WHO GIVES A CRAP
Launching New Products & New Teams
Who Gives a Crap, a sustainable toilet paper company, was seeking new ways of understanding their customers to inform faster innovation. Digging deeper into the humanity behind the people that use their products allowed Who Gives a Crap to delight their current customers while also reaching new customers.
I joined their team to give them a better understanding of who their customers were across three countries, and created the base for a new insights team that thrives at the company today.
Building on that work, I collaborated with their teams to identify new product opportunities and led the development of their first new product: The Dream Cloth.
Insights
Our team performed design research using a combination of in-person and remote tools in order to understand customers across the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.
We uncovered a wealth of actionable insights, included behavioral science data and delivered a detailed study on customer archetypes (internal factors that motivate action) and household dynamics (external factors that affect decision making).
Once we had the data it was important that it was useful and accessible to the company, which is why we also created an internal digital platform. This platform gave the company a common framework, language and structure to talk about, and design for, their customers.
A teaser of the insights platform:
The insights work was so successful in building a better understanding of their customers that I later worked with them to create a permanent Insights Team that still thrives today.
The Dream Cloth
One part sponge, one part cloth and three parts marvelous, the dream cloth is a reusable (and washable!) paper towel alternative. They are 100% plant based and can hold 13x their weight in water. I collaborated with the Who Gives A Crap team to ideate, test, develop and launch the Dream Cloth based on insights about their customers, their business and the environment.
Although sales data isn’t public, the Dream Cloth has generated millions of dollars in revenue for the company and has driven significant contributions to the company’s philanthropic mission. To date, Who Gives A Crap has donated over $8 million USD.
”Mari played a vital role in taking Who Gives A Crap’s consumer insights capabilities from 0 to 1. Her deep expertise in research, bias towards action & hands on collaboration style resulted in huge strides of progress over an incredibly short time frame. Our small team has now found its feet, is in high demand across our organization and making meaningful contributions to how we grow and evolve the business by delivering better experiences.”
— Meghan Olney
Head of Insights, Who Gives a Crap