Welcome to the second episode of this season of the Piper Podcast, How I Grew My Brand. In this instalment, Mary Nightingale interviews Freddy Ward, co-founder of Wild, the natural deodorant and body care brand that launched in 2019 with a mission to make the bathroom a more sustainable and stylish place.
The brand developed out of a mission to find more sustainable materials to replace the amount of plastic in the bathroom and help bring natural products to a more mainstream audience by making it, ‘Really convenient, highly effective and quite aspirational, a little bit sexy to entice customers in.’
This mission was reinforced by growing customer trends that Freddy saw when he worked at HelloFresh, the recipe box delivery company. ‘I think in my first few years no one ever mentioned the packaging, people didn’t think about it. By the time I left, it was the second biggest reason why customers were leaving recipe boxes.’ And the second trend, ‘People really thinking more about what they’re putting in their bodies, where those ingredients come from… and for me, it really made sense that that was going to translate to what they were putting on their bodies as well as in their bodies.’
This ability to see gaps and shifts in the market is something we find common among the majority of the founders we interview, but Freddy does not share the common feeling of being destined to be an entrepreneur, ‘I wasn’t selling eggs at school’ but instead was influenced by the experience of the fast-paced start-up world at HelloFresh, ‘The excitement and the learning curve and the opportunities and challenges… once you go through something like that, you want to do it yourself.’
His journey with HelloFresh took him on a crash course through the phases of brand growth that we call, 7,17,70, and meant that he was in some ways prepared for the inflection point shifts that happened along the way as he built Wild, ‘There are very different skills as a CEO and very different company cultures… at HelloFresh I’ve seen what happens, I know what’s coming.’ He talks about how the role of the founder also changes, ‘There’s a lot more responsibility on your shoulders, you’re looking after 80 people.’
Despite being prepared in some ways, Freddy still experienced shifts in the business that weren’t easy, ‘I think 17 is a big moment where you need to professionalise your systems… the business just becomes a lot more complicated, suddenly you’re having to drain a huge amount of the teams time and resources in an area where you don’t see any value… but if you don’t do it you don’t have the right systems and processes in place to scale.’ He admits he wishes they had asked for more help instead of thinking they could figure it out themselves, ‘Our first Black Friday of our new software system, the system just broke, just couldn’t take the orders and the team were having to work all-nighters to upload orders manually.’
Overcoming these challenges is how Wild has maintained its growth trajectory and category disruption. While this disruption originally came from wanting to make the sector more natural and sustainable, the real market shift has come from their direct-to-consumer focus allowing them to try things traditional deodorant brands can’t, ‘The number one reason people buy Wild products is fragrance. They are looking for a more interesting, more diverse range of fragrances. When you go into a supermarket, you probably get four or five fragrances that generally every brand has an adaption of… what D2C has led us to do is create way more fragrances and to have a lot of fun with those fragrances.’
The freedom that D2C brought also played into his long-term strategy, Freddy always knew Wild would have to be omnichannel to succeed, ‘90% of deodorants are still sold through supermarkets and Boots… first year we were just D2C, stayed focused, really learnt a lot, were able to iterate the product and make a lot of mistakes without the pressures of going into retail.’ And now they’re in a place where Tesco is asking them to create new products with Wild haircare now available in 700 stores and Freddy says, ‘We’re really excited about what the future looks like and the potential beyond deodorant. Foundationally, if Wild wants to achieve its goals it has to be more than a deodorant brand, we have to be able to prove we can move into multi-category.’
Being a brand that is, as Freddy puts it, ‘Part of the Covid generation’, Wild has lived through the D2C boom and the harder times that we’ve seen over the last few years as consumers have gone back to shopping offline, ‘I think it makes you realise that when things are really good and everyone thinks it’s amazing, that’s the time to check yourself and realise things can change very quickly… and likewise when everyone is saying consumer is doomed and we’re in a big recession, it’s never as bad as people say.’
Freddy’s ability to balance sentiments and risks to see the bigger picture, alongside his learnings in experiencing the start-up world before setting up Wild, have been key. Yet, to him, success isn’t the quick wins, ‘Success for me, is building a business that can sustain growth for decades, not years.’ He is building a business as sustainable as the products themselves. You can hear many more of his insights in the rest of his interview, available to listen on all major podcast platforms. Enjoy.