By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Rich Owen, President and CEO of Redox Brands Inc. which owns the Oxydol and Biz detergent brands in the Biggs store in West Chester Monday morning (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

WEST CHESTER - Redox Brands Inc. is a small company with a big mission: Making laundry detergent cool.

Its current signature project is Oxydol, the 89-year-old brand Redox bought in mid-2000 from Procter & Gamble Co. The company is trying to create an Oxydol image that is less like Tide, P&G's laundry goliath, and more like Mountain Dew, the soft drink with the cool ads that has become the icon for teens and 20-somethings.

"This category has never had a Mountain Dew," Rich Owen, one of two ex-P&Gers who founded Redox, said. "That whole irreverent angle really struck a chord with the group we were trying to get to."

So far, it's worked. Helped by a liquid version, Oxydol's annual sales have quadrupled to $21.1 million in less than three years. Sales of Biz bleach, purchased a few months later from P&G, topped $30 million last year.

But it isn't enough for Redox, which has a goal of 10 brands and $1 billion in sales after 10 years. It won't try to develop most products from the ground up, but rather pick off those that bigger companies don't need, or form alliances to market those brands.

Depending on the brand, that will mean even more advertising targeted to the consumers that all marketers covet: Young people, particularly young mothers.

That emphasis led to the company's first Oxydol campaign, designed by Cincinnati's Benchmark advertising. Under the tagline, "Get dirty, we dare you," the campaign featured brighter colors, irreverent graphics and plenty of pictures of athletic young people throwing their bodies into the dirt.

Consider the directions on the back of liquid Oxydol: "Follow the care instruction on your labels. If you've dressed yourself properly, they're in the back."

"Moms still like to think of themselves as younger than they are," Owen said. "(Our target market) is not the group you see on the box, but it's the younger end of the moms-with-kids set."

Benchmark president John Carpenter said that age group boasts rapidly increasing income, a media-savvy skepticism and an independent streak that might work against established brands they view as stodgy.

"It has to be relevant, but it also has to have an element of entertainment to it," he said.

Redox is hardly the only marketer aiming for that consumer. In detergents, for example, European giant Unilever has rolled out a Wisk Sport version. For laundry, hardly the sexiest of categories, the movement has been particularly slow.

"You don't often see the words excitement and laundry in the same sentence, but there has been a shift to try to spruce up old brands," said Brian Sansoni of the trade group the Soap & Detergent Association. "That's what you have to do to produce some buzz in a mature consumer-products category."

When detergent makers say "mature," they usually mean "slow-growing." That's particularly true for powdered detergents, which are quickly losing ground to liquids.

Redox's first move was to put a liquid Oxydol on the shelf. It then launched the "Get Dirty" campaign, which has evolved away from the traditional television ads into media targeted to younger mothers. For example, Fit and Sports Illustrated for Women magazines are prime vehicles, Owen said.

Owen is convinced that cutting-edge print ads and packaging will put Oxydol in the game for the moms who are the primary buyers of laundry detergents. He said there's another campaign coming this year.

And the company soon will unveil products in the "Oxi-active" category popularized by the late-night commercials for OxiClean. Redox probably will restrict itself to cleaning products, he said.

On a shelf at a local Kroger store recently, there were six stacks of Oxydol on the shelf, compared with 42 stacks of Tide and 11 of Cheer, one of P&G's mid-priced detergent entries. Wisk Sport was touting a deal with Russell Athletic gear.

Tide was priced at $7.99 for 100 fluid ounces, with Oxydol at $6.99 for 80 fluid ounces.

One local retail customer said Oxydol was making a dent.

"They're a lot more aggressive with their pricing than P&G was," said Randy Miller, a buyer at Bigg's. "They're steady. It's a steady product."

"It's good to have someone who can put a dent in Tide or Campbell's Soup of whatever it is," Miller added. "You have to have competition in your section, or you wouldn't get any promotion from any vendors."

Owen said the results from Oxydol are only the beginning for Redox, which outsources all of its manufacturing, research and distribution operations.

"People ask me, `What do you guys really do?'" he said. "We don't do anything we don't have to. We outsource everything except the brains and the talent.

"Now that we've busted this thing open and showed the model works, we could take it anywhere," he said.

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com