Eric Dick (3:31)

And the main value proposition, beside it being just something that makes sense, is that it actually saves money. It's a. It'll save each of these vendors, these hotels, a lot of money because they won't have kids just like wrapping their whole hand around toilet paper stuff. I'm also thinking that I bet the original TP conglomerates, one of the reasons they haven't innovated this one might be because they're not as creative about toilet paper. But the other is they probably like the fact that you use a lot more of it using a roll. Right. Because then they have to buy more.

Ludo (3:59)

Yeah. So there's two parts to your question. I'll address the second part. First is that to change the machinery to go from that converting of, like the big jumbo rolls to this individual rolls, you know, that takes a lot of money, a lot of time and effort to keep it the same format. Now, a big reason why we are the first to do this, at least in this kind of style and look and feel, is because you have to solve for both the dispenser and the paper. You can't just solve for the paper if no one has a dispenser for it. Obviously, everyone out there right now, in every bathroom you've probably ever been to, has a traditional holder where the roll of toilet paper slides on. So we had to solve for a new dispenser that goes on the wall that would fit our Paper product as well. Right, right. And that's a big piece is the paper companies are typically not selling those dispensers or the hardware that goes with that. That's typically, you know, think of your favorite hardware company in your house. The Moen's, the Kohlers, the this or that. Right. And those companies are not in the paper business. So we're kind of a Mary of the two. On the other flip side of your first part of your question on, you know, consumption. Yes. For hotels specifically in that market, they're not having to remove that half used roll out of a room. And unfortunately, a good portion of those rolls end up in the garbage. The running joke in the industry is that the staff can't go to the bathroom fast enough to keep up with the amount of, you know, half used rolls being thrown at them. And so that's a big piece. But then the other part too is that because it's an interfolded format, you end up using about 40% less toilet paper because you're just pulling what you need versus a role is unrolling itself every time, literally.

Eric Dick (5:40)

And so you approached the market from a B2B standpoint first, which is, which is pretty smart. Talk about your decision to go B2B versus trying to create a B2C product.

Ludo (5:49)

Yeah. So I started thinking about, okay, well, who would buy this? And then I started thinking, okay, well, in my house, if I was to sell this to my wife or even to myself, I would probably start it with one. I would try one bathroom, see what it feels, what it looks like. And then just the shipping and logistics of shipping one piece and then shipping you just a handful of roles gets to be really, really expensive. Anyone that's on your podcast doing D2C businesses and all of that will understand this very, very quickly. So instead of like, well, who has, you know, hundreds of bathrooms in one single location? And then right away within the hospitality hotels stood out in a big way. And then that's when we start to talking to those people, understanding that, you know, that whole market, not only are they buying a lot, but they're wasting a lot on the back end because of the inefficiencies of a toilet paper.

Eric Dick (6:41)

Roll on the back end to do that on purpose.

Ludo (6:43)

There's more sort of the puns here is, you know, you're going to be on a roll here, like there's no shortage. We kind of, as we start, we start digging in here, talk to me.

Eric Dick (6:52)

About actually getting a prototype made that fit exactly what you, you talked about innovating both on the, you know, the tissue side as well as on the dispenser side. There's also some inn how you package the tissue, I think talk about going through the prototypes and how you got this product. Right.

Ludo (7:09)

Yeah. So at first it was us tinkering with, you know, pieces of wood, pieces of cardboard. You know, I had a piece of cardboard stuck up on my wall here just to see how it would kind of feel with, you know, just Kleenexes or tissues inside that were not for toilet paper specifically. Just to have that experience overall. We then start to talk to different industrial design agencies that were out there, because none of us, the original three co founders, have any design or building background, really. So we approached a few different ones. And one of them specifically was Box Clever, which is owned by a man named Brett. And Brett very simply loved the simplicity of the idea. He loved the sustainability piece, which was a really big focus for them as they were kind of growing as a company. Two years ago, he said, well, listen, guys, I. There's one of two ways. Either we can charge you an hourly rate, and realistically, it's going to cost you a lot of money to take this from a back of the napkin idea for have our entire engineering design team and everyone come on board and build this all out. How about instead we come in as equity partners and we join you as true partners in building this out and we disrupt the entire industry together. We had pretty much won the lottery from that standpoint, you know, and we became the fourth company they ever invested in. And we came on as full equity partners with them. And we inherited 20 to 25 designers, engineers, people who had built products for some of the biggest firms that are out there. And that was amazing. So then we went out to San Francisco quite a few times, met with their design team. They had full, by the time we got there, they had full 3D, you know, builds and models of this thing that were 3D printed that we could actually like, see and touch and feel. So that was the dispenser part. The paper part was actually the harder part. So as you know, our tissues come in this kind of package. So this is toilet paper, for example, interfolded sheets of 100 per pack fits in our dispenser. And this has a paper wrapper. So you very simply just take off the paper wrapper, refill the unit, and you're done finding a manufacturer that would be able to not only interfold toilet paper, but then also have it paper wrapped on all sides like this was extremely hard, borderline impossible. And this took a lot longer to build and to find. And what was funny here is that we finally found one that could do it with matching the softness that we wanted on the tissue side, that we then were able to take that and bring it to a few others to go, hey, it can be done. Here's how it's done. And then get a few other manufacturers. So now we have three different manufacturers in two different countries who have that ability and capacity to be able to do that for us. But it took a lot of trips to Asia, back and forth, a lot of Alibaba samples to try to see, you know, could anyone get there in any way, shape or form.

Eric Dick (10:07)

And do you have different inserts for facial tissue versus toilet paper, for instance, or is it the same product?

Ludo (10:12)

So different. So, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds here, your traditional facial tissues has what's called a higher wet strength. And so that ability is essentially when you blow your nose, you don't blow straight through the tissues. It keeps it tight in there versus toilet paper. The minute it hits the water, it's supposed to dissolve. So our. Our toilet paper is the same as what you would normally have as regular toilet paper on your wall. The minute you put it in the water, you'll start to see it breaks down into a million different pieces. And that's a big reason why you should not be putting facial tissues, AKA Kleenex, down the toilet. It's because that stuff does not dissolve, and it will stay that form for a long time and clog up your toilets or clog up, you know, the sewage pipes down the road as well.

Eric Dick (11:00)

Because that's like, there's. I just. I'm going home for Christmas in a. In a week here. And my mom always has decorative Christmas Kleenex or Kleenex box. That's the first problem. I'm calling it Kleenex, which is a brand name. Need to start calling it Fox Fold. Get that to take off. But it's another whole market for you eventually, too, right? The facial tissues, as well as in the bathroom, decorative boxes, themed boxes.

Ludo (11:20)

Yeah. Or branded boxes. Like something like this, for example, for, you know, as a Fairmont logo and brand. So we can create lots of different styles and looks and feels. The facial tissue one was actually really interesting. We had not planned to build that out at all when we first launched this, but from talking to housekeepers and GMs, they were like, well, if you're gonna solve for the toilet paper piece, can you also Solve for that stupid tissue box. And it was from us having no experience in hospitality outside of just staying in hotels where we were like what's wrong with your facial tissue box? And they very quickly came back to us with well, the same problem. We have to kind of remove it once it's down to the last few, we have to remove that whole box out of the room. Traditionally those commercial grade tissue boxes have yellow tissues inside. Those all go in the garbage. And for a lot of these big brands, those little cube tissue boxes with the little plastic lip at the top to hold the tissues upright is one of the last few places that they actually have plastic within the rims, which is shocking. So we solve that with now a facial tissue box that looks like this. And shockingly enough, and I'm still beyond myself to say that this is the world's first refillable facial tissue box. And how I get to say that in 2024 is beyond me. But unlike any other tissue box, you very simply take off the magnetic lid. Inside are the tissues free flowing. And as I mentioned before, they just come paper wrapped and you can refill the unit. Not too dissimilar from a napkin dispenser that you've seen in restaurants and other places.

Eric Dick (12:55)

So talk to me about the go to market strategy or you said eyes light up when people understand what the product is, but how has it gone when what has been your sort of go to market strategy on the B2B side?

Ludo (13:06)

I think, listen, I'm a really big fan of mfm. I love it. It's brought a lot to me in many different ways. From the episodes that I love the most are the ones where they start to dig in on specific entrepreneurs in a million different verticals. One of those was specifically learning about Claire from Aunt Floating. I learned about Claire, reached out to her because of since learning about her through mfm and she's now come on as one of our advisors on our board, which has been phenomenal. And she was instrumental in us building out our B2B strategy early on and understanding what were some of the key points and factors. I mean to our benefit. For anyone who doesn't know on flow, she sells dispensers that go on a wall in a bathroom with refillables of period products. I mean, how much closer to our business that could be is pretty incredible of us putting something on the wall but refillable with toilet paper. And so that was one big component. The other one was to just from what my background and my experience of investing in A lot of startups over the years was just the singularity of being focused on one like vertical as tight as you can. It's really easy to start going into a million different ways. You know, it's easy. It would be easy for us to launch and, and change our website to then be cruise ships and retirement homes and you know, anywhere there's a bathroom really. But it's like, I don't have all the money in the world. We want to have a big impact in one place. There's no shortage of trade shows just within hotels alone. So how do we make that, you know, a core focus? And that's why we picked hotels first is our go to market strategy. And we also knew that we had a lot of customers there that were ready to buy the minute that we launched. So we got really lucky with that. And that also attracted. Once we did go and raise some funds later on, it attracted investors from that market as well, who we're lucky now to have a lot of strategics who own a lot of hotels, who now they bought into the product, they were like, we love it. Hey, let us know when's the next time you're looking to raise some money. So we've been really lucky to have that come on as well.

Eric Dick (15:21)

And I was thinking about it versus restaurants, because in restaurants you have my least favorite toilet paper product there is, which are those giant rolls where you've got to like reach up under those serrated edges and pull it out and sometimes you gotta slide the thing over and pull it out the other side or whatever. But I bet because those are so big and because they're so low maintenance, I guess probably because they have such huge rolls, those might be a little bit harder to dislodge than just traditional TP rolls. Is that right?

Ludo (15:50)

Yes and no. So, but they also maybe only have like two or three bathrooms, right, in a restaurant or maybe, you know, maybe half a dozen to 10 or so, like if you're lucky. And I. And so the shipment piece is still the same, right. Like I still got to ship to that one place. We've done a lot of different restaurants across Vancouver. They've been great. We just. They're obviously not ordering as much as a hotel with even 100 rooms upstairs, let alone 500 would order, you know, on a weekly basis. And so. And the shipping doesn't change. Right. Like whether I'm shipping one box or I'm shipping one pallet, you know, I'm trying to find scale and size and scale on that end in A big way.

Eric Dick (16:32)

It sounds like most of your like marketing has been sort of word of mouth and sort of block and tackle. Like whether it's your strategic investors or people that you're going out to kind of reach and sell the product to. Has there been. What other sort of marketing endeavors have you. Have you had success with trade shows?

Ludo (16:47)

Was a big one because we have a physical product and we don't have some sort of tech platform being able to. For me to show it to you live face to face and for you to touch it and feel it has been a really big one. If you were to go on our website and if you were any kind of business requesting a sample has also been a great conversion piece for us. Most of the samples that we sell or that we give out traditionally converts into a bigger sale. So we've seen a really great ROI from that strategy. And then the other one has just been to join all of the local associations. So my co founder lives in Toronto and so between us we're probably in about half a dozen associations across both Canada and the U.S. and they're regional. So we're part of the Hotel association of Canada, but we're also part of the Ontario Hotel association, the Toronto Hotel association, the Alberta Hotel association, the British Columbia Hotel association, soon the Washington State Hotel Association. So we're trying to like get in with all of those local ones and then just, you know, get in there and get to know all the members and sponsor as many of their, you know, smaller events as we can to really have a big impact. That's where we've seen, you know, really that hand to hand combat come into play.

Eric Dick (18:00)

Have, is it. Are you bootstrapped or have you raised funds for Fox Fold?

Ludo (18:04)

We've done two, two rounds so far and a big portion of that was really just to pay for R and D tooling and obviously building up our inventory, you know, as you can appreciate and I'm sure everyone you've interviewed in the past, selling something that's on the shelf versus, you know, something that's coming in a few months sells a lot faster, a lot easier and gets a lot more traction. So that's been a big part of why we needed to raise money.

Eric Dick (18:30)

How did you find raise? I was just talking about it for potential endeavor with one of my co founders and he was talking with Jeff, who you met, and he was saying how challenging that could be. It depends on the area you're in. How did you find it?

Ludo (18:42)

Yeah, I mean I had come from a background of fundraising for other companies in the past. So I kind of, you know, I had a bit of a cheat sheet in front of me of like, okay, I've seen what others have done and I've seen what's worked and what's not worked. You know, the presentations where right away you're spending three slides telling me about how big your TAM is and how this is going to do a full hockey stick. Ah, you know, traditionally doesn't grab everyone's attention versus, like, you know, show me the potential not in terms of tam, but like walk me through like one customer and what's that's done and how that's benefited them and how. And what kind of, you know, how has your product benefited them and Foxfold and everything else in between. Right. So we've really laser focused our story on that and we just kept it really, really simple. We're not like reinventing the Internet. This is not web 3.0, Bitcoin this or that. It's have you ever used the toilet before and wiped yourself? Well, here's just a very slightly different way. And all of the big sustainability and cost benefits that there are for businesses to be able to do that, and I think that's a big advantage for us, is that everyone can relate to this story. Everyone understands it. There's not a big education gap. And so we were very fortunate in that sense to be able to walk people through that.

Eric Dick (20:03)

How'd you come up with the brand? It's a good, simple brand. You've got the domain, you've got the dot com. Anytime you're trying to innovate a new kind of product category, I bet a lot of thought goes into it. Talk about where Foxfold came from.

Ludo (20:15)

We originally, we didn't have a name, so we called ourselves New Box company N U B O X. And so for the longest time it was, you know, ludoewbox co.com because we didn't even. And newbox.com was already taken, so we had to do newboxco.com just to be able to have like legal documentation, start filing patents and all of that kind of stuff. Then we turned Back to the TP boys, WhatsApp group. The three of us started jamming on names over and over again. We knew fold was gonna be in there some way, shape or form. Because obviously we're folding toilet paper and now facial tissues as well. But we didn't quite know the other part to it. Paper fold, box fold. I don't know many different things. And we stumbled on different animals. Fox became one of them, foxfold.com was one penny, not $100,000. So that was a big plus on that side. But then also just digging in a little bit deeper on F fox, like as a brand or as an animal itself. It's a global animal affected by deforestation. It's really soft and fluffy, but it's also cunning as well and kind of can be vicious.

Eric Dick (21:25)

Very discreet. I feel like foxes are very foxes, you know, I think it's a great, great spirit animal for the product.

Ludo (21:30)

Yeah, I think so too. And so, so that's where kind of it started as an origination piece. We loved the analogy of it. We didn't quite adopt the animal into our branding. If you saw our logo, it's a double F kind of back to back. We didn't adopt. We, we had looked at different ways of maybe having a fox face in there.

Eric Dick (21:50)

And that kind of is a fox face a little bit. Like I could, I can stretch it sort of has that fox angle, right?

Ludo (21:56)

Yeah. If you, it's one of those where it's like if you cross your eyes and you look at it long enough, you start to see different images and popping out. Right. So yeah, so we didn't quite do that a little bit, but not too, too much. You know, the, the double angles there is actually a repetition of a bamboo. Right. So a bamboo plant, which is a really big piece of what we do. The other piece is that double F is really like a stack of our papers. So if I was to pull out a stack, show you kind of the, the edge here, this is kind of the F. So the long side of the F with the two sides popping out. So that's another element of like where that F came from is like us cutting that stack, you know, on a diagonal anyways, lots of time. This is where Box Clever and their marketing team and everything else helped massage the brand as well.

Eric Dick (22:47)

I have a question about logistics. You mentioned how it saves wastage, but I'm wondering because if they come in these full pack inserts in hotels, if anything's like below half, for instance, would they just. Do they have to replace that or how does it actually work when it comes to replacing it?

Ludo (23:02)

Yeah, great question. So our facial tissue box can hold 110 to 120 facial tissues and each pack is 100 tissues. So once you're down to the last few, you can either pull it and put it back on top or literally just keep putting it on top every single time. And so you have the benefit of adding a full stack, and we built it to be 110, 120% bigger than the actual stack itself. On the toilet paper dispenser, we didn't. It wasn't until the end where we started to innovate on this. But every dispenser, if I pull out the paper on this one, every dispenser in this cartridge has a refill line halfway through. And so every dispenser can fit two stacks of our tissues. And so now, as you can appreciate, housekeeping is going in there pretty regularly. And so housekeepers, all they have to do is open up the lid. If they see that refill line, they add another stack on top because they know that another stack will fit. And then to our benefit, all they keep doing is just adding it up, other stack on top every single time and topping it off in there.

Eric Dick (24:06)

If there's something you could do differently that you with, like, lessons that you've learned now that would save you time or money or effort, is there something you'd sort of tell past Ludo?

Ludo (24:14)

Oh, man. One I think is I thought we could create things a lot faster. I didn't realize how long it takes to create something. What I think is really, really simple. So I have a whole new level of appreciation for my. An espresso machine and everything else that I interact with all day long, let alone this camera and the simplicity and beauty of an iPhone and everything else. Right. So I took a lot of that for granted previous to being of something. I also have a whole new appreciation for sole founders. How, you know, people like Tara Bosch and others who've built incredible mega brands as individual, as sole founders early on. I mean, not just the lows. Everyone talks about the lows, but even just the highs. Like, you know, you have no one to celebrate that with in the early days because you're by yourself, like, like mind blowing in that sense. Right. So I'm very, very lucky and very fortunate to have some incredible co founders and to be able to jump on and celebrate all of those wins with. To get a bit more granular and to double click on maybe your question on the dispensers themselves. Like, it was also just not analysis paralysis of, like, we could keep innovating on this endlessly, but we kind. And this was actually feedback from Tara at SmartSuites. She was like, don't try to perfect it early on. Like, just get it out in the wild as fast as you can. You're gonna have feedback. It will never be perfect first time around. And she was absolutely right. So, you know, lots of tweaks that we've made to our existing ones. We're already starting to think about version two for these new, for these new units and we're looking at production for that. We're actually now looking at onshore production with, you know, this whole Trump era coming back into OR and tariffs and everything else in between. So that's another big one for us.

Eric Dick (26:07)

Interesting. Really cool. Where do you see what's your vision for this business?

Ludo (26:13)

Well, my dream is that fast forward 10 years from now, you go to a hotel room and you walk in and it's a roll of toilet paper on there and you're like, ah, Ludo, check this out. They're still using rolls here. Can you believe it?

Eric Dick (26:29)

That's like a rotary telephone.

Ludo (26:31)

Exactly, exactly. So that's my dream is that like this becomes the absolute standard everywhere else and that if you're not, if you're using rolls of toilet paper. Dude, that's disgusting. Like, that's so ancient. Yeah, so that's my, that's my long, long term dream. Shorter term. Listen, I, you know, we want to have a really big impact across the industry. We want to be, we're already, I think, making a bit of a splash early on. I mean, we've only been around since April of this year. You know, this is being recorded in December. So, you know, it's only been a few months and already, you know, we're well over 5,000 bathrooms across Canada and the U.S. and I think we'll, you know, we can see the hockey stick happening now a little bit, which is really exciting. Really, really exciting.

Eric Dick (27:14)

And what's your, what's your turnover? No one's putting toilet paper rolls back on the wall after they get this, right?

Ludo (27:21)

No. And that's why like, you know, once we own the wall, as you know Claire from Aunt Flo had mentioned, they're pretty much married to you for a long time, which is a really big one. So, you know, we're looking at first, for example, the economy to mid scale level of hotels, which is a mega market. It's actually much bigger than the luxury segments of the hotel world. We're looking at creating like an all plastic version of those that still would be incredibly sleek and unique, but where I would be giving you the dispensers quote unquote, for free, but then locking you up on a multi year agreement on those units because then at that point, now we own that wall, we own that business and then as you can appreciate the value of us having a Customer sign a five year deal with us is really valuable.

Eric Dick (28:09)

Speaking of Trump, you could get some solid gold ones or some gold plated ones for Trump Towers. I could see that could be. If you're listening, Donald, I think you want to talk to Ludo here.

Ludo (28:17)

Yeah. Something like this. Oh, boom.

Eric Dick (28:19)

There you go right there.

Ludo (28:23)

We actually built this one as a prototype for the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Eric Dick (28:28)

Oh, nice.

Ludo (28:29)

In la, which was. Which is a beautiful property.

Eric Dick (28:31)

That's awesome. You mentioned patents briefly. And any time you're innovating and disrupting a category, are you worried about copycats or what are. How do you think about. About copycats?

Ludo (28:41)

It's funny because the, the whole patent thing, I think the main reason why we did it wasn't so much because we were scared of copycats. As much as it was requested or demanded by a lot of investors or a lot of potential investors. It was almost like their third question of like, you know, is this patented? If that question didn't come up, I don't know that we would have done patents. I think Elon Musk had put it in a really interesting way where he's like, you're putting landmines behind to like slow people down.

Eric Dick (29:12)

Yeah.

Ludo (29:13)

Now whether those mines blow up or not, who knows, you know, but it's more just of a scare tactic more than anything. So, you know, we went through the process. We got patents now on our dispensers in the US in Canada and China and soon in Europe as well. How much, how much time and energy and effort am I going to spend on the world of patents? I think we've checked that box. I don't know how deep I would go into it. Now where we are going to go deep into it is protecting our trademarks. That one we've gotten, you know, really global exposure to just about every market on foxfold because we do not want, we don't want someone else to say that they are foxfold in, you know, in the U.K. for example, or wherever else.

Eric Dick (29:56)

Well, I'm excited to follow your journey and I look forward to a foxfold future as well where we can shame TP role users. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It was fun to connect this way. Ludo.

Ludo (30:06)

Well, I appreciate you reaching out and obviously if you did want to try it for yourself, you know, we just launched the facial tissue boxes on Amazon, so you can check us there as our first D2C ish channel to try to appease some of that market. And a big reason why we went there is just because the amount of demand that we got from people asking us for our facial tissue boxes and our toilet paper dispensers. So we're trying that out very quietly, very softly, just to see what kind of pickup we're getting there. And then eventually, my dream is that we have this in different retailers as well, and it'll be exciting.

Eric Dick (30:43)

All right, brother. Thanks again.

Ludo (30:45)

Thanks for having me.

Eric Dick (30:52)

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now @directtoconsumeralloneword.co. i'm Eric Dick, and this has been the D to C podcast. We'll see you next time.