design matters. A laundry in your pocket

It’s being called the world’s smallest pocket washing machine, and is on its way to entering the Guinness Book of World Records. If this has you picturing a miniature model that somehow accommodates your shirt and washes it, you would be wrong. At 200 gm, this pocket machine looks more like a deostick. It is battery-operated and works by being applied to the cloth.

If you are prone to staining your clothes while you eat and drink, this would be of some help. It is meant to be a handy and quick grooming aid, says Shanta Roy Sanjeev, Marketing Head, Haier India. The R&D team at Haier Japan came up with the idea, and it was launched online in March, where it sold 100,000 units. In mid-June, it was launched in China, and racked up sales of 200,000 in a month’s time, with about 50,000 pre-bookings. In India, it launched this week, on e-commerce portal Snapdeal, for a price of ₹3,990. The MRP is ₹4,990 but the company says the former price is likely to stay for now.

“We’re going after the people who are e-commerce-savvy. They tend to be always on the move, and they are the right target group for us,” says Sanjeev. Haier is calling CODO’s technique the Squeeze-Wash technology. It claims to remove a stain in 30-120 seconds, with just a bit of liquid or powder detergent and 10 ml of water. (The company now provides the detergent in a separate pack but even hand soap will do the job, says Sanjeev.) It works by agitating the stained portion, at the rate of 700 beats/minute. It needs three fully charged AAA batteries to work, and can support up to 50 washes. “It’s very effective for fresh stains,” claims Sanjeev.

In one’s experience, such gizmos tend to be short-lived. How would this fare? “It’s very important how you maintain it. We tend to be careless about these small gadgets,” says Sanjeev. It comes with a six-month warranty.

What does the name CODO mean? In China, it was meant to imitate the gurgling noise it made when it was cleaning, says Sanjeev. In India, we are explaining it as a “compact dose”, she says.

A search on the internet for the world’s smallest washing machine throws up the names of Dolfi, a CD-player-like gadget that cleans clothes with ultrasonic technology, Vortex, made in India by students of National Institute of Technology – Rourkela, and Scrubba wash bag, where there is no machine but a flexible washboard made up of nodules. Scrubba needs elbow grease, not electricity or batteries, to operate.

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