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Chapter 1: What is the story behind Izal medicated toilet paper?
Hello, welcome to Toast, the BBC Radio 4 series that digs into brilliant businesses, brilliant brands that once promised so much, but somehow they still ended up toast. I'm the BBC's business journalist, Sean Farrington, joined, of course, by Sam White, entrepreneur, business expert. Sam has no idea what's coming up.
We keep her in the dark so we get her reactions as she hears the story herself for the first time. And this episode... we're checking out a product that many people may well remember from their childhood, may be surprised to learn it only disappeared relatively recently. Sam, hello. How are you?
I am very well. I can see that you get the usual level of joy at me being in the dark and you not being in the dark.
Of knowing what we're talking about today. 100%. Well, it is quite good, particularly this one. I'd be so surprised if you knew the story behind it, but you may have a sense, literally a sense of what this was like back in the day. It was a product... that was first made in Sheffield and it became familiar because it was present in a lot of British bathrooms.
Oh.
Right, so there were slogans attached to it. Mother knows best. Now wash your hands. Medicated toilet paper. Isol medicated toilet paper was stiff, brown, coated in disinfectant, sold not as a luxury, but as, this is a quote, an invisible guardian against risks to health.
LAUGHTER
OK.
This is ringing no bells, is it?
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Chapter 2: How did Newton Chambers innovate with disinfectants?
So briefly, there's sort of a scale of... hardness or discomfort that we're looking at here. And by 1956, when this market research is happening, they were writing that the market was within sight of saturation. So basically, not everyone was buying toilet paper yet.
So the psychologists found that in Glasgow, a lot of people were still using newspaper because there was a dislike of spending money on something you were literally going to flush away or dispose of. In Yorkshire, especially amongst men, softness was seen as unnecessary, a bit frivolous, and also a little bit worrying that it might not be up to the job of a good, solid, manly wife.
Too right.
Whereas London looked quite different. So women and more cosmopolitan consumers were much more open to the idea of soft toilet tissue. What the research showed was that the trend everywhere was heading towards softer paper, but there were big differences in who was going to get there fastest.
1973, Newton Chambers actually sold its Eisel division to Sterling Winthrop. One man who remembers Eisel well from the 1970s is Nicholas Goodwin. Thank you for joining us on Toast, Nicholas.
Goodness, I never thought I'd end up talking 50 years on about Eisel medicated toilet rolls. Why was it a standard feature in your family home then? My mother got a sales job with Sterling Health, who sold Isle toilet paper. She would go around to the local co-op and take orders for stock. The problems were often, if the shelves were empty, she had to fill them up as well.
And so therefore, we carried around the boot of the car boxes of Isle toilet paper, which of course smelt. So the car smelt. And it was just that ongoing smell that just never went away. I'm sitting here now thinking, goodness, How did people ever buy that?
But they did. Well, someone else who remembers Izal pretty well is the writer and broadcaster Adrian Chiles.
I was born in 1967 and for some reason it was the only toilet paper we ever had in the house. I don't know why my mum bought it, but I didn't know to ask the question because I thought everybody used it. And then I went to school and, of course, that was what there was in school toilets.
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Chapter 3: What role did public health play in the popularity of Izal?
So Jays had fought back, trying to buy the Eisel business. Then finally, in 1986, Jays won. It bought the Eisel brand from its then-owner, Sterling Winthrop, and this is a good time to bring Nicholas Goodwin back into the conversation. Nicholas, Eisel had been part of your childhood, but it became part of your adulthood as well.
Just tell us how. Wasn't the plan. I joined Jay's as an accountant in the mid-80s. I thought I was joining a consumer goods business with lots of exciting products and so on, realizing later that actually Jay's was all about toilet care. So Jay's wanted to own everything around the toilet, and naturally, toilet rolls fitted with that.
Therefore, having Eisel was a crucial part of that overall portfolio.
And what did the financials look like? How profitable? Because you imagine that the markup on toilet roll, particularly this toilet roll, would be really good. It wasn't very good, actually.
It wasn't very good, I'm afraid. Nowhere near as attractive as I would have liked. But I think, again, it was the fact that actually you didn't want to discontinue it because... You had a consumer base who took it personally. If you stopped making a product they wanted, it affected badly on the company as a whole. So it was crucial to make sure your consumer was happy.
And therefore, that's why the product stayed within the portfolio for many, many years.
So Jay's continued making this Eisel paper, by this stage only in boxed sheets with steady sales. In 2006, readers of The Independent got a bit of a surprise when they learned that Eisel paper was still holding on.
As part of their look at old brands that refused to die out, it was proudly declared that Eisel paper is still on shelves and at 69 pence for 210 sheets in Sainsbury's, it's not particularly cheap. Jane Howe worked at Jay's as toilet care marketing controller, later moving into the marketing director role. Who was still buying Isle at that point, Jane?
Certainly most of the letters were about where can I find it? And they were coming from older people, definitely the older generation, like 70 plus. So I think that the older consumer just wanted to stick with what they knew. So yeah, it was sold in like the smaller chemists. It was a tiny... niche brand that was selling to people that wanted it and they were going searching for it.
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