The Business Story of One Wipes Producer That Is Cleaning Up the Category
Founders of DUDE Wipes® proudly proclaim, “Best Clean, Pants Down” and “Wetter is Better,” using toilet humor to grab the attention of manly men who want fresh results in private places. And there seem to be at least 150 million dollars’ worth of them frequenting the brand, according to the company.
The flushable wipes business is booming in general. In 2018, flushable wipes account for $2.1 billion in sales and consumed 1.9 billion square metres or 98,900 tonnes of nonwovens. By the end of 2023, flushable wipes were said to grow at almost twice the rate of all other nonwovens. Users are growing and breaking demographic molds. What used to be known as a women’s category now includes men who want fresh options, too! In fact, even Mark Cuban is among them.
International Fiber Journal got real with Jeffrey Klimkowski, Co-Founder/CFO of DUDE Wipes®, talking about the experience of creating and growing successful wipes business in the shadow of giant global brand whom we all know. For the last ten years, Klimkowski and his co-founders have dedicated their sweat equity in building a brand now getting its own notoriety.
DUDE Wipes has been named to Bain & Company’s 2024 Insurgent Brands list, which identifies companies disrupting their fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) categories in the US. DUDE Wipes® is one of 97 brands to make this year’s list.
It is a long haul to overnight success, so let’s have Jeff tell the behind-the-scenes story.
International Fiber Journal: Let’s start with a bit of history.
Jeffrey Klimkowski, Co-Founder/CFO: Absolutely. So, my lifelong friends Sean Riley/CEO, Ryan Meegan/CMO and I – the three co-founders within the business today – grew up together in Chicago. Sean and I met in second grade and rode the bus to school together. Ryan and I met later in life in travel baseball. So, we’ve known each other for some quite some time. We all went our separate ways for college to different schools. When we came back, we lived a typical post-college lifestyle, if you will, just down the street from Wrigley Field in a bro-cave.
Just starting out in our careers, I was an investment banker working in an office building. Sean was in construction management selling HVAC units for high rises for buildings downtown. Ryan worked in sales and marketing with his father’s company which rented high-end port-a-johns at events. We were doing our own thing during the week.
We’d go out on the weekends – and you can read this on the back of our packets – and after a weekend of beers and burritos, when Monday rolls around, you have a cup of coffee, you go to the bathroom, and then you sit in an office chair or you’re on a jobsite, and you don’t feel fresh.
Sean, being the innovator of the group, started doing what you should absolutely never do – he bought baby wipes from Sam’s Club in bulk. I was putting them in little sandwich baggies tucked in my coat pocket because I was at an investment bank and didn’t want to walk around with baby wipes. We quickly adopted the habit. All of our friends started using them when they hung out at our place.
We wondered why there isn’t a product like this for men? We did some research and discovered the flushable wipes category. Remember, this is 2010, so no one is talking to men about it. And in our opinion, men stink the most, especially guys in their early 20s.
So, when we discovered flushable wipes, we immediately stopped flushing baby wipes, because we realized that we were causing larger problems. We started the company and we got to work on our men’s wipes solution, and found a manufacturer for the first product, Wipes On-the-Go, which we still sell today. It is not our bestselling product, but it was our first product.
In the design process, we sought to solve our own problem, wanting extra-large wipes. All other flushable wipes on the market were too small; they didn’t cover our hands. We all wanted maximum coverage. We created what we called “DUDE size” wipes, but for some reason, people didn’t get it so now we just say extra-large. But that is how we got the name DUDE Wipes®.
Our first order with the manufacturer was placed in 2011. In 2012, our first order arrived – it took us that long. We were amateurs, we knew nothing about the world of wipes or even getting a delivery! The truck driver pulled up to my apartment complex and he says, “There is no loading dock.” A few unsavory words later, he parked down the street, and the three of us unloaded his truck case by case to my city of Chicago third-floor apartment spare bedroom. The load filled up the bedroom all the way up to the ceiling and into the stairway.
We slowly started by fulfilling orders from Amazon. A week at a time, we would all take took turns to leave work early to get packages to the UPS store before 7p.m. We started selling to some small brick-and-mortar retailers, and the business started to accelerate. Essentially, we doubled the business every single year for over 10 years. That gets us to larger numbers.
IFJ: How did you get to $150 million in sales?
Klimkowski: In 2015, we did the deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. It was a big tailwind for us. At that time, we had just one distribution channel – our first brick and mortar distribution deal with Kroger. After the Cuban investment, we tried to raise venture capital, and no one thought we had a chance to be successful.
We feel like we’re just getting started. We are only 1% of the bath tissue category market. Our goal is to be 8% over the next 10 years, which equals a billion-dollar brand.
They basically all said, ‘This might be a good idea and we understand it, but once you get to scale, you’re just going to get clobbered by Procter and Gamble, Georgia Pacific, and Kimberly Clark. It’s an oligopoly that you’re entering.’
So, our next strategy was to get profitable – and we did. We’ve been profitable ever since 2016 and we’ve been growing. Now our sales are north of $150 million for 2023. It’s been a wild ride. We’ve learned a ton along the way. We feel like we’re just getting started. We are only 1% of the bath tissue category market. Our goal is to be 8% over the next 10 years, which equals a billion-dollar brand.
IFJ: Who is your demographic and how are you attracting consumers?
Klimkowski: It’s competitive. Up until now, we really haven’t been where we can afford promotional marketing, like within Cuban’s esports team. We have done a little bit. But this year is the first year that we are at scale with our growth profile.
We say our target demographic is 18- to 55-year-old men. One thing that is very interesting is that purchasers of our product are 70% women and 30% men. Women are typically the purchasers for the household. Our users are 50/50 men to women; once DUDE Wipes® get into the household, they’re not just for dudes; women use them, too. Even my wife and six-year-old daughter use them.
We target men and try to get them to adopt good cleaning habits; we think they need it the most. Yet, we see the whole household adopting their use, and it is really growing. It has been something that really surprised us.
IFJ: Tell us about your clever marketing campaigns in the media and the internet.
Klimkowski: So, our claim is, you know, ‘Wetter is Better,’ and ‘Wet Beats Dry.’ You’ll also see our tagline is essentially, DUDE Wipes® – ‘Best Clean Pants Down.’ We are saying that we deliver a solution that’s better than just dry toilet paper.
I mean, if you were to get your hands dirty or anything like that, you wouldn’t just take a dry piece of paper and wipe it. So why are we using only dry toilet paper, it’s just something that’s archaic.
We have scientific studies that we will be sharing that exposes how much people are leaving behind when they just use dry toilet paper. So, everything is about providing a better clean than a consumer has with their current habits. We are running our first ever national media campaign, which kicked off in March, that includes television, radio, billboards and more. In our commercial, you will see side by side wiping of television-safe blue goo. Everybody makes fun of us for using blue goo, but you have to use it, otherwise you can’t illustrate this properly on TV.
IFJ: What have been the biggest challenges getting this brand to where you are today?
Klimkowski: I would say there are two things. Number one is the simple cash thing. Just because you’re growing real fast doesn’t mean you have a lot of money. I think people don’t understand that or forget about that. Now, we’re in a good position, scaled, and we’re profitable and doing well. But I would say the first 10 years – say 2011 through 2019 – that’s the part nobody talks about, really. You are working tirelessly to grow a company, but you don’t have enough money for anything at that point.
Those are growing pains for every business – finding working capital, balancing that with marketing, balancing that with having enough product – all these kinds of things are growing pains that you must get through. There’s nothing you can do unless you raise a ton of money, which we weren’t able to do.
Now, I look back at it. I’m thankful that we didn’t raise a lot of money, because it allowed us to grow in a smart way. Instead of just going as fast as we possibly could, we built this business to last, you know, through systems, infrastructure, and people; making sure every piece was perfect before we moved to the next one because we didn’t have time to get tripped up later. We didn’t have the money to solve our problems later. So that’s the first one.
I would say the second one is just the lack of focus. This is one where we walked into the wall, and it hurt. We grew up during the Dollar Shave Club era, you know. When the Dollar Shave Club was coming out, it offered all these different products – razors, body wash, etc. We saw that, and wow, we wanted to do that, too. So, we started coming out with deodorant, body wash, all of this stuff. We just lost all focus.
In 2019, we noticed DUDE Wipes® is the only thing growing consistently every year. All these other products are barely growing. We asked ourselves why are we wasting our time and struggling for money over these products that impact our working capital and marketing dollars? It was a lack of focus, and we learned that the hard way. We are now firm believers that consumers hire you to do one thing. That one thing, for us, is to wipe people’s butts. Anything that does not revolve around that, we are not going to do, and we’ve been cutting product line down ever since.
In fact, we just discontinued face wipes; now we’re going to work them through the system, but we will be done with that. At the end of the day, we will just be footing two products, which is DUDE Wipes® that makes up 99% of our sales and DUDE Shower Wipes, which are a full body wipe. Now, we are a very focused company. We had shiny object syndrome and thought we could be everything to everybody, but when you’re competing with large CPG companies, it’s just super important to be 100% focused on what you do best. Your competitors have more money, so you must be more focused and be quicker than them.
IFJ: What is your goal for the future? Where are you positioning your company for the long haul?
Klimkowski: So that’s a great question. With this focus, today we stand only just over 1% of the bath tissue category. Our goal is in the next five years to be 4% of the total bath tissue category. In 10 years, it’s to be 8% of category. Creating this message and letting consumers know about the advantages of wet cleaning being better than dry, that’s really the big AHA moment for us.
We’ve noticed with this new national media campaign; it is resonating with consumers – they don’t realize that they need this until they use it.
We also did a consumer study where we asked folks that have never used flushable wipes to use a leading brand best-in-class dry toilet paper for seven days, and journal how they felt; they did it and they said that they felt great. They scored it 8-9s out of 10, mostly.
Then, we said, ‘Here’s your toilet paper, the same toilet paper you just used, but use DUDE Wipes®, which were unbranded in a white package, in conjunction. The rankings were fantastic, again 8-9s out of 10. We then took away the flushable wipes and said just use that same quality dry toilet paper again for another week. At the end, all the rankings dropped down, ranging from 5-7 out of 10. They didn’t realize what they were missing until they tried this new habit.
It’s funny. You can change people’s habits through humorously pointing out what they are missing and understand what we’re trying to do. Everybody likes our new marketing. We have a long way to go. Our survey data shows that seven out of 10 people that try flushable wipes stick with the category. We have decades of growth ahead of us. We’re so excited about just doubling down on this category and growing it.
IFJ: What makes you the “go to” brand?
Klimkowski: We are extra-large, flushable and the first ones ever to do that. We continue to improve it, in fact, we are transitioning to be the thickest, most premium flushable wipes on the market. That’ll be fully rolled out by July 1 into the marketplace. With size and scale at this point, we have a competitive advantage.
You know, being the only native brand (cruelty free and never tested on animals) to this category, our goal is to be the Kleenex of the category. When you think of flushable wipes, we want consumers to think of DUDE Wipes.
IFJ: What advice would you give to those seeking to enter the hygiene category?
Klimkowski: The advice I’d give to those trying to disrupt and create a category is lean into the power of staying FOCUSED. The one strategic advantage you have as a small, insurgent brand is the ability to move quickly, much quicker than large competitors with lots of cash, so take advantage of that strategic advantage by staying laser focused on the category you are trying to disrupt. Innovate within the confines of that category and do not let “shinny objects” take you off the path of continuing to push forward to design and grow your category. Everyone in the startup world likes to talk about new products, new products, but innovating within the confines of our category allows insurgent brands to concentrate resources in a specific category and efficiently drive future growth.
IFJ: You were part of INDA, Association of the Nonwovens Fabrics Industry’s U.S. Capitol Hill Fly-In event. Tell us about the experience.
Klimkowski: I think the Fly-In was fantastic. There’s nothing cooler or more American
than being a constituent, going on the Hill, and talking to elected officials about issues that are important to you as a citizen. It gives you more confidence in the system, given all the media headlines about the dysfunction. Maybe things are more functional than you think.
We represented support for the WIPPES Act 9H.R. 2964, Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environmental Safety, which passed the U.S. House of Representativeson June 11]. This legislation will create a uniform label for products that have and/or require a “Do Not Flush” label, creating a national standard.
Right now, only six states have adopted legislation that is similar to the WIPPES Act. With different regulations in different states, it becomes cost-prohibitive for manufacturers to follow. The Responsible Flushing Alliance, CASA and INDA conducted a joint study, proving that less than 1% of the items pulled out of wastewater are flushable wipes. It’s baby wipes, paper towels, FEM care products that are really causing the issues with our water systems.
We believe that establishing the WIPPES Act as law will enable standardized labeling and consumer education on what’s flushable and not flushable.
IFJ: Do you have any other news to share?
Klimkowski: We continue to push innovation within the category. We’re excited about our first ever DUDE Wipes Odor Destroyer Flushable Wipes that launched at Walmart. It will deliver up to 24 hours of odor control. Pushing the envelope on odor control is part of that cleaning sensation that’s important to us to continue to disrupt.
IFJ: Why do you think odor is such a big deal for people?
Klimkowski: It’s a big deal. You know, it has to do with confidence. That’s one of the things that we say in our community, ‘pretty confidently clean.’ People don’t want to worry over a nagging sensation that there’s some sort of odor issue, or anything that hinders the perception that you are ready to perform. I think that is an important personal preference for consumers, and especially our customers who are purchasing DUDE Wipes®.
