What do you get when you cross an everyday household item with a social enterprise driven to improve the world? Answer: Who Gives A Crap. Co-founder of the new toilet paper giant on the block, Simon Griffiths, joined the First Act podcast to share the inspiring story of Who Gives A Crap’s epic success and a few of the lessons he and his co-founders have learned along the way.
If you are a human who lived through the pandemic and who uses a toilet, then you’ve likely heard of Who Gives A Crap.
Founded in 2012, the toilet paper social enterprise made astounding gains during the pandemic. It provided an online purchase option for those facing empty supermarket shelves. In addition, it made a substantial social impact by donating 50 per cent of profits to improve sanitation facilities and innovation worldwide, with over $10 million donated to date.
Profit for purpose
Simon Griffiths and his co-founders, Danny Alexander and Jehan Ratnatunga, are on a mission to ensure worldwide access to toilets and safe drinking water by 2050.
While it may seem counterintuitive to run a social enterprise as a for-profit business, Simon explains why this business model made the most sense to ensure the most impact.
“The initial goal wasn’t to donate all of our money,” he told editors, Cec Busby and Adam Bub. “Our goal was to create the most impact we possibly could. However, we realised donating a hundred per cent of our profits could hold us back because of the challenges of scaling non-profit businesses that rely on donations or debt capital, making the company less stable as it grows.
“If we were truly trying to have the most impact possible, we should reinvest some of those profits into the business to help fund its growth. But still, make it clear to customers that we exist to solve the sanitation problem by donating a significant proportion of our profits. If we could get that right, we’d build a business that was at least twice as big and therefore has more impact over time.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is massive,” Simon admits. “There are two billion people without access to adequate sanitation today. So, we are incredibly proud of our $10 million-plus donations. Still, our donations realistically have to be up into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars each year to truly make a dent in the problem we’re trying to solve.
“We recognised that we couldn’t do that by bootstrapping the business and running on a small amount of cash in the bank; it was time to change how we thought about our operating structure to allow us to unlock the next layer of scale.”
Listen to Simon Griffiths on the First Act podcast:
A poo-fect marketing campaign
After initial market research revealed strong customer interest in the Who Gives A Crap idea, the fledgling company kicked off a crowdfunding campaign. They used an innovative marketing approach involving Simon live-streaming himself sitting on a toilet. The message: He would not leave his throne until they had pre-sold the first 50,000 rolls. The campaign quickly went viral.
“This was in 2012, and the ‘share’ button had just appeared on Facebook,” says Simon. “So, the way the internet worked played into how the campaign was designed – to create something newsworthy, shareable, and time-limited. It went viral incredibly quickly. After 50 of the most horrible, never-to-be-repeated hours of my life, we hit our sales target, and we were in business.
“More importantly, it gave us our first 1,000 customers. Those customers were a critical piece of the puzzle, and 70 to 80 per cent of them ordered from us again. They went on and told their friends, family, and work colleagues about what we were doing. As a result, we were growing organically on word-of-mouth, roughly tripling the size of the business each year for those first two years.
“The last decade has been quite wild when you think about the shifts we’ve seen in consumer technology, and the way brands are built and brought to market. Our business is a testament to that – Who Gives A Crap could not have existed 20 years ago. We needed the internet to be at that point to enable us to bypass supermarkets and reach our customers directly. It was the right idea, but also very much at the right time in terms of the available technology.”
Humour is disruptive
Who Gives A Crap is well-known for the irreverent poo-humour used in their advertising and packaging, which Simon admits is a carefully considered ploy to stand out from the loo paper pack.
“In our category, all of the big, incumbent brands had been built on these bizarre marketing pillars of puppies, pillows and feathers – things that are entirely unrelated to toilets and toilet paper. We realised that having a sense of humour was enough to be disruptive. It was a marketing territory that the other brands couldn’t go after because they’d built their brands on the exact opposite of that.
“So, not only did humour give us an edge, it gave us an advantage that was defensible and that we could turn into a strong brand positioning. The beauty of Who Gives A Crap was, in part, that we could use a product related to the social problem we were trying to solve and raise funds to build toilets and provide access to sanitation. The other part was that we could market the brand in a territory that no other company could go after.
“It’s the idea of working with toilet paper, using the profits to build toilets, and calling it ‘Who Gives A Crap’ that creates this complete package,” Simon explains. “When people hear about it for the first time, it makes them laugh. Those things combined make people much more likely to tell someone else about it. When you get that sort of response, you’ve got a product that has the potential to have strong word-of-mouth and what’s called a ‘viral coefficient’. That enables you to have product-led growth, where you can use your products to help find new customers, which has been a big part of our success.”
The triple-threat for real social impact
With consumer sentiments steadily shifting towards more sustainable and ethical purchase decisions, Simon says this indicates that buyers realise they can have a significant impact in the world simply with their product choices.
“What’s driving the trend is this shift in consumer sentiment,” he says. “Our business exists because people want to spend their money in ways they couldn’t do 10 or 20 years ago. And that shift in consumer sentiment is growing because people realise that it is not just up to governments and businesses but also up to individuals to take action and make changes.
“If we’re truly going to create the future that we want to live in, it’s gonna take all three of those – individuals, businesses and governments – to make a change to create a better version of the world.”
Simon’s advice for budding entrepreneurs?
“I would just say keep going. I think that entrepreneurship is partly about good ideas and partly about luck and being in the right place at the right time.
“But the reality is that to find the right good idea, you have to put enough things out into the world – throw enough darts – to be able to have one hit the bullseye. And hitting the bullseye is partly from getting slightly better at aiming each time and also from that little bit of extra luck when you really need it.
“So, put enough shots on goal to make sure you get one that falls straight into the back of the net.”
Simon shared so many more insights into Who Gives A Crap’s excellent adventure, listen to the full First Act episode for maximum inspiration!
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