[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous guests of Add to Cart where we ask them five quick questions to understand more about them and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Today's checkout features Simon Griffiths, founder of direct to consumer toilet paper brand who Gives a Crap? Last year during COVID who Gives a crap achieved a 750% growth in profit of which they donated half, almost $6 million to build better toilets for those who need them. Simon Griffiths I've got five quick checkout questions for you to learn a little bit more about you. We'll get straight into them. Number one, what is the weirdest thing you've ever bought online?
Simon Griffiths: Oh my God. Probably the weirdest thing in the last year was a flappy fish for our cat. I got like served an Instagram ad for an electronic fish that flapped around and like cats jump on was like yeah, cat's gonna love this. And it arrived in the mail like six weeks after I'd ordered it. Completely forgotten about it. Turn it on and put it down in front of our cat and he just walked off and didn't give a shit about it. That's awesome.
[Voiceover]: Never as good as the Instagram ads, are they?
Simon Griffiths: Maybe some people's cats, not our cat.
[Voiceover]: My cat would, I don't know, just look at it and just walk the other way as well. Cats actually don't try and sell to cats. That'd be the worst audience ever. Number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Simon Griffiths: I mean these are really hard questions. I think, you know, Patagonia is probably up there just from what they've done around how they've gone about building their brand. I probably don't need to say any more about that because they're pretty, pretty famous. Yeah, I think Nike, from how they've gone about their own brand building and probably the first of these like true like mega consumer brands like just nailed it. And then super exciting to see them sort of moving towards net net zero carbon and all that stuff as well.
[Voiceover]: Making big change around, responding to direct to consumer as well in, you know, getting out of that hot market which is a massive move for them, right?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, totally amazing. You know, especially when you think about buying Nike as a kid it was always through like a sports store and now it's like their own brand stores or their website like it's really kind of shifted. Pretty amazing to see them just kick goals over like a 30 year time horizon. But they're kind of more like brand nerd outs I guess. Yeah, I Probably actually don't buy too much from either of them. So I'm not sure. It's probably not the best answer.
[Voiceover]: But, yeah, great examples. Number three, which retail fad do you wish was history?
Simon Griffiths: Retail fad? I mean, like, the whole, like, crappy Instagram ad thing drives me insane. The amount of. And it's really because people are getting sold crap that they don't need. And that's probably a huge retail fad that I wish we'd get over. I think that if we think about the planet that we're living in, all of the excess crap that gets consumed, if we strip that out, then the impacts on carbon emissions would just be massive from production, through transport, through packaging, like plastic, if we just got rid of all of that crap. But it'd be awesome. So I wish people would just buy and sell stuff that they actually only truly need.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, I think it's a great point. And I think in the next 12 months, it's only going to get worse, unfortunately, before it gets better, because we're going to have more disposable income if we're not traveling. Plus, in social, it's going to be easier to have that one click checkout link to your Instagram or whatever. There's just people buying without thinking. It's almost like we need to put more barriers up to make people think before buying rather than make more.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, and that, like, whole, you know, like you watch an ad from, like, one company and then get served ads from 10 variations of the same product they're selling. Companies like, that sucks as well. Like, I just, you know, I wish the Internet wasn't so creepy sometimes. Yes, yes.
[Voiceover]: Don't we all? All right, number four, can we recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Simon Griffiths: I mean, like, I listen to a ton of different podcasts. There's. Yes. Some of my favorite ones at the moment would be how I work with Amantha Imber, which is great. I listen to the Wall Street Journal, their daily podcast called the Journal, pretty much religiously. It's like the one podcast I listen to almost every single day, but sometimes catch up on a whole week in a day because it's just something I don't like to miss too much because it's super interesting. And I mean, probably a more obvious one, but how I built this is just like a really nice deep dive into how people kind of pull off making crazy companies that seem like they're not possible to build. Great tips.
[Voiceover]: If Guy Raz approaches you to go on How I built this. Are you going to jump at it?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, for sure. Who would say no to that? What a cool thing to do.
[Voiceover]: All right, number five, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is.
Simon Griffiths: The future of retail is. I mean, I think the future of retail is starting to think about what the true soul is inside a business. So this last decade, sustainability has been the megatrend, and that's going to continue for a little bit longer, but I think that people are going to start going a little bit deeper into what is the actual soul of this company and the ethics and the values that they live by. So not just the claims that they're making about sustainability today, but the ethics and the values that they subscribe to that tell me what decisions they will make in the future. And so people will need to start really trying to figure out how they tell that story to the customer and how they wear those sets of values on their sleeve. And so that makes me super excited about what the next decade will look like, because I think that we're in for this pretty exciting shift in consumerism towards businesses that do good.
[Voiceover]: Absolutely. Who gives a crap being one of them? So really excited to see what's coming next. Love hearing the journey so far. Thank you so much for sharing, Simon.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Simon, jump back into episode 52, where we follow Simon's journey from a spot split second idea to one of the fastest growing brands during COVID we also discuss how Simon kept his team energised through such a massive year and why he sat on a toilet for 50 hours just to get the business off the ground. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to car.
