When I started developing ShowerSpaah, I was going to eliminate the need for people to handle soap bottles. I was thinking about people with poor dexterity, like people with arthritis. I thought the major problem was going to be opening the top of the bottle and squeezing the soap out onto the washcloth or sponge.
Now that we’ve been in the market and sold a thousand products, arthritis and poor dexterity are the number one reason people buy the product. It is certainly also true that it does make the basic use of a bottle of soap so much easier.
But the thing that surprised me, when you think about it, is completely obvious. That is that the real problems arise not when someone is just picking the bottle up and trying to handle it, but when they accidentally drop it.
This is quite common because it is wet and soapy in the shower, and bottles tend not to have handles, so they are quite hard to grip. And of course, then you’ve got to think about what happens when that bottle hits the floor.
The first thing that happens is the person who’s dropped it wants it back.
Now, if the individual is not as mobile as they used to be, which is generally the case, getting that bottle off the floor would be tricky for many people, even in their living room, when there’s lots of space. But in a shower, space is limited.
So they’re trying to bend over in a confined space. They might not have their handy pickup stick, or whatever they might use around the rest of the house, to hand. They are reaching and bending, and are more likely to lose their balance.
Now, losing balance and falling is bad enough in any room in the house, but in a shower it’s particularly bad. In the bathroom, surfaces are slippery, they are wet, and most of the surfaces are hard.
The bath has corners on it. The toilet has edges on it. There are plenty of things to hit your head on as you fall.
And according to leading occupational therapists, the bathroom is the first place where it becomes apparent that people have a need for some kind of support. Of course, the irony is that it’s also the last place where people will tell you what their problems are.
People really don’t want support in the bathroom because it’s kind of that final quality “me time”, and you want to preserve that. You want to preserve your dignity and independence.
So it turned out that the biggest benefit of eliminating the need to handle bottles was not just making it easy to get the soap on you. It was also that there are no bottles to drop, no bottles to pick up, and a vastly reduced risk of falling over when you’re battling to try and pick up that awkward bottle that’s skating around the floor of the shower where you can’t reach it.
And when you consider that 200 people every day will fall in their bathroom and end up being admitted to hospital it is good to be helping eliminate one of the risks.
