alumni profile
Adam Lowry (BS ‘96 ChemE)

Adam Lowry (BS ‘96 ChemE) is the co-founder and vice president of Method, a fast-growing startup company in a very mature industry: household cleaning products. Lowry and Eric Ryan, who were high school buddies, founded the company in 2000 with the belief that they could revitalize the drudgery of cleaning with soaps and sprays designed to be easy on the eyes, nose, and the environment. Sure enough, it has taken off. Revenues are in the tens of millions of dollars and their products are on the shelves of Target, Safeway, and many other stores.

Method has an intriguing slogan, “People Against Dirty.” What does that mean?

If you look at the words themselves, it seems like a negative message. But it’s actually a very positive message. It allows you to make fun of the establishment and also make fun of yourself and the kind of ridiculous things you do to clean and maintain your home. But what we’re doing is creating a cause. What Method is about is really revolutionizing the way, the method—pun intended—you use to clean. People Against Dirty is our rallying cry and our army of consumers and employees that make it a reality.

So then what are you rebelling against?

Why do we clean our homes with dirty things? Why do we use toxic cleaners that blast away dirt and cause harm to our families? Why are we harming the environment as we are flushing these things down the drain? Why are our cleaning products so ugly that we have to hide them under sinks? Why do they smell so bad? Why do we have to wear masks or open windows when we’re cleaning the house? What’s worse, the stuff you are cleaning or the stuff you are using to clean it up?

We’re designing a better product experience in all of its facets. Not just green, not just smelling good, not just pretty looking but all these things together in a method that would be just plain obviously a better way to clean your home.

How does you chemical engineering background matter in your work?

I always describe myself as kind of a "T-shaped" person. I have this depth of expertise in chemical engineering — it’s not nearly as deep as a lot of other chemical engineers — but one of my strengths is that I’m not "I-shaped." I can speak the languages of business and of marketing. That’s really what I’m doing day in and day out here at Method.

What I like about having the chemical engineering background is two things. First of all, in order to do something really well, you need to have the basic fundamental technical understanding of what you are going to do. You can’t ever design a truly wonderful product experience if you can’t build it up from the foundations. Number two is that one of the things I pride myself on is continually trying to master new things and, quite frankly, when you’ve mastered some of the stuff in chemical engineering, you can master anything.

I knew early on that I wasn’t going to go design reactors for a living. I was interested in using my studies as a foundation for building something much broader and bigger than necessarily what you’ll learn in the classroom every day.

One of the things in previous jobs that I had been really frustrated with was working in environmental circles but preaching to the converted. Method doesn’t do that. We call ourselves “hip not hippie.” What it means is people who aren’t previously environmentally concerned come into the Method brand, learn about the mission, learn about what we’re doing, and it starts to percolate into their personal lifestyle in a way that reinforces responsible habits and green habits. But it’s not in a way that tries to educate them about what’s wrong with the world and solving world problems. We don’t ask you to trade off by using a green cleaner that doesn’t work. This is something that fits your lifestyle. It’s as hip as you are, but it’s also as conscious as you are. Without the chemical engineering foundation there, that could have never happened. We couldn’t have built that from the top down.

What’s going on chemically such that Method’s products are both green and effective?

The simple word is “design.” We won’t do anything that we can’t do as well as the nastiest thing on the market. So for example, we don’t have a toilet bowl cleaner right now. Toilet bowl cleaners are generally phosphoric or sulfuric acid and they work great. They blast all that limescale off of your toilet. I can do a toilet bowl cleaner, and I can make it smell great and I can make it beautiful and I can make it environmentally friendly but if I do those things, I haven’t found a way to make it work as well as phosphoric acid yet. But in every other area where you do see us having products, we’ve been able to solve that challenge. A lot of times that means we’re using like a cocktail approach, so rather than a single active ingredient we’re using multiple active ingredients. We’re designing synergistic chemistries to create a product where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It gives it versatility. It allows it to attack soils with different mechanisms. So rather than using reactive chemistry — bleach, for example, is a reactive chemistry — we use adsorptive chemistries, surfactant chemistries. It’s more finesse chemistry than bazooka chemistry.

Risk equals the hazard of the chemical times its exposure. Most companies focus on the exposure in that equation. They’ll say, use triclosan, which is a hazardous antimicrobial agent at low levels, i.e. low exposure, and it’s safe, i.e. low risk. What Method does is we focus on the hazard side of the equation and we design away hazard. If you only use stuff that is not hazardous then exposure can be infinite and the risk is still zero. That is a fundamental tenet of green chemistry. If Method stuff gets into the liquid waste stream or into the air or even our ground water you don’t have to worry about it at any exposure level.

What we do in the design phase when we’re setting out what’s going to be the chemistry in product XYZ, we’re making sure that we can find a way of creating elegant chemical solutions rather than ones that are cheap, fast, and dirty. I don’t do that alone, by the way. There are a lot of really well-qualified people here that have more depth of expertise in chemistry than I do. We have an advisory panel of chemists who help us with this stuff.

So how has the company grown?

We’re just about to hire our 50th employee. We are doubling every year in both people and revenue. We’re a profitable business. And those 100 percent year-over-year growth rates are something we’re maintaining even though we have a decent overall size magnitude of business right now. It’s pretty unheard of in this industry to be growing that quickly.

One of the things I very deeply believe in is the notion of commercial environmentalism. I don’t think that some of the environmental issues we have today are going to be solved by policy making. I believe that regulation is just a sign of design failure. It’s actually through channeling the creativity and ingenuity and the drive of entrepreneurs who have found a way to align environmental interest with business interest rather than having them trade off as they traditionally do.

I was always frustrated by the idea that what was good for the environment and good for business were always things that were seen as competing and trading off. It was my time at Stanford where I developed a belief that they weren’t opposing sciences, they were the same science. That is where the inspiration came about to create a business where as it grew, the positive benefit for the environment grew with it. It’s through that model, and having more businesses like Method that align business and environmental interests that issues like this are going to get solved. Hybrid cars are a great example of exactly that happening.

This is something I was working on in the early '90s when I was there at school. Now it feels like we are at a tipping point where there are more people looking at these issues and there are commercial successes with responsible products, not just because they are responsible but because they are better. They are not successful because they are green, green is an aspect of their quality. They are successful because of their quality. That’s very core to my philosophy. It’s been great seeing those things happen.

July 2006