Under Review: Joseph Joseph Toilet Brushes

A few years ago, I recall enjoying writing one of my weekly sales emails on the new Joseph Joseph Loo Brush holders, that had just come out. The humour was earthy, schoolboy and therefore rather juvenile, as I recounted how the Joseph's designers had employed a variety of techniques to test out their new product, including the use of Marmite.

This product has been our number one Joseph best seller ever since.

Although I can still hear my mother voice asking me in no uncertain terms what on earth I think I'm doing selling loo brushes, "Andrew, for heaven’s sake, we're a cookshop, not a hardware shop!" In fact she never did say this, as she died in 1999, but she would have, oh most definitely she would! And what defence might I have had in the face of such a question. "Helps pay the bills mum, and its beautifully designed and easy to use" and (a year later) "it is our bestselling Joseph Joseph line"..?

Anyway the fact remains that this is a great product which, colour and finish apart, now comes in 4 guises. These are as follows:

1. Flex Lite Toilet Brush (makes even my efforts at spelling look good). A simplified version of the original Flex with a much lower body. 

2. Flex Toilet Brush. The original design, takes very little floor space, is And at cleaning Marmite off your loo pan, removes other food related stuff as well. And that of course should have been my number one reason for stocking them in the first place, as it doesn’t take much imagination to see the connection between the two...does it? 

3. Flex Plus Toilet Brush. This one has a slightly deeper body to house not only your loo brush but also space for a bottle of some kind. I imagined it might be for Whisky, Gin, Rum or even Vermouth, although the last might be a bit of a stretch as you really need a slice of lemon with that and a glass, and the Josephs, good though they undoubtedly are, neglected to add a shelf or container for them. Alternatively, and rather more prosaically, you might even keep a bottle of bleach there I suppose? 

4. Flex Store Toilet Brush XL. This the daddy of the range and is advertised as holding within its body, not just the toilet brush but also 3 toilet rolls as well. This sounds a bit boring to me, but practical. If you were to use your imagination and think laterally again, then, say a bottle of Bordeaux would fit very well in there, and it’s here that the Josephs come up trumps again . Thoughtfully they’ve designed a corkscrew called the “Bar Star”, (terrible name but a great product) that will fit in there as well. It removes the foil from the top of your bottle, it removes corks, and if you’re a beer drinker, it removes crown caps.