From Bum Health to Boardrooms: Giorgia Granata’s Wype Story

0:00Welcome back to The Serial Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Anna Wood. On today's episode, I speak to Georgia Granata, the CEO and co-founder of Wipe. We discuss bum-plenliness and health, her experience on Dragon's Den, and why building a startup is like a horse. Let's dig in. Good, thank you. Hi, Anna. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming on. So in light of, we always start our podcast with the same icebreaker question, which is what's your favourite breakfast cereal and why? So I'm sorry to say I don't really eat cereal. I do want to shout out to my friends at Surreal because they work next door to us.

0:45Obviously, they desperately need my endorsement. But yeah, I'm not a cereal person. I normally like to eat flavorless kind of healthy seeming things for breakfast so like I don't know what it's called it's not a granola the one that's even less flavorful than granola what do you call it like muesli muesli yeah yeah that's the one muesli nothing added and if I want to sweeten it a bit of organic maple syrup. Fair enough, fair enough. And yeah, we've had a couple of people shout out Surreal recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're good guys. Yeah. So would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me about your background?

1:33Yes, of course. So I'm Georgia. I'm the founder of Wipe, which is a brand that takes better care of your bottom. And I guess from a background perspective, I suppose I could say I've been working now at Wipe for the better part of five years. So it's a big part of my background at this point. But originally, the bulk of my education and professional life was actually in a very different industry, fashion design. Actually, I studied fashion in Milan, Florence, New York, and Belgium. And eventually spent the bulk of my career at Versace. as a product developer and I headed product for one of the diffusion lines Versace Jeans.

2:24I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what working behind the scenes in fashion is really like. It's a very, very tough industry. I mean, that's kind of, you know, the devil wears Prada. I mean, it is kind of like that by some respects. It's a really tough industry. And When you're working for some of the top brands, the main part of your job is really working directly with artisans. So things are made in Italy. So you have a lot of contact with kind of the roots of craftsmanship. But really what my job was about, when you're making clothes, it's really about combining function with aesthetic.

3:10because you're making a product that has kind of a creative purpose but also has to fit on a human body, which is kind of related a bit to entrepreneurship the way I do it now. And also, especially when you're working for a brand, you have to be able to inject it with a story. So you're really kind of selling dreams, you know, like why does somebody wear a t-shirt that says like Nike on it? Not, or Nike. You know, it's because they've woven kind of a story into it. So that was a big part of my life. As you can tell, I could go on and on about it. But at some point I was leading a fairly large team and it just wasn't aligned.

3:58That life wasn't aligned with my core values. It became unsustainable. And I think unsustainable is the right word to use because, you know, fashion in itself is the opposite of timelessness, right? Of something that's everlasting. So even Oscar Wilde has a quote that said, fashion is an ugliness so unbearable, we change it every six months. and in a way I was doing much more than a collection every six months because we had four collections a year so pre two pre-collections and two mains and I was running a menswear and women's wear so that's a lot of collections in a year and you just it starts you stop feeling kind of ethically aligned to to that to to just kind of creating a product that you as a task have to make obsolete as soon as you can.

4:55And with this kind of seasonality and cyclical nature of the work, I felt like I kind of had stopped learning new things. And the progression opportunities were really limited, especially in Italy. There are two main crimes you can do if you're ambitious and in certain industries is to be young and to be a woman. And so that's when I decided that I wanted to make a change And I came to London to pursue a Master in Business Administration at London Business School. And I'm still here. Yeah, that's a huge jump from fashion to what you do now. So kind of moving on to what you do now, what is Wipe and what is your mission at the company?

5:41So Wipe is a bottom care brand or a bum care brand, I suppose. and it's probably worth saying that we call it bottom care but the bottom care category doesn't really exist and what I mean by that is that if you're these days purchasing a product designed to take care of your bum or your bottom on one side there's like toilet paper and flushable wet wipes that obviously aren't flushable and you know this is a category that's so desperate to not talk about what they're being used for, that they cover it in puppies and cartoon animals. It's even set in the household section of the supermarket where you get bleach and dish soap.

6:31It's really kind of pretending that it's not something for your body. Shouldn't it be in personal care or skincare? I mean, you use it on your skin. And then on the other side, And when things go wrong, you kind of lean into hemorrhoid creams, which have wonderful names like Dremeloids and Anusol. And that's why probably on the bottom shelf hidden in some parts of the shop. So our mission was really to create a brand that re-evaluated what it means to take care of your bottom, why you should do it, how you can do it, and to allow people to feel clean, confident, and healthy every single day. and put a smile between their cheeks.

7:13Great. So you went from fashion to founding Wipe. What was the inspiration behind founding the company? Well, the inspiration, the main inspiration came because I'm mostly in the UK for this business degree. And being Italian, one kind of crucial part of our kind of self-care is having a bidet, which is kind of, you know, a piece of equipment that you use to clean your intimate parts without having to take like a full body shower. And so I was quite uncomfortable here in the UK without my bidet. And it's more than just a feeling of hygiene. I think if you think about it the way we think about it in Italy, it's almost a part of your dignity.

8:04like obviously there's a reputation that Italians they dress a bit better they groom a lot you know like all these stereotypes but actually it's about kind of maintaining your dignity so when you're not feeling properly clean it's there's just something undignified about it and it bothers you and rather than just trying to kind of exactly replicate the bidet concept in the UK it just kind of became, I became curious about what was happening in the world at an international level around kind of intimate hygiene, intimate care. And I saw that, interestingly, toilet paper favoring countries, so that's like cultures that don't naturally use water, were transitioning to using wet wipes and flushing them down the toilet and creating like terrible, you know, environmental issues.

9:01And so that kind of was the idea that brought us to try and find a more sustainable way of doing that in a way that would be fit for toilet paper favoring countries. So not trying to go to people and say, now you have to install a bidet in your house, but saying like, look, I'm going to take the thing that you're used to doing and I'm going to just make it closer to a wet wipe cleaner. I'm going to fill it with like soothing and like nurturing ingredients. And you're going to be able to flush it down the toilet without worrying about it. So that's kind of the first product that we launched with.

9:40It's literally a natural and organic gel that you can apply to regular toilet paper. We have a kind of a patent pending custom designed applicator to make it easier. And then you can just do what you need to do. It's packed with soothing and moisturizing ingredients takes great care of the skin of your bottom which is skin too and deserves love and attention and then you can just flush it and forget it great so it's it's hard to kind of speak without mentioning your dragon's den experience so what was that experience like for you and how has the experience impacted your business so it's it's certainly worth saying that where Dragon's Den happened.

10:26So we filmed it in 2021. So quite a few years ago now. And I think that the main thing is that it was a wonderful experience. I would recommend to anybody who has the opportunity to do it, to do it. So I would say if you get the chance to do it, you should probably do it that said we had no idea what we were getting into like first of all myself and my co-founder were both foreign so italian my co-founder is a kiwi so we didn't understand how embedded in the culture like dragon's den really was so we were just like yeah fun whatever let's do it sounds cool no idea no idea what we're getting into and probably not enough appreciation of the level of exposure that we were going to get.

11:23Which, by the way, it was all upside for us. Like for us, it was great. We grew an insane amount that year. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. But at the same time, I think we were a bit too early in our business to really capitalize on it even more. so you know if you're a little bit more mature as a business owner as a business itself you can put in place a whole series of kind of dominoes so that when the domino the big dragons then domino falls it like sets a whole set of other dominoes in motion if you're lucky that the episode went well and and we were kind of a bit you know bright-eyed and Bushy Tales and maybe we didn't do that as much as we could have but overall overwhelmingly positive I think it's a great show and I would do it again I would be like look we're here's where we are now I watched the whole your section of it and there was quite a lot of talk about kind of the taboo I think it came across that there was very much as as you said kind of like a toilet paper fast country there is still a taboo talking about something like that has the taboo around kind of the topic do you think it's been a challenge that you've had to try to overcome yes but but it's really fascinating actually the ways in which it's been a challenge because the one thing that we have never that our customers and you know at this point we're nearing about a quarter of a million that we've sold to which you know it's small but it's also not small they've never had any problem There are people that are extremely open and want to learn and want to be educated about, you know, a key part of your gut health, really, because what goes through your body comes out your bottom.

13:43It's a way that your body can communicate your health status to you. Right. So you have to be comfortable to look in the toilet bowl, look at the toilet paper, know what your normal is. And when it strays from your normal, know that you probably can talk to a healthcare professional or a family member. So there is a community in the UK that is completely open and completely willing to talk about these things. But at the same time, there have been situations in which there's been a lot of kind of pushback on the stigma. you know sometimes with actually you know what not even so much the stigma the newness of the product has been more of a challenge than than actually the stigma the stigma hurts as well but I think the newness and the innovation of the product has been the most challenging thing and as far as the taboo I think it really becomes important as something that you can leverage to improve people's health.

14:59So to say, you shouldn't be ashamed of this because this is an important moment of your day, an important way that your body has of communicating with you, and also from a judgment perspective. I think one important thing to know is that you probably, unless you're a parent, but you probably, the sample that you have of people who go to the toilet is very, very small, as in like, you know how you do it and you maybe know how your kids do it, but you haven't seen your parents do it, I imagine. A lot of people don't see their partners do it, their friends do it. And so to not judge based on your own personal experience, what somebody else has experienced and needs, maybe.

15:55So the battle of the taboo is something that we more do so people can feel more informed and empowered about their health. But as a business, I think the biggest challenge has been the newness of the product. Yeah, it's quite innovative. I think in the UK, we're very used to, as you said, toilet paper or wet wipes, especially people who have kids who use a lot of wet wipes. So I think, yeah, seeing kind of your product, for a lot of people, it would be like, well, why would I even need this? Because what we have now is good enough. And I think for a lot of new products and innovation, it comes up a lot where it's like, but what we have is good enough.

16:40So you also mentioned how you're nearing a quarter of a million sales. I was going to ask, so Wipes saw tremendous sales growth last year. What do you think led to this growth and how has it impacted the way that you lead the business? I think this kind of leads or follows nicely to what you said earlier. A lot of the growth that we saw last year is because there's a genuine demand for the product. so and and i go back to the point of saying i think there there's some kind of like cognitive bias that's where it is that because a person has a an individual experience of what is enough they think that this is a reflective of everyone else while you know you see other people how they clean their kitchen, how, you know, how they eat, what they eat at the restaurant, where they go to the gym, whatever.

17:39This is a moment that is private. And so for us, growing the business has not been, from a customer acquisition point of view, has not been challenging. People, they find out about the product and there is a community that is interested. And that splits into a whole kind of set of needs. So sometimes we have people who literally, they just have never used anything else before, not flushable wet wipes, not wet wipes, not hemorrhoid cream. And they directly convert to the product because they find it interesting, because they want to feel cleaner and because they like it. Then we have people who have been using flushable wet wipes, but they feel like their trust in the category has been degraded because, you know, there's so much overwhelming evidence that you shouldn't flush them.

18:39And actually, the fine to flush certification by Water UK was discontinued last year, not by chance. And then there's people who have health issues. And that could be a whole variety of like chronic or non-chronic issues. You know, IBS, if you imagine somebody, and many people have IBS also, women in particular, if you're going to the toilet 10 plus times a day, I mean, you've had a cold, I assume, where you like blow your nose. You see what happens to the skin there. You need something that actually heals your skin, cleans it. And so we have a whole spectrum of needs. And altogether, that is a quite big and growing community.

19:26And also in us as a brand, they find a safe place where there is no judgment and where, you know, especially through our newsletter and our website, there's a lot of useful educational content. So hopefully that is why the business has been going really well. And as the impact on the way that we lead the business, well, as a startup, one of the most kind of elating things, but that's also challenging, is that when you're changing quickly, you have to be a different leader every time the company reaches a new step change. and so in this phase we're trying to structure things a little bit more because I feel like there was a moment when it was a bit the wild west you know just you know every how do you say in English when everybody has to pull the those things to go on the boat the oars you know it's like everybody has to just move the boat on And now that the business is becoming more complex, it has to be a little bit less reactive.

20:41You have to start putting in place processes that are a little bit more stringent. And also because we got to our scale with a very, very small team. So last year we were four people with a business that was tripling in size. and you know stuff it it gets crazy right so so now we've grown the team a bit and it's kind of like okay now we have to structure it because if we want to continue growing you just can't you can't continue to to to run it like that yeah so so we we've kind of touched upon kind of the the newness and the taboo around the topic, what would you say have been some of the other challenges that you faced on the startup journey so far and how have you managed to overcome them?

21:34I think for us, I can just tell you, like the biggest challenge always is cash availability. So, you know, I think the interesting thing about that is that for us being first-time founders, totally no idea what we were doing. I mean, my co-founder, who's also my husband, is an ex-military aviator. So fashion, military aviation, met at the MBA and working on the car. He also worked at Amazon, to be fair. But it's almost like when you hear about startup culture and, you know, maybe the Dragon's Den or whatever, there's a huge survivorship bias. whereas the startups that you hear about are only the ones that are winning.

22:29But not only necessarily winning, you know, from a revenue perspective or from a financial health perspective or from a longevity perspective, often it's through fundraising. So the first places that you hear about a startup succeeding is this startup raised a lot of money. And so this was a path that we thought we had to go on. And we felt that we needed to go on. Because we were like, oh, we're just going to grow the business. We're going to do all these things. And in a way, if you can compare a young company to a horse, right? I don't know why I'm doing that. It's like you think this horse can go to the races.

23:18I could put in my Peaky Blinders accent now, but I won't. It's terrible. But you think this horse can go to the races. And to go to the races, you have to get somebody to buy you, you know, the ticket to enter the horse and a good saddle and pay the jockey or whatever. And that's really a startup that wants to go through venture funding. but then if you know you can't supercharge your startup like that your priorities shift completely so for us the biggest challenge was that at the beginning we really wanted to kind of take the venture path and we tried to like push the business super hard in that direction and and the fact of that is that you're exposing yourself to certain risks so it's kind of like Like big or bust.

24:13And at one point we realized that, you know, we couldn't necessarily go down that path. And we really had to kind of restructure the business to be more focusing on financial health and longevity and kind of sensible growth. And I say that, you know, after tripling the business. But still, we're not doing it in a way that's big or bust. So really with kind of more sense of responsibility towards our financials and the team and everything. And so that means, though, that you don't have so much room to make mistakes because you're sticking very closely to your numbers and you don't have a lot of room for interpretation.

25:08for experimentation. And so you have to be quite sensible. And sometimes it's frustrating. You just like to, you know, let's get this party started. I want my horse on the track. I want to try everything. But at the same time, I think when you put the business on a more sensible runway, you learn actually what a mature business needs to function, which is very important. Sorry, that was super long-winded. No, no, it was good. Thank you. So on the flip side of that, what would you say have been the highlights so far? So one of the highlights has been we bought white.com. So kind of to link to what we were talking about earlier, we so we have always been wipe uk.com so w-y-p-e-u-k.com which is the first domain that we could ever afford because when you're like a startup that's kind of cash strapped i think at the time it was to buy wipe.com but back in the day like four or five years ago it would have been like one grand and we were like we don't have it obviously now we paid a lot more and that'll teach that's a lesson but it was kind of it was we haven't done the migration yet so if you if you you won't find the website if you type it in but we own it now and we're working on the migration and it was kind of for me that was a really special moment that we kind of bought the dot condom and we finally did it.

26:55It was kind of like, okay, we deserve this. We've spent five years leading up to this moment. So that was important. And really then the rest is, I think the highlight is really the everyday. So seeing how you've been able to attract brilliant people to your team and when they say something smart or do something that you wouldn't have thought of, you feel so fortunate that they're in it with you and you know when your investors because we do have of course investors they they decide to follow on on around or they compliment you on your performance actually one of our investors is even on our board and he's uh he's he's been like a blessing from the sky because he he's an incredible kind of mentor to us and so really I guess people and just the way that it interweaves with your life is the highlight and the low light yeah I can imagine kind of seeing people use your well not not physically seeing but knowing that people are out there using your product and kind of like proving people wrong that originally thought maybe there wasn't a space in the market for it.

28:18Oh, yeah. Wipe in the wild. That's what I call it when somebody tells me, oh, I was at my mates and I went in the bathroom and there was a bottle of wipe. And, you know, it happens. That's that really that's a huge satisfaction. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I can imagine. So kind of talking about the challenges and the highlights, what would you say have been the biggest lessons that you've learned on the journey? There's so many, but probably the biggest lesson that I can think of now is to have more grace with yourself. I think that's not about not working yourself to death, because of course, you know, we have to work very hard to do this.

29:08But there's one thing is working as hard as you can to make things happen. And one thing is constantly hating yourself is a big word, but constantly criticizing yourself for not being a different person. So I have certain strengths that I'm very creative. I'm good at high level strategy. strategy. I'm a very kind of personable person in the team. Like I care about how people feel. What I am not is the kind of person that is able to post on LinkedIn about the company every day. And I'm not kind of a big social butterfly. And there was a period where I was like, if I was a good founder, I would be doing this.

29:57Or I would be a different person. I would be do something different and and the point is like you can only be the best version of yourself and you can push the boundaries and always should push the boundaries of what that person can do and go out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself but one thing is to just you know some of your fundamental character traits you can't you can't just you have to forgive yourself for being the person that you are. And I think as a founder, that's important because there's like the, I forget what his name is, the guy from the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck book.

30:47Right? I've read the book and I can't remember. Oh my God. Right. So he at one point says, do the things that you're good at because like the world doesn't need any more shit physicists. Or something. You know what I mean? And it's like, I think as a founder, it's better that you identify your strength rather than you try to be a shit version of someone else. You know what I mean? So then hire that person. If you're not good at this, find a way to hire that person into the company rather than wake up every morning hating yourself for what you're not. That's my lesson. That's my lesson. And it's a good lesson.

31:29There's no one way to be a good founder either. Some founders like to be really vocal on LinkedIn. They're really extroverted. And other people just aren't built like that. And is there anything, I've heard, less than a piece of advice you wish you would have known before starting the wipe journey? I think probably how much time I was going to spend into it. Because now you look back and you're like, oh my God, has it been five years that we've been doing this? Did you know that this was going to be such a significant chunk of your life? And I suppose across, you know, if you assume that you're going to live 90 years or something, maybe it's not a significant chunk.

32:22But I suppose if somebody would have told me, are you prepared to be in this for five to 10 years? And a lot of founders, not only me, you know, they say, like, if you had known how hard it was at the beginning, would you have done it? And all that. And a lot of people say probably not. but then a lot of people say thank goodness I didn't know because I'm so glad that I've done it but if I had known I wouldn't have done it. Does that make sense? Yeah. So if my consciousness and five years ago had known how hard it was she probably wouldn't have done it but I'm glad that I didn't know so that I had the adventure.

33:06So I suppose what I'm saying by that is that I probably wouldn't have listened to any advice that was given to me because some things you just have to wear on your skin. Just like wipe. No, I'm kidding. Exactly like wipe. So for my final question, I was going to ask, so what do you think is next for the company and what goals do you have for the next year? Oh, lots. We have a lot. So we have our kind of forecast for the year, which is quite ambitious. So a financial goal, first and foremost. And so far, we've been outperforming it. So that's good. But still, we have to continue to do so. And then, like I mentioned earlier, for us, it's really a moment of adulting the company.

34:00So we managed to grow the company a lot in a very scrappy, roll your sleeves up, get it done way. That is now we're at a scale that it's difficult to maintain that kind of attitude. And so there's a whole level of maturity that has to happen in the background so that you wouldn't see outside. You probably won't see it outside in the company. But for example, right now, our website, a lot of it was designed like in Canva by us on the team. And then we send it directly to the developers. So we don't have like a web designer to help. It's just stuff that, you know, if you want to take the company to a next level, you're going to have to add these costs in that just give you that little bit more professional polish.

34:51So we're talking about websites, we're talking about the brand, a little bit of a brand fine-tuning. We're talking about new product development that we're putting in the lab. We're talking about the way that the brand is then translated into packaging and external kind of communication tools. And building relationships with retail. So, of course, we're still in Boots.com, but there's, you know, other things in the cooker. And so, yeah, lots going on. Lots to worry about. All good. But yeah, just now I said the adult thing, I realize people make fun that it's a very millennial thing to say. Oh, I'm a millennial.

35:39So I said it. You know, that sounds really exciting. There's a lot coming for you, which sounds really good. and kind of to top off is there anything else you wanted to add or plug add or plug sure i mean the product is great if you don't believe me we have a 4.8 on trust pilot from over 6 000 reviews 92 95 of people who try wipes say that it improves their bottom health so if you want to try a product that cleans your butt better than toilet paper alone soothes and moisturizes your bottom skin. If you have irritation, you know who you are and is totally flushable and biodegradable. Check out Wipe at wypeuk.com.

36:28Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been great speaking to you and learning more about Wipe. Thank you so much. I'm very grateful. Yeah, I look forward to seeing what we're going to be up to over the next year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll see. you'll see I'll be cute from town from you guys yeah thank you thank you so much bye bye if you like this episode be sure to subscribe to the podcast and check out startup magazine socials to stay up to date on the latest startups news