Emily Kraftman Class of 2006

toilet humour at the start of Zoom calls is the norm, but Who Gives a Crap has genuinely done things differently from the start.

It’s in the big - having our core ‘BHAG’ (big hairy audacious goal) being about eradicating toilet poverty - providing clean water and sanitation to all. This isn’t lip service, it’s why we exist - and fundamentally is built on a belief that business, entrepreneurship and capitalism can be used to do good. In 2021, we took investment for the first time, to accelerate our growth in order to drive us towards being able to make an even larger impact. This in itself is significantventure capitalists investing in a business that gives away half of their profits is not the norm, so finding the right partners who believe in our mission is a small step towards a bigger goal to have good influence across the wider business world.

It’s in the small detailsour wrapped rolls make people smile and make them proud to display them in the bathroom. We even have a specially branded ‘emergency roll’ at the end of the box as a reminder to stock up to ensure no one is caught short. This is fun and delightful, but it also works as advertising - a huge amount of our customers first found out about us through seeing it at a friend’s house or in a cafe’s toilet. Half of them have even given our rolls as a gift and we even get 1000s of love letters every year (yes, really!). Our business is about serious stuff, but people are already overwhelmed by the world. We fundamentally don’t believe that guilt and shame is the way to shift behaviour. So, instead one of our core values is ‘deliver and delight’ - with this sense of fun and levity underpinning every aspect of the customer experience, from our social posts, to the confirmation email, to our limited edition designs. mean some weird late nights and early mornings. But it also comes with a huge amount of autonomy and flexibility to find a routine that works for everyone individually, enables me to travel around the world whilst working and forces a brutal prioritisation that helps effectiveness. For the first time in my career, my days are not dominated by meetings. We use various tools like Slack, Loom, Google docs and others that help ‘asynchronous’ workingenabling collaboration without it having to be live. And there is something quite wonderful about watching a recorded meeting that you needed to miss back at 2x speed.

And it’s in the way we operate as a team - Who Gives a Crap is a ‘globally distributed hybrid remote team’.

What does that jargon mean? We hire in a geographically agnostic way, so some teams are split across markets. As an exec team, we’re based in Melbourne, Bali, London and LA. We have no global HQ. We have office space available where there are more than five people in a hub, but there’s no requirement to attend (although most of us enjoy a mix). We work across four time zones. We don’t use email. Ooof.

There’s certainly challenges“time is time” is the reluctant acknowledgement when struggling to schedule a meeting. That can

The grounding philosophy in our culture is pretty simple…we give a crap. And it makes sense to, the higher the engagement of the team, the greater impact we can have. We have incredibly generous leave policies that include a ‘life leave’ allowance for the things you might need time off for that aren’t holiday. We’re piloting a four day work week. We invest in bringing the entire company together once a year. The list goes on. Again, unlike a classic start up - more work is not necessarily seen as better. For a recovering workaholic, this was actually quite hard to adjust to - but unsurprisingly helps us be more effective.

So, toilet paper. Who knew. A year in, I’m still no expert - but I’ve learnt a lot; get the big things right, find the fun and delight in amongst the serious and sometimes, login from the beach. Oh, and embrace toilet humour.

Q: What did one piece of TP say to the other?

A: “I feel really wiped.”

The archives at NLCS are a fascinating collection, from stories to art work, memories to school photos. Looking back at how times have changed, below can be seen the uniform policy of 1965.