Unilever Home Care brands, Dirt Is Good (Persil) and Comfort, is teaming up with Samsung on plans to revolutionise the future of home laundry by combining the tech of powder and liquids with the tech of washing machines.

The collaboration aims to create a more seamless and sustainable laundry experience for consumers. It’s part of Unilever’s Growth Action Plan, which focuses on delivering bigger and better innovations to ensure unmissable superiority.

To do this, the collaboration will explore how to deliver a fully connected laundry experience by combining technology from both sectors. The pair said they’re looking to leverage rapid evolution of technology in both the laundry and consumer technology sectors to drive category growth and innovation.

Already, Persil’s Wonder Wash was tested using top-of-the-range Samsung bespoke AI washing machines at Unilever’s Port Sunlight R&D hub. Samsung created a new app feature that allows users to scan detergent barcodes for a more efficient and sustainable laundry cycle.

Short cycle laundry is the fastest-growing value driver in the laundry category, with the potential to grow the category incrementally by 21% year on year and is expected to be worth up to €2 billion by 2026. Nine in 10 top-end washing machines now routinely include 15-minute cold washes, and there has been a rapid increase in the inclusion of auto-dosing features.

“This partnership with Samsung will see us co-create the future of laundry with more speed and agility than ever before,” Eduardo Campanella, Business Group President, Unilever Home Care, said. “We’ll be able to combine changing consumer behaviours with in-home technology trends, creating a smarter approach to laundry that suits today’s busy lifestyles.”

VP of Marketing at Dirt Is Good, Tati Lindenberg, added, “We know laundry isn’t always a topic that gets people talking, so this partnership creates new opportunities for us to speak directly to savvy shoppers who are looking to do their laundry in a smarter way.”