Inside Thankyou’s next evolution

Melbourne-based social impact business Thankyou has today revealed the next stage in its brand journey. The business is launching a range of home cleaning products created with 100 per cent natural ingredients, which will be sold across a number of major Australian supermarkets. It’s also launching a natural deodorant and a revised and revitalised e-commerce business.Beyond the new products, however, is an entirely revised business model born out of a desire to work with other brands looking to do good in the world, and a dissatisfaction that they were doing just ‘enough’. Thankyou co-founder Daniel Flynn told Inside FMCG that, as far back as 2018, the business was beginning to rethink whether the way it operated was the best way to achieve the most impact. “We were finding ourselves spread very thin, [and] we started to feel this tension between what was a great vision, and the reality that if you’re not growing, you’re dying,” Flynn said. “We sat back and really reassessed the vision, and [broke the brand down] to ask, ‘What is our 5 per cent?’ In other words, what’s that tiny bit that only we can do?”That understanding helped the team at Thankyou come to a new model that Flynn calls Engine Two. Whereas Engine One was built around creating internal teams to ideate and refine everything in house, Engine Two is focused on keeping Thankyou a leaner operation and working with external experts around the world to bring its vision to life. “It’s a very different idea, and the key to Engine Two working is finding partners. We need partners in innovation, sales, supply chain, and distribution partners, for example,” Flynn explained. “And we’ve found them, and we’ve been working on this for the past 18 months.”No Small PlanThe new model and direction came out of an initiative Thankyou launched in late 2020 to take the business global. The ‘No Small Plan’ initiative was an offer to global FMCG brands to step up and work together with Thankyou to change the way ‘business as usual’ businesses operate. And while the specific brands Thankyou targeted, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, turned Thankyou down, the initiative had a different impact than Flynn and the team were expecting. Thankyou ended up hearing from a lot of other businesses, which tended to land in three buckets: those that said ‘no’, those that said ‘yes, but’, and those that said ‘yes, and’. Many businesses offered Thankyou assistance with overseas operations, but they all wanted to own a piece of the pie, something that Thankyou is unable to do, as it is 100 per cent owned by the Thankyou Charitable Trust, which makes decisions on how to distribute its charitable funding. “And then there was bucket three, where essentially a bunch of independent manufacturers, distributors, retailers and innovation houses reached out and all had the same kind of approach,” Flynn said. “They all said, ‘Hey, we’re not Unilever or P&G, but we can help you get in this country, or this market, and here’s how we can help.’ The fascinating thing is that they didn’t want to own us, or change us, they just wanted to help.“And so, we’re not backed by some big, global conglomerate, but we have a network of really cool, interesting and passionate partners, and while we have a lot of work over the next three years to get this thing around the world, it starts this month here in Australia.”Lean on meThankyou’s new products have also come out of this new arrangement. While Flynn noted that the business could have formulated its own deodorant or cleaning products, having worked with the innovative partners that it has allowed each product to deliver something truly new. The concept for Thankyou’s deodorant, for example, came from a product innovator in Europe who has previously worked with global brands and had created a new, natural deodorant formulation for 48-hour antiperspirant without any harsh chemicals. “He called it his life’s best work, and he wanted us to have it,” Flynn said. “To me, that’s the power of Thankyou moving forward. It’s building that momentum in the FMCG space, and getting leading innovation, branding, design and storytelling. We could have launched a deodorant for the past 10 years, but it wasn’t until we saw this that we thought that it was [a good fit].”Likewise, the brand’s step back into e-commerce, which was paused during the pandemic, comes through a collaboration with US-based e-commerce accelerator Pattern, which will operate Thankyou’s DTC business.What has surprised Flynn the most, however, is that opening the business up to more external partners has made Thankyou’s operations more profitable. “The way this is structured is more profitable than when we ran everything in-house, which is mindblowing, but I do think that a good partnership should be a win-win.”