In Germany over the past twenty years wet wipes as an addition to dry toilet paper have become a common sight in German bathrooms. Nowadays, Germans spend around €100 million per year on wet toilet paper. You can find it in approximately 30% of all German households and it’s even up to 40% of Austrian and Swiss households. Now, I don’t think German-speaking nations are particularly fastidious about their personal hygiene but undoubtedly they like their cleanliness. And the thing with wet toilet paper is, once you have tried it for the first time you are truly converted. I have never heard anybody saying that they’ve gone back to the dry solution only. Frankly, it is a no-brainer that wet wipes clean far more efficiently. And as much as Germans like their cleanliness they like efficiency.

A rather personal matter
From my own experience, what always amazed me was that my usually very pristine and organized parents put up with some ugly plastic containers in a hideous dazzling flower design that cluttered the top of the toilet tank. Even dedicated containers that you can find in some people’s bathrooms are far from ideal. If you get the wet wipes out of their sealed plastic container and put them in the dedicated box they will dry up in no time. If you put the sealed unit straight from the supermarket shelf into your box at home you not only struggle with first opening the box, then fiddling with opening the plastic seal of the packaging but you also advertise your toilet routine rather loudly to all people on the other side of the bathroom door with the sound of crunching plastic. Not everybody’s cup of tea. A lot of people with a rather sensitive nature even try to hide their wet wipes in the bathroom all together because they still feel embarrassed to put them on display.

So, what is the ideal, discrete solution for our beloved toilet wet wipes that would provide a convenient and efficient way to make an inevitable daily necessity more pleasant? One should think the answer is easy: A standard piece of bathroom equipment that goes on the wall, somewhere next to the toilet roll holder, that is a dispenser specially designed for wet wipes to achieve moisture retention over a long period and guarantees smooth and easy dispensability from the first to the last wet wipe and that comes in all sorts of looks to satisfy all sorts of tastes. The problem is, there is no such thing.

Which leads to a more philosophical question: Who should offer household wet wipe dispensers? It’s like selling frozen food to people who haven’t got a freezer. Is it enough to sell it in a cool bag that people can put on their worktop in the kitchen? Or should you sell them a proper freezer as well? Or do you leave that to the white goods industry? Fighting for a multimillion dollar market, sooner or later the hygiene industry had to come up with their own dispensing solution because bathroom equipment manufacturers weren’t prepared to fill the gap and come up with a state-of-the-art household dispenser that sets a defined standard for every bathroom in town. Eventually, about ten years ago some of the biggest toilet wet wipe producers came up with what they thought was the right accommodation for their product: a wall mountable dispenser that looked and worked pretty much like a normal toilet roll holder hidden in a round metal case. You had to stick a wet wipe roll in the dispenser and then pull the string of sheets out, just like you do with dry paper. It was a disaster for obvious reasons—no vacuum, no moisture retention—and they had to take it off the shelves very quickly and quietly.

That means back to square one. There is no bespoke dispenser that ticks all the appropriate boxes.

Necessity is the mother of invention
A few years ago I moved to England and met Roger Boulton, a very experienced plastic injection mould tool designer. God knows why we started talking about toilet wet wipes. He told me he and his wife had used them for 25 years since the birth of their first child, thinking what a brilliant way to keep truly clean themselves. But we immediately agreed that there is only one problem with them: no appropriate, dedicated, functional, efficient accommodation for them in the bathroom. So, without further ado Roger decided to do something about it and design one himself to fill the gap in the market once and for all. I love English pragmatism, which comes entwined with amazing creativity. And because there was no blueprint on the market, he could only rely on logic and professional experience. This is what he came up with: A Springthing.

What is a Springthing?
Literally, the most pressing issue was to find a solution that insures moisture retention and at the same time easy dispensability. So, some sort of force had to be applied on the pack of wipes in the sealed wall-mountable unit that we aimed for. A conventional compression spring doesn’t do the trick. After loading, the pressure on the wipes would be very high so that one would struggle to pull just one wipe out and when the pack is nearly finished the pressure wouldn’t be high enough, which increases the difficulty to get a wipe out at all and therefore would also affect the efficiency of the vacuum by allowing air into the dispenser while one is trying to reach a wipe.

Therefore, Roger tried to find a suitable spring that applies a constant force to maintain a vacuum by keeping the wipes pressed against the sealed front of the box. To his surprise there was no such constant force compression spring. With his usual pragmatic approach he designed one that suited the task at hand. The result is a unit that contains an extension spring, which is used in a reversed way, so that it works like a compression spring. This spring actuator sits on both sides of a wall mountable box, which accommodates many different types of standard wet wipe packs. By filling the box with a new pack (as it comes from the supermarket shelf—just peal the plastic seal off—the spring in the actuator gets extended and due to its nature starts pressing on the back of the pack to coil up again. The constant force provided kills our two birds with one stone. It sustains the vacuum and insures that there is always a wipe right at the front that is easy to pull out.

Furthermore, it solves the headache of people with babies and toddlers. Have you ever tried to change diapers, when your wiggly offspring keeps you occupied while you are fishing for a wet wipe in a loose plastic container that eventually ends up on the floor? A properly wall mounted unit is the hassle free answer.

The status quo
So, there we are. Finally, by thinking out of the box we’ve got the box that ticks all the boxes. The feedback so far from everybody involved in the process has been very encouraging. We have spoken to consumers, spring manufacturers and people in the hygiene industry in the UK and in Germany and got top marks.

Of course the principle of using an extension spring in a reversed way is nothing new. You can find it in plenty of point-of-sale solutions. But our specific modus operandi is unique. Therefore, two years down the line our Springthing and our wet wipe dispenser just got the U.K. patents granted and an international patent application is launched. The patents now belong to our recently founded Springthing Limited and we are in the process of considering all options. We are seeking licensees around the world but we might decide to go into production ourselves.

Outlook
Apparently, in the U.S. not even 10% of households use wet toilet paper, so the market potential is still enormous. Only recently, top American toilet wet wipe producers have pumped millions of dollars into yet another advertising campaign, trying to change consumer perception in favour of the double act toilet paper plus wet wipes. Even celebrities like Will.I.Am are contributing to help the community of wet wipe users grow. In a 2011 interview with the ELLE magazine he said that only dry toilet paper and no baby wipes next to the toilet in a girl’s bathroom is a ‘deal-breaker’. But there are still two main hurdles to take for the industry.

Number 1. We are creatures of habit. It takes time to achieve acceptability in people’s minds and add something to a centuries-old, firmly established cleanliness routine. According to Wikipedia the use of paper for hygiene purposes has been recorded in China in the 6th century AD. The more convincing and convenient and the more ‘must have’ you make it, the easier it will be to achieve the changes with blanket coverage. Our household wet wipe dispenser could contribute significantly to take this hurdle. Imagine you are invited to the Joneses (or nowadays, I guess, it’s the Kardashians) and you discover their wet wipe dispenser, neat and tidy on the wall by the toilet. You ask them about it and they give you that pitiful look that says, ‘You haven’t got one yet? You are still stuck in 20th century hygiene standards? You better keep up.’

Number 2. The industry still has to solve the major problems most wet wipes create for the sewage system. Consumers are well aware that by flushing wet wipes down the drains they risk clogging their pipes and creating a massive long-term problem for the environment in general. As long as there is no easy break-down solution for them, people will always be reluctant to use wet toilet paper.
Of course we don’t want to go back to Roman times when everybody used a sponge on a stick to clean their bottoms. And not every bathroom has the space for a bidet, which still is, let’s face it, the most environmentally friendly and hygienic method. There are other options like the Bio bidet that provides a toilet seat with a jet so that you can transform your toilet into a bidet with a bit of DIY involved. But it needs electricity, is difficult to clean and the jet mechanism is rather delicate. Or you can use a spray to moisten your toilet paper and by doing so turn it into wet wipes. But conveniently, you would need a dispenser for that too, and, closing on a final blunt note, fingers tend to push through wet tissue paper.

Jeannette Schaefer is director of Springthing Limited, an English/German product design team. If you would like to have a closer look at how the wet wipes dispenser works, visit www.springthing.co.uk. You will find two PDF files, which give exact drawings and explanations, as well as contact information.