Who Gives A Crap Founder: The 8 Principles to Building a Global Consumer Brand

35:43I'm sorry, Jim Collins. I think I said Phil Collins, but it is Jim Collins. Don't worry, mate. We can put a bit of Phil Collins drums over the top of that when you said that bit. Yeah, sorry, Jim Collins good to great. And then I think, yeah, I think you're 100 % like good brands, you know, inspire that feeling. But then great brands go that one step further. And what would you say is this? Because the way, if I zoom out, I think you're the first philanthropic consumer brand, really in my eyes that has this has the the the pull of the market like what would you say is the definition of a philanthropic consumer brand like a great one is what i'm trying to say that isn't boring yeah i don't know i don't know um i don't know how if that definition changes but i think the belief and the inspiration that can come from it get exponentially larger So for me, you know, Nike is about belief and inspiration and they are, you know, probably like the best marketers in the world.

36:50The Hikisocrap core fan base that we have, they are incredible and they, you know, some of the suggestions they have are amazing because they will, they're so engaged and believe in what we're doing so much are inspired by it, that they will suggest that we give them cards that they can take into coffee shops to leave behind saying, Hey, I went to your bathroom and you didn't have who gives a crap. You should check them out. And so we get suggestions like that from our fan base. And there was one, um, it's actually happened twice now where we got sent a photo of someone's wedding. And instead of a wedding cake, they had a pile of who gives a crap rolls and everyone at their wedding got a roll of toilet paper, which, you know, like I get tingles thinking about it because it's, it's sort of just amazing that people are willing to, not just willing, but excited to kind of make a brand like ours a part of a day that is so meaningful to them, um, because we tightly align with, with who their values are as individuals.

37:55Um, and so, yeah, for me, it's, it's still about belief and inspiration but the places that you can go to as a purpose-driven brand i think are places that it's very very hard to get to as a more traditional straight up you know for-profit company so completely agree so the bigger the purpose the deeper the purpose the easier it is excuse me it's almost like mobilize both people to your team and and consumers like like the people who are coming in with the coffee card the idea for you know going to the coffee shop completely get that but then the other side to this and you said at the beginning which i thought was beautiful was a brand can be multi-dimensional the other dimensions to this is is the humor and how do you inject humor in in the brand as as you get bigger do you see what i mean Like how do you keep it frivolous and fun?

38:55Yeah, I think, you know, humor, it is a hard place to play as a brand because what's funny is subjective. And so your copywriters and your editors have to be really good at saying that's not funny enough to enough people to kind of make the cut. But it makes it a very hard place to play. But coming back to your original kind of, point or question. I think the challenge of purpose-led brands is that you can fall into the trap of being too earnest, which creates a one-dimensional brand. And for me, this is, I remember going to this dinner party with someone who I had read about and really admire.

39:38And I sat down next to her and was stoked. And we started talking and I asked her what she was really interested in. And I was expecting to get a broad range of, you know, things to talk about. And she just talked about climate change and how she was terrified about where the world was going. And no matter what question I asked her to try and understand what else she was interested in, it always just came back to climate change. And I remember thinking to myself, I really admire this person. I have huge respect for them, but I'm not sure if we could be friends because I don't know if I'd ever be able to kind of get the depth of the relationship that I needed to when they're so focused on this one thing.

40:22And that's, you know, that's truly how we think about building our brand is that we want customers to be able to fall in love with us because, you know, some people will love the packaging, other people will love the social impact or the ease of home delivery and not having to go to the shops as often when they run out of toilet paper. You know, know, they're all different ways in, but we ultimately want people to fall in love with us because they discover a brand that's got many different angles to it that they like that makes their life a little bit better in one way or another. And that might be just, you know, delivering a joke at the right moment when they open up a box or when they are in the bathroom and they decide to read the back of our role and we've updated the copy, you know, from a year ago and so there's something new for them to look at.

41:08And so we, you know, we think about all of those different aspects and try to do it in a way that, you know, purpose is one blade that we use to cut the brand, but there's lots of others in there with humor being one of them, with design being another, with, you know, the great customer experience around it when everything goes wrong. There are kind of all the blades that we use to tell the brand story plus many others. And when we get that right, it's kind of like a, you know, it becomes kind of an orchestra or a mariachi band kind of standing around you versus the one kind of solo singer who's kind of on their guitar trying to play the drums and the tambourine with their foot at the same time mate mate i i what you said there is just is insane like because i've done so many of these interviews now and i asked this question like what is a brand i think it's a fascinating thing to explore and a lot of people say it's that um a lot of people say it's like you can boil a brand down to one word blah blah blah blah blah but what you're saying i think is it's super nuanced but really fascinating is is a brand is almost more like a human being it's multi-dimensional it's it's textures there's layers to a human being like you know i'm into podcasting but i'm also into like doing loads of other things as well i think and and then i'm seeing a brand more as a um as a as a as a as a as a friend almost and that's what what one of the there's a coffee chain over here called caravan and their definition is they said a brand is a friend and i think if the friend you're not going to be friends with the person that dinner party just badges on about climate change because they're not that they're not they're one dimensional or a one-trick pony i'll still be friends with them i probably just won't see them as much as yeah yeah yeah yeah and i think no but that's mad and then and then what you said there about the the analogy of of the the some of the alchemy of the orchestra it's it's it's delicious but just double clicking what's cool about it then is that it can evolve as well you know people change over time and brands can evolve and if you're if you've just got that one blade that you're using to tell your brand story that may get old and it's harder to evolve the brand if you don't have all of those different kind of facets to play with but yeah sorry i cut in yeah you know 100 and i think brands like the best bands reinvent like i love you can probably see the background the beatles like i love the beatles in my favorite man of all time but what i loved about them is they just were like right we're gonna do this and then we're just gonna rip it like rip it up and start again but still keep our soul and i think the brands that can do that that can as you say like rewrite the copy on the box repackage the toilet paper there's a real um there's something in that for for listeners but i want to just really zoom in on this um that you talked about the copywriters because humor as a brand is an interesting place to dance as a brand so how do you hire these copywriters like what are you specifically looking for is there a way to test humor is there a way to make sure that their version of funny is unique enough but still marries up with the who gives a crap values if that makes sense yeah it's um honestly it's it's it's a difficult thing and I haven't been close to the hiring and that side of the business for a while, but I think, um, you know, probably what we did there was early on, we wrote really good brand guidelines around, um, what, you know, what good humor looks like and what bad humor looks like.

44:38And I think, I think our humor as well is it's a particularly challenging line to walk because you don't want to go disgusting if you go too far in one direction. And you don't want to be honest if you go too far in the other. And so you're trying to sort of find the balance between those two. And that is subjective. And there's still, I think it probably comes from, it starts with our copywriters and then we have our kind of creative leads and leaders who are feeding back on it and editing it. And then it's still, you know, any major packaging changes still comes to the founders. And it's a, you know, here's the packaging rollout.

45:18And every now and again, I'll still be like, I think that joke is just pushing it a little bit too far. Is there any examples of that? That come to mind? I think the one that I sort of, you know, exercise my rare veto write on recently was, I think we wanted to write on the side of a box. let's get the potty started and I just thought I don't know like I just I think I think that's probably funny for you know 60 70 80 percent of people but I'm worried about the other you know the small percentage the the possibly vocal minority that that maybe that one goes a little bit too far so that's that's the doesn't happen very often these days um but that's the one that comes to mind.

46:05But in general, you know, that team are incredible. They, you know, they're just a very, we have a very creative, creative team that have a lot of fun bringing some ludicrous ideas to life. Boeimi, our beloved sponsor, are helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands. Look, if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist, your first hundred stockist to wholesale, Boeimi are the platform to categorically speed that up. But if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger, Boemi are also insane. They make field sales marble smooth, silky slick. They're just epic.

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47:15So, so excited. Look, for years I've been badgering on about Hungary the podcast. You're probably bored to death. Thanks for putting up with me. But Hungary is also an agency and we look after one amazing brand called Ireland's Chocolate. We've had a great time over the year with one of the listings at a load of wholesalers, We've got Milk and More. We've got our first grocery listing coming very soon, which is very, very sick. But what I'm thrilled to announce is Hungary's merging with HC Consulting. My boy Harry Clark and his wonderful team, he's an absolute G. They do brand strategy, new business, business and account management.

47:48But why I really love working with Harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is Harry was actually the founder of the boozy, isolate brand Pops. He's been in the trenches. He's grafted his face off. he's had the sleepless nights he's had the turmoil he's had the triumph he knows what it is to be a founder he is a founder and he's got a proven track record in grocery and out of home holy moly dips the gut stuff savile drinks remio gelato so if your brand and you're you're stuck you're looking for like new business help you're looking to scale drop us a message we'd love to chat thank you so much back to the old episode i just love discussing the culture of these ridiculous ideas is i know you talked about when you hire people you say yeah there's a there's a thing is uh i'm a fold scrunches or folders i think is is i don't know this is from a podcast quite a while ago i listened to but is that's the question you ask when you when you hire people if i'm right in saying like unpack that for this i think i think it's brilliant if it's not too annoying to talk about yeah i think it it sort of it sort of shows you know there's when we ask people questions um before they start.

48:56There's obviously a lot of very serious stuff in there, but we do want our brand to kind of shine through in who we are. And part of that, you know, part of the hiring process is always a presentation back to us. And that allows us to understand how someone will interpret the brand and insert their own jokes, whether they're visual or written or, you know, whatever that may look like. And Folder and Scrunch is kind of part of that process where we're sort of saying, you know hey we're serious and we employ people and that's a very serious thing that we need to get right but we also aren't that serious and here's some of the you know the fun stuff that comes along with working with us i think we found um i think 60 of our company are uh folders 40 are scrunches we find folders over index in our finance team and scrunches over index in our creative team that's so jokes and just i don't know listeners probably will get this but this is just it's how you wipe your ass basically just make it clear yeah yeah good good to clarify because we did have one team member who'd been with us for about a year before the penny dropped for him he was like oh my god i just figured out what folder or scruncher meant i thought it was about whether i threw my clothes into my wardrobe or whether i folded them up before they went in so so it might not be apparent to everyone but that's exactly what we are talking about And also I just find that hilarious how the way the accounting team, the finance and ops team wipe their ass are definitely folders.

50:23And you just imagine all the curators as scrunchers. Yeah. And so now, you know, now my wife and I are folders. We've got our son as a folder and our daughter as a scruncher and I'm just scratching my head. Like what, you know, what's she going to be when she grows up? She'll be the feisty, feisty rambunctious creative. um i want to i want to go go into this because you're one of the brands in my opinion that have kept the magic as you've scaled and i another learning from doing those these podcasts is sometimes scale can kill magic and scale can kill culture um often what happens in kind of food and drink or not it's it's not like a blanket statement but a lot of times you get people who come in who who aren't the right culture fit who aren't the right hiring and it just it can be like a cataclysmic bomb that just ruins decimates the culture um maybe that's a strong way of saying it but you know what i mean and um but you've seemed to seem to do this right and you said you ask some really serious questions when you hire but you also ask some quite jokes questions when you hire what are the serious questions i know it's different per role but just this could really help people listening what are some of the like the the serious questions you ask first and then what are some of the playful frivolous questions you asked to to pull out that that that fun yeah yeah i guess when i think about you know we think about culture and hiring as trying to find the right culture adds to the business so it's not culture fits it's you know culture is continuously evolving we're adding people in will they add to the culture um and so So when we're asking serious questions, you know, it's technical questions, like how good at this.

52:05Sorry, just sorry to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt. So by culture add, because I haven't heard that phrase before, if I'm being honest, but what do you mean by that? Sorry. So that's like, how's that different from fit? Because everyone thinks, right, I need the right culture fit. That's the narrative. Fit implies that you've got fixed guardrails and someone has to fit inside them. what we're saying culture out is this person may be different to what we've got inside the organization today but we believe that they're an addition that is worthwhile and they will stretch the culture in a way that is meaningfully better um or positive um and so it's you know i think part of the problem with hiring um and and diversity and equity and inclusion is that often people sort of match who they are themselves when they're hiring people.

52:58And so, we're actively trying to push people to think about who's, you know, what are the right additions rather than, you know, someone who's a culture fit within the organisation that we have today. And we believe, you know, diverse teams, diverse cultures will outperform in the long run. There's a lot of kind of science that says that that's true. And so, we want to be kind of pushing and stretching and evolving the culture over time and hiring in a way that enables us to do that. That's kind of the philosophy. So to try and figure out whether someone is a good culture ad, we've got a lot of technical questions we want to understand.

53:37Can this person be great at their job or the role that we've got for them? But then we've got a lot of questions about, can this person thrive in our organization? And so we're a remote first organization. we've always been a remote first organization. For some people before COVID, that was a big problem. They'd come in and they'd never worked in a remote team before. And about two months in, they'd hit this slump where they're like, I don't know if I can do this. I think I need an office to be able to actually do my job well. And we'd have to coach people through that and get them out the other side.

54:12And so a lot of our questions before COVID were about, have you worked in a remote environment before, what does that look like? What do you need to succeed? And trying to understand whether people can thrive in that environment and whether we could support them through it if we thought there were risks. So, they're kind of examples of the serious stuff. And then the fun stuff for us, it probably kind of creeps in around the more serious stuff. So, one of the ways that we sort of, you know, informally kind of assess for this is when a candidate's coming through our interview process, the second last stage is the homework stage where we give them a deck that's got our brand guidelines in it and allow them to present back on their homework assignment using the Who Gives a Crap brand.

55:02And so, it shows us how they incorporate, our brand into their thinking and if they're able and comfortable to stretch that in ways that bring humour out or whether it doesn't kind of translate in the way that it needs to. And that's not a perfect test. Some people aren't great presenters and don't need to be and will never do a presentation in their life, but it allows us to understand how someone kind of approaches the work that they do and working and collaborating with other people and presenting back to them as well. But you don't need to nail that presentation to work with us. As I said, you know, it's for us to see how you work rather than what the final output necessarily looks like.

55:52Yeah, I think what you said there about this culture ad piece is just fascinating, Simon. It's like rejigging the way I'm thinking about doing these conversations which i love i love doing them but what you said there about it being a remote based um business even pre-covid that's mad because not the narrative can always be broken right but the there's a big podcaster over here called steve steven bartlett i don't know if he's reached australian shores yet he's great yeah yeah he talks a lot yeah yeah but he taught he was i listening to podcasts about him the other day um he was talking the other day about how he has his team in the office like mandatory because he believes when people are closer together back to your what is a brand it's a feeling it's it's a it's a it's an evocation of evoking emotion and a purpose he finds it easier in an office space which i kind of get what why what's your why were you guys remote like what's the advantage you you get for being remote and surely it's really hard to ingrain that mission when people aren't always there?

57:00Does that make – I'd just love to explore that. No, I don't think that's true. But let's come back to what Stephen said. So, you know, he believes that it's easier to do that when he's got everyone in the office. So I think when you think about that sentence, all it is assessing is the return to the business, but it doesn't assess the cost to the employee. And so you could probably break down what he's talking about and say, well, okay, let's suppose we agree that that's true. And we do. We do believe that FaceTime and collaboration is important. But does it need to be five days a week from nine to five?

57:42Should it be seven days a week? Should it be three? Should it be two? Does it need to be like that for every function in the business? you know i know someone who works at um at i probably shouldn't say the company but a very large tech company in los angeles and they've just mandated that he has to go into the office three days a week for him that's an hour and a half commute in traffic he doesn't work with a single person in that office so he has to drive to the office to sit in the office with no one that he collaborates with for the day before driving home. And he's saying, I can't do this.

58:21Like I need to, I need to find another job. And so I think, I think the, you know, that, that equation of it's better for the company ignores the costs for the team. And so we, we see that benefit and we believe it's there, but we also believe that there's, there's hidden benefits of letting the, the life of the team sometimes come before the work of the team. And if we get that balance right, the life-work balance, not the work-life balance, we think life comes before work. If we get that balance right, then what people are able to unleash at work can be different to what they are if they're constrained to a regular nine to five office environment, five days a week.

59:05And that's the philosophy that we started with. I didn't want to be in an office. I hate offices. I've spent not very much time in them, but enough time to know that I'd never want to be in an office. And, you know, it enables me to have a lifestyle that's very different to what I could have done if we had an office. We live an hour out of the city. I can go and swim in the ocean every morning. I can surf in the middle of the day. You know, the quality of life that I get from that makes me a better person at work the rest of the time when I'm at work. And we have a policy at work that if the surf is awesome, it's pumping, it's a killer day, you don't want to be on a call with me because I am begrudgingly on a call with you while I'm thinking about what I'm missing out on on the other side of that call.

59:54And no one wants to be on the other side of that. And so, our policy is if that's happening, go and do the thing that's important to you so that you can then come back and do the best that you can at work. And for some people, that's about spending time with their kids. For other people, it's about getting the right exercise schedule through the week for what's important to them. For me, that was, yeah, there's lots of different parts to that. But I think if you start to think about that equation as both a cost and a benefit, then it starts to be a different equation to just thinking about the benefit to the company.

1:00:30It reminds me of that book by the Patagonia founder, like them let my people go surfing i think it is which is which is great my only not not necessarily um uh pushback but i i could i agree with this um life work balance is is super important but i now to do this podcast i've i'm living with my parents moved home and i sometimes feel super isolated and i'm like i'm like i want to be in a room with other creative people other scrunches you know uh and almost get that get that osmosis and that like you know bouncing ideas off going for a coffee having the water cooler talk um but so but i'm i'm buggering off to columbia in a couple of weeks to do this so like i get your life balance part of the equation and go to asta rica as well but so but how do you get that osmosis that water cooler that i don't know what you could I don't know what the word is for it, but it's something that is kind of important in creative cultures.

1:01:33Yeah. So what we did, you know, before COVID, I think we were at about 50 employees when we did it. We sort of said, you know, we've built a remote team to date. It's allowed us to hire anyone, anywhere, which we think is a great labor strategy because we can get the best talent regardless of, you know, where they're from. We said, this has been great, but we think in this next chapter, as we move into international markets, stepping outside of Australia into the US and the UK, we think we probably need to bring people together around these hubs that are localized in the core cities where we're working.

1:02:13And so, we had one in the Philippines, in Manila, one in Melbourne, in Australia, and one in Los Angeles. and we moved two of our creative team to LA and we built a creative team in LA. In Melbourne, we focused more on our kind of operational parts of the business, like at the time, supply chain, finance, what we called more headphones type work. And the Philippines was mostly customer at that point in time. And so we got those hub teams together and we said to them, you set your own rules. How often do you want to see each other to get the most out of working together? And our Filipino team all said, I don't need to collaborate with anyone.

1:02:55I don't want to be stuck in traffic because the Filipino traffic in Manila is, you know, the worst, literally the worst in the world. I would be happy to see everyone once every one to three months. And we said, okay, well, we don't need an office. We'll just bring you guys together to do something fun together on a weekend. So there's no traffic one to three times a month. sorry, once every one to three months, a Melbourne team said, hey, I do mostly headphones work. I don't need to collaborate. And I don't, you know, that's not what gives me what I need to do my job well. So I would like to see people, but only once a week and I'll choose the day.

1:03:32And I'm at Los Angeles team, you know, digital product, creative team, a marketing team. They said, we get more benefit out of collaboration. So we're going to come in three days a week and it's going to be Monday, Wednesday. What was it? I think it was Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. So everyone was at home on Fridays. And we tried that for about two years and we built really strong kind of team cultures. And then just as we were about to come out the other side of it and start to move back to an anyone, anywhere style model again, COVID hit and it kind of, you know, we were just about to start the decision-making process on making that switch.

1:04:13And then COVID kind of forced our hand and we went back to the model that we've got today. And so what we do today is we know it's important for those teams to work together, but we don't think it necessarily needs to be three days a week. We can do more intensive working periods together when we've got particular projects that we're working on. We find ways to collaborate online. We're massive Miro users now. It's kind of like a collaborative whiteboard or post-it type software platform who we were on very early and, you know, find that as a very powerful tool for us to kind of collaborate together.

1:04:51And then we try to bring the whole company together once a year. I think we're going to do that a little bit less often now because as we've got bigger, it's a huge lift to bring everyone together. We had everyone in Melbourne in May, which was, yeah, 200, over 200 people, which was incredible after not being able to do it for almost four years. And then our teams get together, you know, usually kind of once a year as well. And those are kind of orchestrated as our core kind of in-person moments where we want to maximize that time and get lots of stuff done together and then go away and have, you know, a culture that's built off those in-person moments that help to make it stronger.

1:05:31So, yeah, Yeah, it's sort of a bit of a mix. And then now we hire anyone anywhere. If we've got more than five people in a location, we'll have a co-working space that they can go into and work with together. We find that's really popular in some hubs and less popular in others. So it sort of just depends on who's working on what and who they're working with. Oh, my God. I am so, so, so excited. It feels like Hungary is finally swimming in the big leagues. I can't believe this. It's absolutely mental. but delighted to announce that Big Fish, yes Big Fish, are part of the podcast. Perry's been on the podcast three times, listeners absolutely love it, some of my most downloaded and cherished episodes of all time.

1:06:12But Big Fish are behind literally so many brands in your cupboard, in your weekly shop. Charlie Bigham, Year Valley, Tyrells, Clipper T, Goo, Rana, I mean make the list longer than the River Nile. but they also share risk and invest in brands that they really believe are a force for good brands that they believe are going to be the next big thing like how the snack that gives back but even more exciting news big fish want to speak to the next wave of small challenger food and drink badders that are destined for big things the raconteurs the movers shakers buccaneering visionaries so look if you want to speak to big fish and just have a chat get your brand in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer was in their office aka la fishbowl uh last week chatting to perry freddie and the big fish crew so drop me a message if you would like to speak to what i love about that answer simon is a bit like you know how you're talking about a brand being multi-textured or multi-dimensional the way you've hired and built this culture is the same and i think i think people and even sometimes myself you want things to be so binary and black and white it's like this is how we're going to it's going to be fully remote and what you've teased out there is it's so subject dependent location dependent whether you're like a scrunch or a folder dependent and i think i think there's a lot in in that and um yeah it's it's it's fascinating one thing i've got to ask i asked this to a founder who surfs i just think it's interesting i think there's a lot of parallels between surfing and being a founder like leaning in, you know, the fear of going into, leaning in and kind of embracing your fears and going through it, like the wiping out.

1:08:00What's surfing taught you about being a founder?

1:08:05Well, that's a really good question. I mean, you know, the classic kind of, the classic saying is you've got to be in the water to catch the wave, which is very true. And, you know, for who gives a crap, we've been in the water to catch a lot of the waves that have come with, you know, things like crowdfunding when we got started, things like the share button on Facebook that sent us viral with our first campaign, things like Shopify, which when we started was a crappy like little platform. And now, you know, he's a kind of tech behemoth. So we've been in the water to catch the wave a lot. And for me, that's partly about right place, right time, but it's partly about the preparation that goes into that moment.

1:08:48And so COVID in a way when the world ran out of toilet paper, we'd spent six years training for that moment as a remote team that sold toilet paper online. It was kind of, you know, it was like we were like, we've got this. Like we know how to do this, guys. Let's go like let's go bring this home. And so I think that's probably one of them. And then probably the other is that no matter how big and scary something looks, it's never as bad as what you think when you screw it up. And that's, and probably the last thing is like, sometimes it's out of your hands. You can, you can look like everything's, you can think you've got the best strategy.

1:09:34You can think you're right place, right time. You can think you're absolutely going to nail it. And sometimes you just have to accept that nature is going to work in a way that is unpredictable and that's going to cause things to happen that are out of your control. They're probably the three biggest things that come out of it, which are all, you know, subjecting yourself to the wave, so to speak. Yeah, it's fascinating. The guy I interviewed, his lesson was about finding that I don't surf, right? I know nothing about surfing, but I used to wakeboard. That was as close as I got. But he was talking about the slipstream in business.

1:10:09and he was saying when he was a kid he was paddling out paddling out paddling out and he's just getting absolutely fucked by these waves and this this guy said to him that if you just if you just pull out there you'll find a slipstream and you'll you'll get pulled out faster and i think i think that that's so true in in business as well as you can kind of bludgeon your head against a wall and actually if you just if you actually open up the blinkers there's an easier way out but what you said there you've got to be in the water to catch the wave and you talked about the timing of shopify and uh and also i suppose like doing the remote thing remote work thing before the work work thing was a thing if that makes sense yeah i'd love i'd love to know you said sometimes nature's just gonna you can be prepared blah blah blah nature's just gonna come and wipe you out like what's been i suppose we're linking this all together what's been the crappiest wipeout um on on your journey and how did you get back on the the proverbial board and all journeys.

1:11:06Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a lot of wipeouts. You know, the most recent one was pretty mundane, but our like inventory management system went haywire and sent out thousands of wrong orders to our customers in the UK. So we had to like manually work through this order system. That happened a couple of weeks ago. So what's cool about those moments now is that the team, you know, everyone rolls up their sleeves and jumps in and is like, we got this, you know, we're prepared, we've been training for this moment, let's go, you know, like bring this home. And they're kind of amazing moments.

1:11:47I think one, you know, probably the one I've talked about the most, maybe I won't talk about that, I'll talk about a different one, And that was in 2018, we took 32 of our 36 team members to Cambodia to see the work of WaterAid firsthand. It was the first time we took the full company into the field to see one of our impact partners work. And that trip was amazing. You know, we built that connection to purpose in a way that is inextricable for the team that were on that trip. Many of them still with us today. We have incredible team retention. And what was kind of crazy about that trip was while we were there, I think we just moved warehouses.

1:12:33Our second largest warehouse had just moved locations and operator. We ran our biggest ever campaign and sold way more products than what we were expecting. And it was this free trial pack that we were trying out where people could sign up for the free trial pack, pay for shipping. and we'd sign them up for a subscription that would start three weeks after that trial pack arrived. And we, you know, we're all away in Cambodia, out in the fields, no cell service, no Wi-Fi, you know, connecting to our purpose and seeing the work of WaterAid, which was really meaningful. And we came back into Wi-Fi range and discovered that not only had our warehouse, a warehouse that we changed over, misshipped our free trial pack.

1:13:19And instead of sending a trial pack of toilet paper, they'd sent 12 boxes of tissues to every customer that was on the customer list. We'd asked them to fix it. They said they'd sort it out and they did the same thing again and sent out another 12 boxes of tissues. And so we had all of these customers writing in saying, what the hell's going on? Where's my order? And then we were not able to reply to them fast enough because we didn't have Wi-Fi. And so, they started writing in saying, why haven't I got a response? And so, we started to have 10 times the number of customer inquiries that we would normally have coming in.

1:13:53And just as we were about to say to everyone, okay, guys, pens down, it is time for every single person in the company to respond to customer inquiries, 16 of us came down with food poisoning. So, we were overseas, flying at half mast, so to speak. and we were like, this is not good. This is a terrible customer experience. Our customers were commenting on our social media ads, like what the hell is going on? And then customers started writing in saying, I need you to know that the largest newspaper in Australia has reached out to me because they saw my comment on one of your social media posts and they want me to comment on you not living up to the promises that you've made to your customers.

1:14:34I'm not going to talk to them, but I want you to know that they're probably contacting other people. And so we knew in that moment that we were about to have, you know, an attempted assassination on the brand, so to speak, by a newspaper. And so we said, okay, we have to do something in the next 30 minutes. Otherwise, we're gone. How do we respond in this moment? And we said, the only thing that we can do is be open and honest with our customer. And so if you go back through our Instagram or our Facebook on, I think, the sort of middle of March, about 18, sorry, middle of May, about 18 May, 2018, you'll see that we published an apology to all of our customers.

1:15:11We sent that out to every single customer in the region that was affected by this warehouse. And we basically explained, hey, this is what's happened. We've had a few operational mistakes. We were overseas with WaterAid and we've all come down with food poisoning. We're going to get back to you. If you've got a problem with your order, we will sort it out or refund it, but we need a little bit of time to be able to get back up on our feet. And we thought that was going to be a pile on when we posted that apology. But if you go and look at that post, there's well over a hundred comments on there.

1:15:45Literally every single one of them is positive. And it's people saying, oh my God, I had no idea. I'm so sorry. You guys need to get yourselves back in order before you sort me out. My problems aren't big in the grand scheme of things. And so I think we learned in that moment, the power of being open and honest with our customer and showing them under the hood of the brand. And that we're just a group of people that are trying to do our best to bring this crazy idea to life and really kind of allowed them to build empathy with what we were going through in a way that, you know, someone like Nike probably can't do.

1:16:19And so in that moment, I think we actually, you know, through what was a, we turned what was a really terrible customer experience into one that for many of those people deepened their relationship with who we were as a brand in a way that I think would be very difficult to do in any other sort of circumstance. And so we talk a lot about our customers for giving us for our lumps and our bumps, as long as we're open and honest about them. And so when we screw up or when our customers ask us questions that we don't know answers to, we figure out what the right answer is and we come back to them and make sure that we're being open and honest about what that looks like.

1:16:58And that extends to our team as well. We're very transparent as an organization. There's no question we won't answer unless it's about confidential information about our employees or things that could be harmful to our business if it's external to someone that we don't know. But that's broadly the philosophy and it comes from those moments of realising the power of showing our customers who we really are. realizing the power of showing customers who we really are again it's back to that like multi yeah as you said multi-dimensional multi-textured brand and but as so are humans and when you reveal that and through open transparency you build a deeper connection i think yeah it's owning your lumps and bumps what i absolutely love that um i want to talk about so you've got this global mission i want to talk about um almost colloquialism and like who gives a crap and getting that the humor to land in different countries um yeah because i think it's a fascinating incongruous kind of beast to slay and i think there's there's loads of mishaps i i've actually got here um a quote you said that uh uh we're having to think about trans translation and local language support as you get bigger and i've gone through i've just found for some i don't know why i found this but like what the mcdonald's in different countries so like there's golden arches in the united states mickey dicks um in united sorry in um united states as well mcadoo japan um mackie's uk obviously um mcdonald's mexico like they're just a few examples But I think what that illustrates is that culture specific, you can just have a complete car crash of getting those messages to land.

1:18:47Yep. How are you doing that? Like, how are you getting the word, the humor of who gives a crap to land in like a, I don't know, Mexico and whatever country? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think we've got good at doing it in English. I think the challenge for us that we haven't figured out how to, you know, overcome yet is how we go into different languages. And that's partly just due to some operational stuff where we haven't yet translated website into non-English speaking languages, but it's coming up shortly. It's just been delayed a little bit. but the I think the you know like one of the really fun things about working at Who Gives a Crap is when you use an expression and someone sitting next to you goes what did you just say and I did this recently in London talking to our team and I had my co-founder Danny next to me we've been working together for 10 years and I said it's horses for courses and everyone in the room went, yeah, okay.

1:19:48And Danny was like, what, what do you mean? Like, what, what does that mean? And so it's kind of those moments where you realize that, that there is this massive disconnect sometimes between our different cultures and languages, um, even though we're speaking technically the same language and that's what humor is like across markets as well. Um, and so I think what we've, you know, what we did early on was we had a, uh, kind of first creative of hire, worked with Danny, who I was just talking about, and she was Australian and worked in London and he was American. And so, between the two of them, and her wife was British, and so between the two of them, they could pretty much like figure out what the humour and how things would translate across those three markets.

1:20:35And as we've built that team up, we've really intentionally hired internationally. And when we work on projects like packaging, but also like physical products, you know, good time shampoo bars are a great example of this. We intentionally pick people to work on them that sit across many geographies. And, you know, another analogy for this is our shampoo bars, where the performance of those shampoo bars or the performance of our humour being the analogy will depend on which country you're in because of the softness of the water and that impacting how the shampoo kind of plays out in use. And that's, I think, really good analogy for humor in that you need to find the product or the joke that lands across all of those markets in a way that allows you to deliver the customer experience that you want to.

1:21:27And the best way to do that is to make sure that you're testing it out across all the markets that you play in. And that extends yes to product, you know, yes to product. I won't go into too many details there, but to marketing in general, you know, you really need to test those messages out across multiple geographies to get that right. I think my uncle-in-law, he was a

1:21:53Hispanic advertising guy. And he told me this story about this very popular car in the US that they pushed into Mexico without testing the name. And the name was basically a swear word. And so the sales of this car totally flopped after it was wildly successful in the US. And so there's, you know, that was kind of, I think that instance was, he talked about that as being the birth of the Hispanic advertising industry because the American ad execs realized that actually they needed to have, you know, local language ad execs to be able to help them figure out how to translate brands across markets.

1:22:29And that philosophy, I think, plays out with us today. Hi there, guys. Thank you so much for listening as always. It means the absolute world to me. Before we jump into this episode, I need a really big, big, big, big favor. I have pitched to some massive guests, humongous guests, and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough. Please, please, please just hit the subscribe button on Apple or Spotify or follow. Ultimately, it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well.

1:23:04So please hit that subscribe button and enjoy this episode. i always find it's it's such a mad uh and fascinating topic and i think going into the mcdoddall's thing right is it's how they have these different they have different products per per geography right like the mcrib isn't in the uk i'm sure you guys have got something in oz that is different and it is this kind of um globalized localized uh play which is fascinating how are there any examples where of like where the messaging hasn't landed or something that's like been a take a lot of toil like to get to get right um yeah i i i think i can't think of any examples where we've like got it fundamentally wrong i think what we're seeing now is the evolution of this where what we've done to date has been have a team that generates a message that resonates globally.

1:24:00And what we're starting to do now is use local teams to start to evolve those messages to what messaging is required locally in order to see things really perform. And this probably played out in the UK first last year when the UK got hit by the cost of living pressure before any other market that we were operating in a meaningful way. and so our UK team was really saying, hey, we have to think about how we address this with the messages that we're playing to our customers and that concept and that strategy eventually became relevant in all of the markets that we were in but we needed that kind of local nuanced knowledge to be able to help us figure out how to create messaging that was landing with our consumer and we got there in the end with an incredible message that explains that our products are up to 30 % cheaper than what is arguably the best-known brand in the UK.

1:24:59But it sort of required a local mindset to help us get better at what we're doing globally rather than just applying the global message across all of the markets, which is what we'd done previously. Yeah, it's something I hadn't thought about. I think a lot of brands in the UK try and go into France and it's just that's... it's a car like not a car crash but it's just their way of consuming so different even though we're so close geographically geographically yeah and arguably america is like it probably almost as far away as france in terms of it's the way that it consumes australia i think is relatively similar to the uk how would you say the how would you say the us is different from uk in focus obviously you're you're across all three of those countries right so i'd love to know what you've seen in the US versus the Aussies and the Brits?

1:25:56I think the expectation of the American customer is very high, probably because it's the home of venture capital. And so, you know, people have had hundreds of millions poured into companies that then run at huge kind of negative margins, negative net profit margins, which allow them to deliver customer experiences that are, you know, become hyper-competitive as you get more venture flowing into competing companies against each other. And so that creates a set of expectations for the customer that I think is difficult to, you know, it's a higher set of expectations compared to what we have in Australia where there's less competition.

1:26:39E-commerce was a fractured market. People were used to things being delivered slowly or with large shipping costs. whereas, you know, America's kind of at the pointy end of consumption. I mean, I saw this even, you know, coming into London two weeks ago, walking, you know, I think Waitrose is often put up on a pedestal as kind of the premium retailer. But compared to some of the premium retailers in the US, the selection in Waitrose is really limited in comparison. You know, you walk into the drinks fridge in the US and it's this like sea of rainbow colours of all of the wildest things you could ever imagine, some of them with CBD in them and others with, you know, all sorts of amazing things.

1:27:27And you sort of feel lost in this like in this moment. And so I think, you know, the American kind of consumer gets used to that as being their normal experience and that makes it harder to kind of stand out as a brand, I think. maybe the other markets that we're in. I went to New York to do an interview with a brand called Athletic Brewing. I don't know if you know them. They're like, yeah, it's an amazing brand. And I was walking around the Whole Foods. I was like, everything's just bigger over there. Like the buildings, everything is just bigger. And their kombucha section, I was like, this is like, I felt like Willy Wonka at the fucking kombucha section.

1:28:06I was like, it's a Willy Wonka feeling. And I've, you know, I don't, I don't think I've got that anywhere else in the world, but it's like it's in every american supermarket it's it's mad and then and then let's just let's play i want to go into into melbourne specifically because um as i said to you before we hit record i've got a mate who's moved over there who's did really he's built a couple of really big brands in the uk um he was green and blacks marketing director preterm marketing director yes he's but he's moved to melbourne and he's got a really good he says there's a lot of brands in melbourne that are just cool and this and it's the same in Ireland I've got weirdly Ireland is this very niche vibe when you can almost like look at a brand from Ireland and challenge a brand like that's Irish it's fucking weird right but I'd love to know like what do you think's in the water of Melbourne that has this um this uh like driving force that creates a very unique kind of brand and and for listeners just to give some context like minor figures who are absolutely flying over here stew is is from is from melbourne and um his his previous business keep keep cup was based in melbourne like what would you say he's in the melbourne water like what's in the kool-aid yeah i think um you know melbourne's sort of like the um the um the arts kind of capital of Australia.

1:29:36Weirdly, it's the sports capital of Australia as well. Those two things don't normally go together. But I think, you know, it means, you know, it's not a glamorous city. Sydney is like, it's beautiful. Like if you've been to Sydney, it's up there. Like it's one of the best in terms of beauty. Melbourne doesn't have that. And so, I think we've, as a city, we've turned more internally to, you know, and you see this around the world, often the colder climate cities tend And to have stronger kind of arts cultures and hospitality cultures than the more glamorous kind of beautiful cities that there are.

1:30:14And of course, there's exceptions to that. But that's, I think, kind of what's happened in Australia historically. And it's probably changed a lot in the last 20 years in particular. I think, you know, access to the internet has sort of democratised access to what good looks like in a way that, you know, didn't exist 20 years ago. But I think what that means is that you've got people who have a high kind of bar for what good design looks like and what good, you know, good fashion architecture, kind of whatever that is, is. And for me, brands are kind of a part of that. You know, they're something, they're an art and a science to them that kind of fall into those same sort of categories.

1:31:03And so, when you've got people that know what good looks like, it becomes easier to make things that are better. You've got great agencies. You've got, you know, people with great taste who know what great products, you know, literally taste like if you eat them and so on. And so the kind of conglomeration of industry that's happened in Melbourne, I think, has made it somewhere that maybe makes it slightly easier to create things than what it might be in other parts of the country. And of course, that's changing. And it's, you know, we're seeing incredible brands come from all over the country.

1:31:37But certainly, I think Melbourne's been a real sort of hub and home for that over the years. it's like a completely completely 1000 gazillion percent agree with like the cold weather like the more kind of uh rough and uh roughy and and uh maybe like dilapidated the original kind of city or town the bigger the art the obvious of this is in the uk all the best bands are from manchester and liverpool oasis stone roses arctic monkeys um like joy division they're all from i went to uni up in manchester um so it's like the weather is and it's a bit of a rough city but you can kind of see like as you so rightly said it's this internal forces more are in these cities which is fascinating what are some of the brands in melbourne that are like that are like a cool so i'd love to sort of try and get hold of some of them um i mean i i'm probably like closer to the so i the other thing about melbourne is that um you know we have the i forget what uk politics are we have the two sort of major parties are liberal and labor melbourne we have um uh the greens they're the the party that right you know that melbourne supports and so that's probably the other thing that comes in that that twists brands into having a bit more of a kind of social or environmental element to them it's a a city full of people that um that you know are probably more progressive in their kind of political voting, whatever you want to call that, beliefs.

1:33:15And so the brands that I kind of look at, the sort of new stuff that's coming out are probably the brands that have got that social bent to them. So Great Wrap is one that I love. They're doing compostable cling wrap that's made with, you know, food waste and producing it with solar power and have just started selling across in the US as well as in Australia. So they're one that's awesome. There's heaps of them. Bellroy is another great one doing, you know, backpacks and wallets. They started with wallets, now do backpacks. Amazing global business. Oh, I've seen those guys. Yeah, I've seen Bellroy.

1:33:51Yeah. Yeah, really, really strong global brand. Turning classic bottles into backpacks is kind of what they're doing most of at the moment. But there's tons of them. you know minor figures as you talked about um yeah there's i i wish i'd sort of prepared a list because i'm struggling off the top of my no no no worries i think the other one that mark was telling me about is uh pears the uh i think they've just he was telling me they've just sold the soap that's in all the banging restaurants but pears like it he's another one he's like oh Yeah. Um, I just, yeah. Where I want to go now is I try and push myself to ask some hard questions.

1:34:36So like, if you're not comfortable, like you've got, you're in the driving seat here so we can like cut it out for sure. But, um, I'd love to know like what's been kind of, we talked about like, um, how I believe not all founders, but a lot of founders have kind of like an internal internal friction um as to why they're doing something and the quote i love is is by robert green which is like the bigger the shadow the bigger the kind of the darkness potentially the more you can use that as a force for for creative good again back to i don't keep talking about the beatles today but like you know john lennon and um and paul mccartney both their mom died when they were like 15 and they had this like this pain and this shadow but then they've created the fucking beetles right i'd love to know like what is in your shadow that drives you

1:35:38um yeah i don't know i think like i don't know if i have a shadow so to speak but but um you know i I probably realised a few years ago that I never felt like I was the normal, a normal person. You know, I always kind of wore weird clothes and, you know, turned down corporate jobs to kind of do stuff that looked really dumb on paper. And I think that made it sort of difficult for me to kind of empathise with other people and relate to other people that were not as weird maybe as what I was. And a few years ago, I started to realize that that actually wasn't a weakness or a negative thing. It was actually probably a hugely positive thing for me, but was very hard to kind of deal with growing up.

1:36:35So I don't know if that's like a shadow, so to speak, but more just a very powerful kind of realization of the power of being different and thinking differently and that, yeah, I probably will never feel normal and that's actually a good thing rather than a bad one. That's why I love speaking to founders. We're doing drinks tomorrow night. We've got about 100 founders who listen to this podcast, All In Food and Drink, who we're meeting in King's Cross for a drink up. Why I love it is because they're all fucking weird. in a good way so so how do you feel more normal yeah yeah yeah and and then so say so then there's a that desire to um to like well that realization that you're not less like slightly different which i think every founder comes across which is super reassuring um i then listened to a talk you did which was in 2019 so four years ago and it's 10 lessons i think i wish i knew when i graduated from uni at the uwa career connect i don't know if you can remember that thing oh yeah yeah um and you said you said the best advice you've ever been given is you can't do that and i think building this on to kind of the shadow the internal friction i i have that a lot when so i've basically a lot of my kind of masochistic drive is like when someone says you can't do that i'm like watch this mate like i'd love to know why is why is that the best piece of advice you've ever you've ever received and then the other part to that question is is that how healthy is that do you know what i mean yeah i think that's part of for me that's part of um you know feeling like a fish out of water all the time is that i've always seen the world in a slightly different way to what everyone else does and so um you know with who gives a crap and shabeen it just felt to me that the world needed these things like it seems bizarre that they don't exist yet um and so you know when you when you try to do new things when you try to try to innovate try to do something that hasn't been done before when you ask people about it it is inevitable that people will say to you you can't do that that's you know that's a silly thing to do and that i think is a very powerful piece of advice because um it tells you that you're you're either about to go down a very challenging path that will be unfruitful or you have to figure out how to turn what they've told you into something that motivates you to go and smash through the walls and to to try to bring something that's never existed into life as you talked about with the watch this i'm gonna see what happens but if you take that energy and you run with it and you're doing something that's a really silly thing to do that's incredibly dangerous and so you sort of have to you have to learn how to um you know not react instinctively and actually listen to that advice and think very carefully about what you do next and then use it as the motivation to run through the walls if that's the direction that you choose to go in but it probably took me 25 30 years to get to the place where i could sit with it and dissect it rather than just running through the next wall well i'm asking for a mate here so i'm asking for myself right because i've i've got that it's yeah that's i'm probably haven't come to the again back to this multi-text did you have this ability to kind of have this nuance and hold two things uh at the same time so so how did you almost get it to sort of temper temper downwards and as you said dissect like what are some of the specific things you did because i think again a lot of people will be listening to this thinking i need to run through the next fucking wall and it's like do you know what i mean yeah i think um you know i think a big part of it um was really sort of learning more about myself and um realizing that sometimes what i what i instinctively will want to do in the moment and react to in the moment is not always the smartest and best thing to do and when you start to have that realization i think you can use it and apply it across lots of different parts of your life and for me you know realizing i've got that like burn in my tummy that makes me want to like do something next and that i can choose whether i do that or not and can control that and harness that is actually much more powerful than allowing it to kind of overtake me every time yes um yeah as i say asking for a mate um conscious of your your time simon and super grateful there's a couple more things i want to explore then we'll wrap this up but i'm absolutely yeah loving this um one of my favorite books of all time is zero to one by peter tail and one of the questions he has in in that book is like what is one truth you believe that most pretty much everyone else will disagree with you on i think it's an interesting question like what would you say that is for you what's one truth you hold on to dearly that most people would disagree with you on?

1:41:54I think that was probably easier to answer 10 years ago, where for us, it was the fundamental belief that every business will have to have a social and or probably and environmental strategy in order to be successful in the long run. And 10 years ago, that seemed like a crazy argument. You know, Tesla had just IPO'd for like, you know, not very much money compared to what they're worth today. Reusable water bottles weren't really a thing. You know, no one, carbon neutrality was like a weird buzzword that no one knew what it meant. And then you fast forward to where we're at today and, you know, every, all the biggest brands in the world have net zero strategies.

1:42:39Tesla's the most valuable car company in the world. So we've seen the kind of needle move on sustainability. and I think we're still in the process of seeing it move on the social front as well. And so I think, yeah, that was a belief that we had that was probably one that wasn't common or popular 10, 15 years ago that we've sort of seen the needle move to where we are. We were the surfer in the water waiting for the wave. Today, I don't know if I have that same belief at the moment. I was talking about this recently that I think what was really powerful when we got started was that we had a view of the world and how it needed to be that was different to what existed in the moment we were living in.

1:43:23And we've now built that and it's worked much better than what we ever thought that it could have done, which is incredible. And that will hopefully enable us to have some amazing impact in the years to come. But I think we now don't have a view of the world that's fundamentally different to where we're at today other than trying to show that every business should hopefully start to adopt a policy that's similar to the profit donation model that we have in our business. So it's probably an extension of that. I'm coming back to your question now. It's probably that, yeah, every business will have to think about not just what they're selling but also what they do with their profits in order to remain relevant in the next 10 to 20 years.

1:44:13yeah that makes that makes total sense and going back to this 10 lessons i wish i knew when i was at uni in 2019 which was like pre-covid just before the pandemic some of them were like how can we test this under two weeks for less than 500 dollars or quid whatever um uh check your ego out the door like there's there's loads in that i thought it was it was brilliant i mean maybe you can put a link to that to in the show notes but i'd love to know four years down the line like is there any new you new ones you'd add to that list or potentially update um because yeah we've had a pandemic in between and the business is much bigger now yeah there's a really good one that i would add in there and that's that um you know as you as you get older and probably start to accumulate more wealth, every dollar that you earn has less marginal impact on your life.

1:45:12You know, when you've got no money at all,$1 is a hell of a lot of money. When you've got, you know, if you've got a billion dollars, that extra$1 makes absolutely no difference to what your life looks like. And so, when you think about that, you know, it costs 20 bucks to restore someone's eyesight in the developing world. It costs about$2 to give someone a pair of glasses that will fundamentally improve their productivity and allow them to get 20 % more out of their working week. It costs a couple of hundred bucks per person to provide access to clean water and toilets and these things that are absolutely the most basic of human needs.

1:45:54And so if you think about the idea that you can fundamentally change someone's life by restoring eyesight with$20, but as you start to accumulate more wealth, whether you've got that extra$20 in your wallet or not doesn't fundamentally impact your life. You start to see that there's this disconnect between wealth accumulation of individuals and what the general wellbeing of the society that we live in around the world looks like. And so the big lesson for me, I think, is that it is important for people to give back. And I think that if we don't, then we will only see more things like wars and terrible loss of life from things like flooding and impacts of climate change.

1:46:39But it's very easy, you know, as you get more wealth to just say, oh, well, now we've paid off our mortgage. Let's go and buy, you know, the holiday house, or now we've got that holiday house. Let's go and do this other thing. And so I think the healthy thing to do is actually at some point to say, how much is enough? What are we aiming for as an individual or as a family or as a group of people? And let's write that down and hold ourselves to that as being what success looks like. Because as you start to accumulate wealth, if you say to people, how much money do you need to be successful? They usually will say twice as much money as what I have today.

1:47:19And then when they get to that point, they'll say twice as much money as what I have today. And so you have this creep of expectations that sits in as you start to build wealth yourself, which stops you from actually giving away as much money as what you probably should in order to make the world the better place that it truly needs to be. And so the big lesson for me, having been through that, starting on a bootstrap salary and now having a salary that's a bit more representative of what my role would look like in another company, the big lesson for me is know what that number is and know what it takes to be happy and And hold yourself to account for that.

1:47:54Because if you go over that and say that you're not happy, then you're doing a disservice to that previous past version of yourself. And if you can get that right and then give away everything else and other people follow in the footsteps of doing that, I think that is fundamentally how we will be able to create change in the world that we live in. it's so just so again the narrative of the founder which we were talking about right at the beginning was it wasn't necessarily it's now cool to be an entrepreneur and a founder like in i mean when i was leaving university it was probably on the precipice of that becoming a thing and a big part of that is you can make serious financial personal wealth like let's make no bones about that like a lot of founders go into it for that not necessarily the core reason but if who gives a crap does well you will be prosperous what what is your relationship with with personal i know you briefly talked about it but like say there is a big exit for who gives a crap like what is how do you think your relationship with money could potentially change or would it change we will give most of it away there's like the fundamental answer to that and that's for two reasons.

1:49:04One, it's the right thing to do. That extra 20 bucks won't make a difference to us, but will fundamentally change someone else's life. But the other reason is that I think we've experienced that it's important to keep your feet on the ground. And if you become that multi-millionaire, deca-millionaire, whatever it is, billionaire, there starts to be a very small number of people that you can relate to in terms of the experiences that you're having. and if you only stay at the nicest hotels in the world, every other hotel is a crappy experience for you. If you only fly private, you don't want to fly first class anymore.

1:49:41You know what I mean? And so if you know what your limit is and you know what you're aiming for and maybe it's that you want to be able to take one nice holiday a year and this is what it looks like and you want to have this house, then if you hold yourself to account on that, you can give away everything else that comes after that. knowing that you're happy because you've achieved everything that you've set out to do. But if you get to that point and you've got that nice holiday and you've got that nice house, you just start aiming for the next thing and allowing this expectation creep of what you need to be happy to actually consume you.

1:50:15And ultimately, I think make you less happy because now all the things that you used to like are experiences that are below you in terms of the way that you consume today. And so I think that's like, that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned in the last five to 10 years that's fundamentally different to when I was at university because it only comes as I've started to have a salary that got bigger over time and realized that, yeah, we were able to get close to paying off our mortgage and things like that. And so expectation creepers set in and it's something that I think everyone should hopefully wrestle with no for sure i think it's almost someone that came on this podcast and just he said set your that's enough goal like what is that that's enough because actually if you set that goal and i as i say to you i'm going to columbia i've realized that to live in london is extortionate i fuck that i can go and sit on a beach in columbia and costa rica well costa rica is quite expensive um final uh final two questions so the first one is analysis to all guests but what's one belief you um that you you had um that you had that has radically changed in the last five years um uh probably this is a good one i probably thought that direct consumer was the absolute future five years ago you know e-commerce penetration was was only increasing and i probably thought that um the future of the world was was d2c and that you'd eventually see 100 % e-commerce penetration, it's only a matter of time.

1:51:52Whereas I think we've shifted our view on that fundamentally, probably starting about five years ago to the view now that you need to be where the customer wants to buy you. And for some customers that's DTC, but for many others, it's other places. And it's probably come from the realization that acquiring new customers is only getting more expensive as well. So it's harder today to run a DTC business than what it ever has been and it will only get harder from here so that's probably the big fundamental change that has come about in the last just just quickly are you trying to go into into grocery and retail because i know i know you the supermarkets originally said no to you and then that kind of catalyzed yeah to see yes we're in yeah we're in waitrose in the uk which has been awesome um and then in in woolworths which uh um about 40 of the market in australia and aldi which are about 10 % of the market as well.

1:52:46So really kind of testing out that grocery model and we've got some stuff in the pipeline in the US. So yeah, we're kind of well and truly moving into a pure omni-channel strategy now, Amazon in the UK, Ocado, Whole Foods in the UK as well. So we're kind of really moving into that, you know, sales channel diversification in a way that's fundamentally different to what we thought we would have done five years ago, or even three years ago, honestly, we thought we'd roll the D2C playbook out for much, much longer. final question mate and i can hear your your kids in the background i asked this to all guests and i'll let you i know it's dinner time in in oz but what's one advice you you'd give to them i know they're much younger but when they embark on the world i just think it's an interesting lens to to understand that what's one piece of wisdom you'd pass on to them yeah i think if you've listened to that talk that i gave at um at that university it's probably um you know it's twofold it's follow your passion, which for me was so fundamentally important to unlocking everything that I had to give.

1:53:52Once I figured out what it was that I was passionate about and could work on that, that was able to really fundamentally shifted what I was able to do, which is very powerful, but it's very hard to do that. I was lucky to figure that out in my twenties. Lots of people never figured that out in their entire lives. And so if you aim for that and you don't succeed at it. That's not a way to live life. And so, the other piece of advice I'd give them is to let their passion follow them. And that comes from the idea that sometimes you're doing things that don't feel right. And the reason they don't feel right isn't because you're not passionate about them.

1:54:29It's actually because you're just not good at them and you need to have experience getting better at them over time in order to realize that this is something that actually you really enjoy and is something that you are truly passionate about. and so sometimes you have to stick it out in the things that that you know feel like they're not a natural fit in order to build up your capability and then and then become something that you love doing after that and so it's a bit of a dichotomy you know follow your passion but sometimes you have to let that slide and let your passion follow you what a wonderful way to end and yeah simon so so grateful um i know listeners are going to absolutely love that i think with every guest there's always a kind of a nexus theme that comes through and with you with your story and who gives crap story it's this kind of multi-dimensional multi-texture as a brand and as a human being which is just is fascinating so thank you so much really appreciate it mate yeah thank you it's been great to chat thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you liked that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on LinkedIn search Dan Pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands Thank you so much.