And a former Target marketing executive who had been making luxury cleaning products called Caldrea, pivoted to a more accessible brand, named it for her mother, and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day — plant-based products that smelled like lavender or geranium or basil, not bleach — hit the grocery store shelves. So did Method, designed to match your modernist décor, and which also smelled nice, and the category was forever changed.
That was nearly two decades ago.
What is particular about Safely is not its celebrity boosters, or even its contents. I tried all six of its products, from the Hand Sanitizer, $6, to the Everyday Laundry Detergent, $14. They have pleasant, mild scents: the Universal Cleaner, $6, smells like lemongrass; the Hand Soap, also $6, faintly musky, like sandalwood. They did their jobs.
It is the packaging that is notable.
The containers are simple, and oversize. There is barely any type; the logo, the only discernible graphic, is a large white water drop shape. The different cleaners come in a medley of glowing, minty greens. The whole is distilled into the kind of generic yet brightly colored minimalism that plays so well on Instagram. The products read like Product, with a design so reductive there could be anything in there.
Why not, as Ms. Jenner pointed out, have a coherent array of bottles under your sink, instead of “a bunch of mishmash or doodads that don’t go together?”
I wondered what the greens were. What were their names? Certainly not the Lichen or Mizzles of an English paint company. Or the flat teal that is a foil for so-called Millennial Pink, also known as Baker-Miller Pink or Drunk Tank Pink, from the ’70s-era social science experiment that showed how a certain shade calmed prisoners (and, in 2017, Kendall Jenner, who painted her living room in the rosy hue).
