Clorox wipes remain one of most elusive pandemic items
For six months, May Vanegas hunted her prey.
She scoured grocery stores. She arrived at Target andWalmart early in the morning, hoping to catch a delivery. She followed social media accounts, searching for clues onwhere her quarry last was sighted in her area.
And then, finally, one day in mid-September when the 41-year-old mother of two teenagers stopped at her local Target in San Antonio, she stumbled across what she had been stalking: Clorox disinfecting wipes.
“My daughter and I started screaming in the store, ‘Oh, my god! Oh, my god!’” Vanegas said. “I had given up looking for them in the last month. I had lost all hope.”
Informed the store was allowing shoppers to buy only a single canister, Vanegas and her daughter each grabbed one. The two canisters of Clorox wipes now are displayed on the kitchen counter at Vanegas’ home, trophies from this strange time when American life has been completely upended by the coronavirus.
Most shoppers these days are able to routinely buy common household items like toilet paper, paper towels, pasta and beans that had been in short supply in the early weeks of the pandemic, when consumers were loading up their pantries. But Clorox wipes remain stubbornly elusive.
“We know our products are not everywhere everyone wants them to be,” said Andy Mowery, who, as Clorox’s chief supply officer, is in charge of figuring out how to make more wipes. “It’s a point of personal frustration for me.”
With cleanliness on the minds of many guarding against the virus, the wipes have become the pandemic version of the must-have toy of the holiday season.
Across social media, shoppers share where and when to find wipes made by Clorox, or Lysol — which is owned by Reckitt Benckiser Group — or wipes from other brands. (Only Clorox and a handful of other wipes have been approved by regulators to kill the coronavirus.) Shoppers show up to stores early when deliveries are made and clear out shipments in amatter of minutes.
All of the hullabaloo around its disinfecting wipes has been a strange turn of events for Clorox, which started making and selling liquid bleach as a household cleaning product back in 1916, and presents a big challenge for Linda Rendle, a 17-year veteran of the company who took over as its chief executive officer in mid-September.
The company said it was struggling because demand for the wipes had surged 500 percent in the past few months. After increasing production, Clorox is making 1million canisters of disinfecting wipes each day and to further increase production early next year.
Before the pandemic, Clorox — which also makes Glad trash bags, Kingsford charcoal and Pine Sol cleaner — toldWall Street analysts that, at best, the company would see a 1 percent increase in sales for its fiscal year 2020.
But as the pandemic swept across the United States, sales of Clorox wipes and other household products soared. For its fiscal year that ended June 30, Clorox reported an 8 percent increase in total sales from last year; in the fourth quarter, sales in the category that includes its cleaning products jumped 33 percent from a year earlier.
Clorox’s stock price has risen 40 percent this year.
The demand wasn’t coming from consumers alone. Companies such as Uber and United Airlines formed partnerships with Clorox in hopes of reassuring customers that their locations or services were disinfected.
For Clorox, meeting the heightened demand not only this year but well into next year will remain a challenge.
Only one of the five plants Clorox owns in the United States assembles the finished canisters of wipes; the company also contracts with third-party manufacturers to make the wipes.
Increased demand for disinfecting and cleaning products is hitting Clorox’s supply chain, making it difficult, at times, to obtain the individual pieces that make up a canister of wipes.
These include the plastic container, the lid, the label, the fragrance, the five or so chemicals that are the disinfecting agents, and the substrate, or the clothlike material. They all come from different suppliers, most of them in the United States.
“Putting together these canisters is like baking a cake,” Mowery said. “If you’re missing one ingredient, you can’t bake the cake.”