The Fastest Way to Clean Showers and Tubs: A Professional's Secret

Cut Cleaning Times with the Contour!

Whether you clean in office buildings, educational facilities, hotels, hospitals, or your own home, almost every cleaner has to contend with some sort of bathing facility. Be it a huge communal gym shower, a luxurious hotel soaking tub, or even a cramped apartment corner shower, the one thing they all have in common is no one likes to clean them!

Scrubbing tubs and showers are some of the most universally dreaded tasks in the cleaning world, and it’s easy to see why. No matter how fit or expertly trained you are, showers and tubs have always required huge amounts of exhausting scrubbing, crouching, hunching, kneeling, and stretching, all while standing on slippery, soap-scum-covered surfaces… that is until NOW!

I’m Melissa Homer, a professional cleaning expert with over 20 years of experience consulting some of the largest cleaning franchises in North America, and I am about to reveal to you my best-kept secret to DRASTICALLY reducing the labor, time, pain, and risk involved in making tubs and showers shine, the Contour Frame.

The Contour Frame - Innovation Born From Tragedy

When I worked at the headquarters of MaidPro, one of North America’s largest residential cleaning franchises, I introduced the revolutionary Contour Frame in response to one of the most tragic worker compensation claims I had ever witnessed. At one of our franchise locations, one of our cleaners experienced a truly life-altering yet avoidable accident that changed the way I looked at professional cleaning forever.

This cleaner was well-trained, dedicated, and hard-working, but as she was finishing cleaning a shower-bathtub combo, she noticed a spot she missed in the shower's upper corner. In a burst of zeal for excellence, she stepped on the side of the damp tub and grabbed the shower pole so she could reach the missed spot, but the pole gave way, and she came crashing down shoulder first into the tub.

Three surgeries later, she never regained full mobility of that arm, not only ending her cleaning career but forever limiting her ability to do anything from carrying groceries to picking up her grandkids! The owner of her franchise was devastated, too. Not only from the guilt of watching a cleaner he adored lose so much over a simple spot, but also from the expense of the worker's compensation claim, which was the most expensive the franchise had ever experienced till that point.

Supporting that franchise through that awful chapter lit in me a passion for finding a safer way to clean showers and tubs! I vowed never again would one of our cleaners get hurt like this on my watch, especially for the lack of a tool that would allow them to clean with excellence without risk! I knew there HAD to be a way to clean showers and tubs without such high risk for slips and falls, neck strain, shoulder damage, knee and back pain, and so much more. After much research and testing, I found the ultimate solution, the Contour Frame.

Deep Clean Showers and Tubs from the Safety of Dry Ground!

Traditionally, to clean a shower or tub, a cleaner has to climb in and stand on the slippery, dirty, soap-scum-covered surface and scour the walls of the shower or tub with a sponge or scrub brush. This method requires all of the strenuous work to be done by only the cleaner's dominant arm, causing massive fatigue and strain as they clean bathroom after bathroom. This method also causes the cleaner's whole body to contort into crouching or reaching positions as they strain to clean both high and low, leading to lower back, knee, and neck injuries.

Even if the cleaner managed to stand with enough poise or switch arms frequently enough to avoid injury, the work was, at best, slow and exhausting, especially in large walk-in showers, communal showers, and huge soaking tubs. Worst of all, as I explained above, standing on slippery surfaces has always been a ticking time bomb, either leading to fall injuries or damage claims as cleaners track bleach-filled bathroom sprays around customers' properties with their soapy shoes.

The Contour Frame is a truly game-changing cleaning tool because it allows you deep to clean even the most enormous bathtubs and showers while standing with dignity on the safety of the dry ground.

The Contour Frame is a flexible frame made of industrial-grade rubber that screws onto an extendable mop pole. The frame is just the right balance of flexibility and strength, such that you can deep scrub with real power, but the head bends enough to conform to the shape of any tub, acrylic surround, or other curved bathroom surfaces. The rubber is thick enough to create resistance, but soft enough with smoothed edges that it will never scratch, even when rubbed against delicate stone and fiberglass.

Thanks to the Contour Frame’s unique qualities, it can be used to scour shower walls and bathtubs while standing upright, holding the pole with two hands so that cleaners can use their core body muscles instead of just one arm. By using both arms and their core muscles, cleaners can scrub tubs and showers with large sweeping motions, covering huge amounts of square footage in moments, using vastly less energy than the traditional methods.

Tall walk-in showers and low tub floors can all be cleaned while standing up straight, greatly reducing lower back and knee pain. Best of all, cleaners can stand on dry ground (or at least further away from the slippery soap and water in sizeable communal shower cleanings), vastly reducing their injury risk as well as the risk of tracking chemicals onto carpets and other sensitive floorings.

Unlike all the battery-powered spin brushes that have recently tried to solve this problem, the Contour Frame is actually designed to withstand years of commercial use. There are no batteries to run out or forget to charge, no engines to burn out, and no small attachments to break or lose. The set is as rugged as it is simple.

It’s an ultra-light yet super-strong aluminum extension pole with an industrial-grade, chemical-resistant rubber frame. The quality of these parts mean it can be used for aggressive scouring for years in a commercial or residential setting without breaking or scratching delicate surfaces. I can say this with full confidence, as I got to watch this system in action at hundreds of MaidPro locations across the US and Canada for over five years. Residential cleaners are notoriously brutal to equipment, especially for bathroom cleaning, so I know for a fact that this is a system built to last.

woman cleaning wall using Contour Frame mop

The Contour Frame is Flexible in More Ways than One

As if cleaning showers and tubs faster, easier, and safer than ever before wasn’t enough, the Contour Frame has even more tricks up its sleeve! At the end of the day, it’s just a flexible 9” frame, so it can hold any 10” pad from the Microfiber Wholesale line, allowing it to multitask in bathrooms and beyond!

You can get light-duty scour pads from your favorite distributor to deep scrub showers, tubs, and tile floors (scour pads can be laundered 5-10 times).
Use it with our Mucho Mop pad, and suddenly, it’s a microfiber chenille mop that can clean air vents and uneven flooring like those designer slate tile and pebble stone bathroom floors.
Put on wet mop pads or dry dust pads, and it becomes a super maneuverable mini mop, perfect for small bathroom floors and getting in tight detail areas like behind the toilet.
You can even use it with our scrubber wet mop pads to clean dingy bathroom floors or maintenance clean showers and tubs with light soils, ideal in frequent cleaning scenarios like hotels and hospitals.

The Catch? It Only Works if You Buy It!

If you’ve made it this far but still haven’t added the Contour Frame to your cart yet, let me boost your confidence with the power of math!

The average professional cleaner makes around $15 an hour or $0.25 per minute. The average residential-style full bathroom with shower and tub usually takes around 30 minutes to clean, a good half of which is often dedicated to shower and tub scrubbing. Master bathrooms with walk-in showers and soaking tubs take 50% longer! I know from years of using the Contour Frame myself and watching the impact that it had at the MaidPro franchise that this frame can easily cut shower cleaning in half.

To be conservative for this calculation, though, we’ll pretend it only saves five minutes per bathroom or $1.25 in labor. If you are buying this frame for a team of cleaners, it is $21.98, so each cleaner will pay for their new scrubber with their labor savings in around 18 bathrooms, which is a week or two max for a residential cleaner! This is before you add in the savings from workers compensation claims and employees calling out sick because they are exhausted and sore from too much scrubbing.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a dollar and cents game, at least not the way you think it is. As I explained in detail in my article Making Money with Microfiber, switching to better cleaning supplies makes you a ton of money, but rarely from directly cutting payroll with reduced cleaning times. More often, that reduction in time is used to catch mistakes, clean deeper, slow down to a safer pace, add special touches, and so many other things that drive down poor service recleans, damage claims, workers comp claims, and ultimately customer attrition.

No matter how you do the math, in professional cleaning, you will always make money investing in your staff and supporting their ability to do their work faster, easier, and safer. Especially with tools like the Contour Frame, where you are immediately and meaningfully alleviating a huge pain point for your staff, can you really put a price point on improving morale that dramatically? Yes, you can! It’s $22, so get it already!

Contour Microfiber Mop Frame

Unique flexible microfiber mop frame that allows you to shape the mop to evenly cover things like toilets, baseboards, and more! Pair with our 6ft. Heavy Duty Telescoping Mop Handle.

18" Microfiber Scrubber Mop

Aggressive without being abrasive, the scrubbing strips on the mop are designed to provide aggressive cleaning in high traffic areas without damaging your floors - perfect for scuff marks! Won't scratch wood flooring.

Written by

Melissa Homer
Content Contributor at
Microfiber Wholesale

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Melissa Homer is a professional cleaning expert with over 20 years experience in the commercial and residential cleaning industry. She is a highly trained cleaning professional, business consultant, and educator that specializes in cleaning product testing and research, premium surface care, cleaning safety, cleaning procedure efficiency, training documentation, and cleaning damage repair. Melissa has worked for some of the biggest names in the professional residential cleaning industry, including P&G Professional and MaidPro. She has been interviewed and quoted in numerous leading publications such as Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens, U.S. News & World Report, and The Washington Post.

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