How Simon Griffiths made people care about a toilet roll

In 2012, Simon Griffiths sat on a toilet for 50 hours, livestreaming from a draughty warehouse until he and co-founders Danny Alexander and Jehan Ratnatunga had pre-sold enough toilet paper to finance their first production run. The stunt raised more than US$50,000 and gave the young company something most brands spend years trying to manufacture: a founding story people actually remember.Fourteen years later, the Melbourne-founded business Who Gives A Crap donates 50 per cent of its profits to water, sanitation and hygiene initiatives and says its cumulative donations have passed $20 million. Its early success came from capturing people’s attention online and, now stocked in almost every national supermarket, it has to win that attention again in the aisle, where toilet paper remains one of the more habitual purchases a shopper makes. Griffiths, now CEO of Who Gives a Crap, studied engineering and economics before moving into social enterprise and eventually consumer goods. In this interview with Inside FMCG, Griffiths spoke about learning to lead a fast-growing company, bringing in investors after nine years of bootstrapping, preserving the brand’s peculiar sense of humour, and turning a 2050 ambition into decisions that make sense on an ordinary Tuesday.Inside FMCG (IFMCG): Engineering and economics are respectable foundations for a career. What did you think you were going to do with your working life back then, and how did the path from graduate internships to international development and eventually toilet paper come about?Simon Griffiths (SG): At university, I got funnelled into graduate internships in both engineering and finance, and I quickly realised that traditional office environments weren’t right for me. I knew I was good at problem solving, innovation and markets, but was drawn to the idea of giving back. Other than that, I didn’t have a roadmap for what the future would look like.In 2007, I stepped away from the traditional corporate path and moved to South Africa to work in international development. The moment I landed in South Africa, I knew I was in the right environment, working on a problem that I truly cared about, but I also saw how difficult it was for high-impact charities to find sustainable funding. That’s when I became interested in philanthropy and started thinking about using business as a force for good.It took a couple of years to get from there to the idea for Who Gives A Crap. When it came, I called three friends, and they all said, “I can’t believe no one has done this before.” When you get that sort of a response to an idea, you know you’re on to something special. Next was the crowdfunding campaign. We launched the campaign just after the ‘share’ button was added to Facebook, so the way that things went viral literally changed overnight. When someone working on the campaign pitched the idea of me sitting on a toilet on a live web feed until we’d pre-sold the first $50,000 worth of product, I knew it had just the right level of absurdity to go viral.To date, we’ve raised over $20 million AUD for global water, sanitation and hygiene initiatives, so it was all worthwhile!IFMCG: In the beginning, you, Danny and Jehan were three founders with an unusual idea that still had to become an operating business. How did the three of you divide responsibilities in those early years, and what has being CEO demanded of you as the company has grown?SG: There was a lot of rolling up our sleeves and doing whatever needed to be done. We were a small team trying to prove that an unconventional idea could translate into a sustainable business, so there wasn’t much room for rigid job descriptions. At the start, everyone was moonlighting, but I was working in the business the most, so I took the CEO title.As the business grew, Danny was the first to join full-time, taking on a role that played to his strengths as a product designer with a customer focus. Jehan joined full-time once we had been trading for six years, stepping into a strategy role, which was what he’d been doing at YouTube in Los Angeles beforehand.As the CEO of a startup that goes from zero to almost 300 team members in under a decade, you find that your role goes through a completely new evolution every six to twelve months. That’s the hardest part of the role. You’re constantly trying to figure out what you need to learn next and how you can get up the learning curve as fast as possible. You have to get comfortable knowing that you’ll only be 60 or 70 per cent good enough at whatever you’re taking on before you delegate it to someone else. As a high achiever, that’s a strange feeling. You have to get comfortable with the idea that you’ll likely never have the chance to be exceptional at most of the tasks that you do. It also taught me a lot about hiring great people who can do things better than I can, but are just as passionate about giving back.IFMCG: You’ve built a brand full of toilet jokes and puns while addressing the deeply serious problem of inadequate water and sanitation. How do you preserve that humour and mischief while ensuring the mission never becomes something the company only prints on the packaging? SG: Humour has always been a way into the conversation. Sanitation is a huge issue, but it can also be an uncomfortable one to talk about, so we’ve found that if we can make people laugh, grab their attention and then get them thinking about the problem.You have to be funny without leaning so far into toilet humour that you turn people off. That takes a high degree of skill and nuance, and our copywriters spend a lot of time getting it right.The reason our mission never becomes decorative is that our impact is built into our business model. It shapes everything we do, rather than being something we switch on for a campaign and off once it ends. While humour gets people in the door, our impact is the reason the business exists in the first place.IFMCG: The business was bootstrapped for roughly nine years before raising millions in external capital in 2021. How did accepting outside investment change the way you approached decision-making and the protection of the company’s character? SG: Bringing in outside investment obviously adds another layer of accountability, and that’s exactly what we were after. When we raised capital, we were craving more rigour and wisdom around the table. We wanted people to ask where the business was going, why we were making certain decisions, and how we were balancing growth with long-term impact. That’s what we got, and it’s been great for us.The part we were most deliberate about was who we brought on board. Outside capital only changes character if you bring in the wrong people, so we screened hard for values alignment. We wanted partners and stakeholders who stood behind the mission from the outset.IFMCG: Supermarket shelves place your brand in front of customers who may devote only a few seconds to buying toilet paper. What has physical retail taught you about capturing customers’ attention and carrying the peculiar personality of the brand into an aisle?SG: The first thing retail taught us is just how many people still buy their toilet paper in store. We started as a direct-to-consumer business, but to make the biggest possible impact, we knew we’d have to meet customers where they shop. In the US, getting onto shelves with a partner like Whole Foods Market has been a big part of that, putting the brand in front of people who might never have discovered us online.The second thing we learned is that a lot of consumers still associate “eco” with poor quality. So, a big part of the job on shelf is reassurance: showing people that our products are genuinely great quality, and that an everyday purchase they’d make anyway can have a real impact. Toilet paper is a pretty boring category, and we see our role as both disrupting and delighting. That’s also how the brand’s character survives the jump to a supermarket aisle. The humour and irreverence are what make people stop, even in a category that’s based on habit and autopilot.IFMCG: You have spoken about reaching a scale comparable with Kimberly-Clark by 2050 because greater scale enlarges the pool available for donations. That gives you a horizon of roughly 24 years. How do you make an ambition that enormous useful to the decisions being made on an ordinary Tuesday?SG: Having a big, long-term goal is important because it gives everyone a sense of where we are heading. But you can’t run a business by staring at 2050 every day. The real challenge is working out what we need to do today, this quarter and this year to keep moving in that direction.When I talk about wanting to rival the scale of a company like Kimberly-Clark, it’s not about competing with them for its own sake. They’re simply a useful benchmark for the kind of scale we need to reach if we want truly global impact – the ambition is to build a business that is so big that it generates annual donations above $100 million – using our scale to drive a fundamentally different kind of outcome.The more people who choose Who Gives A Crap, the more we can give. And if we want donations at that level, we all need to focus on reaching more people every single day.