The Shark Tank Winners Building A Billion-Dollar Bathroom Brand

[Music] the American toilet paper Market is an 11 billion industry but using dry paper to clean up during a bathroom visit may become a thing of the past if the dudes at dude wipes have anything to say about [Music] it we knew no one had ever made wipes for guys we knew no one was really making flushable wipes we knew the toilet paper space in general had never even said the word butt or poop before so we just saw this whole thing is so stale and so dry and crusty that we could get in there with our fun and our clean wet wipes and make a splash the Chicago based creators of dude wipes sold $110 Million worth of flushable wipes last year making up 1% of the entire toilet paper industry they first gained overnight Fame after an appearance on Shark Tank in 2015 sharks are you still wiping the oldfashioned way with just toilet paper if so you're a chump and your ass hates you for it but they actually started their Journey four years before their trip to the tank we were just hanging out every weekend doing the post colle thing dreaming big and trying to figure out what was next and I bought a bunch of baby wipes for the apartment at the time stock the bathroom everybody was kind of getting hooked on them and we kind of said well wait a minute here why why are these only for babies maybe there should be something for dudes maybe there could be a better brand a better product here wet wipes weren't themselves a novel idea but in 2011 most were not geared towards adults dude wipes are extra- large flushable wipes so ours are meant to go down the toilet disperse and flush unlike baby wipes you're not supposed to flush those and unlike toilet paper we actually get the whole job done yo so how crazy is this this is the original Dude wipes prototype so when you talk about bootstrapping and grinding and just making it happen you know this was our idea and we just had a white box that we started getting from the manufacturer you can see we scribbled the logo in on pencil here and so I always hold on to this because this shows you really what you can get done if you put your mind to it and that everybody has to start somewhere so every long journey starts with one wipe and this is where our long journey started this wasn't a group of guys with a history and toilet paper but they were lifelong friends so me and the dudes Jeff and Ryan have known each other since high school and even grade school so so we kind of met growing up playing sports together then we all went off to college did our thing they all moved in together after graduating from different colleges and were all working N9 to five jobs in Chicago Riley in sales for construction Tech firm Megan in marketing and clim Kowski is an investment banker we had all these different backgrounds what we really shared in common was like a fun loving spirit and wanting to do something entrepreneurial let me tell you the three of them are extremely amazing guys they really know their no pun intended okay he's the cheap salesman and he's the CEO and you know I've noticed good CEOs can transition from one topic to another seamlessly this guy does that well Jeff knows all the numbers intuitively he understands everything about the business that's going on and Ryan is extremely creative on the marketing front so the three of them have complimentary skills that really work after their light bulb moment with the white box the dudes got into action investing $30,000 to get their idea off the ground we put our heads together we bootstrapped we scraped and clawed to find a manufacturer make a really cool brand that we thought just talked like us like regular people would talk and we were never scared to take a chance and put our money down and buy these dude wipes even though we didn't know how to sell them we didn't know how to do anything you have to start with that mentality where you should be afraid not to do it that you look back on your life and say oh well why didn't I take that risk or try to do something there so that's how you got to flip your mindset in the beginning it's not the fear of what goes wrong it's the fear of doing nothing and looking back and say why didn't we do something so scared money don't make no money once you get them focused on something they really attack it we at actually just selling product out of the trunk of our car or we would go to a college orientation and hand out product and try and sell them to frat houses and so it was literally that like hand to mouth boots on the ground stuff in the beginning and then we started selling them more online in addition to handing out samples at frat houses they found success in subscription boxes and selling on Amazon from the beginning they always knew who they were and what they were selling all along the way you're going to have people trying to water down your brand make it a little Tamer you're going to have people trying to water down your culture make it more bureaucratic and and you know there is certain es and flows and balances of as you grow but what you really can't do is lose all of that magic that dudess doesn't mean just male these guys will be the first ones to tell you anybody can be a dude we did some research recently that showed that uh maybe about over a third of our users are women more than that are actually the buyers they're buying it for the men in their household dude built their brand to be the opposite of the toilet paper Giants that long dominated the industry instead of avoiding messy bathroom topics they leaned into them they had done some videos some absolutely nasty if you ask me videos that were online I watched them and I was like oh God no okay there's no taste here but but they were funny and uh you know they had gotten them to where they were and that was great so we weren't afraid to say what this product was for we always say the dudeness is the magic so our dudeness is that we will talk to you just like a normal human being we will say poop we will say butt we will say this clean better than toilet paper we will say all these things that big toilet paper is afraid to say there's a lot of different brands that some have benefit superiority some have reason why superiority some have brand character superiority like you buy Old Spice because of the character of the brand this brand is very much like that you buy it because of the dudeness it may not have been for everyone but the dude's method hit home for many they landed their first major deal with Kroger in 2015 we got invited down to Cincinnati and we got to pitch dude wipes to a national toilet paper buyer and he was kind of a cowboy he was kind of a toilet paper Cowboy he looked at us and he said said you know what this is interesting guys I'm going to take a chance on you and don't screw it up we really took that to heart he was Bing about A2 million bet on dude wipes he was going to launch them Nationwide put one of our products on the shelf and that was just huge for us we had to figure out how to make that many dude wipes how to distribute them to Kroger distribution centers all that stuff it was truly a breakthrough moment in that same year they finally landed a spot on the hit business show shark tank we tried out three times three years in a row so third time was the charm for Shark Tank we emailed our update over again now we had just launched in Kroger so the business was starting to gain some real traction we were kind of that perfect size for Shark Tank like we hadn't made our first million yet but we had proven out some product Market fit we were kind of well on the way and so boom we got the invite to La 300K 25% yeah TI gok CU been cut them a $300,000 check for 25% of the business and they become one of the most successful businesses to ever appear on the show we Clos the deal with Mark after the show and he's been our only investor ever since that we've been able to grow with and be a huge Mentor for the business and also a big spokesperson for dude wipes to help promote dude wipes now that's fresh the Shark Tank effect was almost immediate sales jumped tfold to $3 million in 2016 they were able to leverage the momentum from the show for a trial in 1,500 Walmart stores in 2018 Walmart's a big deal we know there's a lot of Walmarts but really if you could be successful in Walmart you're kind of part of the American brand lexicon right like you can apply to people at any price anywhere around the country and now your brand is expected to be there today sales in Walmart stores and on Walmart.com make up about 15% of dude's total revenue with retail comprising about half of dudes over R sales its biggest channel is Amazon which makes up 38% of revenues the retailers are looking for productivity in that paper aisle they got these big bulky things that take up a heck of a lot of space and they need to make sure that they're turning the dollars there as a result wipes are a wonderful item for them to add to their offering to Consumers another key moment for dude was when Co struck and toilet paper aisles across the country emptied at an alarming rate so all the sudden retailers are saying we'll take as many dude wipes as you can make we're selling out on Amazon we're doing Millions per week and you know it's just crazy business and we tripled our manufacturing capacity overnight and just started pumping out as many dude wipes as we could making them here in the USA allowed us to make them and get them out to people super quick so we were able to capitalize on the shortage of toilet paper and really come in and serve people in a time where maybe their moods were down from there an interesting Trend began to emerge 75% of customers who bought wet wipes for the first time during the pandemic went back to buy the products again according to dude's own studies of consumer data it wasn't just that we were out of toilet paper so we bought dude wipes it was well we were out of toilet paper we tried dude wipes now we really like them and we're going to keep buying them data from neelon analytics shows the overall category has grown in size by 35% since 2020 compared to 5% growth in dry toilet paper during the same period part of that is because of the sheer size of the dry toilet paper industry which did $9.9 billion in sales in 2020 versus 530 million for wet toilet paper dude wipes has made up more than 40% of this category growth it was almost like a big awareness moment for our brand and for wipes in general that hey you should try these and we were able to you know serve the customer and grow from there but there is the possibility that other Giants in the toilet paper industry like Kimberly Clark's cottell will move to Stamp Out dude's success with their own wet wipes so when you do something interesting and unique there's going to be knockoffs and followers and all of those things and really that means you created a category where other people think they can draft off it but comes back to if he ain't first you're last so anybody trying to do the same thing as we're doing they're running a Fool's errand they're in a losers position cotell is one of our biggest competitors in our some of our Mass Outlets we have overtaken cottell recently so we are becoming the number one brand in several [Music] retailers dude wipes has embarked on their first mass media campaign our marketing goal is reach as many people as possible with our Superior Cleaning message and we've got some indications that that works really well especially in the advertising that we've just completed why did dude wipes clean better cuz they're extra large cuz they're flushable because obviously wet cleans better than dry with big plans to take over more of the toilet paper industry dude is doubling its marketing spend and pulling off even bigger stunts for this year's Super Bowl dude bought multiple giant Billboards overlooking the Las Vegas Strip which it populated with potty jokes and I told told the dudes look you've got this major advantage the other guys can't crap on toilet paper okay because they they sell that stuff you don't you can go after this and the toilet paper Market is about seven or eight times the size of the flushable wipes market now we are growing dramatically okay but it will take a while but just by comparing ourselves to that we get ourselves in that mix and that's a good place to be dude still has some catching up to do to reach category leaders but their wipes are now available in more than 20,000 stores across the US with some big deals on the horizon just cuz you didn't know how to do it doesn't mean you can't learn how to do it and we're living proof of that guys with no experience no Capital no investors have really been able to grow a company into a big disruptor of the toilet paper aisle Nationwide [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Forbes

Views: 101,444

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, dude wipes, mark cuban, sean riley, ryan meegan, shark tank, jeffrey klimkowski, pete carter, creative haystack, money, small business

Id: 1N7_iLgYQOw

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024