Laundry is not known for being the domain of excitement and inspiration. Lugging around a jumbo-sized bottle of detergent (either to one’s own machine or, for most New Yorkers, the local laundromat), throwing handfuls of dirty clothing down a barrel, hastily folding piles of garments—doesn’t exactly invoke self-care and sophistication.

The likes of Tide and Gain (both under the Procter & Gamble umbrella) have ruled supreme in the world of laundry. In 2024, Tide’s sales reached $2.88 billion. In 2025, the global laundry care market had a revenue of $110.02 billion, with the US having the highest revenue share of the market, with $16 billion. In the next five years, the market is expected to witness a CAGR of 4.7%.

As an antidote to the less sexy shopping experience of a local drugstore, in January 2024, Maison Francis Kurkdjian introduced $55 laundry detergent and $120 linen mist for lovers of its Aqua Universalis scent. What was once a single blip on the radar is now picking up full steam, thanks to the creative minds at Snif, Homecourt, DedCool, and Laundry Sauce. 

Price points range from $12 for 40 dryer sheets at DedCool to $69 for Laundry Sauce’s 69 laundry pods, making it a more premium spend, although some would argue you can’t put a price on elevating the mundane into a sensory moment. Budget-conscious consumers may stick to mass brand prices, but for fragrance lovers, it can be a worthy investment.

The Unsung Hero of Brand Growth

Sarah Jahnke, CEO and co-founder of Homecourt, sees the boom of the prestige fragrance market driving growth in the laundry market. “Fragrance is a very important part of the laundry experience. As prestige fragrance started to drive growth, people were more open to spending more on laundry and finding the best of the best for that fragrance experience.”

The brand launched the category in March 2025, but had seen consumer requests to expand into laundry care since 2023. “It was already on our product roadmap, but it was great to see that customers were also asking for it. It was an interesting market, the customers wanted it, and we’re really excited to innovate in the space.”

Homecourt debuted with Laundry Concentrate, a patent-pending waterless formula with 10x concentration, plant-based cleaning agents, and glycerin to hydrate the skin; Linen Spray; and Laundry Fragrance Oil (an alcohol-free version of a dryer sheet, designed to be used on the brand’s light and dark wool dryer balls to scent clothing). To celebrate the collection launch, Homecourt hosted a luxury wash and fold experience with Todd Layne Cleaners in NYC.

The products are available in three of the brand’s signature scents: Cece (a white leather and cedarwood scent), Steeped Rose (a fresh floral with upcycled rosewater and geranium), and Neroli Leaf (a crisp blend of apple, green mandarin, and orange flower). 

The laundry detergent is the best-selling SKU in the collection and, despite only a few months on the market, accounted for nearly 10% of the brand’s sales since launch. Homecourt’s best-selling fragrance in other categories, Cece, directly translates to top popularity for laundry care.

Bryan Edwards, co-founder at Snif, calls laundry “the unsung hero” of the brand’s offerings, with 100% growth year over year, despite its only availability through the brand’s own website, providing 10% of the company’s overall revenue. Snif launched the category in February 2024 with two best-selling fragrances—the vanilla-focused Sweet Ash and the croissant-inspired Crumb Couture—turned into laundry products. Two new scents (the green and fresh creation Rain Check and Old Money, a warm sandalwood and musk scent) were also launched for the collection. 

Laundry presented a departure for the fine fragrance brand from more traditional extensions like home fragrance or bodycare. “It is a scented experience that you are involved in on a weekly basis, an ominous chore. It’s controlled by one big player for the most part, and we saw a lot of what made Snif different in fine fragrance actually applied quite nicely to laundry. Our focus on playful scents felt like a differentiator in laundry.”

For Snif, bestsellers in personal fragrance don’t directly translate to laundry. Its best-selling laundry scent is Old Money, whereas in the fine fragrance realm, gourmands reign supreme. Edwards mentions musky, powdery, and sandalwood notes, fresh and clean scents, plus florals like lavender and jasmine as popular laundry scents.

Edwards described the consumer's priority in laundry products as “scent 1a, efficacy 1b.” Snif currently offers six scents for its detergent and (water-based) scent boosters. With distinctive scent profiles like croissant and pumpkin spice, Snif looked to differentiate itself from the traditional scent profiles on shelves. The brand also tapped into visual merchandising to accompany those products for added purchase enticement: a bed of cherries for Tart Deco or an accompanying espresso martini cocktail next to Midnight Grind. 

Carina Chaz, founder and CEO of DedCool, had the vision of utilizing scents in different ways with her brand from the outset. Aside from personal and home fragrance, the brand offers pet shampoo, linen spray, bodycare, and air fresheners. Laundry care, a long-time aspiration, entered the equation in March 2020, just as the world was slowing down and becoming more home-centric due to COVID.

“Talking to beauty executives and people I looked up to, I heard time and time again, this will never work. ‘Consumers won't trust you to wash their clothes, you're a fragrance company,’” Chaz said. “For me, that ultimately continued to push and inspire me to create new conversations around scent and how people utilize scent in their everyday life through daily touch points.”

DedCool offers five scents in its detergent (named Dedtergent), 64 oz refills, and dryer sheets—all extensions of the brand’s most popular fragrances: Milk, Xtra Milk (both amber and white musk scents in different intensities), Taunt (a floral and vanilla scent and the best-selling laundry scent), Red Dakota (a woody floral scent with gardenia), and Spring (an aromatic green scent with bergamot and moss). The brand also collaborated with OUAI on detergent and dryer sheets scented with the haircare brand’s rosy Melrose Place fragrance, a collaboration which sold out twice. 

Laundry makes up almost 30% of DedCool’s business. “The category is really exciting and the numbers we’re putting across the board are quite impressive. Alongside the heritage laundry brands out there, we're still fairly small. But ultimately, laundry is one of my proudest creations. It continuously inspires me to think outside the box and to grow beauty in unconventional ways.”

Laundry Sauce was founded in 2020 and launched in October 2021 with the premise of introducing premium fragrances developed by DSM-Firmenich perfumers. “Consumers are looking to elevate the small things in their everyday lives, whether that’s high-end hand soaps, kitchen tools, or fine fragranced laundry products,” said CEO Ian Blair.

While it launched with laundry pods in two scents, today the brand has nine scents in its portfolio: Australian Sandalwood, Egyptian Rose, Indian Tuberose, French Saffron, Indonesian Patchouli, Italian Bergamot, Oregon Mint, Siberian Pine, and Spanish Leather. It has also expanded its formats to dryer sheets, fabric softener, scent booster, fabric refresher spray, and wool dryer balls. Laundry Sauce offers a Scent Quiz on its site to pair customers with their best fragrance choice. 

“Laundry was a sleepy category with a massive market, but when you looked at the available laundry products that were on the market, they were very uninspiring. Essentially, we decided to deliver happiness in a box,” Blair added. “We wanted to make laundry day something to look forward to, something people turned into a ‘self-care ritual.’ And we knew high-end fragrance was the key.”

Australian Sandalwood, Egyptian Rose, and French Saffron are the top-selling fragrances, with the formats of detergent and dryer sheets being the most popular, although Blair noted that the brand’s recently released Fabric Refresher Spray “has been a hit and seen sustained sales since its release.”

Laundry Sauce kept its growth numbers confidential but revealed that it has “achieved significant traction rapidly, scaling to an eight-figure business within its first two years.” Actor Scott Eastwood came on as an investor and the face of the brand in September 2024, giving the brand even further visibility. 

Solving the Scent Equation

Scent profiles for laundry detergent are an interesting balance: some want their clothing to smell ultra-clean and powdery, others prefer something soft and cozy. The scent dosage has to be strong enough to make an impact during and after the washing cycle, but not be so overpowering that it competes with personal fragrance.

Creating scents for laundry is more difficult than personal fragrances or candles, Edwards noted. Laundry scents are fresh out of the bottle, then in a wash, and later in a dry cycle, seeing if they can sustain performance with the introduction of water at varying temperatures—plus the heat of a tumble dry as well as on different fabrics.

“We realized that it's actually quite difficult to get something that smells good fresh out of the bottle, in the wash, and also on dry.” The fragrance house Snif works with scent tests on towels and through 10 different washer/dryer setups. Gourmands prove to be a particularly challenging genre to recreate, with Edwards noting the top notes can often dissipate in the dry cycle. Heavier molecules tend to last longer. “You're dealing with multiple elements. When taking a scent from fragrance or candles to laundry, we need to be leveraging the right materials and ingredients that can help bridge the gap. But translating from different categories into one another has been a challenge.”

Chaz described adapting the scent to a laundry format while staying true to its original fragrance profile, and also cleaning clothing properly is a tricky balancing act. However, the outcome is worth the effort. “The moment I open my washer or dryer and get this whiff of scent, I ultimately feel happy, excited, and use scent as this mood-boosting experience,” Chaz said. “Why would you want your clothes to smell like X when you're trying to smell like Y? Let's get synchronized and create something that truly creates unison within your routine.”

Jahnke noted formulation challenges working with the concentrated and fragrant raw materials in laundry formulas. “It has been a bit of a cosmetic chemist feat to make sure this all works well together.”

Breaking Through the Legacy Noise

Going head-to-head with the conglomerate giants who have had a majority share of the market for decades is no easy feat.

Snif’s research showed that customers used the detergent their household grew up with, but selling the product online or getting the consumer to “smell it through the screen” were additional hurdles. To solve that issue, Snif tapped into its existing customer base. The company never ran any paid marketing, instead achieving all growth in its laundry category through organic or earned efforts, communicating with its customer base, plus leveraging email and SMS lists.

“I've been amazed at how much the product category has grown and how shareable people have found that experience on social media, tagging us in UGC [user-generated content],” Edwards said. “That was a big insight for us in just how receptive people were to upgrading this part of their routine.”

DedCool also benefited from its “pronged, multifunctional hero strategy,” which provided a natural extension for customers to buy into their favorite scents in detergent or dry sheet form. Chaz noted some customers coordinating their personal scent and laundry detergent, while others layered different fragrances in different formats from its portfolio. “We meet the customer where they're at. It's a choose-your-own-adventure scenario.”

Blair cited manufacturing complexities, navigating direct-to-consumer marketing, and ensuring consistent product quality as some of the challenges he faced as a start-up. “Ultimately, it comes down to resilience: solve problems quickly and effectively or risk losing everything.”

Retail presents another point of evolution: how and where shoppers buy their laundry products. While most would pick up products at their local drugstore or in an Amazon order, perusing the aisles of a Sephora, Ulta Beauty, or Credo Beauty for household items is a different shopping experience. But challenges also breed creativity.

“I truly believe that home and laundry are the next categories in beauty. It will be interesting to see how retail beauty retailers build out this category,” Jahnke added. While all four brands have their own digital e-commerce fronts, Homecourt is also stocked at partners like Bluemercury, Revolve, and Nordstrom; Laundry Sauce on Amazon; and DedCool at Sephora, Credo, and SpaceNK. Snif, which is stocked at Ulta Beauty, has only sold laundry products through its own website to date, but is currently plotting its wholesale expansion in the category.

New Look, New Formulas

The presentation of these products is a clear departure from the days of bulky white plastic bottles. Snif offers up its Art Deco-esque nude-toned bottles. DedCool offers refillable aluminum tins for its detergent and soft, rainbow-hued boxes for its dryer sheets. Homecourt’s detergent comes in a convenient 100% post-consumer recycled pump bottle in the brand’s elegant black and white packaging. Laundry Sauce’s pods are packaged in recycled cardboard boxes made from 60% post-consumer-recycled materials and are also free of parabens, phthalates, bleach, and dyes.

These brands aren’t just bringing a new scent experience to the humble washer/dryer, but also innovating on the formula. Some brands of liquid laundry detergent contain formaldehyde, while scent booster beads have been linked to microplastics. Snif’s creations are Target and Ulta Beauty clean certified, developed to be safe on sensitive skin while still offering high scent performance, with formaldehyde-free and synthetic-dye-free formulas. “I imagine for the customers that have bought from us, that's been an important part of their other value prop of why they came. It was always important to us,” Edwards said. 

Preparing for the Next Cycle

With a clear white space, customer enthusiasm, and many expansion possibilities, the next few years hold plenty of promise for the laundry warriors of the beauty industry. Homecourt plans to expand the category to other fragrance franchises (there are currently four untapped fragrances in the brand’s overall lineup). Jahnke predicted that in 2027, laundry will account for one-third of the brand’s portfolio.

Snif just released Signature Spin, a melon and citrus scent, with more limited-edition releases planned for Q3 and Q4 2025. “In the same way people are looking for seasonal candles, there is an opportunity to launch more seasonally inspired detergents and boosters,” Edwards said. Dryer sheets and softeners are two other projects on the horizon.

Blair has an equally positive outlook on the category as consumers continue to embrace scent in all its facets, stating, “If it can be fragranced, it will.” He also sees an opportunity for specialty laundry products to replace professional dry cleaning services. “We are always working hard to innovate, not only in fragrance, but in our offerings, to meet the needs of our consumers that they never thought possible. Our mission is to make laundry day the best day of the week, and we’re only just getting started.” Laundry Sauce has just released its newest scent for the summer season: Mojave Peach, a fruity blend with peach, cinnamon, geranium, and labdanum, created by nose Sabine de Tscharner.

DedCool has an upcoming collaboration still under wraps and is constantly testing new formulas and packaging. “There are a lot of really exciting things to look forward to in the laundry category,” Chaz said. “We want to be the leader in the space. It's about cracking this code and being a thought starter in the space and seeing what comes from that.”

Laundry machines may be activated with the simple push of a button, but creating the magical liquid that scents the clothes inside is not an easy undertaking. However, for the customers snuggling up in their freshly scented laundry (while not risking an allergic reaction in the process), the long hours and multiple testing rounds pay off cycle by cycle.