Who Gives A Crap

“Please could you send me that photo of Simon on the toilet?” is not a message you expect to send about your boss in the first week of a new job. And yet, is the position I found myself in whilst preparing a presentation just over a year ago when I joined Who Gives A Crap to run the UK and European business.

Who Gives a Crap is an eco-friendly toilet paper company. We also donate 50% of our profits to fund clean water and sanitation projects. Ten years ago, to crowdfund investment for the first production, Simon (one of the founders & CEO) decided to livestream sitting on a toilet for as long as it took to raise $50k. A painful 50 hours later, that first production run was born.

Today ,Who Gives a Crap has over 1m customers, is available in Australia, US, UK and Europe, and has donated over £6.5m. We sell other products like kitchen rolls and tissues and have just launched a sister body care brand called Good Time. But, our heartland is toilet paper.

I confess: I am not passionate about toilet paper. Ironically, I even remember giving a talk at a NLCS careers fair a few years ago where I talked about only wanting to work in brands and industries that felt innovative, culturally relevant and exciting - and explicitly called out toilet paper as the type of industry I’d never work in. I guess the universe has a funny way of laughing at us.

It turns out, it’s actually because toilet paper is ostensibly such a boring product and category that makes it so exciting. If you can create a disruptive brand about something so…blurgh, whilst tangibly addressing one of the most unnecessary drivers of deforestation (over 1 million trees are cut down every day to make toilet paper - a stat that totally blew my mind when I learnt it) AND have a business model that can truly make a positive difference to society, then I figured I’d probably be surrounded by some pretty awesome people able to do awesome things if I joined.

Words like disruption and innovation often get bandied around - especially in the land of start-ups and entrepreneurs. Yes, I’m biased now that I live in a world where