This old Breeze detergent commercial with Dolly Parton sent me down a rabbit hole, because I remembered detergent boxes with glasses and dishes inside too. I assumed somewhere along the way they switched to towels.
Turns out, that’s not quite what happened.
The glasses and famous Golden Wheat dishes were associated with Duz, a Procter & Gamble detergent. Breeze was made by rival Lever Brothers, and its specialty was towels. Breeze was putting genuine Cannon towels and washcloths in detergent boxes by at least 1956. So what many of us may remember as one promotion changing over the years was actually several detergent companies competing to see who could put the most tempting “free” premium in the box.
And apparently those giveaways really worked. In 1966, Lever Brothers told a Canadian government committee that it had distributed around 170 million towels in detergent packages over 15 years. When the company tried selling detergent at a lower price without the towel, sales dropped so badly they abandoned the idea.
Then along came Dolly Parton. She joined The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967, and Breeze became one of the products Dolly and Porter promoted during those years. Dolly later remembered that they had to do their own commercials on the show, pulling those enormous towels right out of the Breeze boxes. She even said she still had some of the towels years later.
So Mom wasn’t necessarily choosing detergent just because it got the clothes clean. Sometimes she was working on a new set of glasses, dishes or towels too!
What did your family collect from detergent boxes — glasses, Golden Wheat dishes, towels, or something else?
