Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now, regular listeners will know one of my favorite brands is who Gives a Crap? And we had the amazing Emily Craftman on to talk about it just a couple of years ago. Well, I'm joined in this episode by one of the co founders, Danny Alexander. Welcome to the show.
- [00:14]
B
Thanks. Great to be here.
- [00:15]
A
Good to have you.
- [00:16]
B
Yeah.
- [00:16]
A
And be looking forward to this because I'm a really big fan of your brand, who Gives a Crap? And I have been for a while. I love anyone who's disrupting a category and doing things differently and, and marketing in the way that you've done. So take us back to like, how did you meet the other founders? How did it all happen for you?
- [00:35]
B
Yeah, we have a pretty atypical founding story. I think some of our employees are shocked when they find out that I would guess for the first seven or eight years of the business, the three co founders were in the same room maybe three to five times. We met in 2010. We launched a crowdfunding campaign together in 2012. We did everything virtually over Skype and email. We. What happened was I was looking for, looking for my next thing. I had just moved back to the States. I was living in Argentina for a couple of years and wanted to get an MBA and decided on my way back to the states that I wasn't an academic learner. I was always good at my studies, but I was a hands on kind of learner. And so I decided that if I really wanted to learn how businesses worked, that it would be best to do it on the job. And so I figured I'd look for startups that were doing interesting things that I could help get off the ground. And I came across Simon and Jehan, my two co founders at this business plan incubator program in Colorado. They had come from Australia with this idea, met them instantly, fell in love with the idea, we got along great and we decided to do it together. And so that was 2010, which is about 15, 16 years ago now. It took us a few years to get started. Like I said, it was a side project and we were doing it nights and weekends over Skype and email. All of us jumped in full time several years later. I think it was probably about 2015 or 2016 when I made the leap. Probably about the same time that Simon made the leap. He was doing other things. Jehan came on full time a few years after. And so it was a very unusual first few years of the business.
- [02:05]
A
That is unusual. And again, I mean, a Lot of people talk about developing a side hustle for a while, see if it works, then jump full time. So you effectively were doing the side hustle together, weren't you? For five years before 100%.
- [02:18]
B
And, you know, I think I often get asked by young founders, I think there's this perception that founders have to be really risk tolerant and have to do crazy things and really be willing to put it all on the line. And that just wasn't the case for us. We all had other jobs, all for the first few years, we all had something else paying our bills. And so we could afford to take some of the risks comfortably and do it at our own pace. And so, yeah, I think in some ways it gave us a leg up on the competition. In some ways it was. Maybe we were slower than we would have been otherwise, but, you know, it was a really great way for us to get started and figure out how to run this business.
- [02:56]
A
And what's the advantage of having three of you versus say, one of you? And also, how do you divide up responsibilities between you? Do you focus on different parts of the business or do you bring different kind of personality traits to it?
- [03:07]
B
Yeah, it's definitely evolved over the years. I mean, I could never start a business alone. I. There are some people who are able to do it and, and good for them. It's a, it's a really lonely journey even with three of us. Right. I think it's. You're often the one in the room who has to make really difficult decisions. You're often the one defying best practices and deciding. You know, I know that, I know that the industry says we should do this, but we should do that. And so I think it can be really lonely and challenging to own those decisions constantly. So I feel having co founders really helped give us the confidence and support and camaraderie that we could really do difficult things in terms of how we split things up. I think it's just really happened naturally that, you know, my background is in product design and ultimately everything kind of customer facing was kind of my bread and butter. So the brands, the website, the creative, the copywriting, all of that stuff sort of was in my domain. But I've always been relatively academic designer. Right. So I, you know, I could, you know, I know just enough about business and spreadsheets and, and strategy and everything to get myself into trouble and to appreciate that, but not really enough to do it. Jehan, on the other hand, is, you know, he's got a background in strategy and management consulting. He can honestly, I would, I would just like pay to watch him run a spreadsheet. Like, he's just a wizard at calculating things and figuring out how to run things effectively. And I think Simon is somewhere in between. He really appreciates both of them and can find the synergies between them. And then he's also just really strong operationally figuring out how do we need to leverage capital to grow, how do we need to think about our distribution center strategy and really leverage that to help us grow, how do we maximize the volume of our shipping footprint to really drive profit? And so I think there's, there's enough overlap between us that we can really collaborate well, but not so much overlap that we ever step on each, each other's toes.
- [05:01]
A
Yeah, that sounds great. We have to talk about the name, of course.
- [05:04]
B
Right.
- [05:04]
A
So when did the name come about and was it an immediate, this is genius, we're going to have to do it, or did you have any alternative names?
- [05:14]
B
Yeah, so the original story is not, unfortunately not that interesting. It's just kind of an epiphany moment that Simon had where he was looking for a business that he could start that would have some social impact. He wanted to find a product that he could attach a donation model to that everybody used. Right. And so he walked into the bathroom one day, saw toilet paper, and he said, that's it, toilet paper. We could donate half of our profits to help build toilets around the world and we can call it who Gives a Crap. So it was just like, as he describes it, kind of a one shot epiphany. When I met him and Jay Han, they already had the name. I thought it was hilarious. I never thought it would work, if I'm being totally honest. And I think a lot of our early team and our early advisors didn't think so either. I think, you know, we're talking about 2010. It was a very different media landscape. It was a little bit more proper than we expected. Expect now, you know, I was just watching the super bowl the other day and Levi's had an ad that was just all buts. Right. And that in 2010 would have been radical. And so I think the idea of the name who Gives a Crap felt a little too edgy to me. When we launched in the state, we launched first in Australia. It, it became a huge hit. It was, it's a very Australian brand name and identity. A few years later In, I believe, 2017, we were launching in the US and UK. We were really nervous about whether the brand name would work. Or not. So we actually did test several other brand names. We you launched a few basically parallel websites and pointed a few Facebook ads at the sites and saw like, is there any difference in the brand name in terms of like intended, you know, intention of purchase? And we saw that the difference was pretty minimal. We tested like role model and who Gives a Crap and wgac. We tested a bunch of different things and ultimately they were all pretty comparable. But who Gives a Crap gave us the advantage of like the virality, the ability to talk about it. You know, if you see it on someone's bathroom shelf or on the back of someone's toilet, you want to pick it up and read it. So it gave us a lot of the halo benefits of having a global brands that was kind of worth talking about.
- [07:08]
A
Well, I mean I think from a challenger brand perspective, one of the things that challenger brands always do is they think about how everything that they make can be used as media and effectively. Your, your print campaign, your outdoor campaign, your viral campaign is all wrapped up in the packaging, isn't it? It does so much of the heavy lifting for you. Let's talk about the packaging as well because is very disruptive and different so it's hard to miss. And also if anyone doesn't know, you individually wrap every role, don't you? Which is quite, quite different. I presume that comes at quite an expense as well. So what was the thinking behind a. The design, look and feel which is disruptive and also going to the effort of wrapping the role?
- [07:48]
B
Yeah, so I originally started my career as a packaging designer at a company called Method. It's a cleaning products company. I think it's pretty widely distributed in the UK as well. Yeah, so I was one of the first, I was like, you know, employee number 60 there or something. Saw this tremendous growth of the product and the category in that time and one of the greatest learnings I had there was that the product should be the billboard. Right. And that we had. We had a heavy focus on earned media and shareability and word of mouth growth over paid media. I think when we started who Gives a Crap we had the opportunity to do something similar. And you know, the original idea was I was walking through San Francisco where I lived at the time and Simon, my co founder was visiting and we were trying to figure out like how do we design packaging for this? And we hadn't thought of the individually wrapped rolls yet or anything. And I remember being in a bar and seeing in the bathroom they had like paper wrapped rolls there and I realized like, why can commercial toilet paper be wrapped in paper instead of plastic, but when I go to the grocery store, it's always wrapped in plastic. And so we realized it must be possible. And let's, let's figure it out. Let's do it. And so that was the moment when we realized, like, let's, let's run with this paper wrapped roll thing. And then, you know, later that day or another day, I was again walking down the street in San Francisco and I passed a barbershop and I saw those in kind of the twisty poles outside. And I was like, what if when we stacked a few rolls up in the bathroom, it made that kind of stripy barber pole aesthetic? And so that was the original kind of design insight. It was that we could actually not only individually wrap them, but we could make kind of a sculpture or a statement out of them. And so that weekend, Simon and I went into my office in San Francisco and we printed out 48 wrappers, basically that had stripes on them. And we put them together, and it was such an eyesore. There were just 48 insanely brightly colored wrapped rolls in front of us, all with stripes. And it was just, it was too much. And so we realized, okay, we need to bring a little bit of variety in here. And so we started prototyping and printing different patterns. And I was pushing for like 48 different patterns in a box. Simon, again, the operations person, pushed back and we, you know, he's like, what about 2? And I was like, what about 12? And we ended up on 6 in the original packaging. And so that was the early idea. We've since expanded from that. We now do limited edition packages a few times a year. We do, you know, holiday edition, which started as a joke when we first did it, but is now one of our biggest moments of the year. And then I think one of my favorite features was developed by one of our early copywriters, who, she was a copywriter at Innocent Drinks back in the day, Innocent Juices, and is a good friend of mine. And she did all of our early copywriting. She had this idea, what if we put emergency rolls in the bottom of every box? What if we put like three rolls wrapped in bright red paper and just said, don't run out. Like, don't forget to order more. And so ever since then, we've put emergency rolls in the bottom of every single box we ship. And it's always a huge hit to this day, you know, almost 15 years later.
- [10:39]
A
I love that. That's so good. I mean, again because it's the sort of thing you'd only do if you were thinking like a challenger brand. Because any big business would just strip the cost out, right? They look at it and go, well, that's, you know, adding X number of dollars per bag. Yeah, Per container. So we. But there's a value in doing that, isn't there? That's what makes this good. Cause it's the surprise, it's talking, it's the copy that you read that makes people share it as well, which is so cool. Let's just touch on the purpose as well, because that's a very big part of this story as well. So what are you trying to do through the brand?
- [11:12]
B
So our long term goal as a business is to ensure that everyone on earth has access to clean water and a toilet. So for those who aren't aware, over 2 billion people in the world don't have access to toilet. A basic necessity. It's not just a problem of inconvenience or disgust. It's a matter of public health. It's a, you know, I think we all know that access to clean water is important, but one of the reasons it's important is that if people don't have toilets, that waste ends up in waterways, which is the main reason for people getting sick. And when we were getting started, we realized this fact that over 2 billion people lacked access to toilets. And so we decided to donate 50% of our profits to help build toilets. That was the original goal. Now we've added clean because a lot of water and sanitation projects are done in partnership with each other. You know, ultimately by donating 50% of our profits. For the record, I was skeptical of that as well. In the early days, there was a lot of early day debates about, you know, what are the right ways to do these things. It seemed too ambitious to me. In the early days, it seemed like we could probably reinvest. If we donated 10%, it would still be hugely ambitious, but we would have a lot more money to reinvest in marketing or other things. And I think to his credit, Simon was pretty adamant and basically said like the, the boldness of it is kind of, that's the marketing, right? Like, it's the, it's the story that people will, will get hooked on. 10% is great, but like, that's not big enough to really generate stories from. And so by donating 50% of our profits, it's, it's ambitious enough that people talk about it and believe in it. It's ambitious enough that our team are really motivated by it and really see that we intend to do good. And it's just crazy enough that we were getting, we were able to get our investors to, to be on board with it for their.
- [12:54]
A
Well, that's a really good question though, because how do you raise money of your telling investors that 50% of the return that they might have a share of is being given away?
- [13:04]
B
The reality is, in the first few years we weren't sure we could. Ultimately, with a big goal like trying to ensure everyone on earth has access to a toilet and clean water, we needed to grow massively. And so we always knew that capital would be a really important part of our journey. But I don't think we believed we could do it in the early days without really proving this business model. And so we bootstrapped the business through to 2021. We were doing really well, we did really well and grew exponentially through all of that time. And then Covid was an absolutely manic period in, in the toilet paper world, as you may have heard. And so we came out of 2020 just in the best possible position to raise capital. And so we were in a great position to really go out and find investors who were truly aligned with our values and really believed in the power of a purpose driven brand to not only do good, but actually deliver meaningful returns. And so we've never looked at our donations as a marketing expense or an employee retention expense, but I think if you were to take a cold, hard measurement, look at how we've grown versus how we would have grown if we spent that on marketing, I'd bet that we've grown more and retained our employees better, more effectively because we've donated half of our profit. So I think it's a win win that we've been able to prove over time.
- [14:19]
A
Such an interesting way of looking at it, isn't it? How many consumers are buying into the brand because of your donations, how many retailers are stocking you because of that, you know, how much brand awareness do you get? Because the story, you know, so on. So from an investment point of view, they need to factor that in.
- [14:35]
B
Absolutely.
- [14:36]
A
You know, as part of it, you know, not see it as a cost, see it as an investment.
- [14:39]
B
Yeah.
- [14:39]
A
Now, talking of fundraising, you've got quite an entertaining story, haven't you, about how you raised your first. Is it 50,000?
- [14:45]
B
50,000, yeah.
- [14:46]
A
Right. How did that all take place?
- [14:47]
B
Yeah. So, you know, you know, like you mentioned earlier, as a challenger brand, really any bootstrap brand, you really need to be creative about how you use every touch point of your business to drive growth and to really be efficient. And so in addition to the product being the billboard, we really needed to think like, how do we make our marketing deliver disproportionate gains? And we had a marketing budget of zero, and we knew we needed to raise a crowdfunding round of capital to pay for our first production run. And with zero budget and very ambitious goals, we realized that we needed to do something crazy. And so we convinced Simon, my, my co founder to sit on a toilet on a live stream for as long as it took to raise our first $50,000. And it took about 51 hours. And we did it live. It was broadcast around the world and picked up in every media outlet we had identified as like a dream target for us at the time. And we were kind of off to the races from there. That was kind of our first introduction to the public. And then, you know, we fulfilled those products about eight or nine months later. And then we started to see retention and word of mouth growth and everything kind of snowballed from there. But it all started with Simon on the toilet.
- [15:59]
A
And did he actually sit there for 50 hours?
- [16:01]
B
He did, yeah, right. There were, there were a few moments where he had to get up. So he did not use the toilet. On that toilet. We had a staged toilet because we needed to get cameras all around him and everything. And so he had a separate toilet that he would get up and use every couple of hours. Other than going to use the toilet, that was the only time he got off of that toilet.
- [16:21]
A
Well, fair play to him. I mean, that's pretty, pretty impressive.
- [16:23]
B
He still complains about it. He still claims that he's got back problems and leg problems and he's never been the same, but we wouldn't be in business if it weren't for that.
- [16:31]
A
That's brilliant. It sort of reminds me, actually, I did this presentation at Cannes a couple of years ago called the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull, you know, and that is literally the antidote to dull, isn't it?
- [16:40]
B
Oh, my God.
- [16:41]
A
I think it's like even the name, the humor, even the fundraising. I think the fact you're having fun and doing something kind of funny as part of it is all part of the story, isn't it?
- [16:50]
B
Oh, yeah. And, you know, our brand promises make it fun to do good. I think it's, it's fun for our team, but it's also, you know, if, if we, you know, to take a step back. When we first started eco toilet paper as a as a category or do good toilet paper, however you want to call it, was like less than. Less than a fraction of a percent in all of the markets we sell in. We knew that if we really wanted to appeal to a wider audience, we needed to make it fun. We needed to remove all of the barriers of quality and price and convenience and then over deliver on delight to really get people across the line. And so I think that's always been our goal, is let's remove all the barriers, make it so that people have no reason to say no to our product, and then let's over deliver on all the fun stuff that only we can do, and that's how we win people over.
- [17:35]
A
Yeah, you've done a great job with that. Now, you mentioned in your answer there before about COVID Yeah. And of course, the thing everybody remembers when Covid just started is like, national shortage of toilet roll. It was like it was headline news everywhere. So what happens in terms of your business during that time?
- [17:52]
B
I think I can answer that in a few ways. One is in terms of, like, the. The experience of running the team and running the business. I think, you know, in 2020, we probably had maybe about 35 or 50 employees around the world. And so on the one hand, we went through it the same way everyone did. It was a really scary time. Nobody knew what was going on. We were all scared for our health and the health of our parents and our children and everything like that. We were figuring out how do we deal with kids being at home and like, running around while we're on. While we're on Skype calls or Zoom calls. I guess we'd advanced to Zoom by then. So on a personal level, it was really challenging. On the other side of that, though, was that we were in probably the best industry in the world to be in. Then we started the company remotely, so we were comfortable working remotely. We were D2C first, so we. You could ship products from anywhere and didn't rely on retailers. And we were in toilet paper, which all of a sudden was everyone's favorite product. And so, you know, we started to see some crazy spikes in other countries. Like in. I believe Singapore was one of the first countries where we were reading news stories about, like, the shelves being cleared. And then, you know, within hours of reading those stories, you know, we would look at our data in Shopify, and all of a sudden we'd see growth, growth, growth. And it just. There was just a vertical line. It was like nothing anybody I know has ever seen before. You know, we at One point we were selling, you know, orders of magnitude of toilet paper more than we were selling at any other time that we realized this is great. It's also going to be real challenge to fulfill.
- [19:23]
A
How do you fulfill that? Because presumably you hadn't planned the stock
- [19:26]
B
to meet that demand. No, I mean even before we got to fulfilling the orders, we, as a toilet paper business, we'd always sought to, we'd always strive to be, could always be in stock. Right. And so we'd never built the functionality of marking any products as sold out. We, we physically couldn't do it. And so immediately we realized, okay, we've got to mark the site as sold out. We, let's, let's build a team who can, who can solve that and let's capture emails for, you know, when we do have stock, we can, we can redeliver. We, we saved enough stock to fulfill all of our subscribers orders so we were able to keep subscriptions flowing steadily. And then we, we put up that pop up that just says sorry, we're out of stock. You know, if you, if you want to sign up, we'll let you know when we have more. I think within a day or two we had over half a million people sign up. And this is for like a small brands that nobody had ever heard of back then. We were able to convert I think something like 70, 75% of those, those leads within the next few weeks. And so we did a number of things. We, it was just like really working. This was the benefit of working remotely. We were working around the clock to figure things out. And so one day we realized most of our orders are 48 roll boxes. We'll have plenty of toilet paper in two months time. People don't actually need 48 rolls of toilet paper to get through this. What if we delivered everyone who's ordered 48 rolls, 12 rolls or 24 rolls and said we'll deliver the others in a couple of weeks. And so we were able to really help sort of streamline deliveries and really kind of keep things running through that period. But it was not easy. It was definitely a challenge. It was exciting I think. Full page ad in a paper in Australia. When we sold out, we basically took out a full page ad. We'd been wanting to do something forever and just really never had a moment. And we basically took out an apology letter and said, you know, by the way, this newspaper is also made of recycled paper just in case you're in a pinch and really need to wipe. And we put a few perforated squares at the bottom. So yeah, it was a, it was a, it was a. Both a really terrifying time and a really exciting time for us.
- [21:25]
A
And what did that do to your trajectory?
- [21:28]
B
I think like many DTC brands, we saw sort of, you know, we were growing pretty exponentially before that. Then we saw this insane peak and then we saw a bit of a regression to that previous curve. Right. And so I think we, we are definitely better off as a business than we would have been had that period not happened. We're definitely at a certain point. But it didn't maintain that craziness. I think, you know, the supply chains globally sorted themselves out. People started to return to shopping in their normal grocery stores and you know, we've definitely seen and felt some of the benefit of that period. But, you know, we're back to crazy growth instead of absolutely insane growth.
- [22:05]
A
Hi everyone, it's John here. Just interrupting this episode with Danny to give you a quick announcement. Tickets for the Calling have almost sold out. We only have the smallest handful available to buy. So if you're listening to this and it's not yet 21st April and you're in London and you can make it go Google unsent to CMO the Calling and find out about the day. We have an amazing lineup. We have Nils Leonard, Corey Marchisoto, Rebecca hearst, we've got A.J. coyne, we've got Grace Beverly, we've got so many amazing guests. So if you want to be there and you don't want to miss out, get over to the website now and buy a ticket. There are only a few left. I would love to see you there. One of the things that makes you unique as well is the D2C model that you talked about there, which is quite different and disruptive. And you're fairly early on that journey as well compared to others. What's your advice in terms of how does DTC marketing work compared to the traditional model where you let other people sell your product for you?
- [23:07]
B
Yeah, we've been through quite a journey. We now sell in a number of retailers here in the us we sell in Whole Foods primarily in the uk. We're in Tesco and Waitrose and a few others in Australia. We're in a number of the big ones. We've had to really shift the way we do marketing and we're still learning a lot. We're still really learning how to balance shopper marketing and brand marketing with performance marketing. You know, we were built on primarily word of mouth growth, sort of supercharged by performance Marketing. But I think the early goal was always how do we get every single customer to tell one person about us? And so it doesn't matter how much the cost of acquisition is on Facebook, which back when we started was very cheap by the way. But you know, it doesn't matter really how much that cost of acquisition is. If you have that kind of referral engine built in, it makes it really effective. And so I don't know that every business has that ability to do that. But I think rather than think about traditional brand marketing, which is, you know, it's a form of advertising in one way or another, or performance marketing, the word of mouth marketing is the best marketing you could ever get. And so I would really try to foster that no matter what channel you're in, whether it's retail or D2C. And so we're trying to figure out what that means in a retail landscape. And I think we're learning a lot of really great things and doing really well in some areas. Still have other areas to grow. But yeah, that would be my bit of advice.
- [24:23]
A
I mean, looking back on your marketing as well, you've operated under lots of constraints, haven't you, in terms of giving away 50% and so on and being a relative challenger brand up against some huge, huge kind of competitors. What have been the most effective pieces of marketing that you've done?
- [24:42]
B
Oh boy, a few of them come to mind. The first one that comes to mind is a limited edition we did called the Whoops edition. And we didn't intend to sell this, but essentially we misprinted, I believe is about 10,000 boxes of toilet paper, which this was probably 2015 or something like that. That was a lot of toilet paper for us. That was, you know, hundreds of thousands of rolls of toilet paper. And you know, we had a few options. We could either send it back to the factory and have them repackage it all, which would be expensive and really wasteful. We could like shred it and have it turn and recycled and that would just never fly with our team or our purpose. Or we could figure out a way to sell it. And we couldn't sell it as is because it was essentially, I think we printed 2 ply on, but it was actually 3 ply. Something about it was slightly misrepresenting the product inside. The product was still great, but we just couldn't sell it as is. And so we put our heads together and Van, our creative director had this idea of why don't we sell a Whoops edition and just own the Fact that we made a mistake and really celebrate failures. And so we created this whole campaign out of failures. We ended up blaming Phil, who's a friend of mine and our VP of supply chain, and basically totally threw him under the bus. But in a very funny way, it was absolutely not his fault, by the way, it was probably, probably more my fault. But. But we made a whole campaign out of it and it was a huge hit. And I think it was just such a relief for a brand to be human and admit fault, but like own it in a fun way. And so I think those types of marketing moments have been some of our biggest moments. Interestingly, some of our, like, I hate to say it, like best performing posts on, on social media have also been these moments of humanity where either something terrible has happened in the world and we send out a message of just positivity and support or where we've made our royal slip up and we apologize for it and own it. And so I think those, those moments of humanity are actually our biggest marketing moments.
- [26:31]
A
I love that last year I probably mentioned this too much in the pod, but I'm always, whenever I talk to behavioral scientists, I love the pratfall effect. As if you've come across this. But the idea of the pratfall effect is there was an experiment done with looking at, I think it was presenters on stage and what they noticed is if you make a fumble or a mistake or something goes wrong, the audience like you more, they rate you more high.
- [26:55]
B
Oh, your audience is going to love me.
- [26:58]
A
So. But you know, and it's fascinating because, you know, getting something slightly wrong. Now the interesting caveat is you have to display a high level of competence outside of the platform. So you can't just like, if you continue making mistakes, you obviously look at you becoming competent, right? Yeah, but if you're, if you're, if you're very competent but you make a mistake, people forgive you and in fact they warm to you more. So I'm just thinking in terms of that example, the fact that you owned your mistake. Everyone knows your standards usually really high, but because you made a mistake and you owned it in a very human way, it actually made people love you more.
- [27:31]
B
I love that and I think that that resonates really, really strongly with our experience. I think we've had a lot of those moments where our sort of humanity mixed with our really strong intentions and our ability to execute, you know, better because of those moments, I think has been a strong source of growth for us.
- [27:48]
A
So talk about the, the failure because I love digging into this as well. What have been the big challenging moments over the course of your journey?
- [27:56]
B
Covid was certainly one just in terms of managing the team morale through that challenging period. We had the benefit of being on top of the world in some parts of the business and so we, we could invest in just doing a lot of other things. Well, in 2021 we raised a round of capital and for the first time we bootstrapped through to 2021. And part of the goal with that capital was to grow across more vectors. Right. So early on we really were essentially doing one big thing a year. We would launch a new product or a new market and that would be like the focus for the year and everyone would rally around it. We had like insane levels of focus, not because we were really strategic, but actually just because it was like that was our bandwidth to execute those kinds of things given our resources. Once we raised capital, we had ambitions of growing across channels, across countries, across product lines, across brands, across a whole number of different things. That was the intention and I think we executed a lot of that. Some well, some not so well. 2022 happened and we faced some serious supply chain challenges globally. And I think as a company that ships pretty big, not so expensive product, we faced the cost of shipping challenges more than most brands. And so it was a really challenging year for us. It was the first year we'd ever lost money and it was really hard for us to do that. And so we really turned our supply chain team kind of on its head in that moment and they really stepped up and we have like an unbelievably better team as a result of it. But I think once we came out of that year, we got back to like launching new countries, launching, you know, we launched in Europe, we, we launched a number of new products. We launched a new brand called Good Time, which was a plastic free personal care brand. And I think in the process of doing that, I think in retrospect we probably lost focus on the things that made us most special. And I think we forgot about the fact that like at heart we're a funny toilet paper brand that's trying to make the world a better place. And that's what people love about us. And so since then we've gone through a number of transitions to sort of wind back some of that growth. So we've closed down Goodtime, the second brand we launched, we've sort of really streamlined our product offering, we've really focused our markets and limited our international expansion. And I think we're performing much better now than we were a year ago. And I think a year from now we'll be performing much better than we are now because we're getting better and better at getting back to that kind of focus. But I think like many entrepreneurs, we saw shiny new things and we had ambition that was massive. And we still do. But I think our ambition mission we've tried to channel into more core categories and more core capabilities than try to do everything all at once.
- [30:32]
A
Yeah, it's such a big challenge this, isn't it? Like, how do you scale up and not screw up, you know, is basically the challenge, isn't it?
- [30:38]
B
Oh yeah.
- [30:38]
A
And I've noticed as well, I mean, I hadn't realized actually how much innovation you've done because in my head, exactly as you say, it's the kind of funny toilet roll brand. But I've seen the poo bags and then the, which otherwise I've got little dogs. I'm definitely up for that and the bin liners and the kitchen role. But how do you kind of then as you say, you mentioned good time, like how did you like add on to your operation a whole new brand and try and create a new brand? That's quite a big, that's quite an audacious thing to do.
- [31:06]
B
It was, and I think the way we did it was part of the mistake. So I, I, you know, the, the thesis we had was that, you know, if you look at a lot of the big CPG brands in the world, they're not individual brands, they're, they're houses of brands or families of brands. And I think we believed that we had a unique superpower and that we had such a values driven audience that if we were able to help our customers make another positive change in their life by recommending another brand, that we'd see tremendous uptake. And so we decided to test this hypothesis. But what I think we probably should have done is carved out a separate team to launch that and run it fully separately and really protect it. Let it take the risks that we couldn't take in the master brand, let it run differently, let it work with different systems. But I think instead we brought in, you know, we had our, our creative team develop the new brand. We had our logistics team managing the logistics, we had our lawyers managing that. We had it built into our website. And so anytime we wanted to make a change to it is, let's say we wanted to put a new, a new photo even on the website, we had to run it through the digital product team. Which had to balance the cost and reward of that versus the cost and reward of, of working on who gives crap which was literally 100 times its size. And so it never really had the support it needed to really grow. And so I think in retrospect doing a lot of things is possible, but I think you really need to think about operationally how you set them up for success. And sometimes that means combining them and doing them together, sometimes it means really protecting new things and giving them the space to succeed.
- [32:45]
A
Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean it's almost textbook innovators dilemma, isn't it? If you read the book Clayton Christensen, if anyone listens, go and check it out because it's so fascinating. But exactly as you described that organizations as they get to scale when they try and do innovation, the innovation is always tiny compared to the scale and they're always having to make trade offs. I think in his book the only examples that succeed are doing exactly what you just said, which is they find a way of creating a subsidiary or a separate unit that operates independently. Because what's successful for a small brand is completely different to what's successful for a larger brand, isn't it? So as you say like a hundred, you're never going to get 100x out of the new brand from day one. So you're always going to be making that internal trade off between them.
- [33:25]
B
Totally. Well, I mean even, even more so I think we could probably expect more disproportionate returns in the startup in the small thing because like every, every incremental sale is so valuable. But we just didn't really invest in it in the way we should have. I think this is why M and A is such a big thing in businesses as they scale is that it outsources the innovation, it lets it happen in a separate sandbox. And then once it's, once the brands and businesses have proven themselves, they can be acquired and integrated in a way that makes sense. But, but yeah, I think that's one of the many learnings along the way. I think one other one that's a more personal challenge that I think many founders and leaders of all types go through is, you know, entrepreneurs are successful because in part because they take risks and they defy category conventions. Right. So everything we did defied logic. When we started we were shipping a low value product around the world in boxes with a ridiculous brand name and giving away half of our profits. Right. It made no sense. Everyone we talked to, all the experts said this won't work and we knew in our hearts that this would work and we were committed to testing and experimenting to get there. I think as you scale, you bring in more and more experts around the table who are experts for a reason. And we've got absolutely brilliant operations team and people in culture team and creative team and marketing teams. All these amazing teams filled with experts in their own right. So many of whom are good at challenging conventions as well, by the way. But I think knowing when to lean into intuition as a founder and defy convention versus when to accept convention and lean into best practice has been an ongoing challenge. And I think just one of the hardest parts of growing the business and the business at the scale that we're at today is like daily I'm faced with, do I bite my tongue and say like this is probably like trust that this is probably the right approach or do I voice my like dissenting opinion which I have to be careful of because it has, it has weight. So I think that's on a personal level, the been the biggest challenge that's so hard.
- [35:32]
A
I really feel that actually, because I remember I was in a, it was a management buyout of a juice business and we kind of grew pretty quickly. And I noticed we started acting like our, rather than acting like ourselves, we were acting like the competition. So we're starting rationalizing the range. We started kind of going down to core flavors, you know, and I remember saying to the CEO, we've become a small corporate, we need to go back to becoming a big startup.
- [35:58]
B
Yeah.
- [35:58]
A
You know, because we'd lost the agility, you know, we started kind of planning for efficiency, not effectiveness. And yeah, it's amazing how. And also you spend your time internally focused rather than externally focused, rather than spending your time with your customer, coming up with ideas, you're sat around a table, decide you making trade offs between different projects, you know, that kind of thing. And that for me was a massive signal of when it starts to go wrong. And you can literally see the slowdown and the inertia and totally, you know, it's almost, I'd say is probably the biggest challenge for growth.
- [36:31]
B
Yeah. And I think the moment when I feel it the most is when, when I get a, you know, a deck proposing some new feature or some new idea or something. And the first 10 slides are a competitive audit. And I'm like, who cares? You know that like that's not how we're going to get the idea that's going to deliver the next, you know, the next stage of growth. We need to look elsewhere Right. We need to go to museums and get inspiration. We need to go nature. We need to look at analogous categories. We need to, we need to think outside of the box. And so, but yeah, I think, I think that's, that's. It's a consistent challenge that I've heard from fellow founders and leaders as well, is that knowing when to lean intuition versus when to lean into best practice
- [37:10]
A
is a challenge that's so, so difficult. Yeah. And how do you hire? How do you look for talent? As you talked about getting those experts in place to help do the things that you can't do, what do you look for when you hire people?
- [37:23]
B
We sometimes get criticized for the length of our recruiting process because it can be quite intensive, but it's very much by design. So we go through several rounds of interviews and ultimately at the end of that, we give a homework assignment. And that homework assignment, no matter what role it is, I think I'm one of the only three or four people in the business who never had to do a homework assignment. I definitely would not get hired nowadays. But I think the homework assignment is almost always in two or three parts and it's generally testing core capabilities within the requirements of the role. And then your ability to like, add to our culture and our quirkiness and our weirdness. And so, you know, I think we've seen some pretty amazing homework assignments that like, really give us a sense not only of how capable someone is going to be of like doing their day job, but will they also help us sort of challenge norms and really lean into values? Values is like, that's the first criteria all of our sort of homework scorecards ask is like, how do they uphold our five values? And ultimately leaning into our values and really going sort of robustly in the process allows us to get just unbelievable talent.
- [38:35]
A
You talk me through the values.
- [38:37]
B
So we have five values. The first one is probably, unsurprisingly, give a crap. And I think it's the intention there is for us to make sure that our impact and our desire to do good in the world is core to all of our decisions. So that's both our 50% of profits donated model as well as our sustainability goals, and then also how we treat our people and our communities. The second one is called deliver and Delight. And this one's very intentional in that it's a two part one. It's deliver and delight. And deliver comes first because ultimately what we realized early on is that I think our brand is so much fun that we can sometimes go crazy with It. But at the end of the day, we need to get people the toilet paper that they order, remove the friction from them, make it easy to buy, make it good quality. We need to deliver on all the promises that people want, and then only once we've done that can we deliver light. The third one is go big. And this really comes back to like the. The entrepreneurial sort of hunger for growth that we still feel. And paired with that is progress over perfection. So it used to be called stay scrappy and I think that was often misinterpreted internally. So we, we really got back to the essence of like, progress over perfection captures what we really want to achieve here, which is we want to keep putting things into the world. We don't want to spend time trying to make things 100% perfect. We want to test things and learn from them and keep improving as we go. And then the last one is probably my favorite. It's a word in Tagalog. The value is kembat. And the reason for that is that we have a pretty sizable team in the Philippines who've been part of us since the beginning and really important part of our team and our culture and our growth. And I remember one day we were sitting around, we had a full company gathering once and someone used the word kembat and we asked what it meant and we realized it had a dual meaning of both work really hard and shake your booty. And that just captured the essence of working at who gives a crap and achieving the ambition that we want to achieve while also having a hell of a good time doing it. And so Kimbat became our fifth company, Value. So those are the five values. We of course use them throughout the interview process for new candidates. We also use them as part of the performance evaluation. Internally, basically are always calling people out for their demonstration of our values. So it's a really critical part of every day at work. Who gives crap?
- [40:54]
A
Love that. They're really impressive values. And I talk to a lot of startups, entrepreneurs, and it's really interesting how strong the values always are and how important they are and how they come to life, you know, all the time. Now, maybe to round us out, I thought I'd ask you, you know, you've been on this amazing journey, built an incredible brand, been very successful, done a lot of good for the world, and I wish you lots and lots of luck continuing to do that. If you give advice to somebody starting out today, so someone's got an idea, they're listening to this, they want to become an Entrepreneur, they want to follow in your footsteps. What would be your advice to them?
- [41:27]
B
Honestly, for me, like, the meaning of life in many ways is to, like, live a life worth telling stories about. Right. When I'm. When I'm much older, I would love to be able to sit around and tell stories over. Over the dinner table or over. Over a drink or over the campfire and make people laugh like that. That's just the. That's what it's all about for me. And so I think, I think vast majority of businesses, startup businesses, don't succeed. We have to prepare for that reality. We prepared for that reality by having other jobs. And this was the side hustle for us. But I think even if it had failed, it would have made a hell of a good story, right? Like, the fact that we did this, that we started a business called who Gives a Crap, that we really tried to make the world a better place, that we navigated Covid and, you know, saw this crazy spike in demands, the fact that we encourage people to wipe their bums with their. The newspaper in Australia, all of these things are amazing stories that I'm proud to tell. And so I think rather than think about the returns or the investment rounds or the, like, success as it's traditionally defined, I would think about, you know, what does success look like in terms of, like, how you'll tell stories about it someday? Because that's what it all comes down to for me.
- [42:36]
A
It's such good advice. If you're gonna go down, go down having fun.
- [42:39]
B
Amen. Exactly.
- [42:41]
A
Dan, it's been amazing chatting today.
- [42:43]
B
Great.
- [42:43]
A
Thank you so much. A huge fan of what you're doing. I wish you so much success and keep doing good.
- [42:48]
B
Thanks. Likewise.
- [42:49]
A
Awesome.
- [42:50]
B
Cheers.
- [42:50]
A
Thanks, man. So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter, so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the One Thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades, with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rockstar. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System one. I'll see you next time.