How TOTO Turned the Toilet Into a Luxury Experience: Lessons for Edmonton Entrepreneurs | Digital Marketing Edmonton
There may be no product in your home that you use more frequently and discuss less enthusiastically than the toilet. For most of history, the expectations were remarkably simple. A toilet needed to work, be reasonably clean and make waste disappear. Nobody was showing one off to friends. Nobody returned from vacation telling stories about an unforgettable bathroom experience. Toilets were utilities, not status symbols.
Then TOTO changed the conversation.
The Japanese company took a product associated with one of the most private and uncomfortable parts of human life and transformed it into something people seek out, remember and even recommend. Heated seats, warm-water washing, automatic lids, dryers, deodorizers, self-cleaning technology and carefully sculpted designs turned the ordinary toilet into something much closer to a luxury appliance.
That transformation offers an important lesson to Edmonton entrepreneurs: you don’t necessarily need to invent an entirely new industry to build something remarkable. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is taking something customers have accepted as ordinary and asking why it has to remain ordinary.
From Ceramic Utility to a Premium Customer Experience
TOTO wasn’t originally an electronics company. Founded in Japan in 1917, its roots were in ceramic sanitary ware. Founder Kazuchika Okura believed modern sanitation would become increasingly important in Japan, even before the infrastructure supporting it had become widespread. That alone is an interesting entrepreneurial lesson.
Most businesses study today’s market and ask what customers currently want. Exceptional companies also consider what customers may expect tomorrow. Decades later, TOTO began exploring the idea of washing with water rather than relying exclusively on toilet paper. The concept was unfamiliar to most consumers, which created an enormous marketing problem. You can’t simply ask people whether they want something they have never experienced.
TOTO therefore had to understand the experience before the market fully understood the product. When developing its WASHLET, the company gathered physical data from approximately 300 employees to determine positioning, water direction and comfortable temperatures. TOTO eventually settled on details including a 43-degree wand angle and carefully controlled temperatures for the seat, water and warm air.
That level of attention reveals something important about premium positioning. Luxury isn’t created simply by charging more money. It’s created when seemingly small details improve the customer’s experience so noticeably that the previous standard begins to feel inadequate. A heated seat isn’t luxurious because heating technology is impressive. It’s luxurious because sitting down on a warm surface on a cold morning feels better. An automatic lid isn’t valuable because sensors are exciting. It’s valuable because the fixture appears to respond to the person approaching it. A deodorizing system isn’t compelling because customers want to study the engineering. It removes an uncomfortable part of the bathroom experience. The technology succeeds because it serves the customer rather than drawing attention to itself.
That’s a principle businesses in almost any industry can use. Instead of asking, “What features can we add?” ask, “Where does our customer’s experience still feel unnecessarily frustrating, awkward or mediocre?”
How TOTO Made an Uncomfortable Product Easy to Talk About
Creating the WASHLET was only part of TOTO’s challenge. The company still had to explain it. That meant advertising a product designed to wash a part of the body people generally prefer not to discuss, particularly in public. Instead of hiding behind technical language, TOTO found a much simpler way to frame the idea.
A famous Japanese advertisement used the analogy of getting something dirty on your hand. Would you wipe your dirty hand with dry paper and consider it clean, or would you wash it with water? Suddenly, the conversation wasn’t really about toilets. It was about cleanliness.
That’s an extraordinarily useful marketing lesson because nearly every industry has subjects customers find uncomfortable.
Divorce lawyers deal with broken relationships. Restoration companies deal with floods and mold. Autobody shops meet people immediately after accidents. Junk removal companies may enter homes filled with years of accumulated possessions. Electricians sometimes discover dangerous work completed by previous owners. Financial professionals talk about debt, retirement and money.
Weak marketing avoids the uncomfortable part. Great marketing gives customers better language for discussing it. If your customer feels embarrassed about a problem, confused by your industry or afraid of asking a “stupid” question, there may be an enormous content opportunity sitting directly in front of you.
Answer the question nobody else wants to answer. Explain the problem competitors gloss over. Show customers what actually happens behind the scenes.
The same principle applies to the kind of digital marketing Edmonton businesses increasingly need. Effective marketing shouldn’t simply broadcast how great a company is. It should help customers understand a problem well enough that they can recognize the value of solving it.
TOTO didn’t need customers to become experts in toilet technology. It needed them to understand one simple idea: washing could feel cleaner and more comfortable than wiping. Once that idea made sense, the product made sense.
The company also recognized something else: some experiences are almost impossible to communicate through advertising alone. People needed to try it.
TOTO helped expose consumers to WASHLETs outside their homes. Once someone experienced warm-water washing, a heated seat and the other conveniences, the comparison changed. Their existing toilet hadn’t become worse overnight. Their expectations had become higher.
Today TOTO describes WASHLET around concepts including wellness, cleanliness, design and hospitality, and by 2025 cumulative shipments had passed 70 million units worldwide. You can explore TOTO’s official WASHLET history to see how the product evolved from its 1980 introduction into an increasingly sophisticated premium bathroom experience.
What Edmonton Business Owners Can Learn From TOTO
The biggest lesson from TOTO isn’t that businesses should add more technology. It’s that they should reconsider what customers have been trained to tolerate.
Consider a renovation company. Homeowners may expect contractors to be difficult to reach, timelines to be vague and project communication to be inconsistent.
What happens if communication becomes part of the premium product?
Clients receive regular updates. Photos arrive throughout the project. Schedules are clear. Questions get answered. The homeowner always knows what is happening next.
The construction work still matters, but now the company isn’t simply selling a renovation. It’s selling confidence.
An autobody shop could take the same approach. Most customers don’t want collision repair; they’re forced into it because something bad happened. The opportunity isn’t merely fixing the vehicle properly. It may be creating the least stressful collision repair experience possible.
A junk removal company could recognize that some customers feel embarrassed about the condition of a basement, garage or estate. Instead of merely selling hauling, the company could make dignity and discretion part of its service.
An electrician could stop competing exclusively on panels, breakers and hourly rates and build the brand around certainty: when something is hidden inside your walls, you’ll know it was installed correctly.
These businesses haven’t changed what they technically sell. They’ve changed what customers believe they’re buying. That’s how premium categories are built.
TOTO didn’t make going to the bathroom luxurious. It made cleanliness, comfort, design and the overall bathroom experience feel luxurious. Its NEOREST line eventually brought together TOTO’s history in ceramics with automated operation, advanced cleaning systems and sophisticated design. NEOREST itself dates to 1993, with TOTO continuing to develop the premium line in the decades since.
The opportunity for Edmonton businesses is to identify their own equivalent. What part of your industry’s customer experience does everyone complain about? What has become accepted simply because “that’s how this industry works”?
What do customers hate doing?
What makes them nervous?
What subject does nobody want to discuss?
What would make someone finish doing business with you and immediately tell another person, “You have to try these guys”?
Those questions can be more valuable than another promotion, another discount or another collection of features.
At Inspired Method, that’s an important part of how we think about business growth and marketing. Positioning isn’t simply about finding a clever slogan. It’s about creating a business that deserves to be positioned differently because the customer experience genuinely is different.
For entrepreneurs investing in digital marketing Edmonton customers will actually notice, that distinction matters. Marketing becomes dramatically easier when the experience behind the message is worth talking about.
TOTO began with ceramic sanitary ware. It added electronics, engineering, design, cleanliness, comfort and hospitality until the company fundamentally changed what millions of customers believed a toilet could be. In November 2025, TOTO announced that cumulative WASHLET shipments had surpassed 70 million units.
The most interesting part of the story isn’t the number of toilets it sold. It’s that TOTO taught customers to expect more from something they previously barely thought about. That’s the opportunity for almost every entrepreneur. Don’t just ask how you can sell more of what your industry already offers. Ask what customers have learned to tolerate, then create something so much better that the old standard starts to feel outdated.