Simon Griffiths: I was standing in the bathroom, it hit me. I walked out and got on the phone and everyone was like, yep, this is a winner. Daily sales were up 2x next day, up 5x the day after that, up 12x the day after that. We were going to do 30 to 40 times a regular day of sales. Our customers basically have sent us viral at this point and I think like, that's kind of the beauty of it, right? If you can do it with toilet paper, then you should be able to do it with any other product. And that's kind of what we want to show with our business model.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of E commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game. And of course, keep your customers adding to cartoon. Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E commerce talent agency E Suite. Think of the most boring product in the world. Now imagine what you would have to do to make people so passionate about that product that they would gift it to their family or even replicate it as a birthday cake. That's what Simon Griffiths has done with who Gives a Crap? For those who haven't heard who Gives a Crap? They're a direct to consumer toilet paper brand who have revolutionized the toilet paper experience. Not only do they offer direct to consumer subscription funky packaging and a very cool brand, they donate 50% of their profits to help build toilets in developing nations. Their goal is to make sure everyone in the world has access to proper sanitization. Talking big goals here. I spoke to Simon about how he came up with the idea for who Gives a Crap in his bathroom in less than a minute. We also spoke about the challenges and the growth that they saw during the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 and why he once sat on a toilet for 50 hours. I mean, I've hidden in a toilet to get away from the kids, but 50 hours, that's a long time. So let's get into it. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet. Here's our conversation with Simon Griffiths from who Gives a Crap? Simon Griffiths, welcome to Add to Cart.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.
[Voiceover]: Oh, we're very excited to have you on. I Even did a LinkedIn post of me sitting on a toilet. Shades of what you did, but for much. For a much briefer period, asking People if they got questions. So it's the first time I've ever put something of me on a toilet on LinkedIn. So that's what you've forced me into.
Simon Griffiths: How did it perform?
[Voiceover]: It got a lot of interest. I don't know if interest is the right word, but I only got one question out of it. I got more people laughing at me than anything.
Simon Griffiths: Engagement's good. Just not spiking in the type of engagement that you wanted.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that's right. I don't think it's done my professional profile any good either.
Simon Griffiths: No. Yeah, it actually took a while for me to, if you Google image, search me for a while there was a lot of talk photos of me without very much clothing on, sitting on a toilet, which took many, many years of like new press shots to try and get that down in the search rankings. And I think finally they're kind of, you know, a little bit buried down there, which is good. So yeah, if you, if you want to find them, you can dig them up, but generally speaking, they're a little bit harder to get today.
[Voiceover]: All right, we'll get to that story. I really want to get to that story because it's a cracking story. But before we do, as a little bit of an intro, I know you love surfing, so if I was bumping into in the waves, dropping in on you probably wouldn't because I can't even stand up and we got chatting. How would you describe yourself and what you do?
Simon Griffiths: I would probably avoid the question because I think when I tell people I work at who gives a crap? You get one of two answers. Either like, never heard of it, what the fuck's that? Or you get, sorry, I shouldn't swear. Or you get, no, no, no, swear.
[Voiceover]: Why we're swearing. Friendly place.
Simon Griffiths: Oh my God, I love you guys. You're amazing. And you get stuck in like an hour long conversation with someone and that's like either like a hit to the ego or like too much ego to be out in the water, I think. So I'd just say something silly like, you know, oh yeah, I just run an online business.
[Voiceover]: Like a Cool.
Simon Griffiths: You're a mysterious cat. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: All right, so for someone who just runs an online business, you're now a 10 year old startup. I've got startup in inverted commas here. And you have just donated very recently almost 6 million doll to help build toilets and improve sanitation in third world nations. Can you tell me about that feeling when you donated that amount of money? Because it's a huge amount of money. And a huge difference that will make. How did that personally feel?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, I think honestly it's a little bit mixed emotions because this year we donated almost $6 million, $5.85 million, which was an awesome outcome, I think, in a year where particularly a lot of nonprofits really needed the extra money. So purse strings tightened up. We knew a lot of our partners were going to have trouble fundraising and so for us to be able to give an extra large donation this year was amazing. But on top of that, I think the big picture is, well, we're only funding a handful of organizations. There's a lot out there that we're going to have hard years. And the problem that we're trying to solve, there's still 2 billion people globally without access to a toilet. And so 5,6 million Australian dollars is the tiniest splash in a huge bucket to try and solve that problem. And so it's mixed emotions in that. Incredibly proud of what we've done to get to that point. But we've got so far to go if we're really going to truly kind of make a dent in this in a way that's meaningful and accelerate the pace at which we solve this. So, yeah, we have a 30 year goal in our company to make sure everyone in the world has to a toilet. And we're on track to do what we believe is necessary to kind of reach that goal. But we're at the very, very beginning of that. If you've heard about Elon Musk talk about scaling up production and the S curve, we're right at the bottom of that S curve and that's a very painful place to be. So there's a lot in front of us to make that happen.
[Voiceover]: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, looking from the outside, it looks like all bells and whistles and celebratory and it's going great. But I think you've put in great context there.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, I think, yeah, it is just such a huge, overwhelmingly huge problem. So there's a lot to do.
[Voiceover]: So can you, for anyone who's not familiar with who gives a crap, can you give people the context on the business model behind who gives a crap?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, sorry, I should have answered your question properly before.
[Voiceover]: I probably should have asked a real question.
Simon Griffiths: I took it a little bit too literally, but yes. So we're a direct consumer toilet paper company. We sell paper towels, tissues, and now some sponges too. And we use half of our profits to help build toilets in different parts of the developing world. So we've been running for about seven and a half years now and made donations up over $8 million over over that time. The big bulk of that coming in this last year because you know, we've grown exponentially and then we were on track to have a record year in the 2020 financial year and then the last few months of the financial year were just a little bit bigger than what we'd expected and that meant that our donation was a little bit bigger than what we fore.
[Voiceover]: Banana skins, pumpkin dodgy avocados and E Commerce packaging. Our friends at E Commerce packaging supplier Signet are helping retailers reduce their carbon footprint with their new range of compostable mailers. Made from plant based materials, these mailers will break down to organic fertilizer once composted either at home or in industrial disposal. Talk about giving back to the planet. Signet have over five and a half thousand packaging solutions that help leading E commerce businesses step up their packaging game. Visit signet.netau to find out more. Seven and a half years ago, thinking about creating a toilet paper company, what came first? The idea that you could disrupt toilet paper or the mission behind providing toilets for everyone in the world?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, I mean for me this is my third kind of social business. So Mission has been right at the heart of what I've wanted to do for a very long time, almost 15 years now. And the mission was certainly kind of the reason why the company exists. But the reality is that the idea to sell toilet paper and build toilets and combining the two, that happened as a quarter second epiphany. So one day I walked into the bathroom after thinking about purpose for a long time and thinking about mass market products and how they were the key for us to be able to make a difference regardless of who we are and where we lived. Everyone could buy toilet paper. One day I walked into the bathroom and saw some toilet paper and went, oh my God, sell toilet paper, use the profits to build toilets. Call it who gives a crap. I called three friends and they all said awesome idea, you've got to do it. And the third friend said, I'm just wrapping up my last job, I want to come and help you get this started. And so he became the one of the co founders with me.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. And did all of that form in your own head, as in the idea for toilet paper. The name and everything kind of just come together really quickly.
Simon Griffiths: Literally a quarter second epiphany, like I was standing in the bathroom. It hit me. I walked out and got on the phone and everyone was like, yep, this is a winner.
[Voiceover]: That's incredible. So like a. Not even a 24 hour idea. It's like a bathroom idea. Literally.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty amazing kind of moment. But, you know, as I said, probably five years of thinking and tinkering and trying different stuff before that to get to the point where it was like, ah, this is the idea and this could really work. And I think now, like the year that we've just had, there's almost this impression that who gives a crap Become sort of an overnight success. But the reality is that that idea was 10 years ago. We've been growing the business for seven and a half years. It took us two and a half years to get started. And so it's been a very long time in the making. And these things do take time to get to where we are today.
[Voiceover]: Absolutely. And can I ask you to give us the story behind SheBeanBar, which I understand was your venture before? Who gives a crap? Just to give people an idea of what you've been through before, just coming up with this idea instantly, just kind of place the groundwork for your thinking.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. So Shabeen was actually an idea of one of my university friends, Anna McComish. And we'd both spent some time volunteering in different parts, parts of Africa. And while she was sitting on the beach on a broken chair thinking about how glorious this moment was, drinking an ice cold Tusker, she had this idea of Melbourne's got this amazing bar scene. Why don't we start a non profit bar and we can sell beers and wines from all over the developing world and use the profits from those purchases to fund projects in each drink's country of origin. So if you had an Ethiopian beer, you're helping to provide better farming information and skills to rural farmers in Ethiopia. A South African wine could help provide local language books to school kids in South Africa. So we got the business off the ground using philanthropic capital because it was a nonprofit business, so you can't sort of raise equity. And yeah, we launched in 2013, had a cracking start, thought everything was looking really good. Went through a period of mixed performance where we were sort of roughly break even, which isn't where you want to be as a nonprofit. You want to be returning, making good donations by making good profits. And so we put in place a plan to return to profitability. And then we discovered that the wall of our basement level band room, which we thought backed onto dirt, this very loud room, the wall of it was actually shared with the sleeping quarters of the police station around the corner from Us. And so amazing detective skills from these police people who took a year and a half to figure out where the base was coming from. They thought it was from the youth hostel above them apparently. And then when they finally figured out it was us, they made life atrociously challenging for us after a year of kind of fighting them. Most of the fights that we won, but there was one that we couldn't win, which was a curfew on live music at 11pm and that meant that we couldn't book the same caliber of bands that we'd used to build up the business. And so our patron numbers dropped, revenue dropped and the business became unprofitable and we had to wrap it up after a year of fighting. So it was a pretty dismal kind of wrap up of this amazing, I still think amazing idea. Something that kind of peaked interest globally. We got a lot of global press when we opened, but I think from that learnt so much. Hospitality is an incredibly challenging sector. E commerce is very different and much more stable and awesome. The challenges of running a nonprofit versus a 50% profit business model, which is what who Gives a Crap is, which allows us to reinvest in the business and use working capital to kind of build the business over time and running something that has equity in it, which allows you to potentially raise external capital when the time's right to give equity incentivized packages to your staff members who often are taking pay cuts to come and work from you. All of this stuff has sort of gone into who Gives a Crap and ultimately made who Gives a Crap the success that it is today.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. And even though who Gives a Crap is a social model, it still needs to be profitable in order to make that impact, right?
Simon Griffiths: Totally. So yeah, we're kind of lucky in that to be impact maximizing, we need to be profit maximizing. And so we operate with very similar objectives and constraints to what a typical business would. It's just that the reason that we're doing it is a little bit different. So instead of returning capital to shareholders, we're trying to return capital to our beneficiaries.
[Voiceover]: Yep. And did you make any decisions in those early stages of who Gives a Crap that were made specifically to maximize profit? Was there anything that you did differently as a social model then to maximize
Simon Griffiths: profit compared to Shebeen, you mean?
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Or if you were just selling. Selling toilet paper as an E commerce corporate.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, I mean the, like the kind of, the added constraint that we have that a lot of startups don't have is that we need to be profitable. And so we didn't have the opportunity to go and we didn't think anyway you could probably figure out how to work around this. But we didn't think it made sense to go and raise millions of dollars and run a non profitable business for a few years on the basis that we could get to profitability later on. We felt like that would be letting down our customer and the promise that we're making to our customer that we will make strong donations. And so in the very early days that meant no salaries for any of the founders. I think I was the third person to get paid in the business. It forced us to think about how we recruited very differently and who we brought into the business at which points in time and has been one of the big drivers of us having a big Filipino team. Our first hire was actually in the Philippines rather than Australia or the US which were the markets that we were trading in. And so yeah, it's really kind of pushed us to be laser focused on profit, which I think most startups probably aren't as focused on that in the way that we were. So if anything, the social element has made us a stronger business, which is a really interesting kind of takeaway.
[Voiceover]: Does that often surprise people who are coming into the business for the first time that it is so profit driven when they, outside of all the social
Simon Griffiths: giving, I think what surprises people is that it's very serious. Like, you know, what we try to present. Our public image is fun, quirky, colorful, bright, lovable, a little bit goofy. But behind that sits very rigorous strategy and a lot of spreadsheets. Incredibly driven people who are trying to be the best that they can at their career because they know that ultimately the impact that will have will be really powerful if they get what they're doing at work. Right. And so there's a lot of, you know, we're very focused on performance outcomes whilst also being a fun place to work. And I think that certainly we've had staff members join us who are like, I just didn't, you know, I didn't get that there'd be this much rigor behind the way that, that we think about things. Until, you know, week one, week two, it was like, oh shit. Actually this is like very serious. But it sort of has to be because we've got this huge problem that we're trying to solve and we need to map out how we're going to do that. And so that requires a very serious approach to how we work.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. And you would have been one of the first to really ship toilet paper in large volumes online. Right in the early days.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, Literally the first. Yeah. I mean, we started like the term direct consumer didn't exist when we started back in 2012. DollarShave Club had launched their video six months before we launched our crowdfunding campaign. Warby Parker was like, I think they probably just had their first feature, their first press feature and was just starting to take off. Bonobos was like the big sort of breakout kind of e commerce, direct to consumer model. So the landscape was really different. Shopify wasn't public and their website, frankly, was a piece of crap. So a lot's changed in the last decade and it's been amazing to sort of be one of the businesses that's kind of been very early in that, in that movement and seeing all of the changes that have happened because now Shopify is worth like $100 billion. And it's just a very different landscape to what it was when we got started. I think even thinking about postage and E commerce in Australia, absolute nightmare. Shipping stuff around the country in 2012, you do it now and it's pretty straightforward. It's still a bit harder than what it should be, but generally speaking, we're a lot better at it today than we were then.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. There's so much to unpack there. But I love that you've given us the scene of when you guys started, because I think we can all go back there. When you started, you launched with a big stunt.
Simon Griffiths: Right.
[Voiceover]: I'd love you to give us the story of the stunt. And. But also, did you feel pressure to do some sort of stunt because you did have those. That seemed to be the thing at that stage to do a big stunt to launch a brand.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, it wasn't. I mean, we were kind of working on it before Dollar Shave Club launch. So we weren't sort of looking at what they'd done and saying, hey, this, you know, have to replicate this. We were looking at it and saying, we've got a couple of problems we need to solve here. We need 50,000 bucks to place our first production. The minimum order of toilet paper is $50,000. So we need $50,000. If we get that $50,000 and then we can't find people who will buy the toilet paper. We're going to have literally an entire house of toilet paper and that's going to be a pretty huge problem. So we also have to find our first 1000 customers to buy that product from us. So crowdfunding, like, just as Kickstarter was starting to become a household name, amazing opportunity for us. We looked at what were the successful crowdfunding campaigns that had come before us. And at that point in time, there'd been six $1 million crowdfunding campaigns. Now there's probably multiple $1 million campaigns launched every single week in 2012, when we launched those six $1 million campaigns. And so we kind of dissected, like, what had made those campaigns successful. And the things they had going for them were either, like, transformative tech, incredibly cool hardware that people were going to be able to get access to for the first time, or massive cult followings. And they had millions of followers that could come and back these campaigns. And we were like, crap, we're selling toilet paper and I've got like 500 Facebook friends. We're in trouble. So how do we think about this differently? Like, what do we need to do in order to get eyeballs on what we're doing? And really, for us, the crowdfunding campaign, the third thing we needed to test was will people actually buy toilet paper called who gives a crap? And will people in Australia or the US Buy more of it? So get the money, find the customers, prove the brand name, and figure out which market we go into. First were kind of the four things we went to test. And so to do that successfully, we had to get eyeballs, like millions of eyeballs. Otherwise, we could never validate those four things that we were setting out to test. And so, yeah, someone working on the campaign said, I've figured out how we do this. We're going to shoot the campaign with you sitting on a toilet, and you're going to pledge to not get off that toilet until we've pre sold the first $50,000 worth of products. And so we'll live stream you sitting on a toilet in a warehouse, and it'll take as long as it takes, and hopefully it goes viral and we get it done in 12 hours. But it's possible that you're going to be on there for a week and we'll have to get a doctor to come in and relieve you at the end of it, saying, this isn't safe anymore.
[Voiceover]: I would have fired on the spot.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, it was one of those. It was kind of like the quarter second, who gives a crap idea. It was sort of like, oh, crap, this is so good. I can't say no to this. My wife's overseas again. 2012, it was hard to get hold of people when they were overseas. So I was like, I have to talk to her when she gets back. But I have to say yes to this now and then tell her when she gets back that I've committed to doing this thing. And she got back and was like, oh, it's a really good idea. Like, you got to do it. And so, like, that was kind of the reaction that everyone who heard the idea had, which meant that we were kind of onto a winner. I think when you have those ideas where people are like, I can't believe no one's done that before, that's usually a sign of virality because people will want to share that with someone else going, oh, it's so simple, it's so beautiful. Like, why hasn't someone done it? And that was the beauty of that stunt. And so, yeah, we launched the stunt at 6am on a Tuesday morning, trying to get into the American news stream at the end of the day in the US and fortunately got picked up national television in Australia on a few different channels. Eventually got national press in Australia. It took a few days for the newspapers to be honest, but just went like crazy viral on social media. Like MTV picked it up. It just went crazy globally. We got the video of me sitting on a toilet, got embedded onto the homepage of the largest Latin American newspaper in the world in Brazil. We were insanely popular in Greece, again, no idea why. What we thought was going to take maybe hopefully 12 hours ended up going overnight. And because we were super popular in Brazil and Greece, it turned into a 247 stunt where I couldn't get off because there were people all around the world just watching the whole time. And so, yeah, ended up taking 50 of the most horrible, never ever to be repeated hours of my life. I got some sleep in hour 46 to 48 because I started freaking out that I went on Reddit and was trying to drum up traffic. And people were saying, don't you know, if you've been up for too long, you go into a state of permanent psychosis. I was like, oh, screw this, I'm hallucinating. And all these people are like, freaking me out. So I turned around and slept on the system for a couple of hours. And yeah, then we wrapped up the. The end of the start.
[Voiceover]: Reddit isn't the kind of place you want to be on if you're hallucinating, though.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, it was the first time I'd been on Reddit. And yeah, hallucinating and Reddit's probably the lesson I learned from that was not a good combo.
[Voiceover]: And did you reach your goal, your financial goal?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, we did. And I should clarify, I know the hallucination piece. I don't know if anyone's ever stayed up for 48 hours in a row, but eventually you lose. Your brain stops working, and so you start seeing stuff, and all of the still images on Twitter turn into GIF images, and it got really pretty wild. So, yeah, that's what I meant by hallucinating.
[Voiceover]: And no DVT or anything like that from it.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. So, I mean, the pain in my legs at the end of it got so bad that I was so tired, I just kind of gave up and just didn't care about the pain, which was pretty terrible because that seriously probably did put me at pretty high risk of doing something bad. So at the end of it, I kind of collapsed and slept for eight hours, woke up, had swollen calves, intense calf pain, which are two of the signs of dvt. Luckily, someone watching the campaign had a friend who was a DVT specialist and got me an appointment. They rushed me in, and complete stranger organized all of this. They said, what are you doing here? You're in your 20s. People with DVT, we don't see anyone under 40. So I just sat in a toilet for 50 hours and all right, whip your pants off. We'll have a look. Just make sure everything's okay. And luckily they said, yep, everything's fine. No problems here. But I did have. There's this one spot on my left quad. If I sat in a seat on that one spot for too long, my legs. My calves would swell up and I'd get leg pain for days on end. So it took about three years. I couldn't fly economy overnight because that was the. Like, the length of the airline seats is standard, and they just put pressure on that one spot. So I became an expert on how to get anywhere in the world without taking an overnight flight, which is like a hidden skill that I now roll out every now and again when someone needs help.
[Voiceover]: Wow. There you go. Who would have thought that that stunt would have such an impact personally and professionally? Yeah. So fast forward us now into 2020. Can you give us an idea of the kind of growth you've had so since then? And moving into the great toilet paper debacle of COVID How did that impact you guys?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. So, you know, so we launched crowdfunding campaign 2012. We shipped our first product March 2013. We honestly thought supermarkets would be our path to scale, but said, hey, no supermarket interest to date, so let's try and go direct to consumer again. Wasn't a term that existed. Let's see if we can make it work. And so we packaged our roles individually in like beautiful, well designed kind of different packaging. Five different designs in each box. And we started sending them out to our customers and we had about three months worth of supply in our warehouse. All of a sudden we weren't doing any marketing, any like direct selling ourselves. As soon as we started sending it out to our customers our daily sales doubled every day, day on day. And after five days we sold out of that complete three month supply that we had in our warehouse. It turned out that our customers were just taking photos of our products, they were taking it to work. G colleagues, friends, family, everyone just telling everyone they knew about toilet paper, which is kind of super cool, kind of anyone's dream really if you're starting a new consumer product company. And as a result we realized there was actually a hell of a lot more interest in online direct to consumer toilet paper than what we thought was possible. And so basically the first couple of years we just grew off word of mouth. We were just trying to pave the road before we were driving down it the whole time. About two years in we turned on ads for the first time. So we tripled every year for those first couple of years, just some word of mouth and then turned on ads and then basically doubled or tripled the size of the business every year for seven and a half years. And 2020 was kind of a bit of an exception to the growth rule. I think we over performed a little bit but basically we're having a great year. Coming into February we tightened everything up in the business and we're going to make a record donation, a multimillion dollar donation for the first time. And then yeah, the last couple of days of February we saw daily sales were up a little bit. Seen the run on toilet paper in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, said oh that would never happen. Any of the markets that we trade in never happened in Australia, US, UK. Then yeah, sure enough that first day of March our daily sales were up 2x next day, up 5x the day after that, up 12x the day after that. We were going to do 30 to 40 times a regular day of sales. Our customers basically have sent us viral at this point telling everyone why are you buying toilet paper from the supermarkets? Go to who gives a crap. I think we basically became Australia's largest retailer of toilet paper because all of the major supermarkets were sold out and so all of the traffic was basically getting driven to us. And so that month we, yeah we had 1 in 20 Australians visit our website. And including people age 0 through to 110 years old, 1 in 20 came to our website, which was kind of crazy. We had to turn our website to sold out on the 4th of March to hold onto stock for our subscribers to make sure that they'd never run out again. And we turn on a wait list to let people know when we were back in stock. We thought we'd get a few thousand signups for that wait list, but we had more than half a million people sign up for that waitlist, which was slightly higher than what we'd anticipated.
[Voiceover]: Crazy.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. And an interesting time. The world was kind of falling apart as well. So we had this huge business problem to solve whilst everyone's normal, regular at home lives were getting torn to pieces.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. Just for anyone who's not aware is that you've got a subscription model, which is you can choose to get your toilet paper delivered at regular intervals based on the quantities you want, but you can also buy the toilet paper.
Simon Griffiths: Ad hoc.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, ad hoc. Are you able to give kind of a percentage each way, like how much of your business subscription?
Simon Griffiths: It varies a little bit, you know, country to country and whether you're looking at first order or repeat customer, but it's roughly half, depending on how you kind of splice it. A lot of what we call sleeping subscribers. So regular customers who will order from us every X months, but for some reason don't want to take out a subscription. It's a part of the problem with having this huge wait list. And, you know, our subscribers could get toilet paper whenever they need it. They're probably the only people in the world at that point who could get toilet paper whenever they needed it. But part of the problem with that was that we had all of these regular customers who had ordered from us every X months for the last seven years who for the first time couldn't buy from us because they weren't a subscriber. And so part of working our way through the wait list was figuring out how we prioritize returning customers versus new customers and get that split right so that we looked after some of the people that had been supporting us for a long time.
[Voiceover]: As a customer, we subscribe. And your communication at that time was so precise and so calm. When the whole world was going a bit crazy as a subscriber you're like, oh, good, I'm kind of looked after. Not that I was stressing about toilet paper because I think there's bigger things to stress about. But from an operational point of view, when that hit, because like you said, it was literally a couple of days where the world changed. How did you operationally pull the team together and make those decisions quickly and make sure everyone was on board?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, there was kind of a couple of phases of it. So when you've just done, like a month of sales in the first three days of the month, that creates some pretty big operational backlogs. And so it took us about a week or two to kind of clear out the backlog of orders because our warehouses couldn't pick and pack fast enough to dispatch the number of orders they needed to the next day. So it took a week. And then our customers are saying, hey, where's my products? I ordered from you a week ago. What's going on? Has someone stolen it? Because toilet paper is now this hot ticket that's selling on eBay for $1,000 a roll. And so we had huge customer service backlog that took another week to work through. And so once we kind of cleared that, we started to get our head into the mindset of, how are we going to satisfy this wait list? How do we do this? It took a while. It's a pretty interesting problem to solve because half a million people, we get more products arriving in our warehouse every single week, but we were never going to have enough to email everyone at once and say, hey, we're back in stock. First in, Best Dressed would have sold out in 30 seconds. That's a terrible customer experience. We had to think through how do we solve this problem? And what we landed on as being the right framework for that was how do we get toilet paper to the most people possible? Because this isn't just about shipping. The regular orders that we have there are like, there's an actual problem, like a societal problem here where people need a product that they can't get, and we. We have a lot of it in our warehouse. We have to figure out how to get, you know, that into as many hands as we possibly can. And so once we reframed the problem like that, we worked out, you know, we looked at, like, getting a 747, like, you know, full of toilet paper, like, sent over from a manufacturer. Like, we kind of went through all these different scenarios, like, you know, let's explore this stupid stuff and just see if it gives us a solution that's adjacent to it. And where we landed on was the biggest constraints are inventory, customer service, volume, and our warehouse pick, pack, and send. So even if we got a 747, load of product in our warehouses couldn't pick, pack and send it fast enough. And so the problem ended up not being not having enough inventory because technically we could repack as much as we needed to in our warehouses to create the number of orders. The problem was actually that our warehouses couldn't ship more than however many thousand orders a day. And so we ended up figuring out what's that upper limit. And then we hired and trained 25 customer service freelancers in a week so we could triple our customer service volume. And then we broke down our inventory into smaller pack sizes so that we had more orders to ship. So we took our big 48 roll boxes and split them into two 24s and that basically doubled number of orders that we could dispatch. And so then we set up an invite only version of our store. Slowly drip sent emails every single day to invite just enough people through the store on a target conversion rate to take our warehouses to their absolute daily maximum limit. And we did that for eight weeks, basically running a secret online toilet paper club, which was probably the most popular club in the world at that point in time. And yeah, we eventually cleared through what was more than about, you know, six hundred and something thousand people on the wait list which was just mind bogglingly cool. Basically broke every single email marketing metric you've ever seen.
[Voiceover]: What's that? You've had all summer to read Shopify's Future of E Commerce report and you haven't yet.
Simon Griffiths: And what's that?
[Voiceover]: You missed the webinar with Shopify plus head of marketing Robin Marchant and product marketing lead Anthony Kentris. Well, don't worry, we've got you covered. The webinar and the report is available on demand now, so you can access both at any time that you want. Head over to ShopifyPlus Live FOC APAC. That's ShopifyPlus Live FOC APac to get Shopify's Future of E Commerce report and webinar today or you know, before next summer at least we'll put the link in the show notes for you as well. And did you have a flow on impact to other things like your tech stack or anything foreseen?
Simon Griffiths: When you're doing that, you're pushing your team pushes the boundaries of every single system that you have in the business to its absolute limit. So we kept pinging the Shopify API too many times in a minute for it to be able to process the orders. And so our inventory management system switched off and kept breaking the link between the ims and Shopify all of this terrible stuff happened. And when you're doing super high volume, when that stuff happens, if you end up with a day or two of a backlog of orders, it screws you because your warehouses are already at their maximum. And so then you have to figure out how to clear backlogs on top of a maximum volume that is already being pushed through. So it's a super high pressure environment. I think our team said it's the most engaged they've ever been at work because we were just solving like super cool problems every day, knowing that we were doing society a service and if we got this right, we'd bring lots of new customers into the business that ultimately would help us make an amazing donation come June 30th. So super engaging, but super exhausting because really hard work, early mornings, late nights and literally the world was kind of falling to pieces around us while we were trying to solve this problem and kids were at home and it was just a tough work environment. Once we got to June and made this record donation that was pretty much double what we'd forecast it would be. It was just this kind of massive pat on the back for everyone that had got us to that point. And I think everyone, the kind of. That's the nice ending of the story. The bad ending of the story is that we got to the end of June, we're like, awesome, we've done it, we've cleared the backlog, now let's go on. People can go on holiday and take some time off. And then Victoria's cases came up. All of our Australian team were in Victoria. Borders got shut, everyone's holiday plans got cancelled and people were burnt out. Too much annual leave available, nowhere to go. And kind of created a different problem for the team, which we weren't quite expecting.
[Voiceover]: How do you manage that? How do you engaged after this?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, I mean, that was a really once off scenario where we felt like the whole team was at risk of burnout because everyone had just pushed themselves to get to the end of the financial year basically and clear that backlog of the wait list. We realized that people's productivity just wasn't where it should have been. And we felt that in ourselves. We could also see that when we were surveying our staff in our weekly surveys that we started through Covid to check how the team was going. And so we ended up saying we need a circuit breaker, like we've got to do something to try and like, give people a bit of a, you know, a jab in the arm and kind of give them a break. And so we said to the whole company, everyone's taking a week off in two weeks time over a two week period. So 50% will be off one week, 50% the other week. You've got two weeks to plan for it. So you can't get all your work done. You have to choose what work you're going to delay. And in that two weeks there's no internal meetings so you will not be letting anyone down while you're off and you'll be able to get into deep work in the week where you're on. And so we made that change. It wasn't quite we'll give you a week off. It was we'll give you four days of leave for free if you take one day of leave. We had 100% uptake on that offer, as you can imagine and it was a pretty amazing experiment and we came out the other side of that and productivity kind of shot through the roof and that was yeah, kind of the shot in the arm that I think I certainly needed to get me through to Christmas and a bit more downtime. But yeah, really, really well received across the company.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, nicely done. And in terms of COVID we're not out of the woods yet by any means. But has it changed your long term plans for who gives a crap or your strategic roadmap? Because I could imagine it's hard to imagine how to plan this, not knowing what's still to come.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, it hasn't changed too much. I think more short run it meant, you know, there's more risk in the system which means we have to plan with greater variance to our plans. And so we've, we've just held twice, three times as much inventory as what we've ever had in our business, which is slightly challenging because all of our warehouses have fixed storage space and so we've had to get pretty creative on how we deal with that. So yeah, the long term strategies is pretty similar. I think if anything it's just meant probably mostly in the us we found a lot of new customers there where understandably the online sales channel is just significantly outperforming bricks and mortar because people don't want to buy something in a store if they can get it delivered. And that's really even more so than Australia accelerated the pace of E Commerce uptake.
[Voiceover]: Yep. Tell us about your expansion internationally because I heard that you went to the US and the UK at the same time, but that sounds crazy. Is that true?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. So most people would look at that and go that is strategy suicide. I still think it's like a brilliant piece of strategy that we did. Where we originally would gone into the US and the uk. Sorry, into the US and Australia with the crowdfunding campaign. We found that we had with the crowdfunding campaign, twice as many views from Australia and three times as many sales from Australia than the U.S. it was, for whatever reason, being shared more in Australia and converting better. We pulled out of the US to just focus on the Australian market to build up capability, understanding of customer, understanding of products. Get all of that stuff right before we went into the us which is arguably the hardest market in the world for a consumer product. And so in 2016, we're saying, do we go into the US or the UK? We think the brand will resonate better in the UK, but our third co founder, Danny's in the US we have American team members, so we've got feet on the ground, so does it make sense to go there first? I think we had this realization that, that if we went into the US when the going got tough, which it would. New markets are hard. We would say, oh, we would never have had this problem in the uk. We should have gone there instead, and the grass would always have been greener. And if we went to the uk, the same thing would have happened. Doing both markets at the same time allowed us to see what was a systemic global expansion problem versus a geographic. This is an American issue that we need to solve. Truth be told, 95% of the problems we faced with were systemic global expansion problems. And we definitely would have, if we were just in one market. We would have said, this is specific to the us. We would have been much better off in the uk. And so it was a really, really smart move. It took us about 24 months to catch back up on all the compliance stuff that we screwed up with that expansion. Because you need new companies and bank accounts and tax everything. Yeah, it was a nightmare, like legal compliance. So that was. That was a real headache. And unfortunately I was looking after most of that, which is probably why I was so far behind on it, because that stuff's not my strong point. I can do it, but I just hate doing it. And so I don't do it very well. And so probably wasn't until about 2018, 20 that we really kind of got on top of all of that as well.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, nice. And how are those markets responding now?
Simon Griffiths: Australia? Yeah, amazing. I think in November, the US was our biggest market globally. For the first time, we sell more outside of Australia than in Australia. And yeah, those markets are our fastest two growing markets today. We're now opened up our first European warehouse. So we've been shipping into Europe from the UK for a while, but sustainability is important to us. We want to try and cut down distance to customer. So we've made that push now and we'll open up Canada in the next six to 12 months as well.
[Voiceover]: How exciting. That's brilliant. Now, do you have. We've got to wrap up, but do you have a favorite customer story from your time gives a call.
Simon Griffiths: I mean, like so many our customers are just amazing. Like the things that they do that you just would never dream of. So some of my favorites are one time, Cheryl and Gary sent us a photo of their wedding. And in the background, instead of a wedding cake, there was a stack of who gives a crap? And they gave a roll of toilet paper to every person at their wedding instead of a piece of cake. And that's just. Holy crap. On that cake theme, we got sent someone's first birthday and her parents had baked her a cake that looks like one of our rolls of toilet paper because apparently our toilet paper was her favorite toy. So stuff like that that you just can't ever imagine as. Yeah. When you're getting something started, when customers do that, it just blows your mind. And then. Yeah, I think in Covid, we heard stories of people. There was this one woman who, she was in a car park and she opened a bo, found that she had one of our boxes in there and realized that 48 rolls, lots of people probably in the car park didn't have toilet paper. And so she walked around the car park giving rolls of toilet paper out to people. And apparently people in the car park were in tears because it was like such a hot commodity. And they'd been trying to find toilet paper for weeks before that. And so this lady just had a bit of empathy for what was going on and did everyone a. A real solid. So stuff like that, people gifting your toilet paper, that's just awesome.
[Voiceover]: Who would have thought that you could create toilet paper that people are so passionate about? No one's ever been passionate about toilet paper.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah. And I think that's kind of the beauty of it. Right. If you can do it with toilet paper, then you should be able to do it with any other product. And that's kind of what we want to show with our business model. So, yes, the impact that we have, the donations we make is important, but the most impact that we can have is by showing that our business model can be successful at scale so that other people come and copy it and hopefully do an even better job than us and can help solve some of these other problems that are out there other than just sanitation.
[Voiceover]: That's brilliant. I think that's a great way to end it. Simon, if people are looking to contact you or learn more about who gives a crap, what's the best way for them to get involved?
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, so who gives a crap? They can just jump on our website whogivesacrap.org or whogivesacrap tp on social media and then me personally, I'm Simon Griffiths on Twitter and check LinkedIn Semi regularly and then Simon Griffiths on Clubhouse as well.
[Voiceover]: Great. Not on Reddit anymore, occasionally on Reddit,
Simon Griffiths: but I've probably got a funky username on there.
[Voiceover]: Simon, thanks for joining us on Add to Car. Really appreciate you telling our story.
Simon Griffiths: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been good fun.
[Voiceover]: So a special shout out to James Johnson who instead of just laughing at me on the toilet in my LinkedIn video asking for questions, he actually posed a question and he laughed a little bit. But he asked around how who gives a crap? Scaled during the March shortage, some of the numbers around tripling capacities and the 500,000 instant email subscribers is mind boggling. But as Simon shared throughout it all, the team was able to stay rational while pushing themselves to the the limit. The insight around the move to a more elastic model is a really good call out and a great exercise to do if you haven't already experienced it with COVID If demand for your product doubled or halved overnight, could you keep up? Could you maintain a profitable business? Likewise, if supply stopped, how would you manage it? By having answers to these questions now, when the pressure's not on, it will allow you to make quick and rational traffic choices when or if the time comes to finish up. I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to add to cart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops, as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies, tools and research, sign up to the High Five Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from sign up at 12 high one to hig h.comau forward slash high five and the last thing. If you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discover. Discuss your next move. Until next time. Thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to cartoon.
