Sustainably Scale Your Business For Growth Through Partnerships And Innovation With Simon Duffy

 

Scaling your business is more often than not, a team effort. In this episode, Simon Duffy, the Founder of Waken Mouthcare and Bulldog Skincare, shares his experience navigating business partnerships that ultimately lead to the globalization of his brand. Joining Dr. Patty Ann Tublin, Simon shares business advice on what makes a healthy working relationship and explains why they can be necessary to build and scale your business. He also discusses how they’re branching out and innovating their products sustainably and what they’re doing to meet hybrid workplace needs of employees. Don’t miss out on business advice that can fuel your growth by tuning in.

Bullets:

• From Accounting to blue-chip companies to inventor of 1 of the UK’s largest men’s skincare brands
• Founder of Bulldog Skin Care and Waken Mouth Care
• Bulldog makes $105M+ globally in retail sales per year
• 2016 Bulldog sold to Edgewell Personal Care, expanding into 31 countries
• Started creative innovation career at Saatchi and Saatchi for P&D & Diageo
• 2019 developed Waken Mouthcare, launching in Boots & Sainsbury’s nationwide
• Waken has earned 4 beauty industry awards for sustainability
• Previously: Developed curriculum for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at New College of the Humanities
• Currently: Investor, mentor and coach for a number of UK start ups
• Mission: To continue inventing and developing sustainable products and ingredients
• Sustainable examples: World’s first razor made from recyclable bamboo & each Waken mouthwash is CarbonNeutral®

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Sustainably Scale Your Business For Growth Through Partnerships And Innovation With Simon Duffy

I have an amazing guest from across the pond, as we say in the States. Before we go any further since I know you are going to love this interview, make sure you like, comment, share and most importantly, subscribe to this show. Let me tell you a little bit about our British friend. This guy started a male personal care product. We think of skincare for women.

He is the Founder of Bulldog Skincare. He sold that and it has expanded now into 31 countries. You can’t think that an entrepreneur like Simon Duffy will just lay back and enjoy the ride. No, he went on and he is now a disruptor in the wash mouth product for the dental industry. I learned so much from him. He has a product called Waken Mouthwash. He will tell you more about it during the interview. It is carbon neutral. It is all this healthy stuff. Apparently, the mouth wash products that most doctors use in their offices have all sorts of goo in it. Simon is out to change that trajectory. Buckle up because Simon Duffy is about to take us for a ride. Welcome, Simon.

Thank you for having me. It is cool to be here. It is nice to be speaking to someone in America. I’m delighted to be here.

I butchered your intro. I’m not quite sure why. I don’t like to read bio because people can just look you up. I’m sure they will when we are done. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you are? You can start from now and reverse engineer. You can start from when you are in your mother’s womb, wherever you want to go.

When I look back on things that I have done in my life professionally, Bulldog has been a formative thing. We started that in 2006 and launched in 2007 with a mission to disrupt skincare and create products that related more to men and grow this category. I stopped doing that in 2016. It was bought by a cool American company called Edgewell. It is the company that owns Schick razor, Banana Boat, and Hawaiian Tropic.

When you sold it to Edgewell, an American company, were you involved in the sale? Did you have criteria as to what type of company it was that bought it or did you go all out American capitalist and go for the money?

It’s the former. I’m selling a company that I have poured my heart and soul, and years of work into it. At that point, it wasn’t just me. It was my business partner who had been along the journey with me every step of the way. We had the same ownership. We are equal in that perspective, and it was a whole team. You are looking for good hope. That is the right time for a brand that has started as nothing and two people to put it into a much bigger organization. It gives the brand a better chance to fulfill its mission to get into more homes and get into more retailers.

It was the right time for the brand to do it, but we were purposeful about the right type of company. We needed someone for the brand that would be good stewards and could add value to it. We are also looking for a partner that would treat the team in a respectful way. We were all kept in the same office. The whole team was kept intact. In some cases, they want the brand but they do not want the people and they are pushed to the side. People were important, and from that perspective, we only spoke to a few companies when it came around to doing the deal to find a bigger home for it.

Did you stay on either as a consultant or co-president?

I had two brilliant years full-time. That was part of the personal excitement about it. You are in a small team trying to solve massively complex problems. There is a temptation when you are a small team to think about how the big company is doing it. We got a lot to learn. That was certainly an exciting thing for me to see what it is like on the inside of these huge companies that you have been competing with from the outside with far fewer resources. I was there to learn.

It was a great opportunity to travel. Bulldog went from 12 countries to I think you said 31. If you ask the team, it is probably up to about 35 or 36 over. Those two years are when that explosive international growth happened. That was my part individually of the overall attitude and responsibilities to the team. I was going around the world and introducing Bulldog to new resellers, with the new owner, and meeting all the local team.

When you start a business, you’ve got to divide and conquer a wee bit.

I’m trying to tell the story and build the narrative in all these new markets. For me, it was a great opportunity to travel, meet some amazing people, and see some cool places around the world. The entrepreneurial drive where I find I can add the most value, be most excited, and contribute the most is right back at the beginning.

Since this is called The Trust Doctor, I always say to most people, “All success is based upon the ability to create, nurture, and sustain healthy relationships, especially in business.” You said earlier that you wanted to see the inner workings of a company trying to solve problems perhaps differently than a smaller company. I would suggest while they are still accessing the people, that is the human capital to do that. What did you learn? What was different that surprised you? Perhaps what was the same that surprised you when you got that inside view?

From a relationship perspective, there is a lot that does the same. It is about building effective relationships, collaborating, and understanding the bigger vision. Executionally, big companies have to behave a bit differently because the team is big. Once you are a public company and you are reporting results every quarter, that is a different discipline. It takes up lots of time. That was the big learning in going from a private company to a public company.

A lot of headaches come along with that.

You are forecasting and re-forecasting. You got fiduciary responsibilities. Not that you do not have that in a small company. One of the cool different things was the scale and the ability to move quickly.

Most people think the larger you are, the slower you can move. You are saying you feel that you can move faster because of the resources.

You could answer that question both ways, and that isn’t to sit on the fence. I would say genuinely, big companies can be a lot slower to make difficult decisions. There are more people involved in the legacy opera. That is not always the case. There are more rungs on the ladder between leadership to execution. There are more meetings. That is where things slow down.

To put it nicely, there is more bureaucracy.

Inevitably because they have to be. If you think about it from a product perspective at Bulldog, we launched into razor blades. We were primarily skincare at that point, natural and sustainable skincare for men. It was a winning formula and proposition. We are scaling brilliantly. There’s so much more growth to come, but we were to prove that we understood how to do that.

We always wanted to do razor blades. The razor blade industry was an absolute catastrophe from the perspective of sustainability. You think of all those disposable plastic razors, single-use. A big bit of plastic fall into landfills and can’t be recycled. There are the systems where you buy the blade separated from the handle. If you can imagine several years ago, what that would have looked like. It would have been a plastic handle held on a plastic wrap thing that you can’t get into. You are trying to smash it with scissors to open it.

Bulldog came along and we tried to remove 100% of plastic from that proposition. We had to ensure you have a tiny weeny bit around the blades where they are held in the cartridge. The handle was made from bamboo. It is like metal inside. It was fully recycled. All of the packagings was more about how you would buy an Apple product. It was all paper and recycled cardboard.

 
We changed the way that these products were made and positioned in the store. If you go into the store now, at least in the UK, everything is packaged in this way. I do not know what it is like in America now. That is when you are a small brand, from the outside, you can be a real thought leader. You can be a product where you can say, “We got a hypothesis about where this market is moving to, what consumers, and what’s in the future.”

In our case, it’s more sustainable products among other things. If you can get the big company to buy into this vision, they can go so much quicker in terms of execution. There is bureaucracy and it is a bit slow to make decisions. It took ten years for us to go from 1 to 12 countries. This big corporate sponsor comes along, and we go from 12 countries to 35 countries in two years.

They can roll out an idea, and we also change products. We went into other product categories and the millions of pounds it takes to create razor blade factories. We can’t do that as an outsider. Working with 1 of the 2 leading players in the whole world at this stuff, we could go much quicker toward the vision that we have for the future. Some things we are faster, some things we are a bit slow. That is only a function of scale rather than anything else.

Let me challenge you a little bit. It took you a while to get from 1 to 10 countries, and then when the big company came along, that accelerated much faster. Have you known that it was not necessarily a product that you hit that tipping point number, and all of a sudden, things take so much less time to move?

In truth, I do not because I only know the story as it played out by reaching this point and going into it. To wrestle with that a bit, we would have grown quickly within our own resources from the point at which we sold. When I look at the major drivers of growth over the first year, that was all stuff that we coordinated before we sold, not completely. It was rolling out into the big American retailers such as CVS, Walgreens, Target, Myer, and places like that.

Those initial bills to go into 8,000 CVS stores will be a dump. Beyond that point, Bulldog is now a leading brand in Japan. I remember going to that famous crossing and the Bulldog face in an iconic bulldog advert was on a huge billboard projected over Tokyo. We had all these press launches and influence launches. I was on stage presenting Bulldog to a room of 100 journalists and being translated into Japanese.

We could never have done that within our own means as quickly and as effectively as that. It has unlocked so many international opportunities outside of America. We had been in America for several years. The points at which we sold, we are probably the leading brand in the famous natural and organic retailers, certainly in some of their regions. The idea of the Bulldog emerged in New York.

I know you have been all around it. As everyone knows, I’m a native New Yorker. Before the show started, Simon was saying that he spent some time in New York and that he loved it. Where were you with your business at that point?

There was no Bulldog at all. There was no business. My Annabel, who is now my wife. She was my girlfriend. I lived in New Zealand for five years after university. I met Annabel in Auckland. We moved to New York together. We had a tiny weeny shoebox flat. You are never in the apartment. You are always out having fun. We were at West 11th and 7th Avenue. It was a cool spot. The closest Whole Food store was in Union Square, which I loved.

What year is this?

November 2005 or December 2005.

Leave your ego at the door. There are certain areas where you have to take a backseat and not feel like you have to have the final say on everything.

It was before the world went crazy.

People in London have no idea how cold it gets in New York. You wake up in the morning and there are 6 feet of snow. Those snowplows have gone down. If you happen to own a car, which we did not. The car is completely buried in it. Somehow the architecture or the way they design the streets funnel the wind down the streets. It is freezing.

You went in where the brownstones are on the west side of the village. You’re right, the streets are certainly like a wind tunnel.

We walked into Union Square, freezing cold. My face is all chapping. I’m off to get a product for Annabel. It is where you go to get natural skincare, Olay, or whatever it was. I got this product for Annabel and I was about to walk back. I was like, “I’m going to get some moisturizer. My skin is freezing outside.” There were no male products. I remember speaking to the team leader, “Where is the men’s section if I wanted to get a male moisturizer?” She said to me, “There isn’t one. We don’t have any male skincare.”

What store were you in at the time?

The Union Square Whole Foods. It is a big retail store. There are thousands of products for women and babies. If you have got to go back several years, there was nothing for men. It would be different now. There would be lots of other cool brands. I remember her saying, “In situations like this, we recommend that men try this Olay product, this Jason or Kiss My Face.”

They are brought to life in a feminine way. At least, that is what I always said back then. It was like, “That is interesting.” If it is not in Whole Foods in Union Square in New York City, it does not exist. New York is the center of everything. I thought, “If there is nothing in Whole Foods in Union Square, then it does not exist.” That is the gap in the market type moment.

The entrepreneur is born.

You spend a year trying to work out if there is a market in the gap, “Why is this product or category of products does not exist?” You try to unlock it because men aren’t interested in skincare. There is no market for this. Can these products be formulated in a natural way? You start to break down this category opportunity into individual challenges that you need to address and jigsaw it back together to get your products onto the shelf for the first time. That is how we approached it.

What were you doing for work before you came up with Bulldog?

I had done a few things. I studied History at the university. It was not a business-oriented thing. I had some training as an accountant. There was a schema before university that I did during the university holidays to help my tuition. I took a lot from it but ultimately, it was not for me. I figured that out quite quickly. I moved to New Zealand. I thought for about a year but ended up sticking around for almost five years.

 
What brought you to New Zealand?

I felt like I wanted a different experience from being in London, which is where I was born and raised. My university, Oxford, was about an hour away. I spent a bit of time at Dartmouth in America. I had been up to New Hampshire, but Oxford for the remainder.

You’re used to the cold when you came to New York.

I went to Dartmouth for the sophomore summer. I left at the final term of the UK academic year. You have a big summer holiday, and you go back in September. I jumped straight on a plane, flew to Boston, and got a bus up to New Hampshire. I did the Dartmouth term, came back, and started the final term at my university.

I had always lived in the UK. I just wanted to go and do some more things. The idea that Accountancy wasn’t for me precipitated a bit of an impetus to do something. I had a friend in New Zealand who I had met at university who was working in an advertising agency. I was saying, “Do you think if I come over, there might be a role for me?” He was like, “Let’s see.” I had a conversation with his boss and went from there. I ended up staying there for a long time.

One of the lucky quirks of fate for me is that New Zealand is often a place where an international company will have an office, but because of the size of that country and it is 4.5 million people, financially, it will be a small part of the overall. Saatchi’s biggest office was in New York and then it was LA. It is based on servicing huge American brands.

The Global CEO lived in Auckland and lived in New York. I managed to start to work for him in his team doing different things. We were doing organizational change and then we were doing innovation.

When I was in New York, I moved to Saatchi & Saatchi in New York. I was working on innovation challenges for global brands, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Samsung and Starbucks.

We would go upstream into these organizations and see the sorts of products that they are trying to develop five years from the market. If you imagine, advertising is about brands that are in the market that have a communication challenge. They need to introduce a new product to attract people back to a product that is losing relevance. The output of that is typically an advert.

What we were doing was taking the same creative problem-solving approach and applying it to innovation. How can we partner with these big companies to better unlock a category opportunity and better articulate the way that consumers will think about it in the future? I was doing that for these big brands. It was within the team I was with. I was a member of this team that was trying to work with the innovation departments of these big companies.

It was awesome because I learned so much about business, innovation and brand. At the same time, it also felt things were getting slowed down, and great ideas were getting diluted through committees rather than staying pure to what they were. I took both a positive experience about how they did do it, but I also took the impetus to think that we can do this ourselves.

Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.

We can ferment change in a category from the outside and articulate a vision for the future as effectively as these big companies. Perhaps that is naive but that is what we thought. I had an important relationship and the person for me on many levels is Rhodri who was my business partner on Bulldog and many ventures. He is Welch.

He had a different skillset. He could turn his hand to everything very easily. He came from a financial background and we worked together, his training and my training, his experience and my experience. We had a good friendship at the time and we found it quite easy to collaborate. We set off together on this journey to create Bulldog and see if we could launch it.

Were you working together in Saatchi & Saatchi?

He was working out with brands but he was doing more. His company is buying that company. We had a different skillset that we could combine quite well.

Let me slow you down because I do so much work. I have readers that work with business partners and help them. It is a lot like a marriage. It works until it doesn’t, and then it falls apart. There is a lot at stake. The example I give all the time is if you think about Apple. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were best friends, they created Apple. The rest is history.

When that relationship became toxic and went south, the stock tanked at the time. Steve Jobs was one of the first people that have been thrown out of the company he founded. Now it’s not that unusual but at the time, it was unusual. That was all based upon the health and the souring of the business partnership.

You said something that is important to talk a little bit more about. You acknowledge that your partner, although he is great at a lot of things, probably could do what you did. The entrepreneurial world talks about that from Dan Sullivan, the Founder of Strategic Coach. It’s that his unique ability where he will thrive and that he can do better than you or probably anyone else in the business was the finance.

It’s a lot more than finance. Operationally, he would take on the challenges of creating the products and making sure stuff arrived on time. If you took an analogy to a restaurant, my role is probably the maître d’. I’m greeting people, introducing them to the menu, and trying to encourage them to buy some stuff.

You are a people person.

It is not to say that he’s not a people person, but I know that I am not the chef. I’m making sure that the team of 40 chefs are consistently turning out top-quality food, to budget on time, no one is getting crossed and getting ill, and everything was perfect. Behind the scenes, that we got exactly enough ingredients turning up from the best possible producers and so forth, and everyone is getting paid on time.

It takes huge attention to detail and the ability to see the big picture. It is a difficult role. Entrepreneurially, you start off and you think you can turn your hand to anything. In a different situation, I could have turned my hand to that. The other thing is when you start a business, you have to divide and conquer a wee bit. There were certain things that I knew that I could contribute and add value to, which are introducing the products to the retailers, to the buyers, to the press, and building a story. I felt like I could do that quite well. That is what I focused on.

 
That’s not to say that Rhodri could not have done that, but it is more that I could do that well, whereas I think he could do that sort of work well. In a great business relationship. You can learn to think with one brain. Maybe that is dangerous to say, but I could almost anticipate. I came through time to anticipate how Rhodri might feel about something. There was also total trust. You leave your ego at the door.

There are certain areas where I’m quite happy to take a backseat and not feel I have to have the final say on everything. That is quite important too because you are full of the big picture. We are still getting on it. We are still striving for the same goals. For the day-to-day tasks, you do have to split them out and divide them. At some point, not get in each other’s way. Allow them to crack on and get stuff done.

I’m going to poke the bear a little bit. I’m struck by how respectful you are of your partner’s skillset. You are constantly saying, “He could have done that too,” but not as well as you is the part that you are not saying. Just like in marriage, you can love each other like crazy. You realize that you are the yin to her yang or whatever. In a business partnership, what was a challenge that you had to overcome? I feel like there is so much that the readers can learn from you. There must have been times when even if you would take a back seat or even if you would be humble. You are working together for how many years?

We started kicking the ball around on what would be our business in Bulldog and all that stuff in 2005.

It would be impossible not to have had differences. How did you overcome them with your business partner?

I have learned to get a lot better at this. We had arguments as I do with Annabel, my wife. It does not change fundamentally how I feel about that person. In the beginning, the first phase, I came to acknowledge at this point that it is all up in the air. We do not know if it is going to be successful or not. Things are going to feel a little bit more fraught. You also do not have as many resources. Everyone is trying to do too much.

As you get a bit bigger, you can have structure, process, and delegate a bit more. Firstly, it helps to understand that it would be crazy if we did not sometimes vent or frustrations fall over. What I learned to do better is to focus on listening. If you seek to understand before you seek to be understood, listening becomes your superpower.

Back to what the more discreet contribution that I had towards Bulldog, which was the retailers, it is not the gift of the gab. That is slang in the UK. A dangerous proposition is that you can go in and talk and get your own way. The way that I approached it was in every relationship that you are trying to foster with a buyer, a retailer or a journalist, you listen first. That is not being passive. You are determined and focused on listening to try and understand what is important to them.

They call that active listening where you are actively present.

A different sporting metaphor that someone is using in US sports is organizations practice pitching a lot, but they do not practice catching a lot. When you are working in sales, you need to practice catching. At the beginning of the meeting, you want to suck a lot of stimulus and information on what is important to the retailer.

As long as you position the glove correctly, you can help the pitcher throw the strike.

Using a sports metaphor: Organizations practice pitching a lot, but they don’t really practice catching. When you’re working in sales, you need to practice catching.

When you come to your opportunity to tell your story, you are able to do it with nuance and understand the drivers for them. It is back to back conversation about building a tight co-founded bond between two people that are ultimately setting out and have the same goals. It is about you diffusing tension but first trying to understand the reasons why your frustration has bowled over.

In part, it comes down to different people with different responsibilities. If there is one person who is day-to-day with finance, worrying about cashflow, which is important when it comes to ensuring that a small business can survive. At a certain point, that is going to become a powerful thought that you take into conversations about, “Should we be more aggressive in terms of how much we are spending on marketing?”

You have to play the role of the financial person in the room that says, “Hang on, we need to plan ahead for purchases of this and payroll here.” That is a realization that helped me to understand that we have all brought in different experiences and different priorities to this meeting. What helped me was the ongoing knowledge that we were both putting in 100% effort, and we both had exactly the same goal.

You always stayed aligned. The alignment was never at risk.

The alignment of what we are trying to achieve and the most important aspects of the brand. With Waken, we want to disrupt dental and present a different point of view to Colgate and Listerine. We are going to do that by delivering effective products that are formulated with fluoride, go through all the same tests, and deliver twelve-hour protection or eight shades of whiter teeth. All of the functional parts of these products have to do, we are determined to do that. Where we can be distinctive is we are going to do it sustainably because dental is an appalling category when it comes to toothpaste tubes that go to landfills or black plastic caps that can’t be recycled. We are going to use natural ingredients.

All of the other products use artificial mint. That mint flavor is artificial. We are going to use real mint, and we are going to make these beautiful. These items shouldn’t be stuff that you want to hide away at the bottom of the bathroom cabinet. They should be out on display like a candle or a hand soap. Whatever we might tussle on day to day like fundamentally, the values that are driving the company’s state, we are 100% aligned on that.

When you are not quite seeing eye to eye, it is easy to focus on the 2% of things that you might disagree on and forget the 98% of things that you agree on. If you can remember that, it is quite helpful. It takes the stress out of the room a bit. The other thing I would say is there is a real moment for being quite tough and quite direct.

I remember an important point with Bulldog where we went to see a big retailer. There was the buyer or the person that makes the decisions on what products get into the stores and what shelf position they get. It is a fundamental success factor. Once a year, they change the assortment. Rhodri and I drove up to the big merchandising center where they built the plants out. There are all the different formats on the shelf. We walked in and there was this huge shelf of Bulldogs that massively exceeded our expectations. We are like, “Thank you so much,” to the buyer.

He was like, “This can’t happen. Your sales aren’t good enough. I have told you to do this, and you did not do it. The number one thing I do not like is your packaging. I’m going to delist the brand entirely.” I don’t know whether this was a trick, but it precipitated this difficult decision that we took, which was to go back to the world, find a different designer, re-imagine the products and look at the branding and how we were telling the story of these products on the shelf.

It was a hard thing to do because we had 200,000 units of products in our warehouse at that point with the wrong packaging, something that he did right. It is a tough bit of feedback to take, but it was a good bit of feedback to take. We listened to it and we acted on it, which is the trick you have to do. It galvanized the business. Internationally, we started to get export business through the new packaging.

How did you discriminate between this one particular buyer and this one particular retail outfit that his opinion that’s right for him was in fact, right for everybody else? How did you do that?

 
There are two factors. We did use a professional research agency in a small way. A few of those helped articulate what we were trying to do. Sometimes an external set of eyes helps you see the wood for the trees. There was a feeling we had that we knew we were not telling the story to consumers in the most effective and best possible way. I do not know whether that is instinct or it is your gut. It is being open to the stimulus around you and not being dogmatic about it.

This buyer had a reputation for being spiky, aggressive, tough and confrontational. He got it in our face about it. He threatened to delist the company. It was a huge retailer in the UK. It would have been quite problematic, but great feedback. That is the risk. There are different retailers who are polite. We have meetings. They would be like, “I think that is great. Have you got everything you need?” I have got everything I need and nothing ever happened. I probably look back to those meetings and it is that person for whatever reason because he knows we have everything right in this company. It has to be successful. They do not want to give bad feedback like, “I don’t like it.” They dodged the opportunity to have an impact by not wanting to have an awkward conversation.

That sinks a lot of relationships. It sinks marriages, business relationships, and companies because I always say that feedback is a gift. I will say, “Let me hear. Let me have the feedback.” It is so hard to hear, but those are the conversations that you have to have. You might have even been in the State, Simon. It was years and years ago when Coca-Cola rolled out their new Coke product, and it was an absolute disaster.

I do not think I was, but I saw a famous case study. They tried to solve the flavor. People did not like it but they pursued it anyway because they wanted to scratch the itch that it would taste better than Pepsi.

Either they did not listen to the feedback they got because the executives did not want to hear it, or they did get feedback and it was ignored because it’s full steam ahead anyway. That is why the difficult conversation in a relationship are the ones that you have to have. It is true with partners and businesses.

That was such a gift that that abrasive buyer gave you because the nice person, you don’t learn anything from. It is just, “Great.” I will say, “No.” If I told you that you could not get off this call without giving me some negative feedback, many times, they will say, “If you want to know.” They will tell you and I always need to process it because it is hard to hear.

It is hard to do in an organization. I look at it both ways. I have been guilty of it myself. There is an opportunity to have a difficult conversation that might lead to someone learning a skill or doing something in a way that ultimately could be better. You dodge it because you do not want to hurt their feelings. I would be guilty of that. That is the focus there.

If you are speaking to people from your team, you can sense that not everything is right. In the end, you might say, “If there is anything petty that is bugging you, you just tell me.” It might all come out once it has been given permission. It is hard to give feedback and receive it. At both ends, it is a skill that you practice and it is a gift. As a person, you have to be open to receiving it in that way because some people back off.

I’m speaking with people. I’m in there coaching and consulting, and things are not going right. The business guy came in and said their business model was great. If it is not the business model, that only leaves me. The relationship expert or the Trust Doctor. They will tell me all this stuff. It seems as if we are done and I will say, “Anything else?”

To your point, wait, perhaps the most important thing that comes up is the last thing that is said because they are hesitating to share that with you. I firmly believe you can say almost anything to anyone. It depends upon how you deliver it. Some people need that New York in your face “This sucks” style to get their attention. Other people can’t hear that. Many times, I will say something like, “I got to tell you something. You are not going to want it.” I make it as somebody died, and then whatever you say, “Is that all?”

It is different tactics for different people. I guess you are trying to achieve the same thing. A degree of understanding, honesty and consistency. Whatever it is, it becomes the bedrock of an effective working relationship.

When you’re not seeing eye to eye, it’s easy to focus on the 2% of things that you might disagree on and forget 98% of the things that you absolutely agree.

Roosevelt said, “Nobody will care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” To your point earlier, I won’t even bother saying anything to that person because they are not going to listen. You set them up that way. I always liked to derail a little bit. Tell us how you got from Bulldog now to Waken?

It is an exciting opportunity in Waken. It is this enormous multi-billion pound category that has approached taking care of your teeth and your gums, with all of the products we associate that with like toothpaste, toothbrushes and mouthwash in a very old fashioned way. If you look at what has been happening around the world, the world is crying out for more sustainable products. This is at least one of the key issues that you will face.

They are demanding it.

The frustration I have is somebody who uses these products before someone who creates these products and has a company that tries to do. When I think about stuff that I want to do every day, brushing my teeth is going to be in there. Before waking, I felt like I know that this toothpaste tube is going to go to the landfill. It is such a frustration. It is the same with mouthwash. You do not have to look too far around the internet to find those pictures. This bottle was washed up on the beach or these caps can’t be recycled.

The floss is all plastic too.

It has to have a degree of strength as you put it through your teeth. We have got a floss that is made from recycled milk bottles. You can close the loop on this particular product stream. That is important. In some cases, you have to find a better type of post-consumer recycled plastic. Make sure you put these products together. It is a single plastic type and it can be recycled.

Overall, if you look at beauty, that’s where Bulldog was more broadly categorised. There are loads of independent brands that have a point of view on sustainability and use natural ingredients. You look at dental and it does not exist. The stuff that the dental industry gets away with would not work in beauty. We are trying to bring some of that.

People do not realize that dentist is a doctor. You can die on these procedures.

There is an Australian dentist called Dr. Steven Lin, who wrote a book, The Dental Diet. It takes a wellness and health perspective on caring for your mouth. It is the early warning system for the health of your whole body. By taking care of nutrition and your mouth, you can have a demonstrably positive effect on your overall health and wellness. It is an important part of what you do every day. It is a category that deserves a more purposeful sustainable option that people will buy. As I said, “These products have to be effective.” You have to formulate them and create them in a way that means they are going to care for your teeth.

What year did you start this company?

It has been a bit of a roller coaster with the pandemic and everything. We hit the ground running from a cold start in January 2019.

 
Is it the same business partner as with Bulldog?

Yes. We finished in September 2018. We relaxed for a bit and then off to the races on the new one. We were selling in Sainsbury’s and Boots from 2019 November. Maybe several months to get it into the market. We had four months or so until the end of March or early April 2020. That is disruptive. The retailers that we aspired to be listed with suddenly are focusing on other things. We’re keeping people fed, figuring out how to get products to people’s homes when the stores are shut down and everyone is isolated. It meant that it was quite a turbulent time to try and introduce this new product.

I coached two dentists during that time. I know they were still working, but they had to make all these accommodations.

It was difficult with dentists. Lots of people put off treatment, working within the constraint. Every country will be different. I don’t know what it would have been like in America. In the UK, it was pretty much down to emergency treatments only.

There were two different states. Both were more conservative states where things carried on more than perhaps in other areas. How did you look at it as an advantage at that time where clearly you had to pivot early on?

Going back to the theme of listening for me, which is what is unusual for a business that has just started. Normally, when you launch a brand, you are spinning all these plates. You are moving from one problem or opportunity to the next one. It is a lot about momentum and determination, and let’s get all this stuff done. All that dries up because the world has changed.

You have this talented group of people that we want to focus on something that is going to work towards the overall vision and what we could do. The opportunity in that is to pause, revisit a lot of the decisions that we have made, and think about in the context of what we are seeing now, the pandemic and how that is going to transform the way that people shop or where we work. Does it ruminate and creates changes or speed changes that were already happening in technology or working habits? How are we going to adapt to our brand? Do we need to? With the initial assumptions that we had, what would we change now?

There is nothing in the life of a brand that is better than the first two years in terms of the opportunity to listen, learn and make changes. There is only so much you can tease out and figure out before you get started. You have to move from hypothesis to action. In that first period, we got a few things. We challenged ourselves on price. We have made it a bit too expensive.

I was going to ask you the price point between what you have that is natural and healthy.

We launched it and it was too expensive. The price was a barrier for lots of people. We changed our model a bit and made us think about things in a slightly different way. Fundamentally, we were still determined. We did have to change.

Did you lower your profit margin?

Listen to your gut, be open to stimuli around you, and don’t be dogmatic about it.

Yes, because what you don’t want to do is take quality out of the product. You can think about what stayed exactly the same like the vision and how important we think sustainability and natural are going to be. How focused are we on making beautiful products and products that work? That will stays the same. We do not want to change our strategy. We still want to be in the same retailers.

We might have to adapt to the balance. How they interact with shoppers changes. What changed for us is we learned that the price was a bit too expensive. We learned about flavor. If you look at the Waken website, there are peach, elderflower, and black currant. The hypothesis was that people want delicious experiences. It doesn’t always have to be 100% mint.

I still believe that we have gone too far down this playground of flavor. We should bring it a bit back at least to where we are at the moment to real peppermint, real spearmint or it’s minty but it also got a touch of lemon or strawberry. We should tone that down a bit. We started off as a mouthwash and it is in and of itself an enormous product category.

In what way?

In scale and size. It is in 50% of homes and it is a product that we could create that both men and women use. Whereas Bulldog is focused on men and 15% of adult men that are using skincare products. Dental is fast. We had to broaden the ambition to not just mouthwash but toothpaste and every other product that you need in this assortment. We have to think bigger. Those were the challenges that we took away.

There were some other things we had to do and work out how we were going to collaborate as working from home rather than being in an office. I’m a firm believer in the role of being with people in the same room to achieve stuff and come up with great ideas. Personally, for me, that was quite a challenge and it was for everyone. It’s trying to maintain that energy but do it through a TV screen, a computer screen or whatever.

Do you have everybody working back in the office now?

We use a split model.

That would be hard to get anybody 35 and on undo to work for you.

The genie is out of the bottle on that. We are not going back to five days in an office anytime soon.

Put the toothpaste back in the tube.

 
Someone was telling me the story of Steve Jobs. When he bought Pixar, one of the things he did sooner rather than later is looked at what they were doing with their office. They were splitting out into three different areas, flat animation here and finance here. They ripped it all up and he put them all into the same space.

He forced through the design of the building. The most important thing that we need is for everyone to interact. All the cross-function meetings, the canteen, and the meeting rooms were all in one place and cleverly nudged towards them. I think that we can achieve more if we are together in the same place. I also want to be flexible and allow people to work from home, be more efficient and focus on their tasks. We are in a split model at the moment.

I will challenge you. You do not even have to answer it. Let’s say there is an awesome person that you would love to have work for you that says, “Let’s make it up in New York,” and cannot or will not relocate. Would you want to risk not having that talent? Just to play devil’s advocate.

If it is the right person, you find a way. Ultimately, on the side of flexibility, it is also difficult when you are building a culture to have one rule for one person and one rule for everybody else.

You can’t do that, actually.

If you accommodate one person in a certain way, that might send ripples around you. You have to think carefully about that. I remember meeting some of these amazing soccer players that we had from the UK go over and play in the MLS. They are so wealthy. When they turn up, the whole of the team flies coach back to the training. They then get on their private jet and said, “Meet you back at the training.” I do not think that works in a team environment where you have superstars that have special rules.

It is also the corporate model. The CEO stays at The Four Seasons and flies on the corporate jet, and everybody else is staying less than The Four Seasons and gets in trouble. My only comment was we have to customize and know each person that works for us to know their why and build that relationship. I’m working with two firms now. They are very old school, and they are dying because they can’t get people to stay or they want to work remotely. They are accountants. How much creativity is gone? Having said that, we have to take the new paradigm and not try to solve the cultural issue with the old paradigm.

I’m not saying that you are not right. It’s the way to bring people together every quarter anyway but certainly, if you are remote, you have to bring people together. I don’t care if you make pizza or if you have someone like me come in and talk about emotional intelligence or whatever. If every quarter you get people together and it is done right, that goes a long way in building those relationships. I was out at a conference for two days. Within two days, I feel like I know these people so much better than before.

Take it out of business and think about your family. Some dads and some moms travel a lot with work or they have to be away. It does not mean that they love their kids any less, but if you are building a strong family, that’s part of the requirement or it is an easier environment to do that or if you are at home every day with your kids, rather than seeing them at the weekends or something. It is hard to work remotely or be a parent.

The word we are both looking for is intentional. You have to make a conscious effort to be intentional. It is interesting. I find it exciting. As we are talking right now Elon Musk is in the process of buying Twitter. What I find fascinating is the conversation. I’m not commenting one way or the other. I won’t touch politics with a 10-foot pole. I find it fascinating the dialogue that is going on around that. I’m like, “Wow.” It evokes such strong emotions. It is amazing to me.

I don’t know how to think about that. On one level, he is someone I admire hugely. Twitter is something that has the potential to do enormous good but also enormous bad. It would be interesting to see quite how it will be regulated and guided under his stewardship.

A degree of understanding, honesty, and consistency become the bedrock of an effective working relationship.

Isn’t that good for the internet if you talked to parents, the kids that are being bullied and all electronically? I brought that up to bring it full circle, the conversation we had about hybrid work or remote work. I find it fascinating because people, for the most part, feel strongly about how they feel about it. Having the conversation is awesome because it means we are evolving and changing. We would all be driving to work in a dinosaur and creating the wheel.

Where do you think we will be in ten years? That will be the question. Perhaps the office will be completely gone, or there will be challenges during the working week. Young people will be saying, “I’m contracted to do 35 hours a week. I’m going to do that in three days, and I’m going to take four days off.” I’m like, “As long as I get my hours done or I do not know.”

I imagined with this discussion and reassessment of how we work or what is important, whatever the real driver is, we are only getting started. I’m with you. It is going to be an exciting period. I think whatever we have optimized towards now, we are not going back to five days a week in the office. I would think that ten years from now, it’s going to be different to where we are.

Your comment about the 35-hour workweek in the office full time, people want it. It wipes out the whole middle layer of management. We are all adults. If you get the results that you need to get, it might take me two hours. It might take somebody else five hours. Who cares? I feel compelled as a mom of four children that are grown at this point. I can tell you since women went into the workforce full-force after World War II until we had a little bit of law, guys came home. For the most part, for at least the last twenty years.

Working women and moms have been begging to be able to work remotely. It makes life so much easier to be able to put your kid on the school bus, drive them to school or even quite honestly, I need the plumber to come. Now I have to take a day off from work. The doorbell rings, and you let the plumber in. I don’t think women are not working anytime soon.

It is another challenge sometimes that different people have different roles within an organization. Back to retailers, the people that work in the supermarket putting the products on the shelves can’t work from home, and the cashiers can’t work from home. It is always the first principle, flexibility works. In some cases, you do not want to create a culture where the head office team is working from home and enjoying the benefits of all that flexibility. They are trying to marshal the resources of people that are in stores that have to work in the store because that is their place of work.

You want to find a perfect solution for each individual, but there is a role perhaps of trying to work out what is going to be fair and how that is going to impact all of the stakeholders within the organization. That is why management is such a complicated thing. That is part of the reason why maybe I am drawn to the early stage of these product developments. You are thinking with all the complexity that goes on of how do I solve this challenge from a product perspective.

You build people and processes around that. When you are the CEO of a big public company, a lot of it is how do I sell these complex people, resource challenges, and I’m erring on the side of 2 or 3 people in a room trying to solve a product challenge. I’m drawn to the intellectual challenge and opportunity associated with that.

In the future, to make it a little bit more macro as opposed to micro, the ability to work remotely will inform people’s career choices. Do you want to be a mechanic and you have to be in the office? If you are a physician or a dentist and you have to be working in the office. It is interesting. As a society, we are evolving. I’m not that old but I was the first girl on my block to wear sneakers. That sounds ancient. I remember my mother going from dresses to pants. I’m not that old.

From the turn of the century, we went from a six-day workweek to a five-day workweek. Several years ago, I had a CEO I coached. He talked about the four-day workweek. It is all evolving and it is exciting. Thank you so much for your generous time. I could talk to you all day about this conversation. Anything else that you like people to know before you share with them how they can find out about you, your products, and all that good stuff?

The one thing that I reflect on from time to time is when we were building Bulldog for the first time, there were people who made time for us when we were rookies, and there were people that weren’t. I remember the positive people who were generous with their own time, network and wisdom. That was important for us. Since we had some success with Bulldog all the way along, if anybody wants to talk with us and speak with us, we always made ourselves available.

 
The thought I would leave people with is lots of people have brilliant ideas. Ideas that when you sit down and talk with them about their ambitions to become an entrepreneur, to start a business, to start a brand and solve a problem, they are great ideas. The great majority of those people fall away on actual execution, giving it a go and taking action.

That is the thought. It does not have to be perfect when you start. You just have to get going. That is something that you try and make it as good as possible, but if you are not changing things in the first couple of years, you are not listening and not doing your job properly as an entrepreneur. Get going and do not allow yourself to get to a point in your life where you look back and you feel like, “I deeply regret those choices. I did not do the brave thing or the unknown thing.” Give it a go. That will be the final thought in terms of if there is some advice that people want to take away from this.

You answered the question I didn’t ask yet, but I will ask you my last question. What is the last book you re-read and why?

It isn’t a business coach book. It is the Dune book by Frank Herbert. I read it in anticipation of the film coming out.

Are you into sci-fi?

Not all the time, but it blew my mind when I was in my teens. I read it again and it blew my mind again. It is complex and detailed. It is a fantastic story. He wrote that back in the ‘60s or the ‘70s. I might be getting that horribly wrong, but the themes about ecology, the battle over resources, and how precious water is, it is relevant now.

This theme of religious war and how it can spiral out of control and all of the bad stuff associated with that is relevant nowadays. It is an incredible story wrapped up in important narratives that we see when we open our eyes and look out at what is fermenting discord in the world nowadays. It is an incredible story, but it is also a thought-provoking narrative that he sets out.

How would you like people to find your product?

It’s www.WakenCare.com. If you send an email to [email protected], it is either myself or Rhodri who reads that. That’s a great source of feedback. You can reach me there. The other brand we talked about was Bulldog Skincare, which is BulldogSkincare.com. Check it out. We have Bulldog in America, but we don’t yet have Waken in America. It is something we would love to do soon. Watch out for it in your local store.

Let me know if maybe I can help you with some contacts. That concludes the episode with Simon Duffy who did indeed take us for a ride. Thank you so much, Simon, for your generous time and your words of wisdom.

Thank you for having me.
 

Important Links

• Bulldog Skincare
• Waken Mouthwash
• Edgewell
• Waken
• The Dental Diet
• Dune
• [email protected]
• https://www.Instagram.com/BulldogSkincare/
• https://Slman.com/life/how-Simon-Duffy-disrupting-entire-industry
• https://www.Facebook.com/BulldogSkincareNorthAmerica
• https://www.Instagram.com/BulldogSkincareNorthAmerica/
• https://www.Youtube.com/BulldogSkincareUS
• https://www.Facebook.com/WakenCare
• https://Twitter.com/WakenCare/
• https://www.Instagram.com/WakenCare/
• [email protected]
• https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=jRsC_tgDghg

 

About Simon Duffy

Born and raised in the UK, Simon started his career at one of the largest accounting firms in the UK. Craving creativity, he went to work at Saatchi & Saatchi and leading innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212, for clients such as P&G and Diageo.

Working on innovation strategies for blue-chip companies gave him pivotal insight into the research and product development functions of FMCG brands. Hungry to create something himself that prioritised sustainable processes and ingredients, Duffy left his job to invent 1 of the UK’s largest men’s skincare brands, Bulldog.

Today, Bulldog makes $105M+ globally in retail sales. In October 2016, Duffy sold the company to Edgewell Personal Care who helped Bulldog to expand into 31 countries.

Duffy then had a new idea for shaking up the dental aisles with Waken Mouthcare. In October 2019, Waken launched in Boots and Sainsbury’s nationwide, including four vegan friendly mouthwashes, containing no artificial colours, flavours or alcohol, and packed with sodium fluoride to protect teeth and gums.

Waken’s sustainable credentials & highly effective formulas have won four beauty industry awards and buyers from Amazon and Boots have been enticed to list the brand.

Each Waken mouthwash is CarbonNeutral® – 100% of all carbon emissions associated with packaging, formulation and manufacturing processes. To reduce some of Waken’s carbon emissions, Duffy sourced a combination of sugarcane and Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) plastic for the mouthwash packaging.

Wakens aesthetic has also been favoured by beauty editors from the likes of Vogue, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar who have praised Waken in their editorial features.

“I want to challenge the status quo of the big dental brands. They are heavily artificial, have a huge carbon footprint & most mouthwash products contain alcohol, artificial colours & are packed in single use plastic. Additionally, nobody seems to be using natural mint to flavour their products which seems obvious to me.”