Downy Unstopables: The name IS spelled wrong. But it smells… well, unstoppable.

Perhaps you’ve seen Downy’s newest product, Downy Unstopables. It is an in-wash laundry scent booster.

I first encountered Downy Unstopables at the BlogHer ’11 conference last month. Procter & Gamble had a big booth designed like a house, and bloggers were invited to walk room to room, learning about various P&G products. When I walked into the P&G laundry room, I was immediately handed a towel with a Downy Unstopables logo on it. “Smell this,” the P&G rep said.

I smelled. It smelled great! It was just the way you likely want your laundry to smell when it comes out of the wash: not perfumey — just fresh and clean.

The rep said “That towel was washed six months ago in Downy Unstopables.”

(Oh yes. Think about that for a moment. I did.)

Aside from the “What’s in it that makes the scent last so long” question in my mind, the more pressing question in my mind was this: “Why is the word ‘Unstoppables’ spelled incorrectly?”

The P&G rep did not have a satisfactory answer to that question.

This bothered me. As a writer, a former copy editor, and a Journalism/English major in college, I loathe seeing grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors in professional use. It’s just one of those pet peeves of mine. I’m the kind of person who finds The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks and The Great Typo Hunt both hilarious and sad. I’m so bothered by bad spelling and punctuation that, as much as I love sushi, I won’t even patronize a sushi place near our house because of a punctuation error on its sign. The sushi bar is called “Golden Rolls,” but their sign says “Golden Roll’s.” Know what that apostrophe on their sign is doing? Preventing me from spending any money at Golden Rolls until that sign is fixed. But now I’m really digressing.

Despite Unstopables’ nice and super-long-lasting smell, I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d be rewarding Downy for their bad spelling by buying the product. So I decided I wouldn’t buy it — solely due to the misspelling. (Again, yes, I am that stubborn..!) At the end of the P&G BlogHer house tour, reps stated that attendees would be mailed full-size samples of many of the products we saw during the conference.

About two weeks ago, the P&G samples did indeed arrive… including a bottle of Downy Unstopables.

I opened it up and was immediately rewarded by the nice, clean smell I remembered from the six-month-old towel. And since the smell is so long-lasting, I started thinking about what I could wash with it. Keep in mind that it’s not actually a fabric softener (in fact, Downy advises using regular Downy in conjunction with Unstopables if you actually want the laundry softened.)

Figuring the good smell would wash out the next time the clothes is laundered, I started thinking about what I could wash that wouldn’t need to be washed for awhile again.

The first load of laundry I did with Unstopables consisted of the floor mats from my car and the area rugs from my kitchen. Both my car and kitchen smell fantastic now – you definitely notice the fresh, clean scent when you walk in the room or get in the vehicle.

Then I washed the kids’ fall jackets. Blankets. A comforter. A duvet cover. Mattress pads. All of which still smell delightfully fresh now nearly two weeks later. You know that feeling you get when you change the sheets on your bed, then climb into those clean sheets for the first time and notice how good they smell? The bed smells like that every day… and I haven’t actually washed the sheets themselves in Unstopables — just the rest of the bedding.

So, against my wishes, I really do like this product. Is it worth paying money to scent one’s laundry on a long-lasting basis? That’s up to you. I will tell you that there are not a whole lot of loads’ worth of Unstopables in the bottle. I’ve done five loads of laundry so far with it, and half the bottle is gone. I’m guessing I will get a total of 10 loads of laundry out of this.

I think you’d have to really wash things that you want to smell good for quite some time in it… or things that probably could, by their nature, use a scent boost. During my “what else should I wash in this?” experimentation, I threw my daughter’s gym suit into one of the Unstopables loads without telling her. After wearing it on Monday, she came home and said (and these were her exact words:)

“Oh gosh, what did you do to my gym suit? It smells so good! When we started running in gym, I smelled it and… you have no idea. Mom, this is weird but I asked my friend to smell my shirt, it smelled so good. What did you do to it? Did you wash it in something special?”

So there you go. It does smell good. So good that you might be compelled to ask a friend to smell your shirt.

… 

This past week, I got an email from P&G’s publicist asking if I had tried the Unstopables yet. I wrote back and said that I really liked the product but the misspelled name is driving me crazy to the point that I can’t decide whether or not I want to spend money on it. Did she have an official response on why “Unstopables” is misspelled?

Here’s P&G’s cheeky response:

To answer your question regarding the spelling of the product name, Downy chose the word “Unstopables” to embody the playful and feisty spirit of the new product’s unique form. The name puts a spin on the word “unstoppable” similar to how Unstopables puts a fresh twist on your laundry! However, Downy and Procter and Gamble definitely do not endorse the misspelling of the word “unstoppable” in daily usage.

So there you go. I also have a suspicion that trademarking “Unstopables” with this spelling was easier than trademarking “Unstoppables.” I know from my limited experience with trademark law that it’s very difficult to secure a new trademark on a common, normal word. It’s a lot easier to register a trademark on a “nonsense” or misspelled word. And Unstopables is indeed a P&G trademark.

If you want to try Unstopables for yourself, they’re giving away 2,000,000 free samples on Facebook this month. You can request a free sample of Downy Unstopables… and start thinking about what you’d like to wash in it.

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Note: I received a bottle of Downy Unstopables in a box of free P&G samples sent to BlogHer ’11 attendees. I was not asked or required to review this product, and I have received no compensation for this post. I’m also not sure if I would buy Unstopables unless the product was on sale with a good coupon. I do know I’d be far more inclined to buy it if their logo looked like this:

(There’s nothing that a little Photoshopping can’t fix.)