What do you do with 10,000 mislabeled boxes of toilet paper that can’t be sold as-is? If you’re Danny Alexander, co-founder of Who Gives A Crap, you turn it into a hilarious, viral marketing moment and call it the “Whoops Edition.” Danny tells host Elizabeth Gore why this happy accident became one of the most successful campaigns his company has ever run, and what it taught him about why people don’t trust brands, but do trust people.
It’s a big mistake we made, but it’s actually one that we ended up ended up turning into something really amazing. I think we
this is maybe eight years ago or so. We um, we accidentally made maybe it was like 10,000 boxes of toilet paper that were labeled incorrectly. So I think they said they were two ply but we’ve always made three ply. Um so I’m not sure how it happened.
But we whatever the mistake was, they weren’t salable as is. and so, um we got our our team together including, you know, a cross-functional team to think like, how do we solve this?
We don’t want to just like send it back to the factory and have them repackage it. That’s super wasteful. We don’t want to just like recycle it, which is what a lot of companies would do. They would just say like, ah, this is just waste. write it off and and dump it.
So, um, yeah, we decided to celebrate it and we decided to do, we called it the Whoops edition and we created this whole campaign about like celebrating mistakes and um,
we uh, we did I I did create this campaign where I blamed my co-worker Phil and said here our head of supply chain at the time.
Um, and uh it was absolutely not his fault. I think it was my fault. but I had a had a lot of fun creating like a landing page and an email campaign blaming Phil and then celebrating the the the failure. We included the whoopy cushion in in the top of every box. Um and we just put a put a big sticker on the outside of the box saying the whoops edition that said like the real the real um information that it needed.
So, it was a great experience and I think it was honestly like one of the one of the best campaigns we’ve ever done, like really successful.
I think it just landed because people like people. Like people don’t like brands. Like people want to hear from other people.
