Source: Google Trends
The signal: As toilet paper continues to be wiped from shelves around the world, people have reverted to an alternative that has existed for hundreds of years: bidets. The bathroom fixture that washes your "under area" is already commonly found in countries like Italy, Japan (over 80% of toilets fit the bill), and Argentina… but is especially rare in the United States.
But just as COVID has forced us to ditch tradition and open our minds up to new solutions (think telehealth, remote work, home-schooling, virtual museums, and more…) -- bidets have found themselves on our front doorsteps (thanks Amazon!).
Another complementary example of this phenomena is masks. As people worldwide either start to embrace the face mask (it’s rare these days to see a person without one in the lanes of Costco or your local grocery) -- or are forced to wear them -- masks are becoming common in places that we never would have anticipated.
In fact, searches in the Western world started surging as early as January (when we wrote this Signal). Interest in masks continues to surge to this day, but is the story the same with our favorite new after-poop devices?
Maybe. Searches for "bidet", "bidet shower", and "bum gun" all surged to their peaks in late March, as toilet paper was clearing off shelves. But since TP supply and demand has stabilized, searches have slowed. Despite this "COVID-bump" potentially subsiding, the short-term spike in attention made us realize that perhaps bidets aren’t so niche after all.
The opportunity: The bidet business is surprisingly large, even in locations like the United States. For example, TUSHY, a company looking to reinvent the restroom, regularly brings up hundreds of thousands of pageviews. In March, they neared a million.
Source: SimilarWeb
That becomes less of a surprise when you look at the keyword profile for "bidet" and bidet-related terms on Google.
- Bidet: 450k
- Portable bidet: 18.1k
- Bidet spray: 18.1k
- Washlet: 9.9k
- Bidet shower: 6.6k
- Bum gun: 2.5k
"Bidet showers" (AKA hand-held bidets) are common in many countries -- mostly in Asia.
It’s important to note that bidets don’t just present a cultural question for Americans, but also one of whether their plumbing will work alongside it. So instead of selling full-size bidets around the country, a not-so-small micro industry of portable bidets and accessories have gained some serious traction. A couple examples:
- TUSHY Travel (advertised as a portable bidet to "take to work, school, or that over-priced festival you regret buying tickets to")
- HappyPo Easy Bidet or the Tonelife Handheld, both for ~$20 a pop
- The Sonny "Microshower" which is currently in a crowd-funding stage
Take this hand-held bidet on Amazon, which brings in over $200k in revenue every month (in the US alone), but won’t ship until May, likely due to supply chain issues. While full bidets aren’t found widely on Amazon, bidet toilet seats, bidet attachments, and all types of other bidet products are… like this toilet seat which does $1.4m in revenue each month. While there’s competition (1.7k products with the word "bidet" in the product name in the US), there are thousands of related keywords that people are actively searching on Amazon, including…
- bidet toilet seat: 227,358 searches
- bidet sprayer for toilet: 109,573 searches
- tushy bidet: 63,014 searches
- bidet attachment: 58,487 searches
- portable bidet: 43,766 searches
The top 10 keywords brought in 1.25m searches last month alone, averaging 788% growth in interest. For the full list, please refer to this doc we put together. You may notice some interesting pseudonyms for the product at hand, including "japanese toilet", "muslim shower", and our favorite… the "bum gun."
There’s opportunity to appeal to Western markets by rebranding the product, similar to how TUSHY has made the age-old practice of pooping more modern, through additional products like bamboo toilet paper (8.1k searches per month) or a premium toilet ottoman. Just like the sleep industry, the pooping market is one that’s overlooked, but one that has a total addressable market of 7B people.
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