The global cleaning products market is worth approximately $60 billion annually. It sells primarily water.
This is not a metaphor. The overwhelming majority of cleaning products sold in supermarkets around the world — hand soaps, surface cleaners, dishwashing liquids, floor cleaners, bathroom sprays — are between 85 and 95 percent water by volume. You are paying to manufacture, fill, bottle, label, transport, warehouse, and retail a product that is mostly water. Then you are throwing away the plastic container it came in.
The cleaning industry has operated on this model for sixty years. It is about to change.
The Market Nobody Has Disrupted at Scale
The home care category is enormous, resilient, and innovation-resistant. Major FMCG companies — Unilever, P&G, Henkel, Reckitt — have owned the category for decades with products that are functionally excellent, logistically optimised, and deeply embedded in consumer routine.
What they have not successfully done, despite years of sustainability rhetoric and incremental reformulation, is fundamentally redesign the product format to eliminate the plastic and the water.
Concentrated cleaning products exist. Refill formats exist. Some direct-to-consumer brands have built meaningful businesses on solid or concentrated formats. But mass market penetration remains low. The category has not yet had its version of the oat milk moment — the reformulation so obviously superior in its sustainability credentials, its cost efficiency, and its consumer experience that the old format begins to look indefensible.
GreenClean is built to be that moment.
How It Works
GreenClean is a Swedish cleaning concept built around dissolving concentrate technology. The product — available as hand soap, all-surface cleaner, and dishwasher powder — comes in a small, lightweight tablet or powder sachet. The consumer adds water. The product dissolves in seconds and is ready to use.
Packaging: a GreenClean refill tablet weighs a few grams and ships in a paper envelope. A conventional 500ml hand soap weighs approximately 550 grams and ships in a plastic bottle. The packaging reduction is greater than ninety percent by weight. The logistics efficiency gain is equally dramatic.
Carbon footprint: transporting water around the world in plastic bottles is, when you examine it closely, one of the more absurd logistical habits of modern retail. Eliminating the water from the supply chain reduces the carbon footprint of cleaning products substantially — in manufacturing, warehousing, and retail distribution.
Consumer cost: at scale, concentrated formats can deliver significant cost-per-use reductions compared to conventional products. The savings in packaging, transport, and product formulation can be partially passed to the consumer, partially retained as margin.
Consumer experience: modern dissolving concentrate formulations are, in terms of cleaning performance, equivalent to or superior to their conventional equivalents. The concern that a tablet cannot clean as effectively as a liquid is a legacy perception that does not survive empirical testing.
The best product innovations feel obvious in retrospect. That's exactly how we knew GreenClean was right.
The Nordic Consumer as Early Adopter
Sweden is not an arbitrary location for this concept. Nordic consumers — Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish — are among the most sustainability-activated consumers in the world. Scandinavia consistently produces the highest rates of willingness-to-pay-premium-for-sustainability in European consumer surveys. The regulatory environment reinforces this: Swedish retail and foodservice operators are under meaningful pressure to reduce their plastic footprint, creating a pull from the supply side of retail as well as the consumer side.
A Swedish-origin brand carries a sustainability signal that travels. "Made in Sweden" or "Swedish concept" on a cleaning product communicates something real to consumers in Northern Europe, in the GCC, in Asia — markets where Scandinavian design and environmental credentials are genuinely valued signals.
GreenClean's Nordic heritage is not marketing dressing. It is a legitimate competitive advantage in the markets we are targeting.
Distributors, Investors, and What Comes Next
GreenClean has reached an early but significant milestone. Distributor interest has been secured across multiple markets. An investor has expressed interest in acquiring or investing at a $1 million entry valuation. The concept, the formulation approach, and the brand direction are established.
What comes next is the build phase: finalising the product formulation across the three initial SKUs (hand soap, all-surface cleaner, dishwasher), completing the packaging design aligned with the Swedish eco-premium aesthetic, establishing the manufacturing and supply chain, and executing the market entry across priority distribution channels.
The category dynamics are in our favour. Consumer demand for sustainable cleaning formats in Scandinavia and Northern Europe is growing year over year. Retail buyers at major Nordic chains are actively looking for credible sustainable alternatives to conventional cleaning brands. The regulatory direction of travel — increasing restrictions on single-use plastics, extended producer responsibility legislation — is creating structural headwinds for conventional formats and structural tailwinds for GreenClean.
The Bigger Picture
GreenClean is one of seven owned ventures Investable Studio is developing simultaneously. It represents one particular dimension of our portfolio thesis: that category-defining product innovation in large, stagnant markets — where the status quo is technically indefensible but commercially entrenched — creates asymmetric opportunity.
The cleaning industry is not going to disrupt itself. The major FMCG companies are too invested in their existing SKUs, their existing packaging infrastructure, and their existing retail arrangements to move quickly. That is precisely the opening that a fast, well-designed, sustainability-native brand can exploit.