Brandspiration: Who Gives a Crap

To celebrate B-Corp month, our editorial consultant Hayley kicks off a new regular slot for Red Setter with a brand that inspires through impactful action and category-busting design.

From our Monday news round-ups to celebrating clients’ work to general lunchtime natter, we talk a lot at Red Setter about the brands we love. It got me thinking, what constitutes brand love: how do we define something so intangible and visceral?

After some mental journeying around concepts including the ability to build trust, create emotional connections, drive loyalty, and stir nostalgia, I finally landed on a definition of brand love that felt right to me.

Like most Millennial parents, we keep a close eye on our kids’ internet settings to try and keep any insidious marketing at bay. Based on that notion of some brands as unwelcome intruders, I realise that the brands we actively invite into our home and, more importantly, introduce to our daughters, are the ones I trust—and maybe even love.

And so, to Who Gives a Crap (WGaC), the Australian-born subscription toilet roll company. To those questioning the idea that a bog roll service can elicit any sort of emotional connection, hear me out. Like presumably many others, I discovered WGaC via a friend; a strong precursor for forming a positive inclination towards a brand. This was also mid-pandemic, while stuck at home with a propensity to try and make meaning from the things around us, and through the considered choices we made. With loo roll in short supply at supermarkets, I suppose the conditions were strongly pre-set for signing up to a subscription service to the stuff.

Five years on, though, and with toilet roll in plentiful supply in shops, I’m still a loyal WGaC subscriber, and not just because its eco-friendly, paper-wrapped product seems a more ethical choice for something we flush down the pipes every day.

The WGaC brand is uplifting, its packaging is a thing of unexpected, playful beauty, and that custom typeface… 😁 Also, its monthly email is one of the few that doesn’t make me hit unsubscribe very hard. In terms of brand voice, which can so often veer towards cringeworthy or over-familiar for purpose-driven companies, WGaC is on point. It earns its tone of voice through a commitment to action, and by never greenwashing. This company has stuck to its promise of donating 50% of profits to water and sanitation projects. By consistently innovating with its products (print an awful ex’s love letters onto my toilet roll? Yes please) and bundling products in enticing ways, I’m never bored as a customer. To coin an ambition often promised yet rarely delivered by brands, I am genuinely “surprised and delighted” to see what’s coming next in the world of toilet roll and eco-friendly products.

In truth, I’ve sometimes felt resistant to the idea of brands eliciting ‘love’. Emotion is so enmeshed in the unquantifiable, the visceral, the soul, that I can personally struggle with the idea of any form of commerciality having any place in the realm of feeling. But putting the proven business impact of well-designed brands aside for one moment, they also have an inextricable role in meaning-making, memory, belonging, and shared connection. My most recent communication from my brother was a text asking if I remembered a childhood teatime favourite of ours, cod in butter sauce. Of course I did. Who could forget rectangular, plastic-wrapped fish! Served with Birdseye frozen petit pois, obviously. Adam’s message transported me straight back to our dining table in ‘80s Wembley. There, Captain Birdseye was very much a regular guest—and facilitator of many shared jokes over Mum’s ‘boil in the bag’ last resort (but nonetheless our favourite) dinner.

So, I suppose the answer is that I measure brand love by my inclination to invite it into my home—and those that elicit an extra bit of joy are always welcome back.