McNEIL-PPC, Inc., K-Y Sensual Silk™ Personal Lubricant

K-Y Sensual Silk™ Personal Lubricant
As a tireless consumer activist I leave no stone unturned. No product or service is safe from, or immune to, my expert scrutiny. Today I focus my long-overdue attention on another chronic offender, K-Y “Sensual Silk™” Personal Lubricant. It’s not the lubricant itself that I have a problem with. It is a fine product. Rather, it is the manufacturer’s extremely poorly designed packaging for the product. Specifically, the bottle it comes in has two shortcomings. I’ll start with the less-serious of the two:

(1) The bottle’s base. Simply stated, it is too small. The bottle is intended to stand up, yet the size of the base is far too small to provide stability. Trying to get the bottle to stand up is almost like trying to balance an egg. It is highly unstable, and tips over easily at the slightest disturbance. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for the next, more serious design problem:

(2) The cap. For the cap on this bottle, K-Y chose one of those tilt-open type caps like you see on shampoo bottles. A good choice for a number of reasons; It stays attached so you can’t lose it, and you can open and close it one-handed in the heat of battle, so to speak – a very nice feature. Unfortunately, the cap does not seal properly. Ever. I have burned through countless bottles of this product (yes, I’m just that dedicated in my consumer testing) and every one has been a leaker. This is not a fluke, or a “bad batch.” It is a chronic design problem, and K-Y obviously has no intention of correcting it.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask? I’ll tell you. The first time I discovered the leaking problem, I had left the bottle lying on its side (remember, it doesn’t like to stand up). Over the course of a day, the slimy liquid had slowly but steadily seeped out all over my nightstand. Much like “The Blob,” A slippery pool had spread to engulf my TV remote, the base of a lamp, and had soaked the corner of an expensive book.

My next leak had just as disastrous consequences. Packing for a trip to visit a lady friend, I placed a bottle of Sensual Silk into my $150 Coach leather shaving bag. Assuming the prior leak had surely been a defective cap, I foolishly placed my trust in K-Y’s bottle cap. Shame on me! I let them fool me again! Sure enough, upon arriving at my destination, I opened the toiletry bag and found a gooey, slippery mess. The entire bottom of my nice leather bag was covered in a layer of slime, and everything in the bag had been covered in slippery goo. I spent an angry 15 minutes cleaning up the mess. At least it’s water soluble! (And no, I hadn’t been on an airplane, where pressure changes could be blamed. This was a short land trip by car). OK, lesson learned: Don’t trust the cap! But what an expensive, frustrating and maddening lesson! Way to alienate your customers, K-Y!

Lessons Learned/Solution:
If you’re going to provide a cap for a bottle containing a liquid, is it too much to ask that the cap actually seals the liquid inside without leaking? Apparently for the folks at McNEIL-PPC, the makers of K-Y, it is. Their chronically-leaky cap is made worse by their choice of appearance over functionality. Here I refer to the too-small base of the bottle. The bottle’s overall shape was clearly designed to provide a sensual appeal to consumers. Its androgenous shape is at once feminine and phallic, to appeal to women without offending men – brilliant! However, the resulting base is way too small to provide stability. As described above, stability is critical to a bottle with a poorly-design cap that always leaks! Suggested work-around: Try another brand of lube! AstroGlide™, here I come…

Postscript: Adding insult to injury
Like more than one company I have knocked heads with, McNEIL-PPC, Inc., parent company of K-Y brand, offers a “contact us” option on their web site. And, like most such sites, theirs is a web form, requiring various pieces of information be submitted along with your comments. The K-Y site was, hands-down, the worst such form I have ever seen. To begin with, it required the “Lot Number” and “Expiration Date” codes from the bottle. The expiration date format on their web form was completely backwards from the format shown on the bottle. Worse, the date had to be chosen from a drop-down list, which only went up to the year 2008. My product expires in 2011. But wait – there’s more!
Let’s touch on web form functionality. Next came the “country” and “state” entries, which also required selection from drop-down lists. When clicking in the field boxes, or on the down-arrows, the drop downs would appear, but scrolling via a mouse’s scroll wheel didn’t work. OK, so in order to enter my home state of “Wisconsin” (way towards the bottom of the list, mind you) I typed “W”. On every other drop-down form I have ever seen, this would take me to “Washington,” then two quick presses of the down-arrow would produce “Wisconsin.” No such luck. Typing “W” did nothing. So I was forced to physically click on the scroll-bar and drag it down to make all my selections.
Does all this sound petty? I don’t think so. When providing a form for customers to submit complaints, is it wise to design the form to produce even more angst in an already frustrated customer? Is there any excuse, in this age, to have such a poorly (dys)functioning web form for customer feedback? How do you even make a drop down that doesn’t respond to alpha characters and scroll wheels?!?!?