"Who Gives a Crap" on DTC vs retail, small budgets and their first TV campaign - Emily Kraftman, Managing Director UK

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about who gives a crap, not the general attitude to life, but actually a brand that is disrupting the market for toilet roll. I know I never thought I'd be talking about toilet roll in quite this level of passion on the podcast, but I'm joined by Emily Craftman. She is the managing director for Who Gives a Crap for UK and Europe. And I want to catch up with her to find out what the brand are doing. Why does purpose matter? Why does purpose in toilet roll matter of all things? but what are they doing to completely disrupt the industry how they establish a brand d2c and why they're now going into retail now prior to joining who gives a crap emily was also marketing director at deliveroo in fact she was marketing director before most people had even heard of it and of course we all know what it is now but actually she was on the journey very early on as that business went through a massive transformation so i also wanted to find out from her what was the secret to their success particularly from a marketing point of view There's loads in this episode.

1:04I know you're going to love it. Here's my conversation with Emily Craftman. Welcome back, everybody. Sounds like CMO. And here I am, joined by the managing director of Who Gives a Crap? You must find, how are you introduced? You know, like that? Yes, it does get me into trouble sometimes. So I go to the US for work a bit. And last year, when I was at Border Control, and they're asking me why I'm there. and then they said where do you work and i paused because i realized if i replied who gives a crap i was probably going to get arrested so then had to start with i work for a toilet paper company and i it has a funny name but i promise it's real um and then when i told my team they're like yeah that's just a rite of passage that everyone has to go that's like the induction program you have to have your awkward moment with security go come on let's be honest who gives a crap you know that must be actually you've given me a flashback so i once got detained by u.s border force and it was really innocent like so i was um i was making an advert for a kid's drink and we were we were we were filming it in columbia because apparently there's a you know an amazing kind of film industry in columbia so we could film two ads for about a third of the price of london and anyway the it was a dutch agency i was working with so they were flying you know from uh skipper and i was flying from london and they said john would you mind it was it was a kids we were filming these two kids with spacesuits right and they were like on mars or whatever and they said john could you bring um the two spacesuits out that were kind of tailor-made in London, right?

2:28In your kit with you. And can you bring, I think it was$10 ,000 of cash because we're going to pay all the locals in Canada. I know. Well, if it was a direct flight, it'd be fine. But I was flying via Atlanta to Bogota. And I didn't even think about it, right? And I'm in the US security queue, right? Doing the, I've got four hours, you know, to get between my plane and the one that's leaving. And do you know what? It genuinely didn't cross my mind until I was sat there looking at the, and they look really serious, don't they? you got the screens and the almost guilty when you feel like i did something so where are you going i'm going uh columbia all right and there's a immediately i'm thinking oh okay all right that's not does it sound good okay and what are you carrying on your person oh two spacesuits and a bit of cash and they're literally going you know do you think i was born yesterday type thing it was like three and a half hours i got detained i sat in a room with four of them grilling me eventually they go this is so bizarre it can't actually you cannot be like you're doing anything So anyway, there's my Border Force story.

3:28Let's take you back to why marketing in the first place? How did you get into this wonderful world? Yeah, well, I think the truth is somewhere between a very flippant answer and the answer I'd given like my grad scheme interview. So the flippant answer is I had no idea what I wanted to do. I'd always picked subjects that I enjoyed studying. So I did history and politics at uni and I'd spent all my uni summers being a camp counsellor, which I loved but wasn't a long term career. And so I kind of ended up going down the grad scheme route by process of elimination of can't do that. Don't want to do this.

4:00Don't want to do that. Oh, marketing. That sounds interesting. The actual interview answer was more when I thought about it. History and politics is all around like how people think and why they think in the way that they do and why they behave in the way that they do, which marketing is fundamentally. And also I grew up in a really entrepreneurial kind of environment. My dad ran his own business. My grandpa ran his own business. and so I was always interested in kind of the business side of things so it was kind of the process of elimination type side with knowing I wanted to work in business and then trying to figure out functionally what that would be but I had no marketing like education or anything like that so I in some ways fell into it after realizing that camp counselor was not a career choice.

4:41I think we're a little bit similar because I did finance and economics and then I suddenly I was trying to work out what function in a business makes the decisions and basically shapes the future because i i started off an accountancy and i kind of realized oh i'm adding up what the you know what other people have done and i suddenly go how do i get to be the one that you know does that makes the change that other people add up sort of thing and then i kind of eventually figured out that's marketing what i love about your career so far i should say so far shouldn't i is you've done what i wish i'd done which is you've done the corporate stint but you very quickly realized that actually there's life outside you know corporate headquarters and there's a whole kind of exciting startup world so before we get onto that because that's obviously the main thing I want to talk to you about um you were at well I was gonna say you're in Bev weren't you for for a number of years and you managed Stella what do you recall from that time what what what did that teach you about marketing that puts you in a good stead for today yeah I mean I think to your point I did I think I was about five years in corporate if we're gonna say that at Nestle and then at InBev and whilst I realized relatively quickly that that world probably wasn't for me I'm so glad I started there because the biggest thing I learned working on a brand like Stella or Stella Artois I should say because I learned that very early when I started at Stella Artois that you call it Stella Artois you can add two pounds to a pint just by going Artois was was kind of how to do things properly which again I say in inverted commas but I don't think I appreciated how amazing that education is in that kind of FMCG world so at Nestle, I think it was called Building Brands the Nestle Way, which I don't know, assumes still exists in some way or the other.

6:13And at InBev, it was the Marketing Excellence Program. And whilst that sounds very like hoity-toity, it actually was just incredibly useful on how you build a brand. So, you know, consumer insight and brand strategy and brand purpose and all of these things and frameworks, which at the time I sometimes found overwhelming. But actually now, when you move into a world which has none of that structure, has been incredibly valuable to me. And then the other thing I always think about is like both at InBev and at Nestle is their portfolio businesses. And so you're essentially sitting with your competitors next to you because you're all selling beer.

6:47Beer in particular, I think, because it's probably offending lots of people when I say that lots of beers taste quite the same. Yeah. And so how you build that portfolio incrementally so that you're not cannibalizing from each other fundamentally came down to marketing and brand so that you could differentiate them sufficiently, that you had different audiences and different customers and so on. And so coming out of that and looking back, I'm like, oh, that's actually amazing. Because if you can build Stella Artois next to Budweiser, next to Corona as one business, then you're really getting those fundamental things right.

7:23And now I don't work in a portfolio business in the same way, but I think those principles have been incredibly useful to stick with. One of the things I love as well, but you worked on Stella Artois, Cider, if I've got the pronunciation right. Cider and not Cider. Cider and not Cider. Yeah, very clever because it gives it some provenance and some je ne sais quoi, all that kind of thing. It's one of my favourite innovation case studies for a curious reason because when it first launched, I was like, that ain't going to work. Like, honestly, what credibility does Stella have going into Cider? I mean, I want my Cider from an unusual orchard in West Country, you know, that no one's ever heard of kind of thing.

7:58I thought, that's an odd move. It's only actually when I came to work for System 1 And then I suddenly realized that System 1 was using the testing on that as a brilliant case study of how to get innovation right. And the fact that it, I mean, the phrase that System 1 were using is 80 % familiar and 20 % new because it brought the stellar brand into a category that at that time was establishing itself. But gave it a little twist, like with raspberries or fruit. And actually, I think it's a brilliant case study in how to innovate. But from someone who used to manage it, how successful was that?

8:29and is there any truth in how I've kind of articulated it? Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I can't take any credit for the launch of Cedra originally because that wasn't when I was working on it. But I think one of the things that was amazing working at InBev was innovating within that portfolio. And so with Cedra is exactly as you said, you know, it was, we were a beer business, we are predominantly a beer business, identifying that opportunity. And then this was before my time, but I think there were discussions on, do you launch an entirely new brand or do you actually put it under underneath another brand and i think the amazing thing with cedar is that it took all the strengths of the stellar artois brand and i know it's a it's an interesting brand because it's had its ups and downs in terms of brand perception but like fundamentally is a good quality brand with lots of loyal fans but added as you said that kind of twist and that kind of belgian provenance and making it cedar not cider and kind of having a bit of a knowing wink um saw it be super successful and leverage the fact that obviously we have the really we It's very much not we anymore, but they have the relationships with the retailers and the on trade and so on to be able to drive it.

9:34So it was super successful. I think in the latter years, you know, other competition catches up. So we were not the only brand innovating in fruit cider. And, you know, lots of other competitors can see where the market was going in terms of consumers wanting sweeter taste palettes and things like that. And so it became very noisy. I remember when I was working on it around share of voice from a media perspective and things because lots of people and there was a lot of innovation. So it was like raspberry and peach and this and that and like getting the right shelf space and those kind of things.

10:07But fundamentally, like to be able to create an entirely new category under a mother brand, I think is a pretty good case study. I think it's a classic case of remembering that you're not the consumer because I looked at it having a little bit of experience in the drinks business and a little bit in beer going, oh yeah that's that's kind of breaking the rules a little bit yeah but from a consumer point of view that oh yeah brand i love yeah uh you know making a category making a category quite simple to understand and making it sound delicious by adding fruit like tick tick tick you know you always get that's what hence why you need to do the research to understand whether you know whether it's going to work now after that you did what i wish i'd done yeah which is kind of you made the big jump and i think it is a big jump isn't it like kind of you know well-established marketing led organizations with all the academies and support and professionalization now you know you went to Deliveroo which obviously sat here now go oh yeah Deliveroo big successful company but when you joined yes it was probably you know you know a handful of people in central London kind of thing yeah exactly like so what inspired the jump from kind of I guess the safety uh you know and relatively early on in your career yeah the safety of of that professional organization that you get with InBev to a pretty crazy I'm guessing a crazy startup kind of I don't head for the skies yeah I mean I think that like I said before that I had I really appreciated the grounding I was getting and the the kind of education and also like the opportunity to work on amazing brands like to work on Stella Artois and Quality Street and Fruit Pastels so early in my career was amazing and you also got exposure to you know the full marketing mix and P &L ownership and all of that kind of stuff that you don't necessarily get in other businesses but quite early on I was like I think I'm not quite sure I fit here just from a personal perspective the the corporateness and even neither and both of those businesses are of quite different you can't in Nestle and Inbev are not culturally the same but ultimately very well established huge conglomerates slow and steady growth with very mature categories and I just had without really knowing what I was getting myself into had an itch of I want to take more risk I to have more responsibility which isn't necessarily more budget but like i want to be able to make decisions and they might be bad decisions and we might fail but i want to feel like i'm not a cog in the wheel when you say you didn't fit can you do you remember the moment that you went ah yeah i don't think it was there like a time or was it just a general it was kind of a general feeling from to be totally honest from like quite early you know when i was at nestle this i mean this sounds ridiculous to be like i changed my career because i didn't like not wearing jeans but you know it was business attire and now when I look back at every day in the office I moved to York for the for the role which I ended up loving I definitely as a Londoner that had went to uni in Nottingham was probably not as open-minded about moving to York as I should have been at the time and I just remember probably the best way to describe it from a personal perspective was I was myself I you know I loved the people I worked with at Nestle I had great bosses I made great friends but ultimately felt like I had to kind of dial myself down somewhat in those environments and that I'm by nature a really curious person I ask lots of questions that can come across as challenging at times and realizing that there wasn't necessarily that openness well not not not purposefully but just kind of the infrastructure wasn't there to say like let's do this totally differently to how we've done it before you're just kind of in the cycle of it only took for me three or four or five annual planning cycles to be like I don't think this is for me career-wise long term and so that I was kind of hungry for something more entrepreneurial I happened to be a really early consumer of Deliveroo because I lived in Islington I lived on my own I'm not a great cook and so you know when I saw the opportunity it felt like a great fit at the time but as you said like Deliveroo really wasn't well known so when I I think I told you this earlier like when I resigned to my boss at the time he replied deliver who and when I saw him years later he we remembered that yeah damn it yeah he um you know who it could have been a startup that totally failed I still think it was probably the right thing for me to do at that moment in my career um but definitely ended up being like a rocket ship that I hadn't anticipated and that is I mean the difference between you know I don't know what your targets in Bev were but if you grow five or ten percent that's probably in a standout year i assume to a business where doubling is the minimum requirement you know just to stand still kind of thing in a cashier that's exploding describe to me what the greatest challenge for you personally going from you know a stable environment to i imagine quite a hectic dynamic constantly changing challenging environment like that definitely and i mean i think the first year at delivery was probably the most challenging in my career just from a like holy moly what on earth is going on because you know at that time then at that point it was so early in a way that the percentages are crazy right there's like a thousand percent because you're going from like barely barely anything but I think the biggest shift for me was the the pace so the irony of like fast moving consumer goods not necessarily being that fast moving internally in those type of businesses whereas here we were just a totally different business model and so early.

15:25So one of my first roles, part of my responsibility was rider marketing. And I remember my boss at the time saying, take everything you've learned about doing consumer marketing in terms of how you recruit consumers and how you maintain their loyalty and all of those things and apply it to riders. Cool, but it's actually very different. And, you know, got drawn in by the head of rider marketing title and then realized I was the head of me and the only person doing it globally. So literally figuring out from scratch, like, what does it mean to do rider marketing? Who are our target audience? What channels are they in?

15:58And literally going from scratch. We didn't have any agency. So like if I wanted to buy media, I was literally phoning up people and saying, can I have an ad in this magazine? And the pace of that was, you know, if you didn't have enough rider applicants applying to become riders at the beginning of the week, you knew you had a problem servicing demand at the end of the week. And so dealing with that kind of relentlessness and pace and also uncertainty, because we were making up as we as we went along, was a lot to reckon with. I also loved it, though, like loved it to the point that it was kind of all consuming because you just get such a kick when you then are getting enough rider applicants.

16:40well then you're seeing the orders tick up and you know we were we were doing restaurant marketing for the first time and being able to say you know you can get a wagamama on deliveroo and those kind of things it was kind of addictive in a way that i hadn't had before in my career because you felt like you were really part of it i imagine the feedback loop is super fast yes like you know you're not having to wait 12 months to see if your brand equity measures have shifted by a percent right if the riders don't turn up on saturday game over totally and you know like customer The service then is going up.

17:11People haven't got their orders. Orders are not as high as they could be. You've got the demand. How you start managing marketing spend. So when and how should we be spending if actually our demand is higher than our supply? And so all of that kind of stuff was new to all of us, but definitely new to me from supply issues weren't something that we really thought about day to day. You knew there was going to be enough Stella Artois on shelf most of the time. um this was very very real time essentially you remind me something i did a little bit of work for uh deliverable with system one this may be a couple of years ago and um it was quite interesting because because one of the benefits of of our sort of test is it predicts whether it's going to impact on short-term sales and long-term sales anyway they called me and said oh we've got a bit of a problem i said oh no what's happened you know sort of thing they say well the trouble is we're obviously selling this methodology into the business and they think it's great but honestly like we're expecting to double so how are you going to go where is doubling our sales the next 12 weeks good or bad how do we know right because the market's doubling anyway so how do you and i was like well it's relative to your competition you know competition and so on but you know it is changing so rapidly it becomes quite challenging to know what you know what success is isn't it when it's moving that fast i mean it was a really nice problem to have but that definitely was a real problem during that journey of like exponential growth was how much of this is because of the work we're doing in the marketing team versus how much everything else and we did we did some really really innovative quite innovative stuff where you know it was too soon for us to have a full like econometric model because we just didn't have good enough data but we did you know incrementality tests on performance marketing channels we did you know we first went on tv we did regional testing so we could actually see the difference between how things work so that it was definitely not perfect but at least it gave us some better benchmarks where you could say actually like our contribution is is this but the other thing with delivery and definitely true with who gives a crap as well is our advertising was was great i don't know if i do say this by myself but um it actually was a lot of the other touch points that massively drove awareness so you know riders in really standout rider kit window stickers in all of the restaurants those touch points are as impactful if not more in a way because they're really close to that point of connection than you know the tv ads and all of the other stuff that totally comes across i mean yeah it scores very very well on system one i think kind of three four star average most delivery uh work which is amazing one thing i noticed as well is is is as a as a brand the positioning has changed hasn't it so i mean when i first uh used delivery it was like having a restaurant delivery kind of thing that was how it felt now you can kind of get almost anything on it it was that a conscious response to the market or or how did that change yeah i mean i think lots of people are familiar with the story of how delivery started but will who's the founder and he was a banker who had been working in new york and he moved over to london and literally the insight was he was working late and he asked colleagues what they were going to get for dinner and they said like a microwave meal and he was shocked that he couldn't get the caliber of food that you could get in new york delivered in london and so that was really the starting point of wanting to be able to get good restaurant food delivered as we scale you know you want to be able to reach new audiences and so you want to have the more mainstream restaurants as well and that was also incredibly powerful to be able to get your kind of favorite high street restaurants delivered for the first time it was like a dream for most consumers and then there was really interesting discussions as we grew around like what does that mean for with fast food restaurants and so on but ultimately if you want to be the definitive food company which is what the delivery kind of vision was that means like having what consumers are looking for in all occasions in all different need states like me as a consumer can want something super premium one night and then want a fast food delivery the next day exactly and so it was less i think it was an acknowledgement as we grew and became more mature that if you really want to be that kind of definitive business you can't be in that super narrow niche but obviously like all businesses that scale same with who gives a crap as you move away from that like super bullseye target audience or that very kind of niche proposition how you continue to differentiate yourself as a brand in a more mainstream world is it's like the classic kind of um trade-off that you have to consider now you had five amazing years in your delivery quite something and it must be uh yeah an incredible training ground as well for what you're doing now of course because uh you know you recently became managing director of Who Gives a Crap.

21:49Let's, for anyone out there who, you know, I love the fact you're still smiling about the introduction. So you never get tired of the, yeah. Funny to say that you work in toilet paper and the company has crap in the day. We have crap in the time. Yeah, exactly. Do you feel a bit awkward about that? Does it feel like a bit strange? I mean, no, I mean, I kind of love it. It's, you either people, the reaction I either get is either people are like, sorry, say that one more time, or people know the brand and like, oh, that's really cool. It's the in-joke, yeah. And you never thought, you know, I, um...

22:17I did a careers talk years ago at my old school. And this is when I was still very much kind of in the marketing world. I think it was when I was at Deliveroo. And I remember talking about choosing brands and industries. At that point, I'd worked in sweets and chocolate, in beer, and then in food delivery. And I was like, oh, I'd never work in a boring category or industry. For example, I'd never work in toilet paper, because it was just the category that came to mind as like illustrative of something incredibly boring. So the universe obviously has a funny way of laughing at us. And now I kind of love that ostensibly toilet paper is super boring because it's in a way it's that that made this role and what who gives a crap have done before my time that made it so compelling.

22:58I've got a theory about this. I've long thought that I must do this one day rather than talk about this. But I do have this theory of finding the most boring categories in the world on the basis that everyone thinks like you think. I think, too. Right. You go, oh, I'd love to work in chocolate or I'd love to work for an airline. And those categories are well overexposed with the world's best marketers. Right. Find the dullest category, the most commoditized category where there is no marketing at all and do something interesting. You know, and weirdly, going back to the system one database as well, we find an inverse relationship between how interesting the category is and how good the advertising.

23:34So the more interesting the category, like the more feature heavy, like mobile phones or things like that, typically the worse the advertising because you tend to, you know, you tend to have too focused on products. Oh, God, so many things to talk about. Our new kind of LED headlights. Whereas if you've got a commodity category, I mean, you're taking it to the extreme. You have to do brand. You have to create a brand. You have to stand for something. And you have to make entertaining advertising that people can remember because you're not going to talk about, you know, I've got 15 ply, you know, super soft, you know, kind of toilet roll, whatever.

24:09I don't know. Maybe that's an innovation idea, but I don't think so. So it becomes about the brand, doesn't it? But tell us about the backstory, because I'm sure people are wondering, like, how on earth did someone decide to go and innovate in the, you know, toilet roll market? Yes. Who Gives a Crap has been around for just over 10 years. There's three founders. They're all still in the business. Simon, who's my boss, is the CEO. And he was the face of how the business started because it was actually crowdfunded. So he had this idea. He'd been working in kind of like purpose for or thinking about how you can do business differently and use capitalism to do good for a while.

24:46And he kind of was like it sounds overly simplified, but had this moment of we should make toilet paper. we should donate half of our profits and it's all donated to to wash initiatives to build clean water and sanitation and decided that the way to get that off the ground was to sit on a toilet on a live web stream for as long as it took for them to crowdfund fifty thousand dollars turns out it took 50 hours 50 yes and i have grilled him on this when i joined saying like really did he have deliveroo delivering him like food to his toilet i actually haven't asked him that question which i should have um but i i guess in a way it's that's kind of indicative of how who gives a crap has done things from the beginning which is like always very tongue-in-cheek like you can if you google it you will see pictures of him on the toilet it was like a funny moment in my first week when i was doing a presentation and i slacked someone saying oh do you have a do you have that picture of simon on the toilet which is not something you necessarily think you're going to say about your boss in the first week of a new job um but it went it went viral so to but not so to speak it actually did and so it got traction in random countries it was on like i think the front page of a big media website in brazil or something so it truly went everywhere because it's funny and silly um it was already called who gives a crap at that point and we crowdfunded the amount to fund that first production and obviously because of that traction there was everyone who had donated and everyone who had seen it and and to be honest like the rest was history from there in terms of how the business then grew it was immediately d2c but it's funny because when we talk about it was like d2c at that point this is like 2012 2013 wasn't it wasn't like a conscious choice to be a d2c brand it was more this is the easiest way for us to start it wasn't some genius strategy about the future is going to be subscriptions so that's what we're going to do it wasn't the thought it was more you know we want to get to consume we want to make this product if you think about the alternative would have been to rock up to retailers and start talking to them from from early days and i and i think and i can't speak super accurately because it's way before my time but it was kind of let's get it out to consumers and and learn and see how we go um and then obviously just grew from there and i one of the great benefits of a d2c business is you obviously have that interaction with customers you're really getting their feedback very live and it's pretty scalable across markets um so you know we're we start in australia and then we're now in the us the uk and also in mainland europe as well it's funny that it doesn't obviously stand out as a candidate because you go it's low value it's bulky yeah it's an everyday purchase it's not like a luxury purchase you know so it doesn't obviously put itself out there as oh yeah i'm going to subscribe to toilet roll but obviously it's worked so what was the secret to subscription bait you know working well the well one thing as you said was we did um i guess flip it on its head a bit which is on on our website you buy the toilet paper in boxes 24 and 48 um so it is in bulk you know that really helps from a sustainability perspective as well because our roles are double length as well and so like the overall footprint of that purchase is as low as possible um because you're buying in bulk presumably reducing the supply chains you're not delivering it to a distribution center going out to a regional distribution center going to a store sat in the back for a while exactly and there's lots of um you know i think one of the things that we talk about a lot is like progress over perfection so i'm definitely not saying this way is 100 better than that way because you know we we also want to be in retail and there's lots of benefits in in both the models but with everything that we've tried to do we've always tried to do it kind of to the best of our ability at that time and what we found is like people love just having one less thing to think about um we we talk a lot about kind of unexpected delight so that one of the things i think that has made who gives a crap as popular as it is is because it's made something that's really boring easy and also delightful so you know there's they're all individually wrapped which the prime reason for doing that is hygiene because it's in a big box and you don't want them to get dusty whilst you're going through them.

29:00It's like, well, if you're going to do that, you might as well make it great. And so it means that people love showing them in their toilets. There's lots of Easter eggs in our kind of tone of voice and hidden thing. Well, for anyone who's not a customer yet, I'll ruin the surprise. But at the bottom of the boxes, we have emergency rolls, which are wrapped differently and are called emergency rolls. And that's like a reminder to them to stock up, which is really fun. And then, you know, all of the kind of touch points along the consumer journey from the website copy to the emails to social and everything is just trying to help people do good in a way that's fun and easy.

29:39One of the most genius bits of marketing when I was a kid growing up was you used to get lollies and they'd have a joke on the stick. Once you'd eaten the lolly, then you reveal the joke. It's like those little surprise and delight things at the bottom of something is brilliant. Yeah, totally. And I think that the causes that we care about, we fundamentally exist to donate our profits and to make a difference in wash and also sustainability. We take those very seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously. And I think consumers want to make better choices, but they don't want to be shamed into it.

30:11They don't want to be guilted into it. Everyone's got enough going on in their lives. They don't need a brand saying you're using the wrong toilet paper in a very lofty way. But if we can make it easy for people to make the switch where they are doing good, but actually it's also fun and delightful. I think that's kind of the hardest. Let's talk about the purpose. Because, I mean, purpose is a hot topic in marketing. It's used and abused in probably equal measure, isn't it? So what is the impact you're actually having on good causes in terms of hygiene and sanitation and water? Yeah. So, I mean, one of the reasons why I love our business model is because rather than that kind of, and what's the purpose of this, you know, coffee cup or whatever and how it's going to help in the world.

30:51It just fundamentally everything we sell does good. And there's two sides to it. So there's the profits, which we've donated over six million pounds so far to various wash causes around the world. We have a number of partners. WaterAid is kind of probably the biggest and most well known. And then on the sustainability side, we can literally calculate and it's done based on the trees that would have been cut down if the toilet paper we'd sold was traditional. So how is it made then? So it's not made from trees. What is it made from? So we have two product lines. One is bamboo and one is recycled paper.

31:26And then people make jokes about it's recycled paper. It's not recycled toilet paper. That recycled paper is kind of old school homeworks, old office materials. Oh, that's my question. and it's actually on we have that on the retail pack like so that people understand what it what it is and for anyone who wants like geek out on paper there is like various grades of you know where what different types of recycling goes to so that it's like office and those kind of stuff like this basically and so those are our two product lines the recycles are the ones that you see in the nice brightly colored wrappers and the bamboo is the black and white so yeah so we can calculate kind of number of trees saved.

32:09And so I think as of the last couple of months or so, it's 1.4 million trees that we've saved to date. And obviously, as we grow, that becomes kind of exponential because we have incredibly strong retention and loyalty, which is awesome. And so it's cool to be able to see, you know, each of those consumers that stays with us is saving more and more trees and same on the kind of profitability side. So I think we do really hold ourselves to account on trying to share as much of that stuff as possible um again the progress over perfection thing comes in where i think it's a really interesting space where lots of brands are talking about these things you do need to be conscious of if brands are over-egging those things equally um i think it's something that we're super proud of and and try to give as much transparency as we can now you've been growing rapidly and i think you're recently now listed in waitrose we are yes congratulations our first national retailer available now in waitrose you know um that's obviously a new uh distribution channel i guess for you what kind of challenges that give you as a i guess going from a d to c now to be in retail as well i mean it's been a really interesting journey and it was probably one of the reasons why i was hired and i've built out a team here which is you know you can scale the business when it's primarily d to c without necessarily having people on the ground but when we're really thinking about that kind of local retailer knowledge and so on.

33:31I think the why was it comes back to our big hairy audacious goal is pretty hairy and pretty audacious and recognizing that you know we love being the biggest toilet paper D2C brand but the reality is most people aren't buying their toilet paper online and so kind of the classic physical availability of we want to be where our consumers are it's very different so like internally obviously the majority of the business has been focused on d2c so like thinking about what processes you need what capabilities you need like having a sales team having a pack and proposition that works for retail because as much as i would have loved to have my big box of 48 rolls on shelf in waitrose i don't think we would have got that much shelf space so it was almost starting it was starting from scratch on a number of the fundamentals and figuring out, you know, given that we're not going to control the customer experience in the same way or have as many touch points with them, how do you try and bring to life what that brand is all about on, you know, a second or whatever the latest stat is on how long you have when someone's looking at shelf and kind of bringing all of those things to life.

34:40And to be honest, we are very, very excited that we've launched in Waitrose. in in many ways like when i joined getting that retailer listing felt like a huge milestone then when you get there you realize like actually it's the start line not the finish line and so we know it's kind of very beginning of the journey super excited to be working with waitrose and kind of partnering on you know how we grow that eco segment in store and and figuring out as we go you know with packaging for example i'm sure the packaging that's in store today is not necessarily going to be the packaging that's there in five years but really proud of kind of what we've done to start with.

35:15Amazing. Congratulations. Now imagine to get to this point as well, you haven't been blessed with big budgets like you might have had if you went back to your AB InBev days. So how have you been able to grow when you've got a lot less resource than say the market leader in this category? Yeah. And a lot of it comes back to some of the stuff we've really talked about. So, you know, the packaging is very different to most normal toilet paper. And that's done a few things. One is the packaging and probably the whole kind of brand in itself, which has meant that we have i generally don't like when people talk about people loving the brand and brand love and stuff because it's like they you know they just they don't love your brand as much as you think that they do however we do have a slack channel called customer love letters and you'd be surprised people really do love love the brand because of our like when i say brand in terms of the fundamentals of kind of the tone of voice the purpose people feel like they are doing good but they also bring this like smidgen of joy because our emails are funny and those kind of things that means we have a huge amount of advocacy so you know half of our customers have given who gives a crap as a gift which is ridiculous when you pause because it's toilet paper gift um that comes from the fact that we have you know they're fun because they're wrapped we also do limited editions which also sounds silly when you think about it limited edition toilet paper but we've done a you know a huge array of different um things we've done holiday editions we've done like a where's Waldo style one and so you know kids love them people give them as gifts so all of that kind of stuff has meant that word of mouth advocacy gifting um has been huge for us also people literally just seeing it in their friends houses and then we've also done that kind of a bit more explicitly on the b2b side so we talk about b2b to bb which is to build brand an awesome way of just driving more visibility so hopefully people go into cafes to restaurants to hotels to offices and they see our brand and again because of the wrapping you know that it's who gives a crap and when you talk about limited resources that's super powerful because it's obviously a sales channel um but also doing the marketing side as well i think this is a massively under under un misunderstood or underestimated channel is b2b isn't it i think people forget that well firstly that b2b cannot operate similar to b2c and you're building your brand in the same way you might do elsewhere but also that b2b can help you build your brand overall because you're seeing the right places you know you talk to people that might then go on and buy you as well you know that b2b can be a really powerful channel yeah absolutely and for us particularly when you've got no budget as well this is the thing because then you you kind of you leverage other people's budget or you leverage availability through you know through third parties yeah exactly and um especially in australia which is our most mature market like it's really fun when you are in melbourne because you really see the potential of that in a similar way probably to to how people see deliveroo in london you know like a window sticker on every restaurant that kind of who gives a crap in every toilet um we're not quite there yet in the uk you're there in certain pockets of London you will see you will see it um but I'm the the weird but also amazing thing about working in toilet paper is that obviously toilet paper is it's not a category that needs education on what the actual product is or that doesn't have the penetration but the education on like the problem that we have around deforestation and wash and also the like the opportunity to drive that visibility is kind of endless and so yeah I'm excited about hopefully one day every restaurant in the UK.

38:46The brands that you guys remind me of a lot is Tony's Chocolonely. I don't know if you've been to Amsterdam where they originally, but it's literally like seeing the future because Tony's popped up everywhere kind of thing and it's just amazing. And the packaging again and the novelty and all that kind of thing works really well. You've also recently had your first TV campaign. Congratulations. So it's all very grown up now. Yes, it is. We're on TV, ladies and gentlemen. How's that gone? Oh, it's been a really interesting journey. And we're going through that classic kind of shift when as a scale up and primarily as a DTC brand that's then scaling both in DTC and also into other channels.

39:28The traditional DTC startup channels of being really reliant on performance marketing, which is the other side to the word of mouth piece, I guess, in terms of how we scale isn't going to be the formula that's going to work for us in the future. and obviously with a marketing background one of the things I've been super passionate about since I joined was you know what how do we mature and diversify the way that we're approaching marketing and it is a massive leap to have that conversation of we're not going to be able to measure it in quite the same way of the impact that it has and all of those things but it's been really exciting I think one of the there's been lots of things that we've talked about one of which is as we've discussed we have a really strong brand in terms of those fundamentals but we haven't really done brand marketing before so what does who gives a crap look like on tv everyone in the business probably had a different idea of what that was at the beginning and as the managing director and not the marketing director knowing when to keep my mouth shut and when to give my opinions was also like a personal um learning with that for anyone that has or hasn't seen the ad the ad is primarily bum focused which is another sentence you don't realize you're going to say often tell you what why don't we quickly play the ad now right everyone listening and watching can see it Our planet, our future, rests upon your cheeks.

40:43Every day, over one million trees are destroyed to make traditional toilet paper. With Who Gives a Crap's recycled loo roll, bums of the world, you can stand, nay, sit down for what you believe in.

41:03Uncrack the world with Who Gives a Crap. Now, what we see in this ad, of course, is a lot of people shaking their bums. Are we going to see a lot more bum shaking in future? Is this going to become the iconic who gives the crap signature? Yeah, I mean, so the platform is Uncrap the World. And, you know, the whole idea is we've talked about already is, you know, we don't want to be preachy. We don't want to guilt people. We want to kind of excite people and get them to be advocates, get them to be activists. and so it's kind of a call to a call to bums um to get people to to take that leap and it's it's hopefully indicative of the type of brand that we are which is a bit silly literally tongue in cheek and so yes i think you will see more bums around um the copy is great by the way i love this i was about to say thank you and i was like all credit to the creative marketing team sit down for a good cause you know exactly well well quick quick quick plug for the tv by the way because he did very well on system one so well done and it's unusual for startups to do that straight out the bat as well i mean we did a research project a couple of years ago called scaling up without screwing up it's amazing how many startups when they go on tv don't get it right because and we worked out takes on average four years for a startup to get to the average on the database so well done for getting straight in there and doing a good job um you mentioned something there about um being the managing director not the marketing director i think this is a challenge so maybe to end on tell me what it's been like making that transition from marketing director to managing director because that's quite unusual there's not that many marketing directors do make that move I think unfortunately because actually it's a great training ground for strategy and vision and understanding your customer but what's that change been like for you when I was like making the decision to leave Deliveroo I knew I kind of had two decision points like did I want to go deeper into the marketing route and you know go down a CMO type route or did I want to move into this general management kind of route.

43:02And I guess like in that earlier jump I took in my career, I do like trying new things. And I guess coming all the way back to the beginning about like always having been interested in business and driving growth in the business, I almost had FOMO on the other functions and like I've always been very interested in - Give me a supply chain to get my hands on. Yeah, how it all comes together. And so just felt like from a learning perspective, it would just be such an amazing opportunity. it's obviously it's a leap for me it's also a leap for business to um you know bring me on and do that which i'm super grateful for i think my personal development opportunities are like two opposite things on the marketing side it's like how do i empower the marketing team that i have and also my global peers to do their jobs and not getting too into the day-to-day but also adding value where i know i can and obviously how we do marketing is super important to the overall uk in your business then the other side is like yeah supply chain manufacturing toilet paper you're the one that gets phone call when the factories you know burn down or the supply chain people also and that's a really interesting you know leadership development on obviously working with people where they have better functional expertise than i do and i'm not going to pretend otherwise and nor am i ever going to overtake what a supply chain person knows but recognizing like where you can still add value because you have that holistic overall view building the team and kind of setting the overall vision but it's it's really fun because it's two such different dynamics and things to to learn about so it's been 18 months it feels it feels it's one of those classics like it feels like two minutes and also a lifetime i remember actually i i this closer i've been to you was doing a private equity takeover a juice business and the thing that shocked me was i remember the first board meeting and marketing got half an hour at the end i was I sat through the whole thing, you know, talking about legal disputes or factory efficiency or how we're going to fund the business.

44:57You know, I loved it, though, because you realize actually as a marketer, you have so much impact on the business. But you need to understand how the rest of business works because your decisions affect supply chain. You know, the margin you make or, you know, how happy customers are. You know, it's really, really good, I think, for a marketer to see the impact they have on the whole business. 100 % and I've always been like the geeky commercial marketer that I'd wanted to know you know how it all leads back to the P &L and all of that kind of stuff so it's it's fun to yeah to be in this role.

45:25Brilliant. Emily it's been a real blast talking to you thank you so much for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen thank you again for listening to Unsense CMO I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed making it if you never want to miss an episode again please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts if you want to watch this head on over to YouTube, hit subscribe over there as well. If you want to contact me, you can do at Twitter at Uncensored CMO or I'm on LinkedIn, John Evans. It's been great having you with me. See you next time.