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cleaner called Shower Power, the formula for which was concocted in a factory in Yatala,
Queensland. In 1995, Tom Quinn and John Heron bought a struggling cleaning products
business, OzKleen, for 250,000. It was selling 100 different kinds of cleaning products,
mainly in bulk. The business was in bad shape, the cleaning formulas were ineffective
and environmentally harsh, and there were few regular clients.
Now Shower Power is
claimed to be the top-selling bathroom cleaning product in the country. In the past 12
months, almost four million bottles of OzKleen's Power products have been sold and the
company forecasts 2004 sales of 10 million bottles. The company's, sales in2003 reached
$11 million, with 700k of business being exports. In particular, Shower Power is making
big inroads on the British market.
C
Oz
Kleen’s turnaround began when Quinn and Heron hired an industrial chemist to
revitalize the product line. Market research showed that people were looking for a better
cleaner for the bathroom, universally regarded as the hardest room in the home to clean.
The company also wanted to make the product formulas more environmentally friendly
One of Tom Quinn's sons, Peter, aged 24 at the time, began working with the chemist on
the formulas, looking at the potential for citrus-based cleaning products. He detested all
the chlorine-based cleaning products that dominated the market. "We didn't want to use
chlorine, simple as that," he says. "It offers bad working conditions and there's no money
in it." Peter looked at citrus ingredients, such as orange peel, to replace the petroleum
by-products in cleaners. He is credited with finding the Shower Power formula. "The
head," he says. The company is the recipe is in a vault somewhere and in my sole owner
of the intellectual property.
D
To
begin with, Shower Power was sold only in commercial quantities but Tom Quinn
decided to sell it in 750ml bottles after the constant "raves" from customers
at their retail
store at Beenleigh, near Brisbane. Customers were travel-
ling long distances to buy
supplies. Others began writing to OzKleen to say how good Shower Power was. "We did
a dummy label and went to see Woolworths," Tom Quinn says. The Woolworths buyer
took a bottle home and was able to remove a stain from her basin that had been