Simon Griffiths

Early days

Prior to co-founding Who Gives a Crap, Griffiths graduated with bachelors degrees in Commerce and Engineering at the University of Melbourne. Following graduation, he help started Ripple, an internet advertising model that donated to charity. This philosophy continued with Shebeen, a socially minded bar that aimed to donate to charity with every drink.

Without many similar business models to draw inspiration from, Griffiths says that a lot of the organisation of Shebeen and Ripple involved making things up on the go. While neither project proved to be viable in the long term, they taught him valuable lessons that he takes into his ventures today.

A roll in every bathroom

When they started Who Gives a Crap in 2012, Griffiths and his co-founders Jehan Ratnatunga and Danny Alexander knew from experience that it would be best to find a consumer base before starting production. They set out to crowdfund through IndieGoGo, and Griffiths pledged to sit on a toilet in a warehouse until the tally reached $50,000.

“Our whole business is actually built on jumping in and riding waves at the right times,” he says.

“There's this great saying that the surfer that catches the wave is the one that's in the water.”

They’d chosen their waves wisely. Who Gives a Crap were one of the first businesses to reach success through crowdfunding, and Griffiths’s stint on the toilet gained them a huge audience in the earliest days of internet virality, shortly after Facebook had introduced the 'Share' button. Who Gives a Crap toilet paper now sits in bathrooms across Australia and much of the world. This year, they’ve made their second ever multi-million-dollar donation, taking their total past $15 million. As the reach and the impact of the business grows, Griffiths keeps his focus on the ‘profit-for-good’ model that he and his colleagues have honed.

“We would sacrifice some donation this year, if it helps us [grow the business] to donate more overall in the long run.”

Capitalising on excitement

Griffiths’s fascination with economics and the chaotic world has helped to train his business sense. Whether a business was selling beers or toilet paper, Griffiths saw an untapped desire for the consumer to have an emotional investment in the product they’re buying. Simply, it’s in the best interest of Griffiths, Who Gives a Crap, and their consumers if everyone in the process is excited about the impact the business is making. It’s the core of Griffiths’s business philosophy, while also conveniently being good marketing.

“Making people understand, believe, get excited by and want to tell other people about the product - I think that's the holy grail,” he says.

“You can start to play with people's decision making, which is all microeconomics, and how they place value on the goods and services that they purchase.”

“Bringing all of that together, combining the economics and the social impact and getting it into that moment where it's ready to explode. That's what I live for.”

A beacon for change

Fundamentally, Griffiths sees Who Gives a Crap as an opportunity to show other businesses that it’s possible to actively make change.

“I think we've got an opportunity to shape, not just the toilet paper category, but capitalism more broadly, if we get this right,” he says.

Hopefully that means that lots of other companies will come along, and we can be a lighthouse to allow people to follow in our footsteps.