There is a tall black cabinet in London filled with 150 bottles and 300 unblinking eyes. It’s always strange seeing part of your childhood in a museum, but I never expected to be reminded of my mortality by a yellow plastic bottle moulded into the spikes of Bart Simpson’s head. “I had that! On the edge of my bathtub 20 years ago!” I thought earlier this year as I stared into the display of character-shaped bubble bath bottles at the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. The display is just one part of the museum’s journey through time, a pitstop between 80s magazines and 00s snacks. Soaking in the rotundity of Super Mario’s belly, the bloom of Aladdin’s plastic pants and the shiny red point of Pingu’s beak, I couldn’t remember which of the bottles I’d had and which I simply coveted – but I realised they were once everywhere, and now they’re nowhere to be seen.
At the turn of the millennium we were (unknowingly) in the middle of the bubble bath boom. Characters in every show, film and video game were brought to life as hollow novelty figurines that were decapitated to reveal a foaming mixture within. It’s impossible to overstate the scale of the thing: there was the Mask, Quasimodo, Barbie, the Little Mermaid, Fred Flintstone and Raymond Briggs’s Snowman (as well as every other man possible – Bat, Action, Spider, He). Who was behind this moment in pop culture history? Why was it the golden age of the bath toy? What made the bubble burst? It all starts with Robert Beecham.
When he was 21 and employed by a hosiery company in London, Beecham, now 71, worked something out: “I really liked women. I love children. I love smells.” After studying philosophy in America, but failing to obtain a degree, Beecham spent two years in hosiery before he had a realisation: “You know what? You’re not gonna make a fortune here.” He quit and combined his love of women, children and smells into a new business, Château de Bubble, a bath mixture sold in wine carafes.
During his first year of business in 1975, Beecham sold 12,000 bottles for around £39,000, but as his company grew he stayed in contact with friends in the US. “I started getting letters from my pals in America and they said, ‘Robert, have you heard of War Star or Star Rolls or Star World or whatever?’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?’” Beecham recalls. The very first Star Wars film was released in May 1977 in America, but it hadn’t yet reached the UK. Beecham smelled an opportunity.
Here’s the story as he tells it, and it’s too good to tell it another way. Almost exactly 45 years ago, Beecham sneaked into the offices of Peter Beale, manager of 20th Century Fox in London. He told him he knew about the upcoming Star Wars film; said he wanted to put his bubble bath inside the film’s characters. Beecham had come up with the idea in Boots in Piccadilly Circus, when he realised there weren’t many toiletries for kids (Beecham’s father, incidentally, was in the toy business).
As Beecham tells it, Beale’s “eyes lit up” when he heard the idea; he said the bubble bath businessman could premiere Star Wars in London. Beecham invited representatives from major shops and the press, but when he introduced himself and his Darth Vader and R2D2-shaped bottles before the film: “I was met with complete and utter silence.”
Thankfully, the movie did Beecham’s job for him. Enamoured sales reps clamoured to get Beecham’s product – his range was released in time for Christmas. Writing in the Daily Mirror on 22 December 1977, columnist Keith Waterhouse recommended swapping bog-standard giftsets for Beecham’s stuff: “I suggest for once that you get on the ball and invest in Star Wars bath salts,” he joked. “The bubble bath market didn’t know what happened to it,” says Beecham.
Beecham wasn’t the first person to create character bubble baths – in the 1960s, “Soakys” shaped like Bugs Bunny were popular in America, and even the Beatles were bottled. Matey, the far less intricately shaped sailor soap line that’s still going strong today, was also on the shelves in the UK when Beecham had his idea. But Beecham’s company, Grosvenor of London, came at the exact right time: the dawn of licencing as we know it, when everything began to be slapped on everything else.
“I was brought in because I’m a bit of a maverick and I’ll just try things that have never been done before,” says Gary Little, who became creative director of Grosvenor in 1994. Little helped Beecham secure a Disney licence, and before long, “we had all the major licences” – Beatrix Potter, Popeye, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, Harry Potter. “Barbie, as far as I was concerned, was my queen,” Beecham says – she could be reinvented annually in a different outfit. Hulk Hogan, in contrast, was a flop. “One minute he was top of the pops and the next minute, he was busted for steroids.”
Little says that he “had a free rein to do and create anything I wanted” – he once got a letter from Simpsons creator Matt Groening saying he had some of the range in his own bath. Before long, Grosvenor was releasing 300 products every year.
It was, at times, challenging work. When designing a Pocahontas bottle, Little got “carried away” with sculpting the intricate figurine and forgot about how much bubble bath he needed to fit inside. Pocahontas was designed to be diving off a rock, “so the rock started getting bigger” to hold the liquid. “It was more like a mountain when we finished,” jokes Little’s wife, Helen, who worked on production at Grosvenor. (The couple are now based in Berkshire and don’t reveal their ages; he says he’s “past retirement” and she says, “I’m younger than him.”)
At one point, the hyper-realistic sculptor Ron Mueck helped craft Grosvenor designs – as did Timothy John Staffell, a modelmaker who put together the band that would go on to become Queen. “There was loads and loads and loads of clay,” says Yve Hooson, 59, who designed bottles for Grosvenor in the 90s. Hooson would draw her designs and a sculptor brought the prototypes to life with clay in a back room. “Obviously, everything is now 3D sculpted on a computer,” she says.
The production process was complicated and ever-changing. Beecham first worked with a company in Wales before swapping to factories in China. Originally, the bottles were hand-finished, later they were injection-moulded with different coloured plastics. “Some of our models required eight to 10 different tools just to make one bubble bath,” says Little.
Hertfordshire-based designer Elena Jackson, 49, who worked at Grosvenor in the early 2000s, recalls the challenges of designing with production limitations in mind. “She has her arm like that because in any other way, it would be too fragile,” Jackson says, showing off a Snow White bottle with her hands chastely clutched under her chin. Because licensors had strict rules about designs being scale accurate, Jackson couldn’t make an arm wider or a leg thicker to fit more product in a bottle. Another problem was ensuring that the bottles stood up. Princesses were OK – they had big skirts – but for superheroes, Jackson had another trick. “You had to use the cape,” she says.
Someone who appreciated the hard work was Beverley Heyworth, 55, an NHS worker from Manchester, who began collecting character bubble bath 30 years ago. Today, she has more than 800 in storage. In the 90s, Heyworth took advantage of Boots’ 3-for-2 deals to stock up on bottles – she would use the product and ship empty containers to buyers around the world. “I was squeaky clean,” she laughs.
Heyworth placed adverts in newspapers and magazines to connect with other collectors and negotiate trades. “I made friends with people in Australia, America, Canada, Japan and Europe,” she says. “It’s nice to have been at the centre of it.” Once, Heyworth travelled to Holland with her husband to meet another collector couple and trade for a German Batman bottle. “The first time we met, we went to their house and sat there with dictionaries, having a laugh and talking to each other,” Heyworth says, “and the only thing that connected us was our toys.”
Heyworth liked collecting bottles because they were “colourful and lively.” She also enjoyed hunting down rarer models, such as a Roger Moore bottle from the 70s. Her obsession culminated in her writing and printing 150 copies of a book: Collectabubbles: Guide to Bubble Bath Characters. The Littles keep their copy to hand.
Heyworth’s late husband fell ill in the 2000s and her interest waned. She didn’t notice when characters started disappearing from the shelves. In 2002, toy company Hasbro purchased Grosvenor; Beecham was officially the world’s first bubble bath multimillionaire (in 2015, he caused a stir with plans to build London’s biggest domestic basement at his home). The Littles worked for Hasbro, but claim it struggled to understand the market, so they started their own toiletries business, Kokomo, in 2010.
The trouble was, times had changed. Four things explain the disappearance of character bottles: the recession, rising eco-consciousness, an explosion in popular culture and toothbrushes. “Retail changed and it’s never changed back,” Little says of the 2007 recession – the prices of character bottles increased, so they were no longer the cheaper option for parents compared to toys. Plus, there was that whole plastic thing.
“Back in the day, you never used to think about the landfill,” Helen says, but in more recent years, “at a dinner party, I would have felt less embarrassed if I’d said I was a heroin pusher.” A burgeoning entertainment industry meant the Littles struggled to choose from the 100 new character licences they were offered annually. Meanwhile, in the UK, a 2019 survey found the majority of Brits prefer showers to baths. By the time the Littles sold Kokomo in a management buyout earlier this year, licensed toothbrushes accounted for 40% of turnover – after all, everyone needs to brush their teeth.
Maybe it’s no bad thing that I can no longer get a bubble bath Bart, that today’s children make do with a normal-shaped bottle with an Elsa sticker slapped on it. But those involved in the boom mourn the loss of a creative era. “In the 90s everybody was very keen on being as different as possible,” artist Hooson says. “Now people don’t want to take risks, every shop wants to have exactly what every other shop has, and there is no design any more.” Beecham fondly recalls the time-consuming processes of creating a Game Boy bottle – he “sat in the factory for God knows how long” designing “rubber nipples” that shot little jets of air to make a real, playable game.
The Museum of Brands does not hold London’s only shrine to bubble bath bottles. In Beecham’s garage, there is shelf after shelf lined with his products. “The bare bones of what I struggled to produce have been demolished inside a corporation, unfortunately,” he says of the Hasbro takeover, but his company lives on in his mini-museum. “I had a fabulous time and a fabulous life,” Beecham says of being a bubble bath tycoon. “It was absolutely wonderful.”
