Five entrepreneurs founded the Electro-Alkaline Company in 1913 by creating a bleach product with chlorine and sodium hydroxide as its main ingredients. Fifteen years later, the company listed on the San Francisco Stock Exchange and changed its name to Clorox, a loose acronym formed from the names of its ingredients. It remained a one-product company until the 1970s, when it aggressively expanded into everything from cat litter to salad dressings. Yet its geographic expansion has been much more modest: just $1.2 billion of its fiscal 2010 sales of $5.53 billion came from international markets, with the remaining 80 percent from Canada and the United States.

Clorox’s international presence is currently limited to Australia and Latin America. Yet the incentive to expand geographically is obvious: pretax earnings growth from international markets was 23 percent in fiscal 2010, compared with 7 percent for the core North American cleaning-products business. The executive charged with spearheading Clorox’s expansion effort is Beth Springer, who joined the company in 1990 in brand management and is now executive vice president, international. In this interview with McKinsey’s Amy Howe, she discusses how the history of Clorox has shaped its decision making and the way it evaluates potential growth markets.