries. It’s the same in consumer goods – although maybe it’s happening a little bit later – but big players want to be a part of that change as well,” said Franzi.

ZipJet has around 20,000 active users across the three cities where it operates - Paris, Berlin and London. London the most established, counting around 10,000 active users although across the board ZipJet claims to see very high repeat usage.

And so driving trials of product at scale is not necessarily what Persil is hoping to achieve with the deal. Instead, it will go some way to helping it understand how millennials are using these services and where its laundry product fits in.

For its part, ZipJet said with the partnership it will be offering up data, analytics and insight into how people’s habits are changing when it comes to the billion-dollar dry-cleaning market in the UK.

“We are like retailers in that we are collecting a lot of data on our consumers and patterns. This is very interesting when we talk to Unilever,” ZipJet’s Franzi told The Drum.

“It’s interesting to bring the biggest brand in the laundry space into ZipJet and to see what kind of impact that has on us and our acquisition of new customers and if that will help us grow faster because people have the trust and recognise the [Persil] brand. We want to show that we’re about laundry, not just dry cleaning.”

With this in mind, Franzi said he would consider more partnerships of this ilk as the brand looks to grow. Within its partnership with Persil there could yet be opportunity to expand, particularly into categories for people with particular needs.

“Persil has bio and non-bio and our customer have already expressed a desire to access these products. So we could think about other products, like sensitive-skin.”