Scrub Daddy’s next ‘billion-dollar product’? A toilet cleaner to ‘completely change the world,’ says CEO.

Scrub Daddy is going down the toilet. Literally.

The Pennsauken-based company has a new bathroom-cleaning product expected to launch in the fall, and it is “going to completely change the world,” the company’s CEO, Aaron Krause, told the Philadelphia Business Journal this month.

Krause believes the toilet cleaner his company has been developing is going to be a “billion-dollar product,” he told PBJ. The new product is a cleaning “puck,” which has detergent, bleach, and fragrance, and attaches to a wand for users to clean their toilet bowl. Once clean, the user leaves the puck in a basket attached to the bowl where it can continue generating its clean smell in the bathroom between washes. The product is intended to smell better and be cleaner than other toilet cleaners on the market, according to PBJ.

“This is a pain point for people, and if we can solve this, well, we could change the whole toilet industry,” Krause said.

Krause studied psychology at Syracuse University, and after college started a vehicle-detailing business in Bala Cynwyd. He eventually built a manufacturing business that developed buffing pads, which he sold in 2008.

An early version of what would become the Scrub Daddy sponge was originally intended to be a hand scrubber, which Krause marketed to car washes, auto-body shops, and other customers, but it found little demand. One day, Krause used the sponge to clean a kitchen pot that had some tomato sauce in it and discovered that it had a better purpose than cleaning hands.

“We’re missing the boat. It’s not a hand scrubber. It’s the best pan scrubber,” Krause told The Inquirer in 2011 about the discovery.

Scrub Daddy started selling its now-iconic smiling sponge in 2011, and today the company has a line of products that include Scrub Daddy, Scrub Mommy, Big Daddy, and BBQ Daddy to tackle different messes.

The company was featured on Shark Tank in 2012, a competition show for entrepreneurs, and has garnered increased popularity since launching. Scrub Daddy made over $220 million in revenue last year and expects to increase sales to around $350 million this year, according to PBJ. It also opened a 162,150-square-foot distribution center in Cherry Hill in October.

Scrub Daddy has seen success from QVC, the West Chester-based home shopping station, where it sold out 16,000 sets of its Scrub Daisy product in seven minutes, Krause said in 2017.

More recently, the sponges have leaped into social media fame. The company’s TikTok account reached 1 million users in February 2022, according to PBJ, and the hashtag #scrubdaddy had 3 billion views on TikTok in April 2023, according to Food & Wine.

Some of the content on the social media platform is not what some might traditionally expect from a corporate business. In April 2022, 4 million people watched a TikTok video that features a Scrub Daddy character having a baby with the owl mascot of Duolingo, a language-learning app. Scrub Daddy and Scrub Mommy mascots, as well as giant smiling sponges, have been frequently featured in the company’s social media videos which also rely on memes, according to PBJ.

Krause told The Inquirer that TikTok has allowed the company to reach audiences it hadn’t previously attracted with traditional marketing.

During the pandemic, the company saw a boost in sales, as people bought cleaning aisle products, he said.

“For the last two years, people were home cooking, cleaning three times a day, and they have plenty of time to sit and look at videos on their phones,” Krause said. “And because of that, you know, the interest in cleaning products and sponges has gone through the roof, and we’ve been right there with the engaging TikToks.”

The original Scrub Daddy sponge is firm when used with cold water — for scrubbing tough messes — and becomes soft in warm water. The eyes of the sponge allow a user to insert their fingers into them when using the sponge in hard-to-reach places, and the smile helps clean tableware.

Scrub Daddy is also working on “Scrub Body,” which combines a loofah and soap, and which could be offered in different scents, according to PBJ.

After Reuters reported in March that Scrub Daddy was exploring options that included a sale of the company, Krause told PBJ that if he were to sell it, it would likely be to a company that could continue to expand the brand, citing Unilever as an example — a company with personal-care brands including Axe, Dove, and Vaseline, as well as other kinds of products.

“I’m in business to sell things and at some point, everyone should be in business to sell their business because you have to think about your exit strategy,” Krause told PBJ. “It would be stupid for me not to explore what my options are and what the price available to us is. [That] doesn’t mean I’ll ever take it.”