Home care giant Procter & Gamble had something new up their sleeves in 2019, quietly soft-launching a cleaning brand designed to reach millennial, eco-friendly audiences like ours: A new line of products — “NBD”— that would be built exclusively by an audience on Instagram. I helped the team at Procter & Gamble to tell NBD’s unique story and get this exclusive peek behind the curtain at an international brand. 

The hub of this project is that Instagram account, @nbdclean, where P&G Home Care Innovation Designer Jessica Stoll is, at this moment, busy posting pictures, asking questions, and answering comments about the brand. NBD is Stoll’s pet project, born from a conversation at a lunch table roughly one year ago, when she and a chemist coworker talked about social media and their perceptions of how millennials don’t really like to clean, and that cleaning is no big deal… NBD, she told me. Because Stoll’s job is to innovate home care products, that conversation evolved into a pitch: Let’s start a cleaning brand where the consumers decide everything.