How the Co Founder of Bulldog and Waken Built His Businesses | Simon Duffy | The 2%

We would just walk around stores and go, right, this is a huge category that I think has looked the same for like 20 years. The best brands sort of sit at that confluence between vision, opportunity and desire.

Simon, you are a personal care entrepreneur extraordinaire. So you look like you wanted to say something there.

I was having a sip of water. That's a lovely introduction. Thank you.

So you've gone from accountant to blue chip to inventing one of the UK's largest men's skincare brands. Skincare. I think that is doing over 100 million now globally.

I actually think sort of the last time I checked in with the team, it's probably about 150 million worldwide, 35 countries. Been a cool journey. Way bigger than perhaps we thought it might be.

Yeah. And you had a successful exit with that in 2016. I know you sold that to Edgewell Personal Care.

Correct.

And. And I know you got some of your, you know, background and innovation from Saatchi and Saatchi and. And now you're one of the co founders of Wake and Mouth Care, which I think you started in 2019, right?

We launched in 2000 and yes, we started in January 2019, launched in November 2019 in stores over here in the UK.

Okay. And you even developed curriculum for the entrepreneurship and innovation, I guess, section at the new College of the Humanities. Right. So quite a lot.

That was something I really wanted to do. I know. I did that for seven years. It was a really cool university concept. They were trying to combine the best bits of the Ivy League in the US and the Oxford Cambridge tutorial based system over here. But they also wanted to take humanities subjects and make sure that people left having studied humanities subjects more employable. And that's where entrepreneurship became part of their overall program. And I developed the. The curriculum and taught that for seven years. And that was seriously cool to have a go at teaching and try something different and spend time with younger people, because I think entrepreneurship is such a fascinating and brilliant thing to do and it is really underserved by the education system. So that was, you know, a personal passion project.

Let's start there. Were you, were you born an entrepreneur?

I think I always had an entrepreneurial leaning, like I was always trying to come up with schemes to make a little bit of extra pocket money. But I've always admired people like the Mark Zuckerberg who is able to.

Maybe he's an outlier, but create something straight out of university. If I look back out to my own personal entrepreneurial journey, I think there was a Few formative experiences that got me to the point where I was ready to take it on. I think in my own sort of story. I started in a really conventional job, accountancy in London, you know, as generic as it could possibly have been based on my background. I had the opportunity to go to New Zealand. I thought I'd only go for a year but I ended up there for four and a half, five years, worked in Saatchi and Saatchi, started to work on innovation. But I think just taking myself out of my comfort zone, going to a brand new place where nobody knew me, my educational background had no idea, you know, it was just, it was just that thing, I think, and it was such a positive, energetic and practical mindset over there and I think that really rubbed off for me.

How do you go from, you know.

I mean, look, when I took accountancy courses in university, those were like the most dull, worst, like I, like I hated them everywhere. I don't know, there was few people that I met that were like, oh, I can't wait to get to that accounting class. So how do you go from something that I think most people would kind of like think is like quite dry and very unentrepreneurial to, you know, what you're doing these days? Like how does that happen?

Well, like most people I didn't have a clue really what I was going to do after university and I wanted to study history, I studied history at university but. So I joined a leading accountancy firm in the UK which ran a scholarship scheme. So you. I didn't want to go straight to university, I wanted to travel so therefore I needed to earn some money before I traveled. So I joined what they called this scholarship scheme. And you joined with the graduates that, you know, the big graduate intake following university. And then I was employed by this company during my university holidays which helped to fund my university and I finished university, finished three years doing history and thought, what do I do with history? I don't want to be a history teacher. And I thought accountancy would be a good three years to get some business know how and experience onto my CV before I really figured it out. But I would say after about six months, everything you were talking about, then it was dry and I knew it wasn't for me. I wasn't feeling fulfilled.

It was the wrong place to expend my energy just straight out of university. So I packed it in, moved to New Zealand, found a job, I think I told my mum I was going for a year and ended up staying for Five and just absolutely loved it. Met my wife in New Zealand. The team I was in were all taken and moved to New York. So I had another two, two and a half years in New York, which for similar reasons and different reasons was also just absolutely awesome. Like the buzz and the energy, but also professionally the opportunity to work with some of the biggest and coolest brands in the world on their innovation strategies. That also gave me a little bit of insight, inspiration. You know, they did some things brilliantly, but I also, as an innovator, I think you also see the frustrations and how long they can take to get to certain decisions and it gave me the confidence to try this stuff for myself. So about seven, seven and a half years away from home, moved back to the UK to start Bulldog in 2006. And you know, if I was to think back to where I could have been if I decided to stick it out at accountancy, it would be a much poorer existence, I would think. I don't mean financially, I just mean being unfulfilled, doing something I wouldn't have loved. But I could easily have seen myself getting sort of trapped into that mindset, living in London, staying with the same friends I knew from school and university and sort of working myself up a big firm. I'm so pleased that I didn't do that and I sort of tried to do something else.

And I think it's so inspirational too because I bet a lot of people, you know, listening aren't entrepreneurs but would like to be entrepreneurs. They might be in a job like accountancy or something else which is traditionally considered, you know, more risk averse and not the entrepreneurial type. But you're definitely breaking the mold and demonstrating that you can completely switch tracks. Right. Personally, was risk aversion a thing for you or did it not really factor in? Was it easy just to assume the risk of starting your own thing?

Well.

Yeah, I think so. I don't want to be glib about that. I think if you sit down rationally and try and list out all of the reasons why it doesn't make sense to start a male skincare company, there'd be so many, you know, resource big companies, difficult space that traditionally wasn't a space that had grown that much before we started. So there's thousands of reasons to say no. But ultimately you just have to back your conviction. You have to, I think you have to think I have a vision for where I think this category is going to go and I think some enough consumers to make a viable business will see this over time and join this space and you just have to make a start. And I think.

Do you think, sorry, jump in. But I just want to pull on this thread a little bit. I'm just curious your point of view on this. Do you think that you, as an entrepreneur, that.

You view risk in the same way, but you are better at figuring out ways to protect the downside of that risk, or do you think fundamentally that you just don't think things are as risky as the average person views them to be?

I think it's the latter. I think fundamentally I don't see it as risky because I think.

I loved my career and I left a really good job and I thought, what is the worst that can happen? I can start a business and it goes bankrupt in two or three years. I've had a go at this thing that I've always been interested in, and perhaps that is less. It may disrupt my career. Perhaps I'd be able to plug back into a big agency with all of this additional learning that I've had and experience and.

Opportunity to have tried new things. Perhaps I even plug back into a big career to a conventional job higher up the ladder anyway. Like, seriously, what's the downside? Perhaps there's a bigger risk. Waking up at 45, 50, having always wanted to try something and then just thinking, oh, it's too late because I'm trapped into a mortgage. I'm. I'm sort of supporting a big family at this point. So I really thought it's now or never, you know, like, you know, in my personal life, I think I was reaching a point. Having lived away from home for seven years, thinking, what country am I going to live in? And, you know, I had a girlfriend who I wanted to propose to. I wanted to have a family. So I thought, you know, at this point, I'm sort of 26, 27, 28. Like, we really should get started on this because I have a window of time where we can scrimp and sort of live in bed sits. I lived on a building site for a bit, you know, but you can't really do that when you've got kids or, you know, not as easily. So. So I did feel. Come on, come on, man, you have to give this a go. Like, you know, you're running out of time if you want to try this. So that was an incentive to try the other. The other thing I'd say is, you know, the number of people in, let's call them conventional jobs that I've met while I've done Bulldog. And latterly, while I'm doing waken, who say, hey, can I, can I come and talk with you? Could be friends, could be people that just get in touch. I always try and make myself available. I've got this idea, they've got brilliant ideas. More often than not, they are great ideas. And the number of people I think I've met who have great ideas who don't even make a start, you know, I think partly it's just about having a crack, having the courage and your conviction to, right, I'm going to put down tools on my career for a year and give this a go for a year, sprint at this, see how much I can do and then make a decision about do I want to stick with this or I don't want, do I just, you know, I don't want to be too proud to pack something in that isn't working and go back to what I was doing before. But most people don't even make a start. So that is such a sad fact.

And I think this is a really, like, important insight that, you know, we're talking about here. You know, again.

Somebody listening right now could probably be thinking that, well, yeah, the reason I haven't started something is because I can't figure out how to make it less risky. But what we're saying, and I can totally relate to what you're saying as well. As an entrepreneur, it wasn't that I was good at de risking things. It was more that I didn't perceive the risk to be as big as the average person perceives it to be. I think that's far more powerful because what we're actually talking about there is that you have a belief that even if the worst happens, that you'll just pick yourself back up. Right. Instead of trying to only move if you can eliminate all of that from happening.

That is so right. And I also think you've got a risk from a slightly different perspective of there's a certain mindset where people think they have to understand everything about a problem or a business opportunity before they make a start. And I think that totally misses the point. I think you need to make a start, create a concept, get it into market to really start the learning. You know, with, with waken, with Bulldog. If you are not open to change learning, adding, subtracting, like slightly changing your, your direction of travel, like, you've got so much rich insight when you actually start. That's the period where you should be really learning. Like too many people try and do too much research and take Too much time to sort of de risk success, you know, so de risk failure because they can sort of do this research phase up front. But that misses the point. You need to do enough to get going with a sense of purpose. But then you've really got to open your eyes, really learn, really try and understand what's working or isn't to sort of perfect your proposition. So you don't need to have all the answers before you start. And also you don't need to be a domain expert in almost any part of what you're doing. Like, I think you just have to believe that you can be good with people and you can collaborate your way to success, whether that's through building a great team or if you have, like when we did with Bulldog, not that much resource identifying consultants, third parties, companies that you can work with to take a big complex problem, break it down into lots of different bits, and then find experts to work with to solve all of those little bits and roll it up into something that works.

Yeah, yeah. That's the thing that I've always comforted myself with, is that no matter what venture I want to start or new thing that I want to do, that I almost think of it as like, matter is neither created nor destroyed in the sense that all the expertise that I need to make whatever this business is a flying success, it already exists. It exists within people, books, knowledge out there. And so the only thing that we need to do as entrepreneurs is be.

The masterful kind of coach or orchestrator or conductor and kind of find it all, stitch it all together. Right. And make it work.

Yeah, it's like getting the right people to do the right things at the right time. That's what you've got to do. Yeah.

So, okay, so let's go back to. Very cool. So let's go back to. So, Bulldog. So.

Just describe for those that don't know Bulldog, what were its main kind of products?

What were you doing? We made brilliant, naturally formulated, sustainably manufactured skincare products for men. Latterly, we've also added razors and blades, deodorant, shower gels. But it all started off in skincare. We wanted to compete with the likes of Nivea and l' Oreal to really ferment change in this category. Hitherto, this was a category that Perhaps only about 15% of men were using skincare versus 80, 90% of women. So something wasn't working with these massive established brands and companies. So the idea with Bulldog was to bring sustainable and natural thinking to the male skincare place, but space, but to do it in a way that would attract men into this category for the first time. So we did that through almost simplifying and demystifying this space for people that hadn't used these products before. You know, often sort of wellness or sort of better for you entrepreneurs at the moment, they take a category that is working and then just offer an eco alternative to a behavior that is understood. And that's a brilliant thing to do. I think the challenge with Bulldog was a bit different because the category wasn't really working. Part of our job was to attract new people into this space for the first time. So that was something that we did. I mean, the idea for it came in New York. Annabelle, my wife, sent me out to Whole Foods to get a skincare product for her. I loved Whole Foods. It was like cool, vibrant, full of all the stuff that I was interested in, sort of natural and sustainable, but it was like a real buzzy, energetic place. I went to the Union Square store, like December 2005, it was freezing cold to get this naturally formulated skincare product for her. And I thought, I'm going to get moisturizer for myself. Couldn't find it. Spoke to the Whole body, Whole Foods sort of shop team, like, where is your male skincare section? It was like, oh, we don't have one. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. So like, what do you do when men want skincare products? And they say, well, we, we recommend this product from Aleda or this product from Kiss My Face. They're so typically female brands. And I was like, ah, you know, that's what a lot of entrepreneurs will say. I think there's a gap in the market here. No one is doing this if it's not in New York City, in Whole Foods, maybe it doesn't exist. And then with my friend Rodri, who was my business partner in Bulldog and is my business partner in Waken, I think that first six months for us was trying to validate there's a gap in the market here, but is there a market in the Gap? And could we create products and do that in a way where we could make a business out of this space? Like, what would that involve? And we were doing that while we were both working. And then it got to the point where like, we have to commit to this, like this really exciting. Let's just do this, let's raise some money. Visa wise, we moved back to the uk, got it going, found a factory, started speaking to retailers. June 2007, six products started in Sainsbury's, which is a big grocer over here for the first time. And we sort of worked from there.

And what were your most. Looking back at your. We're going to get to waken what you're currently doing in a moment. But just sticking with Bulldog, because this, to me, this feels like it really was your entrepreneurial training ground. And that being the case, there was probably a much higher percentage of mistakes in that experience than there was that there is in Waken. So what were your most valuable mistakes during the Bulldog time?

We didn't get our packaging right. So we had three or four goes at, I think, optimizing the presentation to consumers and sort of really understanding what was working. But back to what I was saying before, that was always the idea as well, to get these products going and then to learn as we go. So if you did a focus group, which is how big consumer products companies think about innovation, why aren't men using skincare? I doubt a single person would have said yes, but if there was a naturally formulated one named after a dog, I would definitely give it a go. Like, no one is saying that. So you are sort of making a bit of a leap. But, you know, the downside of changing your packaging is you, you're itching to do it because it's a better way of communicating your, you know, your features and benefits and values and purpose to consumers. But it leaves a big warehouse full of obsolete stock. So that was quite an expensive change to make. I think we also weren't focused enough when we started. We started with six products, but that included the shower gel, a shampoo, shaving skincare. I think we worked out. Before we could go broad, we had to really win and create something that had really real momentum in just one product category. So after a couple of years, we sort of decided, let's really focus on skincare. So for us, that meant moisturizer and face wash. So men who were, say, a bit cynical about our skin care is not for me. We would say, don't worry about everything else, just try these two steps. Wash your face, moisturize your face. It takes about the same time to do that as it does to brush your teeth. You definitely have time. And if you just make this small, positive step, but a small step, but you just do it every day, your skin will sort of thank you. Over the long term, you'll start to sort of have healthier skin. So that that added a lot focus to the business. And with that came economies of scale. And we were able to sort of improve our cost profile. That meant we could invest more. I think what I'd wished I'd done with Bulldog in a position to do that would be to recruit experts into the team more quickly. Like, I think Roger and I were a bit guilty of trying to do everything ourselves, not really finding quickly enough the right balance between what bit should we do ourselves and what bit should we put people in who are frankly better than us and get better at sort of building a team and delegating? So I think that that was a sort of learning thing for both of us. But partly that was to do with resource. We started with, we raised about a million pounds, which sounds like a lot of money, but for sort of professional people that sort of are involved in investing in brands, it's a tiny amount of money to launch a brand with. And that was pretty much the only fundraising we ever did. So we really set ourselves the challenge of figuring out how to make Bulldog profitable and scaling within our own means. So we didn't build a huge team or have huge marketing ahead of sales. Everything had to. We generated everything through figuring out a profitable model and then scaling a profitable model. And we just. We sort of grew headcount, grew marketing expense through that.

Beautiful, beautiful. And so entrepreneurship and innovation, obviously they go hand in hand, which is most certainly why that was the curriculum that you developed during the seven years that you were quite enamored with, as you said earlier when you were teaching. So is there a formula for innovation?

I don't know if there's a formula where it. Where, you know, scientifically, do this, do this, do this, and you always get an answer. But one of the things that we taught at the New College of the Humanities was it's a combination of vision, opportunity and desire. So if you can imagine, like a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles, you're really looking for your brand idea to sit in the middle of those three circles. And we spent time.

During that university period unpacking what that meant. And what I mean by that is you've got the founder's vision. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do that's different? What are you anticipating? You've got the category opportunity. Where is the gap in the market? You're trying to understand.

The role that you can play. Meaningful differentiation is, I think, what you're looking for there. It's one thing to be different to the category, but you need to be different and relevant. Like, you need to be doing something that people are going to want to support. Financially, and then it's consumer desire. Do people actually want to buy this? And the best brands sort of sit at that confluence between vision, opportunity, and desire. So if there's a formula, at least to defining what you're doing, that would be part of it. And then I think you need to hit it with discipline, determination. It's not a formula, but I think a common success factor is tenacity, not giving up, work ethic. And then I think you also have to be a great collaborator, good with people, so that you can sort of work out what you're not good at and then work out people that you can work with to get it done. And then I think you have to be sort of flexible, nimble, and not too proud because you're developing something which you're really proud of, and you have to be totally prepared to listen and understand what's working, what isn't, and then change it as you go. So I'm not quite sure whether that's a formula, but those would be, I think, common factors that would sort of help with the process.

Yeah, no, yeah, I like it. And as you were talking, I was thinking about going back to my Skype days when we were building that before we sold it to ebay. So vision. The whole world can talk for free.

Yeah.

Opportunity.

There wasn't a good voiceover IP client with video on the market at the time. Desire. Do people want to talk for free?

So it's like, tick, tick, tick, all there. So it passes the Skype test. Okay, so we got Bulldog. We exit, sell it to Edgewell Personal Care. What.

Did you already have waken in mind? Was that like, okay, we just do that or how did that happen?

I did not have waken in mind when we sold bulldog. I was 100% focused on bulldog. And in the run up to the sale, I'd spent a lot of time in America. At that point, we were the number one men's brand in that Whole Foods natural speciality channel. Just I'd been in Chicago with Walgreens, Minneapolis with Target, you know, all over the place. And I was building out opportunities to cross over into food, drug and mass in America, which was hugely exciting. And we were starting to worry that perhaps our capacity to supply and all the operational parts.

We were sort of building a bigger business than we could support. So it was an opportune that these big companies started to look to partner with us. We thought it was the right thing to do with the brand. But I was myopic on Bulldog, really. And then I had this two great years working with the folks at Edgewell, taking Bulldog around the world. We went from 12 to 35 countries. It was a cool thing to do, but I was sort of itching to do something else. And I think.

I remember walking around big retailers all over the world.

And people can do that themselves. I don't think there's sort of like, it wasn't really a data led approach to sort of finding a new territory. We would just walk around stores and go, right, this, this category has been done. There's some really cool, interesting, disruptive brands in there. This category has been done. And then you got to mouthwash and it was like, wow, this is a huge category that I think has looked the same for like 20 years.

No one is, yeah, as you say, so boring. Right? It's like Listerine. Yeah. And it's the same in Target, it's the same in Carrefour, it's the same in Boots in the uk. And then I looked at mouthwash and I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like no one's doing anything interesting in mouthwash. And then you and I started to like, look at some of the data, you know, just, just stuff that's readily available on the Internet. And it's fast like compared to when we started within skincare. It's like, you know, I think I said something like 20% of men use male skincare products and that's going up, but it's about 20%. Mouthwash is used by 50% of adult men and adult women. Toothpaste is used by like 95%. Then dental is a vast, fast category. And then things that personally interested to me, sustainability, natural ingredients, beautiful design. This category is bereft of environmental thinking. You know, beauty's been transformed by sustainable brands, indie brands, natural ingredients. Like you cannot, you, you cannot like enter a store without tripping over about 10 brands that all on this space. And that's brilliant because that's where the world needs to go. Like dental. Like take a typical Colgate toothpaste tube, the way that's formulated, that's going straight to landfill. Those products are not recycled. It's like one and a half billion of those.

Do not get recycled, but purchased in America every year. It's like 300 million in the UK. You look at a sort of a typical mouthwash bottle, black plastic caps, that's not getting recycled. So it's a category that is not thinking about the environment or, you know, another, another mint. Mint is the go to flavor in dental. There's not a Single major dental brand that uses real mint. It's completely artificial. Really.

They even do this in shampoo now. Right, right.

So, yeah, so it's like you just, I was thinking, like, you just cannot get away. You just could not get away in beauty with how the dental brands are sort of offering consumers products. Like, everything's synthetic, nothing is sustainable. And the other thing is they're just so ugly. So it's like when I moved house, sort of. I probably moved house 2017, I was unpacking my bathroom and it's sort of. This is again, sort of what was stimulating me to think about mouthwash. And it was. I had like this old mouthwash, you know, like where you drink it out of the cup. You'd put the cup on, all the mouthwash would sort of smear down the shoulders of the bottle. It got dusty. It was so disgusting. And I think a lot of the time people hide these products away, like headache pills, and when they, when they feel like they've got an issue, they reach for the mouthwash that sits at the back of the bathroom cabinet. We thought, what if we could create these products that are just so beautiful that you want to display them on your, you know, your bathroom cabinet? Wouldn't that be cool? You know, like, people are at home so much more now, sort of as a result of, you know, the changes in work habits, you know, sort of brought about by the lockdowns and all that sort of stuff. Like, bathrooms have become havens. Like, people think about them as their Instagram studios. Like, create products that are dense, like really hardworking, brilliant, effective dental products, but just make them beautiful. Like, it seems so obvious, but it was just so lacking in dental. So that was like the, that was sort of. It just felt like, wow, low interest category. And we just need to make high interest products. And I think that's the thing. Like, I hate it when people say, oh, it's a low interest product. I said, no, no. It's like it's the fault of the major brands that they've made this category low interest. Let's make high interest products that people can really get behind and feel excited by for the first time in that space. And that's what we're trying to do with Wake up.

Love it. I absolutely love it. Because.

You know, there's, there's a couple of different. So you've gone from accountancy.

Yeah.

People consider quite dull. Right. To entrepreneurship. You've proven that that can be done. And then you've taken what nobody even thinks of, frankly, as A category, right. And said, look, this can be shaken up. And not only that, but it needs to be shaken up. Right? Because the fact that these, these big brands don't have anybody challenging them, you know, all the artificial ingredients, the massive carbon footprint, you know, the single use plastic that you're talking about, it's like, no, nobody is doing anything. And these are high usage products. Meaning that there is a lot of stuff that's going into the landfill because we consume it so often. Right?

Yeah. People, you know, people are looking for ways that they can be more sustainable and sympathetic to the planet, you know, and you see that with, you know, avoiding meat, you know, sort of, you know, from vegans to just like people who just have a couple of meat free days. And I think how, you know, the brands that you support on your products that you use every day is just a great way to do that. You know, it's not everybody should be brushing their teeth every day. If you just opt for, you know, we have aluminum tubes that can be recycled. If you just opt for a product that is just a little bit better and everybody did that, that would make a huge impact. When it's all rolled up, it feels like a little thing, but it's, it's the same sort of behavior as walking rather than taking your car or dodging meat for a couple of days or perhaps taking one less flight. It's just all of these small things matter. I think the other thing we saw with Bulldog, we launched a bamboo razor and now we've got a razor where the handle is made from recycled glass from beer bottles and all of the packaging was in cardboard. Again, sounds really obvious, but if you sort of cast your mind to how you imagine this razor blade shelf, it's like everything's plastic and then the handle is on a sort of plastic sleigh that's wrapped in this plastic oyster pack which is almost imposs possible to open. It's like plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic. So we launched this, the first brand to launch a sort of bamboo and metal razor in cardboard. It was like dramatically less plastic. And we're still not a massive brand when it comes to shaving. But you go to the supermarkets now, every single brand like Gillette, all of their packaging is in cardboard. I'm not saying that we, they would say that stuff that I can't speak on their behalf, but we were the first brand to do that. And I think you can almost tip the much bigger companies into thinking more sustainably and offering consumers more sustainable products just by being a thought leader in the space. There needs to be a thought leader to try and ferment and precipitate positive change and Waken, you know, it will take a long time for us to have be a meaningful share player but by, by sort of creating these high interest products that offer people something different, we can nudge the bigger companies to more positive behavior. And that would be brilliant because it's like a burning problem at the moment, the lack of sustainability in this particular part of personal care because they're products that people use morning and evening and they have so much, you know, they're so broadly used versus other products and they're sort of fundamental to teeth health. So hopefully we sort of trigger a bit more positive and a bit more action and urgency in some other people too.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I just want to drive, underscore the point again. People who are listening. If you use mouthwash, you got to try this product, try wake and mouthwash because you're not just going to be.

You literally will be helping the planet by doing so and perhaps find a new product that you like better as well.

Now Simon, somebody listening can be like, okay, yeah, but Simon's not like me.

He'S just a serial entrepreneur. He's just hitting home run after home run. You had some great success but I'm sure you've had plenty of down moments too. So can you take us through your most recent example of discomfort professionally or something that didn't make you feel all that great? A bit of a knockdown perhaps?

Well, I mean the big challenge that we've had at Waken is partly timings. We launched in November 2019 and from March, April.

The world has changed and it's exactly the wrong time to be launching a sort of niche, natural, sustainable product into these big retailers because rightly so, these retailers are focused on feeding families but very quickly sort of doing everything online, you know, massively less people in their businesses, you know, less store as. So there was definitely a period where we just weren't getting any orders that was a bit daunting. I think there's been some things with Waken where we've under emphasized some important things on the first iterations of the products. We've haven't really told the story of mint like these intensely refreshing natural mints. I think for some.

I think for our core consumer, I think what we're learning is we're absolutely resonating brilliantly. But to perhaps take away some barriers for a broader audience who are perhaps more wedded to the traditional brands we need to tell our efficacy story a bit better. It's a bit hard to discover on the pack, so there's definitely been, you know, the way that we've launched the product, we could have done that better.

And we're way behind our plan now in terms of where we thought we'd be selling. So, like any entrepreneur, we are keeping a sort of tight view on cash and making sure that we're going to be able to get this into enough places to sort of do it in a way that means we can sustain our business. I tell you, at the moment, the big challenge is internationally. I thought we would be in a lot more places around the world, but.

Ongoing challenges on sort of shipping containers around and the costs associated with that being so much higher is making the whole business development challenge a lot harder. And within the team, we've got experts doing our supply chain and formulation and marketing and influencer marketing. And the bit that I personally am taking on are trying to go to all of the retailers that I know through internationally, through the bulldog period, where we're expanding to all these countries and get wake and listing. And I thought I'd have done a much better job at that in terms of having more international distribution more quickly based on the head start that perhaps I have through sort of historical conversations. But I've just not delivered on a few things that I was confident that I was going to do. So, yeah, I mean, I'm totally learning and sort of very aware of my own failings when it comes to like, reviewing everybody's progress within the team, but just keep chipping away. We've got a few exciting things coming. We're launching in Korea, we're launching in Singapore.

We'Re hopefully launching in Australia. So we are making some headway now, but it's definitely been a bit lean versus where I thought it would be.

Very exciting, though. Very exciting.

Just to wrap up here, what would you say is one thing that you believe that few others.

Believe as well?

I think that you can.

Make this dental category high interest. I think for the first time, people. People shop it on autopilot. It's the same brands that our parents, probably our grandparents, would have bought.

And it absolutely baffles me why it's not a huge focus for entrepreneurs and other big companies around the world to try and bring the trends that you see in beauty and other places to this space. So perhaps the one thing is I just see an opportunity for cool, independent, natural and sustainable brands to get to scale in this space. Perhaps it's that yeah, and there's.

And there's probably plenty of other categories that if people just open their eyes, look around as you did, just walk through a store, walk. Walk around your neighborhood, you know what. What looks kind of the same, what hasn't changed for a very long time? Because it sounds very much that that's what you did. You kind of walked through the story, walked to the aisles and said, okay, well, what needs to change here? What needs some vibrancy? What needs a fresh perspective?

Yeah, I was looking for a huge but entirely boring and stagnant category, something where there hasn't been anything interesting for 10 years, and that's a good place to start. You know, if you're starting in female skincare, then it's a very vibrant, innovative, led, hugely cool area, and I love it. But it's. There's a lot going on. Like, perhaps one of the things you might want to do is find a space where there isn't very much going on. Things have been the same, and the big companies are really doing everything they can to keep it that way. And that's where you can be really disruptive.

Okay. Okay. And then last question, a little bit more fundamental. If you could just leave people with. Well, if you could just share one success secret with the world, something. Something that you believe would help unlock people's potential, help them become part of that 2% reflecting on your own life and experiences, what would that be?

It would be determination and the confidence to give something a go. Like, I really want to emphasize that when we started Bulldog and then latterly when we started Waken, I am not an expert in male skincare and with dental, I am not a dentist.

Right.

And you're up against huge companies that hold all the cards, and you just have to give it a go. And once you've given it a go, be determined.

Have confidence in yourself. If you believe that there's an opportunity and that you see the world a bit different, and you can anticipate where you think this category will be in five years, in 10 years. If you think you're seeing something that other people haven't seen yet, just back yourself. Have the courage to quit your job and just have a crack at something entrepreneurial for a few years. And as we were talking before, there is risk associated with that. But I think the bigger risk is that you find yourself 20 years from now just wishing that you'd done something a bit braver and you sort of took the safe option.

Better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all right.

100%. I would totally agree with that.

Wonderful. Simon, super, super happy to have you on the show today. Love all the little gems that we kind of uncovered there. And I'm sure people find it very, very valuable. And, yeah, thanks for coming onto the show.

Thank you so much for having me. That's been good. Cheers.

I know you're going to absolutely love my next interview with Philip Stutts. You can find it right here. Just check it out. Click there. This is a man who helped win three presidential elections. You're going to want to check out that discussion. I'll see you there. Click the link.