Our project is about demonstrating an alternative to the plastic sachet so that shampoo and other products can be sold without generating enormous amounts of plastic waste. We had hoped to work with some big brands, or any brand come to that, already selling shampoo in sachets, but we couldn't get any takers. The most encouraging response we got amounted to ‘Come back to us when you've proved that it works’!

So we had to create our own shampoo brand. An essential element of this is, of course, the shampoo itself.

After some of our own research and testing, we limited down to four shampoos we wanted to test with our target market - low-income consumers in India. As a benchmark, we included the market leader, Clinic Plus from Unilever.

We provided consumers with a sample of products and ask them to fill out a survey. We also conducted supplementary one-on-one interviews to get more detailed feedback.

Results vary across the piece, but the big picture finding is that two of our shampoos beat Clinic Plus, and not by a small margin. Here is the summary table…