Natasha Kahn

One of the things that Victor Aguilar, who is in charge of P&G's $2 billion annual R&D budget, and I were speaking about is that consumer products really evolve on an S-curve.

So there's a cycle of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

So according to him, many products peak at about 14 years.

So for them, it's really important to keep coming up with innovations for the market, even when existing products are selling well.

So actually, the development of these Tide tiles, which took about 10 years to make, they really started that process very soon after pods were first launched to the market.

P&G, they invest a lot in observing consumers and understanding consumers.

And there were a few things that they identified as maybe the trends that we'll be seeing now.

It's interesting because they were predicting this in the early 2010s.

And it's things like athleisure wear and synthetic fibers being a lot more popular.

It's things like, you know, maybe with energy costs being on the rise, Americans would prefer to...

have a solution where they can wash their clothes in cold water.

So these are things that they would observe and then come up with this.