quip Refillable Mouthwash is a fresh take on an important step of your oral care routine. Traditional mouthwash lives in your cabinet, hidden away from view and forgotten. With this in mind, we created a dispenser small and beautiful enough to live on display, in order to remind users to swish daily. Designed to be elegant and compact, this mouthwash takes up little space and looks great on your bathroom counter, helping users form better oral care habits.

With sustainability & design top of mind, the refillable dispenser is designed to be refilled with a concentrated mouthwash. We've made it intuitive to use by dosing the proper amount of concentrate at the press of a button. Our refill bottles are smaller than other mouthwash on the market, and fully recyclable in an effort to reduce plastic waste.

The refillable dispenser and one refill bottle allows for 45 uses. The 4x concentrated formula (1 part mouthwash concentrate to 3 parts water), eliminates having to buy those bulky, plastic bottles that often get forgotten under your sink. Like many quip products, mouthwash refills can be easily added to users' ongoing refill subscriptions.

Since the launch of quip's first Electric Toothbrush in 2014, the company has focused on designing products that people enjoy using with features that guide and encourage good habits. Now quip is extending its strength in oral care and its intuitive and enjoyable design-ethos to transform yet another important aspect of our daily oral care routine: Mouthwash.

Similar to the other oral care products created by bigger legacy brands in the industry, there has been little to no innovation within the mouthwash category. quip's approach to mouthwash was based on the desire to make oral health simple and affordable for more people by making good oral care habits an intuitive and enjoyable part of a daily routine. So quip set out to create a solution that removed the typical "burn" often associated with mouthwash, as well as addressed a key drawback of traditional options — specifically doing away with the eyesore bulky plastic bottles that get stashed away under the sink and in bathroom cabinets, ultimately forgotten and unused.

A major focus of the project was to dig into what allows a mouthwash bottle to earn a place on top of the sink. Through a series of conversations with mouthwash users, we found it came down to a mixture of the product not matching their aesthetic and the bottles being too large to easily store on the counter. This led to both physical and formula explorations. The physical exploration focused on how to make the device appear as a piece of decor rather than an obvious part of a oral care routine and the formulation exploration focused on how to concentrate mouthwash as much as possible.

With user research, we were able to qualify this approach and found that with a combination of a prescriptive dosing mechanism and the peace of mind of mouthwash being delivered; we would be able to make the device fully opaque. This allows the mouthwash to live as a sculptural object, proudly displayed on the bathroom counter both elevating the space and serving as a daily reminder to use the product.

To make sure this sculptural object didn't take up the same amount of countertop space as it's competitors, we dug into into a concentrated formulation to reduce the size of the dispenser as well as reducing the carbon footprint of the product. By removing water from the formula, we were able to concentrate the mouthwash by 4x resulting in major savings in footprint and activating the opportunity to build a dispenser around a formulation bottle.

The concentrated formula follows the same thinking of reducing our impact on the environment beyond reducing plastic waste. Since the bottles take up far less space we are able to more tightly pack them in our shipments. This allows for shipments to be much more efficient in both our direct to consumer and retail channels. The smaller bottles also reduces the storage burden on the user should their mouthwash arrive before they finish the bottles they received in the previous refill cycle.

Since the formulation is concentrated, the dosing of that experience becomes a critical focus. Like all other functional touch points on quip products, the dose button is molded in a soft rubber. The button travels along a tuned track to provide a smooth travel until the button is fully depressed. When the button is fully pressed, the mouthwash fills a pouring chamber which we purposefully decoupled from the refill bottle. This allows only what has been dispensed to be poured from the dispenser, making for a higher degree of accuracy with a simple mechanism. To round off the dosing experience, we carefully surfaced the inside of this chamber to make is easily accessible for cleaning and to also allow liquid to pour easily into the dose cup.

In our design research, we learned that the dose cup was especially critical to the success of our concentrated formulation. The first aspect is giving the cup a place to live with the device to keep all the elements neat and tidy. This resulted in the cup sitting in a groove around the dose button, allowing any remaining liquid in the cup to flow back into the device and giving room for air to flow through the cup to dry. Additionally, this inversion of the cup disguises it as an element of the product rather than outwardly reading a dose cup. The dosage cup must also be functional so we molded the dose lines into the structure, delineating the markings with texture rather than printing. This contrast allows for quick legibility when filling at the sink but becomes invisible when at rest.