Not Gain, Not Downy: This Is America's Top-Selling Laundry Detergent Brand

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If you had to guess America's top-selling laundry detergent brand, you might picture something flashy, heavily scented, or trending hard on CleanTok. With so many eco-friendly and natural cleaning brands hitting the market, offering everything from scoopable powders to water-free detergent sheets, you might be surprised to learn that the brand outselling all the rest isn't chasing novelty at all. It's Tide. Sure, people may have a fling with Gain or experiment with Downy beads, but Tide remains the top-selling laundry detergent year after year, with shockingly little fanfare.

Whether you opt for convenient pods or a massive jug of Tide Free & Gentle, the brand's dominance isn't built on trend cycles or creative reinvention. That classic neon orange bullseye with blocky blue lettering offers an intentional brand consistency that continues to pay off for Procter & Gamble (P&G), Tide's parent company.

While the shelves have grown more crowded, Tide still looks like the laundry detergent our moms bought, and it's the brand many of us grew up seeing on the shelf above the washing machine. From grocery aisles to big-box stores, warehouse clubs to laundromats, Tide is familiar, and it's everywhere. Since it's a lot more fun to build a dream laundry room than it is to figure out which new detergent brands work (and which will wreck your clothes), most shoppers just want something reliable, and that's exactly what keeps Tide flying off the shelves.

When Tide first rolled out nationally in 1946, it totally transformed laundry rooms across the country. According to Chemical & Engineering News, "For the first five years, sales were limited only by P&G's capacity to produce Tide products. By the early 1950s, Tide captured more than 30% of the laundry market." After taking an early lead as America's top-selling laundry detergent brand, Tide has held onto the title for decades — one of the iconic cleaning products that have cult followings — thanks to a combination of household loyalty, cultural ubiquity, and, according to hundreds of thousands of high ratings for products like Tide Pods, outstanding performance.

Today, Tide products still dominate in measurable ways. On Amazon, Tide consistently logs the highest monthly sales volume of any laundry detergent, far outpacing competitors like Gain and Downy, with hundreds of thousands of products sold each month, according to Accio. Whether shoppers are stocking up on bottles of concentrated liquids or the brand's new foaming tiles, Tide tops the bestseller lists again and again.

That influence becomes even clearer when you look at the bigger picture. Although Gain Liquid Laundry Detergent does break into the top 10 laundry detergents sold on Amazon each month, it doesn't perform nearly as well for P&G. And while P&G brands like Downy and Bounce rule the fabric softener aisle, with multiple Downy products outpacing brands like Suavitel, Mrs. Meyer's, and Snuggle on Amazon, those sales don't come anywhere close to Tide's overall sales volume. In fact, Americans spend more on Tide laundry care products than they do on all fabric softener products combined. Shoppers may swap scents or experiment with new products, but when it comes to consumer loyalty, Tide is the one brand that simply cleans up.