Build A Disruptive Brand
With Guest Simon Duffy
Why your initial product launch is just the beginning of the story, not the end
The How to Sell More Podcast
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October 8, 2024
In todays chat on "How To Sell More," host Mark Drager sits down with Simon Duffy, the brains behind Bulldog Skincare and Waken Mouthcare. Simon spills the beans on how he shook up the men's grooming world and is now setting his sights on making waves in dental care.
Whether you're dreaming up your first big idea or looking to breathe new life into your business, Simon's got some gems for you. He breaks down how to spot gaps in the market that even the big players have missed, and why sometimes the harshest feedback can be your biggest blessing in disguise.
Plus, he shares some real talk about the ups and downs of building a brand that stands out. It's a must-listen for anyone who's ever thought, "There's got to be a better way to do this."
It starts with a good idea or a reasonable idea that becomes a good idea through iteration. And that's the first 10%, or whatever it is. The great majority of successful brands are those that are able to grow every year, expand distribution, expand awareness, and get more people to try them -- Simon Duffy
Listen to The Episode!
Top 3 Reasons to Listen
Learn how to identify market opportunities: Simon's story of spotting the gap in men's skincare products at Whole Foods provides a concrete example of how to recognize untapped potential in established markets.
Gain insights on handling setbacks: The pivotal moment when Bulldog faced potential delisting offers valuable lessons on turning criticism into opportunity and the importance of adaptability in business.
Understand the balance between disruption and convention: Simon's strategic approach to deciding which industry norms to challenge and which to maintain offers a nuanced perspective on how to stand out effectively in a competitive market.
Follow Simon Duffy on Social
Website: https://wakencare.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-duffy-mbe-753306a/
More About Today's Guest, Simon Duffy
Founder at Waken Mouthcare
Simon Duffy is a British entrepreneur and innovator who has made significant waves in the personal care industry. He is best known as the co-founder of Bulldog Skincare, a pioneering men's skincare brand that he launched in 2006.With a background in innovation consulting at Saatchi & Saatchi, Simon identified a gap in the market for natural, purpose-driven skincare products for men.
Under his leadership, Bulldog Skincare grew into a global brand, available in over 35 countries and generating approximately $150 million in annual sales. The company's success led to its acquisition by Edgewell Personal Care in 2016.Simon's entrepreneurial journey didn't stop there. In 2019, he co-founded Waken Mouthcare, aiming to disrupt the oral care industry with innovative, sustainable products.
His approach focuses on challenging industry norms and addressing unmet consumer needs. Recognized for his business acumen, Simon was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his contributions to the grooming industry. He continues to be an active entrepreneur, investor, and advisor, sharing his expertise on brand building, innovation, and sustainable business practices.
Key Takeaways
- Identifying and addressing industry challenges - Successful disruptive brands identify significant problems in large categories that established companies haven't effectively solved. This involves recognizing gaps in the market and developing hypotheses about consumer needs that aren't being met by current offerings.
- Strategic approach to differentiation - Effective disruption involves carefully choosing which industry conventions to challenge and which to maintain. This includes decisions about distribution, pricing, and product types, while innovating in areas like formulation, branding, and packaging to stand out in the market.
- Continuous iteration and learning - Launching a disruptive brand requires a willingness to adapt quickly based on market feedback. This involves being open to criticism, making difficult decisions to improve products or packaging, and constantly optimizing various aspects of the business.
A Transcription of The Talk
Mark Drager: So Simon, I've got to note some of the crazy achievements that you've had over the last 15 years. Okay, so first of all, you worked for one of the world's largest ad agencies. Then in 2006, you struck out on your own and launched Bulldog Skincare, a skincare product company that disrupted the male grooming industry. You were able to scale that to eight figures plus, and then actually exit it, sell it for a ton of cash. Now you're looking to repeat your success by challenging the old-fashioned thinking in the dental industry with your latest venture, Waken Mouthcare. Now, from the outside, it looks like you've really developed some kind of Kentucky Fried Chicken secret spices, a secret formula for being able to look at an industry, create a disruptive brand, go in there, and shake things up.
So where I want to start the conversation: after all of this experience, after all of this time, how do you look? How do you assess an opportunity, like with Bulldog, like with Waken?
Simon Duffy: Good question. I'm not sure there's a total formula, to be honest. I'm still very much figuring all of this stuff out as we go along. I think there are consistencies between how we thought about Bulldog and how we thought about Waken. One of those would be that we see a huge category challenge to be addressed that the big companies already in the market aren't doing a good job at. So, for example, in men's skincare, men's grooming with Bulldog, it was about, you know, 90% of women are using beauty products, skincare products, but only 15% of men are. Like, why is that? Why have these huge companies that have all of the advantages in terms of expertise, marketing, and relationships with retailers, not been able to crack this white space in the category?
The really exciting thing with Waken is dental feels like a category if you sort of put it in the perspective of personal care or health and wellness, or other things that you find in the store, where trends like natural, sustainability, and cool independent brands have not yet worked out a formula to disrupt the motherships in mouthwash and toothpaste. It's a really interesting challenge when you think about how big this category is and just how behind it is compared to everything else on trends like natural and sustainability.
So, part of the—if there is a process—at the earliest stage is just trying to identify a big problem that no one else has been able to fix. And we're not saying that we've totally fixed it yet, but we just want to start with something exciting, something big and bold.
Mark Drager: I love that. I've heard this from entrepreneurs, I've heard this from a family of entrepreneurs, I've heard this from lots of people. There's this idea that if people aren't doing it, they're much further ahead, they have better resources, they're smarter. There must be a reason they're not doing it, right? Like, the first piece of doubt that will always come into your head when you spot an opportunity or when you see something, whether you're creating a new company or something else, is to go, "Well, if no one's doing this, there must be a reason why." So, why spend my time? Why spend my energy? Do you ever fall into that trap when you're looking at it? 50% of men use skincare. 90% of women use it. I would go, "Well, I guess a lot of men just don't care about it."
Simon Duffy: Yeah. I mean, it'd be really easy to jump to that conclusion, right? You know, like, there are so many reasons not to start something and get stuck in research or just sort of follow the crowd to really popular areas of consumer products. And in truth, what you're saying now, that was the origin of Bulldog, really. Like, I remember it was a really cold, wintry day in New York, and I was going to the local Whole Foods store to get some skincare products for my wife. Huge natural category for women. And I can remember asking the Whole Body person, like, "Where's the men's section?" And there just wasn't a section in-store. And you think, "Geez, if it's not in New York City, in the big Whole Foods store, perhaps it just doesn't exist."
And then, you know, it's—you often hear entrepreneurs say it again—that is the sort of quote-unquote lightbulb moment. You know, there's a gap in the market here. No one seems to be doing these sorts of products in these sorts of ways. The challenge then, in the first phase, is to work out, whether is there a market in the gap. What are the reasons for the fact that there isn't a brand? Is it because the formulation is impossible? Is it because consumers don't want to buy this stuff? I think that's actually often where big companies trip up in innovation, and stuff sort of ends up feeling the same. We spent a little bit of time doing that, but I think, like with every good business, it does start a bit with a hypothesis. You've got to anticipate where the consumer's moving to, rather than just sort of ask people where they're at.
An example of that is if we were focus-grouping opportunities in male skincare, like how a big company would do it, no one would come up in 2006 with natural ingredients for men because the category itself was so small. No one would even say, "Oh, I'd definitely be in this category if there was a brand named after a dog," you know what I mean? It's like both of those things—hypothesis-driven, rather than coming out through asking consumers to create your ideas for you. But that's how I want it to be. I want to have a hypothesis and see if we can build something.
Mark Drager: And how do you assess, and I mean you, but I also mean, how does one go about assessing whether these inklings, these little light bulb moments, how do you take things further? How do you stay cynical or skeptical enough to not just let your hopes and dreams take you down the wrong path, but also not keep things so tightly wound up that it just looks like nothing will ever work all the time?
Simon Duffy: You have to make a start. I mean, I just can't emphasize that enough. There are so many people I've spoken with, you know, informally, or friends, or people who get in touch and say, "I've got a great idea," and I'm delighted to always talk with those people. And often it is a good idea. And then the challenge comes in just getting the momentum to start something for the first time.
So, I think you can do things to de-risk a launch. You can speak to consumers. You can have brilliant conversations with retailers. You can try and understand whether you can make money at certain points depending on how you launch, but ultimately it will be a hypothesis. You know, that's one way to think about it. The core competence of consumers is to consume. It's not to create. So, you can't keep asking people hypothetically, "Would you buy this if X, if Y, if it was launched in this way, if I had this campaign?" Ultimately, it's all about just getting it into the market in some way and teasing out the learnings once it's in the market.
And then, I think really importantly, and we found that with Bulldog, and we're finding that with Waken, once you're in the market, you've got to leave your ego at the door. Like, no one nails it the first time, you know? And actually, if you think you can come up with a brand or a product, launch it, and then take nothing out of that first two years, and not be itching to change it within two months and then six months, that’s not a sign of weakness. That’s a sign of strength. It’s a sign that you're listening to important people—stakeholders, and consumers—as you go along, looking to optimize.
So, that's very much our tactic in terms of innovation: start with a hypothesis, and get it launched. We want to try and do the best job we possibly can to start with, but then we’re learning as we go to try and tweak, tease out new routes, change packaging, change ingredients—just to optimize, optimize, optimize. And I think, ultimately, that's the only way you can prove to yourself that there's something in your initial idea. It won't happen overnight unless you're very, very lucky. Perhaps as a tech entrepreneur, you can build a network really, really quickly, but I think consumer products take a bit longer to move at the speed of your retailers or other things that may slow you down.
Mark Drager: That is such a great point, and I hope we all kind of heard that. Because often, if I'm speaking to a writer, an author will say, "Listen, this book that you're reading is not the book I wrote. The book I wrote was three times as long and all over the place and meandering, and then I wrote, and then I rewrote, and then I rewrote, and then editors came in and helped me frame it." The book you're reading is like this work that's been workshopped. Or, if you're speaking to a playwright or anyone in the arts, you think you're watching a movie or something on stage.
I come from the film industry. I went to film school, and when my teacher told me, "Oh, you didn't get everything in the first shoot. In editing, you've got to go do pickups." I thought, "What are pickups? What are you talking about?" Well, you realize you've missed something, so you go back out and you reshoot. Yeah, you can make the story better. You just go and plug the holes, and fix things. I think often when we're starting, especially if we're starting something new, we somehow feel that we've got to get everything right, and if we don’t get everything right, right away, we must be a failure of some kind. What you just shared is so inspirational.
So how do you, or how did you at the time when you were launching Bulldog, how did you not fall into that trap of beating yourself up, or of being blindsided by things you never saw coming? Did this come naturally to you?
Simon Duffy: Well, did it come naturally? Potentially. I think I've always been a bit more comfortable with the idea of risk, compared to at least some of my friends who have followed much more conventional paths. I mean, if I take a step back and try to think back to what was going through my mind in 2005, 2006, that led to the impetus to quit a really good job and start Bulldog with, as you're saying, no industry experience whatsoever. I'd been a consultant, so at that point, I was sort of doing pretty PowerPoint presentations—a huge rude awakening. Running a business, you actually have to do stuff and be responsible for things and all that, I guess.
Mark Drager: No super packaged goods experience, no real entrepreneurial experience, no startup experience, no fundraising experience. I mean, no retail experience.
Simon Duffy: No, right, no, no. The experience that I had was working as part of this team within Saatchi and Saatchi, which later became called Fahrenheit 212, and we were innovation consultants. So, an amazing job. It took me to New Zealand, then to New York, and we would go and sit with the R&D folks at Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Diageo, and Samsung, and we would try and inject a creative problem-solving approach to innovation, see if we could help them craft better products. You know, Saatchi and Saatchi would solve communication ideas, and the output would be TV ads. We would try to solve innovation challenges, and the output would be new products.
So, I took a lot of learning from how these bigger companies think about innovation, both good and bad. There were some skills there, but it also gave me the confidence to think, especially when I saw how slow these big companies are, how long it takes for them to go from initial idea to market launch, and how much research they feel they need to do to get it past various milestones in their own processes. There was a definite sense that I could actually do this myself.
Roger, who was my business partner at Bulldog, and is my business partner at Waken, and I became really close, and it's a good team—it’s still a good team. Together, we thought, yeah, we can do it. We can actually come up with ideas. But, sorry, to answer your question about risk, I really challenged myself to think, what is the real risk of failure at Bulldog? Like, if we launched it and it was a total disaster, and three years later we’d lost all of our investors' money, and there was no business, how would I feel? I actually felt two things. Firstly, the experience, learning, and self-development—putting myself out of my comfort zone and facing those challenges—would be a hugely formative experience.
So, I’d probably be a better person as a result of that, and I suspected I could plug back into a similar industry at a different stage. The other thing I identified was, if I look at my own situation, I’m married to Annabelle, my wife, who’s from New Zealand. We were living in New York, and I was starting to think, "Oh, I just want to have a place in New Zealand, a place in London. I want to be able to bounce between the two. I want to be financially unencumbered."
I knew 100% I wasn’t going to be able to do that within the salary-earning potential of my current job. So, I wasn’t even giving myself a chance at delivering the lifestyle I wanted to imagine, and I felt I had much more to lose by not giving this venture a try. Ten years later, looking back, having a midlife crisis, you know, doing okay, being the boss, but never even rolling the dice on the lifestyle that I wanted to build for myself, for her, for our family—that felt more risky than trying to take on P&G, Unilever, and Nivea in 2006, 2007.
Mark Drager: And as you said, at the time, 2006, I have to imagine that these large companies were basically squeezing out skincare products for women, changing a little bit of the scent, throwing it in a blue bottle, and suddenly it's "Now for men." How did you approach this idea of, "We are going to stand out," and know that whatever you're going to do to stand out is actually enough?
Simon Duffy: Well, I don't know if you ever know it’s going to be enough because that is something you discover along the way. I think we actually had a bit of a process to that with Bulldog, which is exactly what you were talking about—being disruptive. We mapped out the conventions in the skincare category and thought there were certain conventions we actually didn’t want to disrupt. We want to be totally predictable. We’re going to follow the big brands on certain things.
So, for example, distribution—we wanted to be on the same shelf as these brands. We weren’t going to disrupt that. We weren’t going to disrupt price points. We weren’t going to really disrupt the types of products that men would expect. It’s a face wash, it’s a moisturizer. So, there were certain things, very purposefully, that we decided to stay the same, and then we decided—
Mark Drager: Why? Why was that decision made? Is it because it was just not the hill to die on, or because, if you're too different, people don't even know how to classify you in their brains, or what?
Simon Duffy: I think, with limited resources, it’s very hard to, for what was at that point a low-interest category—and we can talk about that term, low-interest category, which I hate—but at that point, the category wasn’t really working. We thought it was one challenge to get men to opt into skincare products for the first time. It would be even more of a challenge, or perhaps too much to ask initially, to get men to go to a totally different place to buy skincare products than where they’re buying razors and blades. Or where the person in the household, often a wife or partner, is buying the products on their behalf. It was too much to ask them to go somewhere else.
Also, at that point, the internet was obviously around, but the whole DTC (direct-to-consumer) flourishing of brands was not quite as developed. So, we very deliberately wanted to be, from a distribution perspective, everywhere that L’Oreal and Nivea were listed. We wanted to be on the shelf. I think Byron Sharp, in terms of marketing theory, talks about that as "physical availability." Don’t make it hard for people to buy, make it easy for people to buy. So, we just wanted to put ourselves shoulder to shoulder with the brands we wanted to compete with, rather than being in a farmer's market or a gym or somewhere else when people perhaps aren’t anticipating purchasing these products.
But back to the question, we really deliberately decided these are the things we do want to compete on. So, we competed on formulation. There was an emerging part of female beauty—natural skincare, no parabens, certain ingredients that you want to avoid. No one was doing that in men's skincare, so that was a brand-new way to formulate products. That was a challenge.
From a branding perspective, all of the products in the men’s space were offshoots of female brands, exactly as you said—take a female formula, put it into a gunmetal gray pack or a blue pack. We wanted to challenge the conventions of naming. So, it was a Bulldog—it was obviously masculine. We changed subtle packaging cues, like putting it into a tube rather than pots. We made it white and brown so it really stood out, and that was very deliberate. It was about jarring people through differentiation at the point of purchase, with branding execution, packaging execution, and ingredient execution.
At Bulldog, Rodri and I were guilty of trying to do everything ourselves for too long, not collaborating as effectively, and not getting experts who were actually way better than us into roles quickly enough. So, we held up the trajectory by being too much into the weeds. It’s really important to try to understand every aspect of your business, but what we’ve been doing with Waken is, in terms of the team, we’re where we were at Bulldog in year seven but in year two. So, we put way more resources into bringing experts into roles sooner because we’re hoping to go quicker.
There are probably countless other things we should be doing that we’re not. For example, we’ve launched products, and we’re itching to improve the way we communicate the benefits on the front of the pack. We’ve learned about flavors—what people like versus what they don’t. We’re learning all the time about our online business, how to acquire customers, and what sort of bundles they want. As you’d expect, you sort of know the things you need to get better at, but every single day is about learning improving, and optimizing one small part of the business.
Mark Drager: You create this little company, and you're taking on these massive Goliath organizations. Now, we know time and time again that speed to market, listening to customers, R&D, and being able to pivot are the very edge that gives the little guy a chance against the big players. The fact that you're willing to take risks, and you don’t have much to embarrass yourself with because you don't have shareholders, stocks, and the public eye on you—you can just try stuff, do stuff, and move really, really quickly. In the back of your mind, do you ever think, "I mean, you're going to make it, of course, you're going to make it, because if you don't give up, you will," but at a certain point, you have to come across their radar, and what's to stop them from just taking all of your good stuff and doing it?
Simon Duffy: Well, in short, nothing. You know, if people wanted to copy Waken, all of the ingredients are on the back of the bottle. It was the same at Bulldog. You have to disclose what goes into these products in order to comply with regulations. So, you could take a product to a contract manufacturer and have it knocked off. It wouldn’t be identical, but you could do it.
Mark Drager: You can analyze these, right? They'd have all of these—I'm sure they could give you the exact chemical compounds of every single thing that's in there. Then, they go away, toil away, and figure out the process. They can reverse-engineer almost anything.
Simon Duffy: And some of the retailers that we worked with regularly do that. You know, ahead of coming in for a discussion or price negotiation, they’ll get contract manufacturers in to pitch to their buying teams. "We’re thinking of doing a private label for this retailer. How much would it cost to do X, Y, or Z?" Packaging, labor, materials—they have a really clear view of what they could get these products for.
And then, it comes down to brand execution, the loyalty you can generate from consumers, and, outside of business, the ability to generate a relationship with people. It’s about inspiring them with a vision of how they’re a part of this huge business, how you can help them grow, and attract new people into it. It’s about getting people to buy into the category challenges as we’ve defined them. So, there’s an art to the sale.
But in short, in skincare, beauty, and cosmetics, products are fairly easy to replicate—and it’s never been easier. Just look at all of these DTC businesses that are launching with stuff bought from Alibaba. You see the same sort of products branded up in different ways. If you’re entrepreneurially minded, you could get products from Alibaba onto a Shopify website, into a Shopify-enabled warehouse, and go from no idea to a functioning online business in, say, six weeks. The big time-consuming thing would be getting the stock over from China in the first place. So, it’s never been easier to launch businesses. That’s actually a really cool thing about where we find ourselves today.
Mark Drager: But it just proves the importance of that brand, that narrative, that story, that connection with the customers. Yeah, so it almost seems like once you have the product, it again comes back to being able to create that narrative, that story, that brand.
Simon Duffy: Absolutely, and it’s about execution. I mean, I can’t overestimate that, really. It starts with a good idea or a reasonable idea that becomes a good idea through iteration. And that’s the first 10%, or whatever it is. The great majority of successful brands are those that are able to grow every year, expand distribution, expand awareness, and get more people to try them. And it doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over time by gradually building those connections with consumers, getting them to tell their friends, and being visible in more places.
So, it’s just constant execution—reminding people that you exist, making great products, telling a good story, building the narrative, building the dream. Every single opportunity where you can deliver a positive brand message, whatever touchpoint it is—that’s what you focus on.
Mark Drager: So, I know with every entrepreneurial journey, from the outside, it looks like, "Hey, rocket ship to success," but no one goes through startup, fundraising, product launch, getting into retailers, and growing and scaling a business—no one gets through that clean. Share with me a time when a lot of things were really on the line, and you realized, "Oh gosh, we’ve got to do a better job at this."
Simon Duffy: Well, yeah. There was this horrible period, probably three or four years into Bulldog, where we were, from a financial perspective, getting close to the end of the money that we’d raised or managed to retain from the trading of the business. We were called up to the merchandising center of this huge retailer in the UK. This is where they build out their future plans for products in stores. We walked in daunted and nervous, knowing the buyer we were meeting had a fierce reputation that preceded him.
We turned the corner, and the Bulldog assortment on the shelf was just amazing. There were like 12 products. It massively exceeded our expectations of how it would end up. We were like, "Wow, that’s incredible. Thank you." And the buyer turned around and said, "Yeah, it’s not going to happen. We’ve done everything we can. We wanted to do this for you, but your sales are terrible. I’ve asked you to do this, and you haven’t done it. I’ve asked you to do that, and you’ve been slow to do it. I’m going to have to delist you completely."
At that point, we were thinking, "This is game over," because retailers tend to—well, not always, but they’re very aware of what’s happening elsewhere. So, if you lose momentum in one place, it can spread throughout the whole market.
Mark Drager: So, you walk into this R&D showroom or something that has all of the shelves, and your product is beautifully displayed exactly where you want it, and you're completely excited. Followed by, "By the way, we're pulling everything off the shelf."
Simon Duffy: It's probably some neat sales trick that they teach you. But, I mean, it was the best possible expression of the brand that we'd ever seen. We were told that we were going to get delisted from the biggest retailer in the UK at that time. And it was definitely a moment of questioning whether we had the right product, whether we had wasted our time to date.
The key thing, I think, that we took from that was we really tried to understand, with this difficult personality, what was the main barrier that was preventing him from believing in the potential that we had, because we certainly hadn't delivered to date. You know, the fact-based evidence didn’t suggest that we deserved to retain our place, and it came down to packaging. We hadn't yet optimized the packaging to get people to want to try it. There was a disconnect. People would use the product and say, "Oh, that's really nice. I really enjoy this," but when they looked at the pack, a lot of people were saying, "This isn't for me."
The challenge, as a very small business with limited resources, is that at that moment, we identified we needed to change the pack. But it was a very difficult decision to make when you’ve got a warehouse full of 200,000 units, or whatever it was, of old packaging, which would then become obsolete. And I think it’s hard, but you have to treat feedback as a gift. It would have been easy to ignore that and just try to carry on, but it was a real moment where we decided, "Right, we really have to wrap our hands around this problem."
It’s probably something that had been at the back of our minds—we hadn’t quite cracked the different elements of how we communicate the story through the packaging. So, we went back, redesigned it, figured out what to do with all of the obsolete stock, and then we rebuilt from a really reduced footprint in this retailer. It was definitely a backward step. For a couple of years, we shrunk the assortment right down. But in retrospect, it was a really galvanizing thing. Our rate of sale went up. The new version of the products, provoked by that feedback, really drove more intention to purchase by people in the UK. And it was also galvanizing internationally. At that point, we were trying to build our business in Sweden, build our business in America—just in Whole Foods and the natural specialty channel, doing it in a small, controlled way. The new packaging, which came from this horrible meeting, empowered that, actually. So, in a small way, that was quite a big turning point for the brand, in about year three or year four, something like that.
Mark Drager: Oh, that is—there’s so much to that. Because often, I know for myself, with our products and services, I’ve heard this time and again from clients. There’s this inkling, especially if you're a visionary or a creator, that things could be better, yeah? But you've got a lot on the go, and in your heart of hearts, you know that you're not delivering what you want or where you want it to be. A perfect example: if you're producing content and you find your content boring, trust me—other people do, too, right? If you look at your product and you're not excited about it, why would anyone else get excited about it?
But for those of us who are perfectionists, we're also trying to guard ourselves from falling into the trap of making everything perfect all the time. And so, yeah, this guy comes out of the blue. He says this—it’s maybe a wake-up call—but you have to figure out how to slow down, make a new investment, write off previous investments, and yet, three or four years later, you can look back and say, "It was worth it."
Simon Duffy: Yeah, and you have to actually hunt it out. It felt a bit aggressive at the time—it was nerve-wracking, and we did a lot of soul-searching—but that really difficult feedback led to a really positive outcome. You know, a different retailer at the time, who we were trying to get distribution with for the first time, would have meetings with us, and they'd be so polite. They’d say, "I love it. It’s a really good product. I really like you guys. It’s a really good story. I think I've got everything I need."
And then, nothing ever happened. I look back on those meetings and think, perhaps that person was just unwilling to say, "I don't like your product," to two young entrepreneurs who they knew pretty much had everything riding on the success of the business. It’s probably hard at that moment to give difficult feedback. But the person who was direct enough to tell us it was rubbish at that point actually saved the business by being honest, and in his own aggressive way, he managed to precipitate a really positive behaviour from the team at Bulldog. So, we sort of look back on those times now happily, but at the time, it was daunting.
We took the opportunity to look back on some of the decisions we’d made or the hypotheses we had and reassess. You don’t normally get that in year two. When you're setting up the business, year one, year two, you wonder, "Have we made the right bets?" If there’s one thing that we feel absolutely was true when we started, and we feel even more excited about now, it’s that this hypothesis—that we can make people care about dental products for different reasons—holds up. People do want products that look beautiful in their bathroom. People are interested in sustainability. People do like the taste of natural mint versus artificial mint.
So, can a dental brand take on some of these characteristics that you might associate more with beauty? Absolutely. We're getting leading beauty influencers and magazines talking about mouth care, where they’ve never talked about the incumbent brands before. So, we are proving the hypothesis that we set out. The way these brands behaved before us is just one way. We can present a totally different approach, if we put our mind to it, in terms of business development. We’ve got a lot of work to do from where we find ourselves at this moment.
Mark Drager: I love it. Final question for you, Simon. For you personally, as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a business owner, as a marketer—at the end of the day, what does it all come down to?
Simon Duffy: Well, for me, it’s about challenge. What I appreciate most about Waken, and when I look back at the most exciting parts about Bulldog, it was just the opportunity to set out on an adventure, try and take on these huge companies, and do it with a small team that can inspire you day to day.
I would be most proud if we could encourage these big companies—who’ve been behaving in a really average way, I would say—to think more sustainably, think more positively. An example of that with Bulldog was when we launched a razor made from bamboo and metal, and later, we launched one made from recycled beer bottles. So, it used dramatically less plastic in the core device, or no plastic, and was packed in cardboard. You know, five years ago, the category was full of these plastic devices in plastic trays in plastic shells that you couldn’t open without scissors. You look at the category today—now everybody is presenting their products in a more sustainable and thoughtful way.
That is at least one example of Bulldog acting as a thought leader, where perhaps it couldn’t be the sales leader. That’s what I want to look back on with Waken. Yes, we’ll be able to build a business of a meaningful scale, with all the excitement that comes with that personally, professionally, and financially. But more than anything, the real "why" is this: a category has completely ignored what people want in terms of more sustainable options. Just think about all that stuff going to landfill. The fact that the packaging choices these big brands make almost mean it has to go to landfill—no one is really addressing this.
If we could just encourage everybody to revisit the choices they’re making and encourage the biggest brands—which would have way more impact than what we could do with Waken—to think in a more environmentally positive way, that would be hugely personally satisfying, and I think, really good for the planet, and really good for consumers who are looking for those products. So, I think that’s what I’d like to be able to say 10 years from now—that the whole category is behaving in a more positive way, and Waken is a brand within that.
Resources & Go Deeper
"The Art of Disruption: Lessons from Successful Start-ups" - Forbes
Explores how start-ups disrupt established industries, relating to Bulldog's approach in the men's skincare market.
