• by Les Luchter , February 5, 2025

Packages of Henkel Consumer Brand’s All Free Clear laundry detergent tubs and pouches now include a NaviLens smart code, allowing easier in-store access to shoppers with blindness, low vision or language barriers.

Phones employing the NaviLens app detect the product codes and audibly notify users of the product name, type, dosing instructions and precise in-store location.

While All Free Clear is the first laundry detergent in the U.S. employing NaviLens, Procter & Gamble’s non-U.S. Ariel brand has been using the technology for several years.

Other brands using NaviLens codes include Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s and P&G’s Always Discreet, Pantene, Olay, Gillette, Pampers, Oral-B and Old Spice.

NaviLens has at least one competitor in this retail arena: Aira, whose app is being used by such retailers as Walmart, Target, Meijer, Wegman’s, Starbucks and Gucci.

Aira connects app users to a professional visual interpreter, who assists with navigating the store, helping the shopper look for deals, place or retrieve an online order, or find the shortest line.

All Free Clear has also pledged to mark February’s Low Vision Awareness Month by donating $25,000 to the American Foundation for the Blind.

While Henkel cites the American Academy of Ophthalmology as reporting that more than 7 million Americans are living with low vision, The Foundation reports that, of 50 million American adults with some degree of vision loss, almost 4 million have a great deal of trouble seeing even when wearing glasses, and 340,000 can’t see at all.

All Free Clear, which Henkel declares is “the #1 doctor recommended laundry detergent brand for sensitive skin,” is the current iteration of a brand that was first launched in 1959 by Unilever and acquired by Henkel in 2016.

Last year, the brand became the first laundry detergent to name a Chief Dermatology Advisor.