The Brand That Turned Poop Jokes Into a $308M Business

0:00Joey Thomas:We call ourselves Dude Wipes now. We are purely a flushable wipes, foot wipe brand. Marketing for Dude Wipes hasn't been that hard because it seems it's been pretty accepted by the public, right? When we were marketing Dude Wipes in the early days, it was like very much like talking to guys who like Chipotle and, you know, like football and ate bad. And as we've grown as a brand, it's become more for like every household because like you're growing household penetration, you're bringing more consumers into the fold. Do you have any channels that you feel are leading to more conversions or that work best for you guys?

0:28The banger of a channel that's come out in the last 18 months is TikTok Shop. We've got to get like these armies of creators that have like at least 5 ,000 followers that start selling a product for you. Dude Wipes isn't just for dudes, but does the demographic that buys your wife, is it mainly males? I'd say like from a marketing voice perspective, we're speaking to guys, but 40 % of our consumers, purchasers are women, 60 % are guys.

0:54Joey Thomas:Hey everybody, welcome to the show. My name is Andres Figuera, and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and a global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. All you got to do is visit GlobalTalent.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we reach out.

1:26Joey Thomas:And today with me here, I am speaking with Joey Thomas, vice president of Dude Products, the creators of Dude Wipes and the first company to introduce wipes for the adult male demographic. So with that said, Joey, welcome to the show, man. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks, Andres. It's a pleasure to be here, man. Thanks for having me. No, we're so happy we were able to make this work and that you guys were able to make it. So Joey, just so that we can hit the ground running and get the audience a bit more in context, would you be able to tell us more about your background man and and how you became vp of dude products love it um and we call ourselves dude wipes now we are purely a flushable wipes foot wipe brand uh i'm joey been doing this for the last four years um i'm 42 now so it's taking me a minute to get here but i grew up in like big cbg um actually first job out of school was with 3m and actually i know you're in argentina that's what took me down to argentina so wow okay I was selling sandpaper and tape and car care products for a brand called Meguiar's and then 3M Professional to body shops down in Argentina.

2:29So covered Central and South America for a minute or in my early days.

2:34Joey Thomas:Yeah, that is so interesting, man. 3M, I know that brand. Like I've seen it everywhere, especially on on what's it called? I believe it's windshields, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, yeah. Anything that's like sticky or scratchy for sure. But absolutely like glass, protective, all kinds of stuff. went from that to working for the French. There's a company called BIC, B-I-C. I'm sure you know the lighter, hopefully. BIC lighter. They also do pins. They do razors. Three really unrelated verticals. And then that was sort of like my first big step into e-com. So that was back in like 2015. I dabbled with it before then, but like became their e-com director and was trying to sell on Amazon.

3:10You know, I was trying to sell at retail.com, build a DTC strategy. Went from there to selling tuna for a brand called Wild Planet. It's like a really expensive can of tuna. Helped those boys scale and exit and then came over to Dude Wipes at the end of 2021. So it's kind of like how I went from like pins to tuna to butt wipes. That's the progression.

3:31Joey Thomas:It really is one hell of a journey going from such different products all around. But I do believe that the experience that you gathered in each one of those specific industries, it must have been able to be extrapolated and used for something else. but then now that you're in in dude wipes man not dude products um so tell me more about that where did that idea come from how was that even conceived were you in the company when it started or did you arrive a bit later no i i took a i took a trophy horse and got to run it so uh it was three three um three best friends out of chicago sort of like grinding back in 2011 they uh were roommates had bad diets were using baby wipes as toilet paper because it's more hygienic than than actual dry paper had this idea of like selling flushable butt wipes you know and so in 2011 started to place some orders through those products up in 2012 um sean reilly like the ceo went and like to like a little e-com incubator learned the hacks of amazon landed on shark tank in 2015 where mark cuban made an investment into the brand great um i've sort of like scaled and soared from there so when i joined in 2021 they were like sub 60 million top line revenue uh 2025 crushed about 308 million so it's been a pretty fast trajectory over the last four years um and really sort of starting to starting to teach american households that like flushable butt wipes are much cleaner and more hygienic and better for you than uh tried to the paper i love the education component that it really is more hygienic uh but so crazy and so cool that the idea all stemmed from these three guys in their in their dorm room like knowing that this is what they preferred because that's what I noticed every single product that is created or a good service it comes from a point of friction in somebody's life and it's like I could make this better and then somebody else always has that issue and it's like the classical story um and and then I imagine the marketing for dude wipes hasn't been that hard because it seems it's been pretty accepted by the public right it's it's a product that is being it's is liked well we're 15 years in at this point so it always feels like it's like an overnight success you know what I mean there's a lot of grinding that happens to get there i'd say like um it's also a company that's that's fairly outside of mark you know making an investment on shark tank uh it's a bootstrapped business so the money that we've spent against growth has had to come from margin you know these these boys didn't go out to a bunch of vcs raise millions of dollars and scale this business like they did it the founder way and like you said the best brands are created by founders who have an actual like need and then they swap their problem for themselves and then they speak to themselves as their original clients so like when when we were marketing dude wipes in the early days it was like very much like talking to guys talking to guys who like chipotle and you know like football and ate ate bad and and and had uncomfortable poop sessions you know and and as we've grown as a brand it's become more for like every household because like you're growing household penetration you're bringing more consumers into the fold you know you've traveled the world so you know like the rest of the world uses dubais and all kinds of things like get clean uh but americans it's only 35 percent of houses today that use a flushable or a wet product for cleaning um 65 percent are still just using dry toilet paper.

6:37So it's been about like educating the masses on like migrating over to a flushable wipe and dudes done that effectively.

6:43Joey Thomas:That is so crazy. And I believe that then it, I feel it's kind of obvious, but dude wipes isn't just for dudes, but does the demographic that buys your wipes, is it mainly male male? Is it mainly males or do you find yourself being able to penetrate, get females in your consumers? Yeah. I love the question. I'd say like from a marketing voice perspective, we're speaking to guys, but 40 % of our consumers, purchasers are women, 60 % are guys. So it's like, we're able to, I learned this at BIC actually. BIC's big trick is you can only sell a pink razor to women, but you can sell a black razor to anybody.

7:17You know, women are never intimidated to buy a male branded product, but men are horrified at the idea of buying a female branded product. So in Memphis households, women are the household buyers. So you always want to make sure that they're included in the mix. You can't go too narrow in your language or you can always advertise to a guy and hit the whole house. And that's something that dude

7:36Joey Thomas:has done really effectively. Of course, I can imagine. And do you have any examples of nice campaigns or cool ones that you guys ran that worked really well, maybe when you arrived or anything like that? I love. Yes. I mean, the biggest banger campaign for a dude is always like stocking stuffers. It always surprises people to know that November and December are the biggest sales months of the year for Dude Wipes, that it's become a seasonal business because we fit so well into a stocking and it's become sort of like a shtick that a lot of women by the guys in their life. They throw a pack of wipes in their Christmas stocking and that drives beautiful trial, right?

8:10So it's like, we have learned that there's like a 60 some percent chance that you're gonna buy me again once you've bought me the first time or tried my product. So to me, it's like, we can give that sample away, essentially, we can run it on promotion, on Amazon, we can do Turkey 12, make sure that we're selling those one pack of wipes so people are buying them, throwing them in stockings, knowing that come January, February, March, you're gonna come back. That's probably like the most creative marketing campaign that we've run as a brain on the internet.

8:34Joey Thomas:I did not expect November and December to be the top month, man. That is so cool. Imagine a girlfriend telling her boyfriend, like, hey, yeah, I bought you this. Don't want wipes. Take a hint. Yeah. I love it. I love it. And in terms of your marketing mix right now, man, do you have any channels that you feel are leading to more conversions or that work best for you guys? Or do you have this whole ecosystem set up? Yeah, no. The banger of a channel that's come out in the last 18 months is TikTok Shop. Um, it's changed the entire entirely digitally. So, um, in 2023, TikTok shop was still in beta.

9:09We're all geriatric millennials, you know, so we were all like, ah, it's for girls watching dance videos, 19 year olds, you know, it's not that at all. Um, the average age on TikTok today is like, I think 37 last time I heard it quoted. These are the stats that I'll blow your mic with, right? Um, average user in the U S there's 170 million Americans on TikTok, right? Average user opens the app 22 times in a day 22 opens and spends on average 96 minutes on the app fully engaged meaning the sound is on and they're staring at the screen right um when you're surfacing ads on like a meta product like instagram or facebook and typically sound off so they might be watching scrolling through stories but they may be like also streaming television but tiktok it's full engagement they're fully engaged there um the the interesting thing about tiktok when we launched it i made the mistake of launching it like you would treat amazon so you know like Like you're spending all this money on search on Amazon to get the flywheel ranking.

10:01You're like, you know, A9 starts to serve you up and you rank organically. You can pull back that spend. TikTok doesn't work that way at all. It's all about like these creator activations. You've got to get like these armies of creators that have like at least 5 ,000 followers that start selling the product for you. And they're rewarded with a commission that you set up as a brand. So that's like where we've really learned to crush. Then we've done like some research to show like what, how that's affecting the rest of the business. Because obviously it's a lower margin on TikTok shop. But there's a massive lift that's happening at Walmart, at retail, at Amazon because of the activation on TikTok.

10:34Joey Thomas:Dude, I've heard about TikTok Shop. Here in Argentina, it's not like you can't use it yet. It's not activated, I believe, because you can't monetize through TikTok. But I've heard it's crazy. It's the best place to start selling a product if you do it right because you just get this backup of the army of influencers that help you out. and it just leads to a lot of conversions, man. I can't believe that's the best channel you guys have right now. That is so cool. Yeah, I love that you're calling it out and it will come to Argentina eventually. In the US, it's new, but they expect to do$30 billion in top line sales in 2026 from 18 billion last year.

11:10So it's not a joke. And it is a place where like, if you are an incumbent or a disruptor, big CPG is kind of still nervous about it. They're nervous about the liability around it. You know, like if you're working for Kimberly Clark, you maybe don't want 18 ,000 affiliates selling your wipes because you don't know what they're going to say. If you're smaller and you're incumbent, like you're a little more confident, you take a little more risk. You can empower people to sell the product for you. So I'd say like it's the biggest wide open space. I'd say this is Amazon 2012. You know, it was like the brands that couldn't make it into retail launched on Amazon.

11:41Now the trick is really around like TikTok. If you have something that's highly consumable and you can afford to drive trial on it on the shop reward commissions you can crush with tiktok wow okay no i get that now you just

11:52Joey Thomas:have me thinking like what cool product can i think of to just put it there because it is like it's a wild west right now and i know it's like a a double-edged sword when you let influencers just say whatever they want but like i feel dude wipes is a is a brand with personality so you guys can take whatever anybody says and it'll just be like a cool anecdote or a funny story and it doesn't have to be taken personally so it's just awesome that you're able to provide that that um like openness to the creators yeah you'd love it like you can't be afraid there's i work anytime i consult on like a big cpg or large they're terrified of what people will say and they spend so much time perfecting the message that the message never gets out and um when you want to be disruptive you've got to just run with it you know so you can't be too protective of like we're big byron scott guys if you follow byron scott like he he wrote a book called how branch grow he teaches these seminars you know we've gone to them as a company and like he teaches like consumers not as obsessed with you as you think that they are they are not like sitting there being like oh i really am so concerned with what dude wipes is going to say today you know they are absent-minded and you are solving a problem that maybe they didn't know that they had when they're exposed to the video at first okay but then you realize like oh dry toilet paper is kind of gross like who cleans mud with dry paper like maybe it doesn't need to be wet you know and so it's like there's an instant purchase there along with the marketing that happens.

13:08So don't overthink the messaging. Don't try to restrict creators. Allow the brand to speak for itself. Allow people to sell the brand to their audience in the way that they know their audience will respond versus you curating a message that you think is going to deliver better.

13:21Joey Thomas:Of course. And you just got to get them talking. It doesn't matter what they say. As long as they're talking about you, that's a home run for me. It's like noise is noise. More is better. They say, I mean, we'll tell you, throw 20 bad videos up versus put two good videos up, right? It's about momentum and volume. It's true. It's true. Joey, another question I do have, man, is, well, 15 years is what Dude Products has been going on for, and you've been there for four. But how big is the company, man? Because it feels a pretty big endeavor, the one that you guys have already set up. I love it. When I joined, it was less than 10.

13:56So we were like a really, really small crew. And that, I mean, that, again, speaks to the value of grinding founders. Yeah. You got three guys. work their asses off. I mean, just like, and they're still doing it today. And so it shows you like what a handful of people are able to accomplish if they're willing to work hard and they have a really focused strategy. And the strategy was very much like grow this on e-com, grow this online, and then take that story into retail. Today, we're probably sitting around 45 people. So it's grown up. We brought in some investors in 2025, you know, minority share of the company.

14:27And it's more about like headcount and allowing like specialists to come in and really focus in on things. So instead of like letting Joey be like the guy who's got to go sell the bag to Costco and Sam's, you know, it's like, let's bring some, some specialists in here and really scale this thing the right way. Um, early days it was, it was a few of us, you know, trying to try to figure out how to do this thing.

14:45Joey Thomas:Wow. And are you, are you guys remote first or do you have like a headquarters where the 45 people are at? Yeah, no, it's a remote first company. Nobody has to go into the office, but there is an office in the West loop of Chicago and we try to make it a fun, chill environment. Like we are like not going to put you in a board room and have you in seven hours of meetings a day like we you know we're gonna like have fun make a lot of poop jokes um it's a company that does not take itself too seriously but it's like wildly effective so you are really really smart people you let them do what they do best you know and you let them just crush um and we have an office in case you got kids at home and you're trying to escape the life like you can come in okay man that's cool and in terms of then i love to ask about teams and and how you guys have grown and everything like that and now i just pass on to AI, bro.

15:28Joey Thomas:Are you guys leveraging AI in any peculiar, weird way, using it for comedic inspiration or anything like that? For sure. And our leadership is like bent on us finding ways to use AI. Like we don't want to be afraid of it. So I'd say like where we can remove the human from something that is like a mundane task, we absolutely want to do that. That includes like data analysis. You know, it's like give AI access to all of the data, all of the PO data, know all of the forecasts um and allow it to start to think through that versus like hiring a bunch of humans to sit there like quants and try to interpret things i feel like with simple things like tiktok it's like let's use yuka let's use a bot outreach to flood dms you know so that like when you're in open collaboration like you're targeting a bunch of people you know um instead of having somebody who's got to sit there and dm creators that you think are going to rock the brand well you know that's like an element that you can remove i'd say like you know when it comes i think the real thing that we want to watch is like the ai shopping piece i mean like i've been saying social commerce is the future of commerce in the U.S.

16:27for the last two years, but now it's like, how is AI going to fit? Like, how is chat going to be that shop bot, you know, that's going to like make decisions for customers and help navigate like their choices when they're buying? There's some services, I talked to one called Nectar and they're like, because it turns out like chat is pulling 70 % of its knowledge from like, or its answers from Reddit. So they're like flooding Reddit with information about a brand so that when chat pulls that question, so if somebody goes to chat and says like what's a good flushable wipe then it has all this database to say dude wipes is really loved by consumers and this is why so i think like there's uh early hacks now

17:02Joey Thomas:that we're all going to want to do um in order to be ahead of the curve so in terms of book i i was not aware that chat i knew it used reddit but 70 from reddit is a lot of influence that reddit is giving into what chat spits out so have you guys like just put your company's information on reddit or have you been able to like create an organic comment section that just doesn't shut up and people keep talking about dude wife because i feel that's like the biggest hit yeah and the 70 quote came from nectar so i'm quoting somebody who's quoting somebody so i'm in the world for opening eye uh they wouldn't appreciate you know me acting like i know it um but i'm repeating like a rumor mill um i'd say like we we are exploring the opportunity of having an agency sort of like repurpose our comments on the internet and put them into reddit so that it has to pull from but i would say there is a value add there that like dude is probably the loudest flushable wipes brand on the internet we do troll in the comments you know so there is sort of like we are like engaged with customers and that is a piece that like we are not putting on ai like we're not going to have ai answer comments or interact with customers like it's still really the founders like most of the time when you see comments like whether it's on twitter or or even linkedin it's sean you know it's our ceo like he's he's the one answering people um so i'd say like i think it's gonna be a mix but i do think the reddit piece is gonna be interesting for brands okay okay no i I love that.

18:21Joey Thomas:It's so cool that you guys are keeping it real, making sure that dude wipes and the CEO is the one who replies. And it's just like funny banter with the customers, because I think that is also what you as you say it, it makes you guys loud and it makes you guys unforgettable. Because I don't know of any other flushable wipes brand that is doing this or at least is getting so close to their consumers. This is like a it feels like what they call it, like chilling with the bros and just talking about that, which is a topic that is usually taboo or you won't even address. See, and that's the big advantage.

18:51I say like if you can find an industry where big CBG is afraid to state the obvious, you know, the obvious is everybody poops. Everybody deals with wiping their ass. Like we are a brand that can say that, you know, and effectively on the Internet. Kimberly Clark, Parker and Gamble, they're not going to say that stuff. Now, later when they find that you're trending, they start to try to follow on your skirt a little bit. You know, they're like, oh, maybe we can make a poop joke. But it's it's it's too hard.

19:15Joey Thomas:try of course okay so no i love the way you guys are managing ai that is amazing and and having it help you out in the future once it's uh like it's more developed with the sales that's gonna be crazy man it's gonna be crazy and in and in terms also for this year man like we're already in february january flew by but um what are like your main goals for dude wipes as vp besides getting more um leveraging more ai and everything like that do you have any other things that you'd love to accomplish yeah the biggest hold back for dude has been supply fortunately it's a good problem to have when you you know but um there's not really there's pent-up demand we just have struggled to make enough wipes now the brand is like unlocked that uh manufacturing so it's about to crush even harder here i'd say like the biggest unlocks are you know the the ones have sort of been like waiting in the in the wings are like club you know but there's like costco rollout planned for the brand which is sort of like maybe like the biggest door impact that we'll have from like a sales perspective at jude this year okay i mean just continuing to like be hyper focused and scale you know um when it comes to there's a lot of copycats so like when you're flushable wipes and you're the first brand that like does a mint wipe you know then everybody's got to come out with a mint wipe a few years later you know now we do like dumpkin spice and dingo bells like we do these like limited time like holiday flavors we're up the puns okay but we just launched like menthol you know which is menthol but like we're we're launching like a wild amount of like innovation against wipes to make it an even more fun category for consumer um so that's an exciting thing and e-commerce is the best place to do that because you can just like go you don't have to bid for shelf space you can just go wild so um you'll see a lot of innovation coming to amazon you'll see a lot of creators on tiktok pushing that innovation and we will watch that spillover that's happening from tiktok to the rest of our like digital footprint dude okay no i you left me crazy with the names you guys are putting for the for like the smell so creative man who comes up with that is it the founders as well do you have like a creative team that really um put puts their head to it it's the founders that's it's it's sean riley thinking something's funny and it just works i mean he he is the backbone of this sean jeff ryan but they are they are very much the ones who even like name the wipes okay okay and man another question i have which um i i I hadn't asked them till now.

21:36Joey Thomas:I just remembered it. It's do you guys just sell within the United States or are you trying to go international with DudeWatch as well? Yeah, right now there's enough runway for us just to be hyper focused on like U.S. growth. I think like you add some complexity when you start to do like wild, like international, you know, spread. I'd say like, you know, there's a little bit of there's a little bit happening in Canada. You know, I'm on Amazon Mexico because it's right there. But but we haven't expanded too far beyond that. First is like taking over the states, making sure you're dominating the market there, at least the way you want to.

22:06Joey Thomas:And then you'll see if you actually expand somewhere else. Yeah. And markets that make sense. It's like it turns out flushable isn't really too much of a thing in Central and South America because a lot of toilet paper isn't even flushed. You know, so you're like, ah, you know, do we make a ton of sense to have a flushable wipe? But maybe, you know, it's going to depend where we're headed. I think like Europe is probably the most obvious. I'll tell you once a week, I got somebody in the Middle East sending me a message saying they want to sell deed wipes. So I think there might be opportunity to unlock, you know, that sort of window someday.

22:33But we'll wait and see.

22:35Joey Thomas:No, yeah. And that like you got me thinking about it. It's like here in Argentina, everybody has a day. So it's like, I don't know if Dude Wipes would be the biggest disruptor here. But I'd love to see what's in the shelves in my local store. That would be crazy, dude. And do you guys like in terms of marketing and stuff, have you been like, I don't know. I imagine Dude Wipes being on like the shirt for a team or something like that. Have you done that type of marketing? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. A big partnership with going with the Cleveland Browns because Browns makes sense for us as a brand. We got a lot of fun with that.

23:08I got a guy, Ryan Megan. He's the founder and the CMO. And he strikes up great relationships. We've done like different UEFA soccer teams. He kind of like runs that. It's interesting to see like a lot of sports teams aren't super excited about having like a butt wipe on their shirt. But the ones that are, get it, you know. So like we were always down to clown.

23:29Joey Thomas:Hey, dude, you guys have everything so thought out and it just is so cohesive. Like the jokes with the brand, with how it is. And it's just cool how you have planned it, man. And also in terms of, well, with the growth, if you guys get placed in Costco, that's going to be like a home run hit. But do you guys plan to expand the company even more or do you guys, are you feeling chill with the 45 people you have right now? Oh, in terms of headcount? Yeah, I think the big unlock that the brand will do this year is like bring in creative, like fully in house. So like when you're like, looking to marry up with like a strategic, typically like creative is the thing that they don't do well.

24:08And so you just want to make sure like you're really owning that. And I think that's that we can like optimize the most is like making sure like anytime the brand is spoken about, it's somebody in house. I'd say like the other thing is, is like building out like the TikTok piece, like the lives in house. So instead of like outsourcing that to A and C, like, let's have a team in house. is just going live all day, every day on TikTok shop because I think live shopping is like absolutely the future. We can have more fun with it and be even funnier. So I think those are like the big things that'll be built out.

24:31So yeah, absolutely. The company is going to keep growing.

24:34Joey Thomas:Okay, no, that's so cool. And I understand that the creative aspect that should be maintained in-house, but for the fact that you guys have a very specific tone and very specific humor that needs to be maintained and be like, it's how I'm seeing you speak about the brand. Everything is funny. So I get it needs to stay that way. Right. But Joey, I noticed we're almost at the end of the episode, but I did want to give you the chance to let anybody who's hearing us know if you're a dude, if you're if they're not a dude and if they're interested in dude wipes, where can they go get them or how would be the best way for them to find out if it's available for them?