Irish Spring Soap

You smelled like bus stop hobo-sex, but for less than a dollar you could fix that.

In the vein of “old man yells at cloud” this is my preferred fist shaking genre, products. I have thoughts on things like art, politics, and the culture, but who wants to be subjected to that kind of garbage. I used to save that punitive exchange for close friends only, these days I am branching out I guess.

So anywho, let me vent about soap. Well not soap as a product category, just my soap: Irish Spring.

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Weapons grade freshness

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What you see in the photo above is what will likely be the last time I purchase bathroom bar soap. I figure I have about 20 years left of ass washing, and traditionally a bar of soap in the shower will last me 2 or 3 months. By the time I do run out, I ain’t gonna be caring too much about hygiene I wager.

But why? Why on earth would someone purchase 120 bars of soap aside from some sort of Howard Hughes-esk pathology? Those that know me would find almost nothing remarkable about this kind of shit, but perhaps for a general audience, illustration is needed.

“WASH YERASS MEN, WASHERASSS!”

SSG A. HILL - Drill Instructor Man

I started using Irish Spring during training in the army in 99’. In the AAFES (post exchange store) on Ft. Benning you had two choices at the time when it came to soap. Irish Spring and Dove.

Both bars have their own special side effects when it comes to teasing and insults. As a guy with the last name Fitzpatrick, I had already endured the “Patrick fits Gerald, Gerald fits Patrick” gay jokes as were the custom of the day, so what new tortures could having an “Irish Spring” in the shower room present me with. Dove however… no room for doves in the infantry.

We were all Irish Spring guys in my training group.

By the time I finished training, I had spent so many hours steeping in the smell of Irish Spring from our showers that I am pretty sure it oozed from my pores.

Uncle Ashy and the decade of dry.

I started using Irish Spring during training in the army in 99’. In the AAFES (post exchange store) on Ft. Benning you had two choices at the time when it came to soap. Irish Spring and Dove.

Both bars have their own special side effects when it comes to teasing and insults. As a guy with an irish last name, I had already endured the “Patrick fits Gerald, Gerald fits Patrick” gay jokes as were the custom of the day, so what new tortures could having an “Irish Spring” in the shower room present me with. Dove however… no room for doves in the infantry.

We were all Irish Spring guys in my training group.

By the time I finished training, I had spent so many hours steeping in the smell of Irish Spring from our showers that I am pretty sure it oozed from my pores.

So in the following 20 years or so, I was just in that groove. I never had to think about it. Which is to say, I took it for granted. The trick is that with Irish Spring, it did such a good job, and cost so little, I would buy one or two packages of it a year, and that would pretty much do it. So when they changed the recipe, I was already too late.

As a design guy I am perhaps ironically, greatly swayed by packaging. Irish Spring rebranded at some point over the past few years, and while the package looked good from a design standpoint and they often changed the box, it was different this time in comparison to the old stuff (exhibit B). When a legacy company “updates” its branding, it means something “new and improved” is coming. Some shit-heeled Product Manager got a bright idea, and a pay bump, and now I have new problems where none existed before. Hooray.

Oh, you BASTARDS!

Maybe I was primed to notice a difference. While the box looked different, oddly enough the form of the soap itself looked the same in some of the new boxes which was, troubling.

Irish Spring always cut corners, but to have the same box with different contents seemed beyond the pale itchy skin, even for the Colegate corporation. To me the bars seemed to be the same soaps, regardless of the box. But somewhere the bars diverged (exhibit C) and our adventure begins in earnest.

The first thing I noticed was the smell, or lack thereof. Idk what is in Irish Spring, but I always thought the jingle for Coast (another bargain soap) fit Irish Spring better; “...the fresh scent opens your eyes”. I essentially identify the smell of Irish Spring with waking up. I am not truly awake until that smell hits my nose half way through my shower like someone popped smelling salts. My brain is on auto-pilot until my Irish Spring alarm hits me.

There was some of the scent I remembered in there still, but it seemed somehow lessened. Sort of like those La Croix beverages, memories of flavor not actual flavor. Even that memory of the scent vanished after a shower or two. It must have been a glazing, or as if it was just wafted over the bar as it rolled off the production line. I tried another bar, and the same thing happened. The spidey senses, they were a tingling.

Leprechaun dust

The next thing was the feel. Irish Spring is notorious to some for drying out skin. To me, an Irish-Italian mutt, a little dry skin is a benefit not a detriment. I got enough self lubrication going on already, the last thing I need is an additional oil layered on top of that. Anytime I ever use any other soap on a trip or at someone else’s house I feel like I have a film on me. Not my normal genetically provided film, but artificial, like I just put on lotion or some such.

After a bar or three of the new soap I just kind of accepted I would have to find a different soap. I could write a whole other 1000 word screed about how bewildering the “health and beauty” isle is to me (I need neither health or beauty, I just need to wash my ass and look less homeless), but I will stay on topic here.

At the end of a rainbow, a pot of old

As I was shopping for a manual on Ebay I saw it. Some folks were selling “original recipe” Irish Spring soap! I say this to you all now only because I have my supply in hand. Not that there would be a run on “vintage” soap, let alone vintage Irish Spring. But I felt like I stumbled upon two things at once.

The first was that I was not in fact imagining things. If there was a market for the old recipe, by implication this proves there was a new formulation rustling my jimmies.

The second was that it was enough of a problem out there that one could charge a premium for the old stuff, a black market serving the fiending masses.

Fun Fact; I don’t know how I would react to a woman using Irish Spring. I am picturing Vasquez from the Aliens movie, which to be fair is my kind of lady.

Now I say “premium” when it comes to price, but hilariously enough it was cheaper to buy the old stuff on ebay. Though again, much like the “health and beauty” isle, amazon is also a bizarre animal. Look at the gamut of these prices in top results on amazon. From $0.17 an ounce to $0.81 an ounce. Package size always plays a role in stuff like this, but seldom does it make THIS big a difference (exhibit D).

The example on the far right of the picture appears like the old recipe, but having made this mistake before, I ain’t buying. In contrast the old stuff I got off ebay, which came from New Jersey, only cost $0.51 an ounce. Not too shabby for 25 lbs of water sensitive product that needs to be shipped. If I walked down to the store I could prolly get closer to the $0.17 an ounce rate, since Irish Spring is reliably the cheapest soap option in the store. Seems like it always has been the bottom rung pricewise, and most likely the main reason it ends up in AAFES.

Mission Accomplished

Alright so to sum up. The new Irish Spring is shit for me, but I managed to sate my psychosis through ebay and at a bargain! So, what’s the problem? (asked no one). The problem is that I had to do this at all.

The beatings will continue, until morale improves.

THE BREAKROOM - every construction shop ever

If someone in the marketing / product dept. at Irish Spring would like to enlighten me, it may be a story I would like to hear. As a currently out of work design guy, I have some time on my hands and would be open to some brand consulting / customer advocate work to stiff arm getting back into the employment pool. But here is a teaser for you:

Sample for your consideration:

Never change your legacy product unless it starts killing people.

As far as I am aware, ain’t no one out there class actioning on behalf of whiskey tangos like me for the hardships Irish Spring has caused us. It may turn out to be “known by the state of California to cause cancer” but here in Michigan there is anecdotal evidence to suggest it is a viable, albeit non-evidence based solution to cancer. At least in this current case study of one.

How is it that Coke taught EVERYONE this lesson by example, so much that it is a meme, yet that meme still manages to elude a collection of marketing PM’s at Colegate?

I don’t want to hear about how New Coke was actually great. I don’t give two shits. Making that argument misses the point. It’s not about better or worse, it’s about what your customer’s value. Not POTENTIAL customers, actual bar buying, mouth breathers like me. It is certainly not about what some brand agent PWC consultant values or perceives as a value. Me (exhibit E).

If it was a profitability problem, raise the price. If it was a growth problem, break off a sub-brand (how many fucking flavors of Dove are there?!). If it was something as stupid as a tooling and sourcing issue, get off your ass and follow the chain and resolve the issue. Rest assured anyone who is working in the factories making the product would have an idea or two about this kind of thing, especially considering most of them almost certainly use the product at home.

“I wonder if this is load bearing?”

MARKETING - your company

Your product has been on the market for 54 goddamn years.

I get it, everyone is looking to “grow” and “scale” and all that. The idea of deodorant soap may not be a pitch for guys like me who now sit at a desk all day. But how stupid do you have to be to take a thing that has worked for 50 odd years and start fucking with it.

Well, apparently you have to be Coke stupid. Worse because you could have just googled “How not to fuck up your product” and had an ocean of examples for reference.

Politics aside, we JUST had the apocalypse over Bud Light. That beer is piss IMHO, and even THEY didn’t change the product. They ate it for a whole year and beyond at the cost of billions for just fucking about and finding out with their actual customers, while in pursuit of the mythical POTENTIAL ones.

I am no longer a customer of yours. Not as some kind of protest, but simply because the previously mentioned black market score I came across, now stored in sealed bags in a back closet of my house.

But on behalf of my brethren who have either failed to pathfind a way to my solution, or can’t be paying a premium for some vintage shit, I suggest (bordering on demand) that you, Irish Spring, get your shit together and roll out an ACTUAL original formula bar for them. Hell, you can frame it as charity, since the soap has always been essentially free anyways. A small nod to smelly, working bastards everywhere.

Irish Spring and Lava are the only two soaps most men I talk to even know, and ain’t none of them degloving their bodies in the shower with Lava.

They prolly HAVE to use the new shit now. Begrudgingly, and in resignation that there is nothing to be done. Another zombie brand they used to love so much, they took it for granted.

We both dropped the ball here, obviously.

Like any relationship that falls apart, blame is a shared burden. But for many out there, there is a chance you can at minimum reconcile. As they say “think of the kids” and work it out. A kid takes 18 years or so to prep for the world, and who knows, in 20 years maybe I will need my next bar of soap, there is time.

My hope is maybe by then Irish Spring will be a good and ubiquitous product again. An essential product for the guys who keep this gravy train on its tracks. Barring that, it will join the scrap heap of legacy brands that now decorate hipster t-shirts that none of them has ever used.