It is a challenge. Renaming a product everyone already knows – and getting them to follow you. I led the transition from Kleenex to Velvet, spent two days a week on-site at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose to negotiate shelf space, and grew market share year after year.
In the UK, Kleenex wasn’t just a brand name — it was the word people used for the product itself, the way “hoover” means vacuum cleaner. SCA held the brand under licence, and when that licence changed, the business faced the kind of problem no one envies: move an entire, much-loved brand across to a new name, Velvet, without losing the shoppers who’d bought “Kleenex” out of habit for decades — and without losing a single point of share or brand equity on the way.
The situation
A rename like this is won or lost long before the new pack ever reaches a shelf — and it’s won or lost on the shop floor as much as in the brand studio. There was no version of this that worked without the retailers on side.
What we did
I spent two days a week on-site at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, negotiating shelf space and working through the transition shelf-by-shelf with the retailers who controlled where and how shoppers would actually encounter the new name. Alongside that retail work, I ran the brand side of the transition — making sure the new identity carried enough of what people already trusted about the old one that the switch felt like a change of clothes, not a change of relationship. In parallel, I broke new ground elsewhere in the portfolio too: becoming the first SCA UK key account manager to land a mass-market listing for Tena for men, at Sainsbury’s, opening a category that had lived in pharmacy-only distribution until then.
What happened
The transition from Kleenex to Velvet went through with no loss in share of market and no loss in brand equity tracking — the outcome everyone hopes for and few transitions actually achieve. Market share kept growing year after year once the dust settled.
It’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to make a shopper follow a brand across a name change. This one worked because the retail relationship and the brand story were built at the same time, not handed off from one team to the other.
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