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Dorward, wearing a smart green vest and a brown suit, pauses, glances over his glasses at the taller Lowry, and answers in a prim British accent: "I'm going into another meeting, and I need it." There's an awkward pause. "We have only one conference phone."
"I know." Lowry rubs his face.
Dorward steps aside so someone can file past him, and after a few seconds' hesitation, hands over the phone and its dangling cords. "You take it."
Dorward, 35, who calls himself "the gray-hair in the company," joined Ryan and Lowry in November 2000, by which point the two young entrepreneurs had realized they would need an older guiding hand to help them transition from their apartment operation to one that could serve retail giants like Target. Dorward, who earned his M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University and his M.B.A. from a business school in France, had excellent credentials: He had founded and presided over a successful venture-backed soup business called Covent Garden Soup Company, which was worth $40 million and at the brink of sale when he left in 2000; he had spent the previous six years providing strategic consulting for executives at leading corporations in London, Warsaw, and San Francisco. Plus, he already knew Eric Ryan, having recently rejected him for a job as head of marketing at his previous company.
"I knew we'd wind up working together someday," Dorward chuckles. "Instead of me hiring him, he wound up hiring me."
Dorward was attracted to Ryan and Lowry because they exhibited a mixture of "passion and humility" that he found relatively rare among young entrepreneurs in the roaring late '90s. He was also struck by how well the two friends blended their respective skill sets – Ryan concentrating on the external forces of fashion and marketing, Lowry on the internal processes of chemistry and product development. When they first told him of their idea for a product, Dorward says, his initial gut reaction was, "Duh. This should have been done before, and I couldn't come up with a good reason it hadn't."
Neither can Tom Vierhile, executive editor of Productscan Online, a trade database that tracks new consumer products and packaged goods. Method's emphasis on look, scent, and safety contrasts sharply with its more established competitors, Vierhile says, who have always tried to sell themselves on efficacy alone.
"The company is really to be applauded, because they've tried to do several things – packaging, formulations, the aromatherapeutic angle – in a pioneering way," Vierhile says. "And if you can come in and be first in something that's defined as a niche, you do have a leg up."
But, he adds, the nonproprietary nature of the packaged goods market makes it easy for large corporations to simply copy the upstarts, and this is one reason the consumer cleaning aisle remains the province of so few companies. There are no trademarks or patents to prohibit a company like Clorox from introducing a line of cleaning supplies mimicking Method; the only obstacle is the high cost – in both dollars and consumer trust – of re-engineering a mass brand.
"But Method may be harder to copy, because they're not just hanging their hat on one thing," Vierhile says. "If a company knocks 'em off, they're probably not going to do five varieties of every cleaner. And I really doubt Procter & Gamble is going to come out with a shower cleaner that smells like cucumber or ylang-ylang."
Indeed, Dorward is banking on the big companies being too entrenched and muscle-bound to rethink their entire approach to a stagnant consumer category that has historically been viewed as unsexy. "We'll never be the core driver of this category, but we can bring some incremental growth to the niche we've been working on," Dorward says. "We're not trying to cannibalize the business of our major competitors; we're looking to grow the category and play to our own strengths.
"We get fan mail you'd expect from a different business," he says with a dry laugh. "We're getting consumers saying, 'We're a Method home. We only use Method products.' You'd be surprised the extent to which our customers become passionately engaged by these cleaning problems. We're onto something ... we're trying to elevate the category from problem-solution to something a bit more inspirational."
Such levitation is made easier when one of your products -- in this case, a Method dish soap bottle – pops up on the counter of Courteney Cox's kitchen in an episode of Friends.
There's a downside to success in the grocery business.
"When we went national, it just ruined shopping for us," Ryan says with genuine sadness. "Every time you go to a Target or a grocery store, you go to the section, and you either get upset that it isn't there, or you get upset it isn't merchandised well ...."
"I eat out almost every night," Lowry says, and he's not kidding. "I hate going to the grocery store. I can't do it."
"It drives my wife crazy, because I disappear every time we go inside," Ryan says. "But she knows right where to find me."
Even when he's not in a grocery store, Ryan can't keep his eyes off the merchandise. His gaze floats back to the sprawling shelf of cleaning products in the corner of the conference room – a hulking symbol of the industry's monotonous uniformity and a constant reminder of Method's still-small stature among the Goliaths. "I was on a flight the other day, and someone asked what I did, and I told them ...," Ryan shakes his head sheepishly. "I told them advertising. It's soap – you can't get too cocky."
