This popular household brand makes all products with environmentally friendly materials, and donates 50% of profits to help build toilets for those in need. To date they’ve donated over $2.5 million dollars to charity! We spoke to Tim Baxter, Growth Marketing Manager at Who Gives a Crap to learn more.
1. What makes your company Best For The World?
Who Gives A Crap is all about impact – we’re on a mission to show that businesses (and consumers!) can have a huge positive impact on the world by making better decisions. Who Gives A Crap exists because 2.3 billion people across the world don’t have access to a toilet. That’s roughly 40% of the global population! We think that’s pretty crap. That’s why we donate 50% of profits from our eco-friendly products to help improve access to basic sanitation in the developing world.
2. What makes you stand out from other companies?
We believe that doing good shouldn’t mean making tradeoffs of quality, price or aesthetics. That’s why we’ve spent years ensuring our products are super-soft and super-strong, and we go to great lengths to ensure that using Who Gives A Crap is a delightful experience. All of our products are beautifully packaged so that they look great in any home or office. We’ve taken something like toilet paper that people normally hide away, and instead made it something people are proud to display (or make pyramids, forts, jenga – you name it!). 3. How do you plan to celebrate?
By giving ourselves a pat on the bum, of course!
4. Part of being “Best for the World” is striving to always use your business as a force for good. What initiatives do you have planned for the coming year to continue to be Best for the World?
This past July, we decided to take on a company-wide challenge to get all the little bits of plastic out of our products. We are already one of the only toilet paper companies that uses mostly paper packaging, but we don’t want to stop there. The process has taken a lot of negotiating with warehouses, researching, testing, retesting, surveying, finding new suppliers and hours and hours (and hours) of trial and error. We still have some work to do, but we’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made and we can’t wait to continue this initiative through the year!
5. What advice do you have for other B Corps and purpose-led businesses that want to improve their impact?
One of the best pieces of business advice is to never underestimate the importance of focus. This means understanding that being focused often means saying no. In the early days, we pretty much said yes to everything because we were so desperate not to miss an opportunity. In hindsight, this meant we ended up spending a lot of time on high involvement, low return activities that were a distraction from what we were really good at. We’ve gotten a lot better at saying no since then.
