• by Les Luchter , November 4, 2024

Floor-cleaning brand Bissell was born as the USA celebrated its 100^th birthday, way back in 1876.

Now, two years short of its 150^th anniversary and still family-owned, Bissell has grown from its carpet sweeper roots into a…pet product company?

Not quite, but it’s just added “Pet Proven” badges to 27 of its products “that excel in pet performance clean up” and its web page, redone in an effort led by the DEPT agency, also blares “Pet Proven.”

And, early last month, Bissell became the first Amazon storefront to work with the online retailer to suspend sales in exchange for solicitating charitable donations.

The charitable cause was the 13-year-old Bissell Pet Foundation, and in the four weeks since that one-day donation takeover on Oct. 4, World Animal Day, over $170,000 has been raised.  

“This collaboration with the Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab is a groundbreaking campaign that reimagines the online shopping journey as a catalyst for positive impact,” James Sandora, Bissell’s vice president of marketing, tells Marketing Daily.

Declaring that Bissell “has always been passionate about pets,” he notes that the Pet Proven certification, launched in late September, is another “industry first.”

Its roots can be found in a 2022 global study of 7,500 people that Sandora says was designed “to determine which of the many cleaning jobs pet parents face are most important to them.”

“Based on this feedback,” he continues, “we honed in on the top three pain points, being ‘fur’ (hair, dander, allergens, etc), ‘yuck’ (pet accidents and stuck-on messes), and ‘trails’ (dirt, litter, crumbs, grass, muddy paw prints, etc)."

Hence, Bissell’s Pet Proven products are “specifically designed and certified to tackle cleaning up fur, tracked-in trails, and pet accidents, meeting rigorous testing and consumer satisfaction standards.”

The Pet Proven program and Bissell Pet Foundation’s pet adoption efforts are interconnected, per a statement from Lauren Aylsworth, Bissell’s director of cross-category marketing.

"The Pet Proven badges are all about simplifying the shopping experience, making it easier for pet parents to find the highest-performing products for tackling fur, tracked-in dirt, and messes," she says. "By doing so, we hope to inspire more people to embrace pet adoption, knowing they have reliable solutions to manage the challenges that come with it.”

In addition to pet adoption, the Bissell Pet Foundation works to reduce the number of homeless animals through programs like transport, spay/neuter, vaccination, microchipping, and crisis and disaster response.