For 50 hours in 2012, Simon Griffiths sat on a toilet in a draughty warehouse and asked strangers on the internet to pay for toilet paper that did not exist yet.
He has said he would never do it again, but that it was the right thing to do. His legs paid for it. He ended up with nerve damage that lingered for about three years, after a scare over deep vein thrombosis was ruled out.
Next he opened the Shebeen, a bar in Melbourne's CBD that handed over every dollar of profit to charity.
The stunt was the end of a long run of near-misses. Griffiths grew up in Western Australia, looking after neighbours' cats for pocket money and making sandboards to sell to friends. After school he took a gap year, taught himself to code and paid his way through the University of Melbourne with freelance web work. He lived at Trinity College on a scholarship, treasurer of the music society, the sort of student who signed up for everything.
Then came the trying. A short stretch in management consulting left him unfulfilled. In 2007 he co-founded Ripple, an online fundraising platform, with his university friend Jehan Ratnatunga and Matthew Tilleard. It had early success, but it could not sustain itself. Next he opened the Shebeen, a bar in Melbourne's CBD that handed over every dollar of profit to charity. It closed too. He later described it as a three-year education in business, a costly one.
What almost nobody knew when the toilet went on camera was how many times he had already failed at doing good for a living. The idea itself arrived in a bathroom, staring at a six-pack of toilet paper, with the knowledge that about two billion people have no toilet at all. He and Ratnatunga teamed up with Danny Alexander, who had a product development degree and had worked on toilet-building programs in Africa.
The campaign asked for A$50,000. It raised A$93,000. A first run that could easily have been their last sold out within days of launching. A retailer deal stalled, which pushed the founders to sell straight to households online, and that decision became the company's shape: recycled paper at the door, wrapped in loud paper, with half of profits going to sanitation.
The pandemic delivered the biggest test. In 2020, when shelves emptied, demand jumped by 1,100 per cent. By then the company had given about A$8.3 million to partner organisations, and A$5.85 million of that in a single year. Griffiths has visited WaterAid projects in Timor-Leste to see where the money lands.
The lesson is in the order of events. The famous stunt looks like a gimmick, but it came after a failed platform and a failed bar. Griffiths had spent years finding out what people would actually pay for. A toilet roll, it turned out, is easier to sell than an abstraction like impact, and the failures taught him to sell the roll.