The wipes warriors

Guerilla marketing to national distribution

They began handing out wipes for free to anyone who would take them, including at music festivals (they paid $1,500 for a booth at a local electronic music festival) and on college campuses (their first big order was selling $400 worth of wipes to a frat house at Illinois State University). This is a tactic the company still uses to this day – Dude says its products will be sampled to “hundreds of thousands of students” at freshmen orientations via a partnership with Amazon.

In 2013, Dude was doing just $20,000 in sales when the founders started approaching major retailers, hiring a broker in Cincinnati to help secure the meetings. Most laughed them out of the room until they met with Kevin Darcy, the head of toilet paper at Kroger, in 2014.

By this point, Dude’s sales had jumped to $225,000, largely thanks to their success on Amazon, where they were steadily racking up repeat customers. “He was like this is early but you know what, I like it. I’m in toilet paper. There’s not anything cool. There’s not anything new. I’m going to give you a shot,” Riley recalls.

In 2015, Dude signed a $2 million deal to stock its wipes in the toilet paper aisle of 2,000 Kroger stores.

That same year, they finally got a “yes” from Shark Tank’s producers after two previous attempts to get on the show. The effect was almost immediate: sales doubled to $3 million in 2016, up ten-fold from 2015 (thanks in part to the Kroger deal).

They leveraged this momentum for a trial in 1,500 Walmart stores in 2018, which went so well that Dude secured a permanent position in Walmart’s toilet paper aisle, or as Riley calls it, the “Super Bowl” of toilet paper.

“They had identified opportunities to serve the customer in a different way that others weren’t,” says Will Loan, the Walmart buying manager who brought in the wipes, citing the male-focused marketing, larger wipe size and packaging. He adds: “They were willing to talk to the customer about something everyone experiences (bowel movements) but no other brand was willing to do at that time.”

Today, sales in Walmart stores and on Walmart.com make up about 15% of Dude’s total revenue, with retail comprising about half of Dude’s overall sales. Its biggest channel is Amazon, which makes up 38% of revenues.

The pandemic opportunity

Things were already rolling for “the Dudes” when COVID struck. As toilet paper aisles across the country emptied, more and more desperate shoppers began searching for alternatives and stumbling upon Dude Wipes.

From there, an interesting trend began to emerge: 75% of customers who bought wet wipes for the first time during the pandemic went back to buy the products again, according to Dude’s own studies of consumer data. The overall category has grown in size by 35% since 2020, compared to 5% growth in dry toilet paper during the same time period, data from Nielsen analytics shows.

This gave the founders an idea. Instead of existing “adjacent” to toilet paper as was their strategy previously, could Dude Wipes directly compete with it?

“We’re on the disruption toilet paper path, like hey can we move everyone over to this solution?” says Riley.

Going mainstream

In 2022, the Dudes hired as a consultant Pete Carter, a 40-plus year marketing director from Procter & Gamble who led transformative campaigns for products like Tide Pods and Swiffer. Carter, who calls himself “the Old Dude,” is guiding what he describes as the company’s “mass media” campaign.

Up until recently, most of Dude’s marketing was through social media and word of mouth. Now, they’re investing heavily in a national advertising blitz, including a TV commercial that played across the country, radio spots, and billboards. They also sponsored a NASCAR race, “The Dude Wipes 250,” at the Martinsville Speedway track in Virginia in April.

Surprisingly, it’s not just men enjoying the product. The company claims about 50% of its users are women, choosing the brand over traditional toilet paper because it “cleans better.”

Among Dude’s surprising fans is musician John Mayer, who sent the company a message on Instagram last year asking them to release single packs with two wipes instead of one: the “two wiper”.

The road ahead: challenges and opportunities

Burt Flickinger, a retail consultant who works with Procter & Gamble, Kimberly and Clark and other flushable wipes makers, calls Dude’s plan for domination “overly ambitious” (the toilet paper market has been around for about 1,500 years, after all). But he does see plenty of opportunity to expand the category by being “complementary” to toilet paper.

“With truckers, people doing more long-distance traveling, hiking, camping, etc., Dude could very well be the primary or sole consideration,” Flickinger notes.

Cuban’s take: “It’s not about changing habits but about filling a need that is already there.”

One factor that could help: convincing consumers it’s not any worse for the environment, and maybe it’s even better. To help educate consumers that their wipes are flushable and biodegradable, the founders are lobbying for the passage of the Wipes Act, which they helped promote and is currently moving through Congress. The act, if passed, would promote clear labeling distinguishing between which ones can and cannot be flushed.

There is, of course, the threat that Kimberly & Clark and other giants move to stamp out Dude’s success with their own multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns. As of now, flushable wipes “are a pimple on the butt of the toilet paper behemoths,” says Carter.

The brand is Dude’s best defense, Riley agrees. “That’s how you compete with a Goliath is being completely differentiated and doing things they can’t do,” he says. “We can never compete with their capital and their people. But they can’t compete with our spirit and our creativity, how fast we move, and the things we say.”

He grins, adding: “The Dudeness is the magic.”