led in size, launched a brand new product the Dream Cloth and donated $5.85 million across six different charity partners.  “We’ve done it all with our incredibly nimble team who was working through some pretty unprecedented circumstances,” says Griffiths. The largest challenge was fulfilling the skyrocketing demand for toilet paper. Who Gives a Crap saw its orders spike in March, at its peak selling 28 rolls of toilet paper every second.  The retailer changed its website to ‘sold out’ and turned on an email sign-up so that people could be notified when the product was back in stock. “In the middle of March we had an 1,100 per cent increase in our daily sales and sold out globally,” Griffiths says.  “We thought we would get a few thousand sign ups, but got a bit of a shock when more than half a million people signed up! Immediately, we rolled up our sleeves to figure out how we could get TP to as many people as possible.”  The business came up with a creative solution to manage the unprecedented level of demand: it repacked rolls from its 48-roll boxes into 24-roll boxes to ship twice as many orders. “We found and trained 25 freelancers in less than a week to help us with triple the number of customer enquiries. And then we slowly started sending emails to what ended up being a 600,000 person waitlist to let people know they could buy from us again,” Griffiths says.  “By the end of May, we’d moved through the whole waiting list thanks to an incredible amount of hard work from our team and partners, many quick pivots and one broken inventory management software.” Each year, Who Gives A Crap donates 50 per cent of its profits to help build toilets, and the sales spike enabled it to make its largest ever donation.  “From the very beginning, our mission has been to ensure everyone in the world has access to a toilet, but we never thought our impact could be this great,” explains Griffiths.  “To put it into perspective, our very first donation was just $2,500 to WaterAid Australia, but this year we donated $5.8 million between six amazing partner organisations. Really, it’s a milestone that’s unbelievably exciting, but also incredibly humbling.” The total donation amount was five times greater than in 2019 and it more than doubled the total amount Who Gives A Crap has donated to date, now over $8.3 million. These donations funded a variety of water, sanitation and hygiene projects, like building toilets, advancing disability inclusion, and providing soap and handwashing stations in countries like Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, Kenya and India. When asked if he has a prediction for the size of next year’s donation, Griffith says they hope to be able to expand the number of charity partners they work with.“We didn’t see 2020 coming, so who knows what 2021 will look like! We’re happy so many new people have become customers because our donations grow when our business does too. We hope to bring on even more charity partners and expand our continued impact around the world,” Griffiths says.  “In everything we do, our priority is to help as many people as possible get access to proper toilets and sanitation. We’ve seen how toilets really change the landscape of communities, from education to local business and beyond! As a mission driven business, we make sure  our company goals always ladder up to our purpose – toilets for everyone.”  This article was originally published in the Australian Retail Outlook 2021. To download the report, click here.