Posted 11/23/2009 - 1:14:19 PM

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What are these?

NEW YORK— The steam cleaner category is hot, red hot.

In an economy where many business segments consider flat sales to be a victory, the steam cleaner segment is growing exponentially, said vendors, catching consumer attention both via infomercial and on retail selling floors.

The category, which has grown by fits and starts for more than a decade, has caught hold over the past 18 months with the proliferation of steam mops that appear to have captured consumer awareness and shopping dollars.

“Steam is emerging as a quick easy way to clean bare floors,” said Jim Krez-eminski, executive vp and chief customer officer at Bissell. “It’s a better execution than some other formats the consumer has seen and they’re responding to that.”

More than a decade ago, U.S. consumers got their first view of mass market steam cleaners with the infomercial debut of Steam Buggy, a canister style cleaner that sold strongly on infomercial but could not sustain that momentum once it transitioned to the self-serve environments common to most retail selling floors. In 1995, Bissell tested the waters with a handheld steam cleaner that also came with wand attachments for cleaning floors. That product too performed well in initial infomercial tests but also did not sustain its momentum on retail selling floors.

Since that time a number of companies have tested various steam cleaning formats— handheld, canister, multi-purpose— with varying degrees of success. Each new iteration however has served to advance consumer exposure and understanding of the technology and its potential. However, with the development of the steam mop, the category appears to have fully hit its stride, building off existing consumer awareness and delivering a level of convenience that consumers intuitively appear to understand and covet for use in their own homes. The real key however, according to suppliers, has been the confluence of these factors with evolving consumer lifestyles.

“It’s not a question of what has happened recently in the steam cleaning business as much as it is how consumers live,” said Romy Haan, founder of Haan Corporation, a supplier of steam cleaners and garment steamers. “Today’s consumer is demanding chemical-free ways to clean and sanitize their homes. In some cases it is about allergies, fear of toxic effects of chemical cleaning agents or just a general concern for the environment.”

And while the category is widely acknowledged as the fastest-growing segment within the floor care business, it continues to present merchandising challenges on retail selling floors. With very few exceptions, most retailers have presented steam cleaners as an item, often outposting individual items— typically those supported by infomercial— on endcaps, or merchandising a unit from a key supplier as a singular addition to a specialty cleaning assortment.

With the recent rapid proliferation of suppliers, models, technologies and formats, there is increasing opportunity and increasing discussion about evolving the business from an item presentation into more comprehensive assortment statements.

“There’s no question that steam is a legitimate category,” said Brian Cartwright, director/brand marketing at Vornado, parent company of steam cleaner and garment steamer supplier Top Innovations. “At this point you have a number of different players with a variety of shapes, functionalities and breadth of assortment that the consumer would absolutely benefit from having more options.”

Shae Hong, president of Sensio, which recently licensed the Bionaire brand for a range of floor care products that includes steam cleaners, agreed. “I think this is definitely a segment that should be treated more like a category than an item business,” Hong said. “That being said, there are still retailers who have not accepted that, though I believe we are getting much closer.”

He cited as an example the broadening of some retail assortments this fall to merchandise better and best options within individual steam mop segments, often encompassing multiple brands. “When you look at the category today, you need to have something at the $100 plus pricepoint,” suggested Hong. “To get there you also need to tell stories at $59, $79 and $99. To me that would be the perfect mix.”

While such a diversity of pricepoints and corresponding feature sets would have been difficult as recently as two years ago, the recent proliferation of offerings within the category has made it not only increasingly easy, but also increasingly important, to present consumers with a range of options, said suppliers.

“In my mind, this is no different than the way corded vacs are now assorted and merchandised at retail except that the opportunity for retailers is now even better with steam,” said Mark Miletti, spokesperson for Monster USA. “At a minimum I easily envision that any retailer serious about the cleaning category will merchandise at least two or three steam mops with varying pricepoints and features along with one or two handheld steam cleaners. The TV exposure alone would justify this.”

Whether or not steam, which also encompasses garment steamers, is a category unto itself or simply would benefit from greater assortment merchandising remains up in the air, with at least some suggesting that steam cleaners represent just a new means of achieving a long-sought goal— eliminating the mop and broom.

“I’m not sure it’s a category in and of itself,” said Bissell’s Krzeminski. “It certainly deserves more space than one item. But steam is just one execution in the effort to clean bare floors.”

He pointed to a number of products over the last several years, including Bissell’s Flip-It, a sweeper and floor washer and Hoover’s FloorMate, as products that have attempted to address consumers’ desire to find more convenient, time-saving and labor-saving ways of cleaning hard surface flooring. And it is this factor, and consumers’ belief that steam and in particular steam mops, offer a superior convenience alternative to the traditional mop that is helping fuel the category.

The role of bare floors in the American home has become increasingly important in the floor care business as numerous surveys, studies and trade groups have reported the decline of wall-to-wall carpeting in U.S. homes and an attendant growth of multi-surface flooring. It is this long-term trend, underway for nearly two decades, that has led to persistent efforts to develop stick vacs, hard floor cleaners, combination vacuum-floor washers and now steam mops, that can capture consumers’ attention and discretionary dollars.

The challenge now for both retailers and suppliers is to present these products in ways that give myriad consumer demographic and psychographic segments an alternative they perceive as meaningful to their individual home and cleaning style. It is also this evolution within the business that is leading many to seek greater diversity of product on retail selling shelves.

However, this effort also calls out another merchandising challenge, that of presentation. In a universe defined by finite floor space and in which consumers seek cleaning products across numerous departments within the average store format, the question arises as to which adjacencies and presentation methods will best serve to maximize steam cleaner sales velocity while working within existing space constraints.

“For steam mops and canister steam cleaners, it is currently floor care, though I would love to see space open up around mops and brooms,” said Haan. “For portable handheld steam cleaners, it is currently around hand vacs; again it would be great if it could also be merchandised with cleaning chemicals.”

The other issue that will play a role in shaping the category going forward is differentiation, both between individual suppliers and within the lines of each supplier. Until recently, steam mop assortments from individual suppliers have often been built around a base unit, differentiated by the various attachments offered along with it. Over the past 12 months that has shifted as suppliers have increasingly differentiated their individual steam mop offerings through the use of differing technologies, steam delivery methods and the diversity of features found on individual units.

At present for example, individual steam mops can be found that employ electric pump, natural emission or manual pump methods of delivering steam. Heating times, indicators for various functions and methods of filling water reservoirs have also become more diverse. The category is also now seeing the emergence of combination units that offer the ability to sweep and steam floors. All of which are serving to raise the need for the presentation of more diverse assortments at point of sale.

The next battlefield is likely to emerge around product quality and product claims. “There is such a gap right now between the consumers’ perception and the reality,” said Robert Kahn, president of Reliable Corporation, a supplier of commercial steam cleaning as well as retail-distributed steam cleaners. “I think many times consumers are quite literally fed a bill of goods and when it comes to actually buying the product, it disappoints because they’re buying an idea, an image based on visuals and not how the product is made and how it performs the function it is designed to perform.”

The other issue that has been quietly under discussion in the background of the industry this year is product claims. While steam cleaners are often presented as sanitizers— steam at 212° Fahrenheit kills bacteria, germs and household allergens— some in the industry have suggested that under common household use consumers are not actually delivering full-temperature steam to the surfaces within their home. As a result, there has been some discussion of challenging claims made regarding products’ ability to sanitize.

“I remain concerned that the industry continues to make embellished, if not downright misleading, claims relating to their products’ sanitizing ability or at a minimum what you need to do with their product in order to gain any significant sanitizing result,” said Monster’s Miletti. “The notion that steam in and of itself is an instant and effective sanitizing agent has simply not held up when put under the bright light of testing.”

The issue, according to Bissell’s Krzeminski, is not unlike that which arose around UV light technology when applied to floor care or that of certain household chemicals, both of which require “dwell time” to deliver effective results. At present, suppliers differ on the extent to which steam may or may not require such “dwell time” over a surface to deliver on its sanitizing promise.

It remains to be seen to what extent such challenges between suppliers will be pursued and to what extent such efforts will provide meaningful levels of differentiation going forward.

However, on one point suppliers were unanimous: steam is here to stay.

“This is not going away,” said Reliable’s Kahn. “The reality is people are getting fed up using the latest pink-colored gel to clean their home and they’re looking for an alternative.”

And soon they may find multiple alternatives on their local retail shelves.