Brush

Tushy

The environmentally-friendly toilet cleaning solution.

Role:

Director of Product Development, Product Design Engineer

Responsibilities:

Engineering director, product co-designer

Project Duration:

1 year, 4 months

Launched:

April 2021

The Brush

The Tushy Brush is the long lasting and environmentally friendly solution to cleaning the toilet. Toilet brushes are an archaic product that nobody finds delight in using, so we took a new approach to redesigning it. This brush drastically reduces landfill waste and expensive plumbing infrastructure repair created by traditional plastic brushes and consumable plastic pads filled with toxic chemicals.

This brush features a sturdy aluminum wand, a “catch and release” hands free pad system, built in pad storage in the base, a antimicrobial bamboo handle as well as upcycled and biodegrable cocnut husk cleaning pads impregnated with all natural and nontoxic cleaning agents.

Problem

Current toilet brushes are disgusting, ugly, and frequently disposed of in landfills.

Insight

People don’t like handling toilet brushes because of their perceived level of dirtiness, but also feel guilty about throwing them away to buy a new one.

Objective

Our goal was to create a toilet brush that changed cleaning the toilet from being an activity people dreaded to one that delighted them.

Deliverable

We designed a brush that was cleaner to use, environmentally friendly with biodegradable cleaning pads, and aesthetically pleasing.

User and Market Research

Toilet brushes have a common perception of being gross and unhygienic and this perception is certainly true. The average household toilet brush harbors harmful bacteria and fecal matter which is why it is recommended to be replaced every 6 months. Most of the toilet brushes on the market are solid plastic and not recyclable making them a huge landfill resident and with this replacement frequency not very eco-conscious.

After learning more about the toilet cleaning journey, we moved towards a solution that embraced eco-friendly materials, was designed for longevity, and was an overall cleaner handling experience for the user.

Cleaning Pain Points

Cleaning the toilet is not an activity that naturally excites most and after digging deep into how many people go about the process we found some interesting data points. We found that most people actually didn’t clean their toilets as often as they should because the experience was so off-putting for them, but when they did clean it was a less than ideal situation.

People didn’t clean as often because they were disgusted by the brush.

The storage container for brushes traps dirty water and bacteria where it can sit for weeks.

Toilets can be tricky to clean with lots of weird crevises and shapes to navigate.

The brush is harder to clean than the toilet.

People only believed a surface to be clean if there were visible suds during scrubbing.

Competitor Pain Points

There are lots of brushes on the market, but they are all so similar in design that they weren’t solving the cleaning problems of their customers. The standard plastic bristled brushes are cheap and fairly effective at cleaning, however they are ugly, very difficult to clean the brush itself, and are thrown away frequently. The more reusable brushes that use silicone bristles and pads are more aesthetic and more hygienic, but they are not as effective at cleaning and customers threw them away just as frequently. Another design we discovered used a reusable wand with consumable cleaning pads that were thrown away after each use. These were the most hygienic option, but we found the materials and cleaning chemicals in the pads were toxic and not eco friendly whatsoever.

Unhygienic to use and store.

Bulky, ugly and does not store well behind the toilet.

Always perceived to be dirty and unappealing.

Not effective at cleaning all surfaces of the bowl.

Environmentally damaging.

Design Requirements

With all of these points in mind, we decided to create a solution that used a reusable wand with consumable cleaning pads made with upcycled and all natural coconut husk (a natural bioproduct of coconut products). We developed the handle with antimicrobial bamboo and the body out of sturdy aluminum.