Say No To the Jug: the Method Laundry Detergent Put To the MyBrownBaby Test

I need you to be really clear about this one true thing: I’m a laundry detergent snob from way back. Dead serious: for my entire 43 years on this Earth, my clothes have been washed with the same detergent my mother used from when I was a kid. I love the stuff—the way it smells, the way it makes my clothes feel, the way it’s helped them keep their shape and color. All of it. In fact, full disclosure? When I was pregnant, I wanted to eat the powdered version of the stuff. No lie.

Yup—another topic altogether.

Anyway, when the good folk at method asked me to give their laundry detergent a whirl as part of their Method Mavens program, I was mad skeptical. Like, tell-the-method- owners-to-their-faces-that-I-can-do-the-hand-soap-dish-detergent-and-all-purpose-and-wood-floor-cleaner-method-products-but-your-laundry-detergent-just-won’t-do skeptical.

And who can fault me? I’ve been down that “try another laundry detergent” road before. I’ve tried the cheap one and had it leave pilings on shirts and sweaters and turn the underarms of t-shirts yellow. I’ve tried the “smell good” detergents that leave clothes scented like flowers, but can’t get the stupid grass and mud stains off my kids’ soccer uniforms. Same goes for the “green” detergents that promise my kids won’t get the chemical cooties, but fade clothes so badly that even our newest outfits look like I copped them from the $1 bin at Salvation Army.

After a lot of trials and way too many errors, I’d slink back to my old favorite laundry detergent every time—apologizing for choosing price and empty promises over what has been tried and true.

And then there was method. The heads of the company triple-dog dared me to stack their detergent against my favorite and over the last two months, I took them up on the challenge, ditching my tried and true for the new and unfamiliar. And holy schnapp, Batman, did this little baby deliver! In the eight weeks since I started using it, my clothes have come clean with no fading, no grass and mud stains, no yellow pits, no pilling on our sweatshirts and sweaters, and a totally fresh and clean scent that’s not overbearing or frilly. Shut the front door with that!

That method goes to work on our clothes without ruining them puts it on equal footing with my tried-and-true. But there are a few pluses that’ve made quick work of making me a total method laundry detergent stan:

• It’s super concentrated, so the method bottle is way smaller than the ginormous jug I’ve been squeezing into my laundry cabinet for years—yay for more pantry space and less weight-lifting when I’m getting the laundry done!
• It’s made up of 95% natural and renewable, plant-based ingredients, which means it’s safe for delicate skin and totally reduces the average laundry detergent carbon footprint by 35%. Even the bottle is made of recycled material. Which means method laundry is all the way green, baby. Read more about this part here.
• Figuring out how much method laundry to use is easy peasy: four squirts and you’ve got just the right amount to clean an entire load. You don’t have to look for any stupid lines in the cap. You don’t overdose your loads (which leads to fading and the general jacking up of your clothes and those fancy high energy efficiency mahcines). And you can do like me and totally put your kids on laundry duty because they won’t have to lift any jugs, or carefully pour (and inevitably spill) laundry detergent into anything. In fact, Mari and Lila think the squirting part is fun. Word.

Which is all to say that I’ve got three jugs of the old stuff sitting in the pantry and I haven’t thought about any of them since I started using method laundry. And I totally intend to re-up when my little bottle with the huge staying power goes dry. Because method laundry is every-doggone-thing.

Want to see for yourself? You can get your hot little hands on free method laundry all month long. Here’s how:

1. Cop yourself a free Method Laundry Starter Kit! Pop your info in the Rafflecopter contest thingy at the bottom of this post and I’ll randomly pick 10 MyBrownBaby readers to get two mini bottles of goodness, good for eight loads apiece.

2. Get yourself a $2 coupon. Every Thursday during the month of May, method will give away $2-off coupons for Method Laundry Detergent on its Facebook page. Just look under the perks tab on Thursdays, and you’re in there. (Canadian residents: to get your $2 discount, buy your detergent at http://well.ca using the discount code “WASHME.”)

3. Join in on the fun with method’s “Say No To Jugs” photo contest on Facebook during the entire month of May and you could win a year’s supply of Method detergent! Just submit a photo showing what makes doing laundry a chore—heavy jugs, drippy caps, stinky machines clogged with too much detergent product—and get your people to vote for your photo and you could totally win a laundry bonanza!

In the meantime, I leave you with a little bit of clean happy awesomeness from method’s hilarious spokesinger, Noah and the people against dirty. Clean happy!

So you know: I recently partnered with Method to write about my family’s experiences with the company’s cleaning products. Yes, I’m getting a check for this. No, they’re not paying me to say nice things about their product. As always, my experiences and opinions are my own.

RELATED POSTS:

1. Clean Like A Mother: the Method All-Purpose Cleaner Put To the MyBrownBaby Test
2. Clean Happy With Method Products & MyBrownBaby!

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