You've probably heard of Who Gives a Crap A toilet paper company that loves a good pun, especially one that relates to your bum. And what's more, Who Gives a Crap also donates fifty percent of profits towards building toilets and providing sanitation to those in need. Now, for co founder and CEO Simon Griffiths, having fun with the brand is super important. Simon and his team are obsessed with delivering something unexpected to customers and creating a culture of
quirky fun in the workplace. So how do you take a traditionally very dull and boring category like toilet paper and consistently deliver fun and laughs to your customers. My name is doctor Amantha Imbert. I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. Work On Today is my Favorite Tip episode. We go back to an interview from the past and
I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. So in today is extract, I speak with co founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap, Simon Griffiths, and in this extract we chat all about how Simon sees himself in the business of delight, and more importantly, how he actually makes that happen. So how does Simon demonstrate that delight to both people within the business and also to his customers.
I think to our customers it's just a part of the customer experience, and so it's not something that we talk about externally, but internally it's something that we come back to a lot. And so there's lots of different examples of this, but I think that it's often very easy to say, well, if we're in the toilet paper business,
we just do this. But if we ask ourselves a question of well, what would we do if we're in the business of delight to how we solve this problem, then you'll come at it from a very different place.
So I think that our packaging is an example of that, where when we very first had the early kind of concept for who gives a Crap, we realized that we weren't going to be in supermarkets, which is where most toilet paper was sold when we first got started, so we could think about our packaging a little bit more creatively and differently, and we said, okay, well if we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer. How do
they think about toilet paper being in their house? And you often see roles being stacked up in the bathroom, and so we said, well, what if we could wrap every role individually and design the packaging so that when it's stacked up, it creates a really fun, delightful moment.
And so we took inspiration from I think one of the co founders, Danny, who was working on this with me, had walked past the barbershop and seen one of those red and white striped poles earlier in the day, and so he mocked up, what would it look like if we had these roles and you stack them on top of each other, and they created that sort of barber pole effect with a red and white striped wrapper, and so that was what led us to initially say, well,
what if we did forty eight different design wrappers boxes, And I said, well, our production team will kill us. We can probably do five, And so we mocked up five different roles, with the first of them being a red, orange and blue striped wrapper with a white stripe in there as well. Was one of the very first designs that we did that was part of our first packaging, and so I think we have a lot of wouldn't it be cool if moments and packaging was certainly one
of those. Wouldn't it be cool if we could design something that was so beautiful our customers would want to take it out of the back of the bathroom cupveroed where toilet papers traditionally stored and put it on display.
And there's probably fifty ideas that we have for every one or two that stick, and packaging was one of the one or two that really stuck in a way that was meaningful for our customer, to the point where when people first opened up boxes, it was so delightful that they wanted to take a photo of that and share that with someone else, either in a text message
or what'sapp or on social media. And so I think if we come back to that, putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer and saying, well, what if we're in the business of delight, how would we insert the light into this moment? It allowed to think very differently about what we would do rather than just being a regular old toilet paper company.
I feel like you've achieved that so well, I know within my own home. I had some people over for dinner last night, and I made sure that I topped up my little pile of who gives toilet paper in the bathroom because it just looks so cool. Now, one of the things I love about your brand is how you use humor and especially puns, which you have done from day one. And I'm personally surprised at how few businesses use humor at all. I mean, let alone use
humor as amazingly as you guys do. And I want to know how do you personally encourage humor at work and with your team?
Yeah, I mean I think like this is just like a core part of our culture. I think we have this philosophy of if you can't have a laugh at work, then what's the point of being at work? And so we sort of have a culture in a way, and a brand now that self selects people that thrive in that environment and want to be there to have a bit of fun and to think about things a little bit differently. And I think the challenging part of that is really being conscious of crafting a culture that's quirky
fun rather than dirty fun. And we tread this fine line and we say that our brand name is the dirtiest thing that you'll ever hear us say, And so all of our humor has to be witty and clever and quirky without going down the path of being gross
and disgusting. And that cannot necessarily be an easy thing to do for a toilet paper company, but it's something that we think about a lot, and particularly as we're interviewing for our creative team, for example, we'd really test how people think about the humor and the brand.
How do you test someone's humor?
A big part of our interview processes is the homework assignment, and with our creative team in particular, that can be a brainstorming session with our other team members to understand how they idate and what nuggets of ideas they grip together to turn into something that they think will be
potentially a good campaign for the brand. And so an environment like that allows us to under stand, yeah, like how someone approaches the humor of the brand, what they think is good humor versus bad humor and why, and we can find what are the kind of culture ads or the humor ads of the people that will potentially join the team.
So when you're recruiting for any role. Will that be a prerequisite that people I don't know, how do you learn if someone's funny and they're willing to have fun at work through a recruitment process.
This is something we think a lot about in some of the more serious functions as well. So finance is a great example of this, where we need people in that function who can take really serious concepts and break them down into bite sized chunks that relate to their team.
Then if someone in finance can insert humor into what they're doing, then for us, that's just like a huge win because it's a function that has a terrible reputation for being stale and boring, and if we can change that within our business and make it more fun, then that's a real in for us in terms of how we're building a culture that rewards the right things and helps engage our team in what some people perceive as
being less exciting parts of the business. But personally, you know, I'm a big finance fan, so I'd never say that out loud.
I'd say, we like, when you're recruiting a finance person, how would you find out if they can do these things, if they can communicate complex concepts clearly and maybe with a bit of humor as well.
So again, homework assignments here is so important, and so I no brief for our homework assignments. We encourage people to use jokes and gifts and emojis and allow them to start bringing out their own personality through what they're presenting back to the team. And so it becomes a real moment of allowing someone to get access to our brand guidelines, interpret them, and then use them to create a presentation that for a finance person would typically be
quite boring and straight. And if they can turn that into something that it's the right brand notes even a little bit, then it gives us an indication or a glimpse into what might be possible for that individual.
That is it for today's show. If you are enjoying how I work, you might want to follow me on the social channels. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me
at Amantha Imba. I think I'm the only one on the called Amantha Imba, and you can also find me on Instagram at Amantha I and on Twitter at Amantha I'd love to connect with you, so drop me a nighte let me know you listen to the Show How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Imba who does the audio mix and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise.