How Simon Duffy hopes to make Waken ‘the next Colgate’

The inspiration for oral care challenger Waken came during a US road trip of nearly 1,000 miles. It was 2018, and Simon Duffy and Rhodri Ferrier were driving from Fort Worth, Texas to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

They were heading to a meeting with Target to discuss Bulldog Skincare. That’s the male grooming brand they launched in 2007 and sold to Edgewell Personal Care for an undisclosed sum in 2016 (the year they both bagged an MBE for services to the beauty industry).

En route, they visited 35 Target branches, where they noticed mouthwash was “the most boring place” in store, says Duffy. “It hasn’t really had the same energy from innovation that male beauty has.”

The couple exited Edgewell on good terms not long after their US odyssey. With time on his hands, Duffy researched the oral care market and concluded it was “the most consolidated” area of personal care and therefore ripe for disruption. “It’s a massive underachiever in terms of bringing newness,” he says. Thus, the self-funded Waken was founded in late 2019.

Sainsbury’s and Boots agreed to list the brand’s first line, an aniseed & mint-flavoured mouthwash. It didn’t last long. In a giveaway at Boots head office, people said it tasted like sambuca. “So, that was not a good product,” Duffy says. Peppermint, Spearmint, Lemon & Mint and Strawberry & Mint felt like safer bets – all alcohol-free and packaged with an eye on aesthetics.

The aim was for consumers to beautify their bathrooms with Waken’s sleek, pastel-coloured bottles. They were initially made of aluminium but soon transitioned to recycled plastic. “Part of me felt sad about that, because I thought aluminium was such a shorthand for a more sustainable approach,” Duffy admits. “But the reality of doing aluminium was becoming less sustainable.” By which he means the metal’s tendency to dent and its “very complicated supply chain”.

Sustainability isn’t just a buzzword for Duffy. After all, the environment was also a key consideration for his first venture, Bulldog. The idea for that came on a cold day in 2005, when Duffy was living in New York: “It must have been minus 20 with the wind chill.”

To protect his skin, he was using his Kiwi girlfriend’s natural moisturiser from Whole Foods Market. “It was a bit stinky. But it was natural, healthy and different to what you get in Walgreens or CVS – and I was like: ‘I need to get some skincare products for me.’”

A return to his native UK followed in 2006 and work began on Bulldog. “We set out to raise £1.2m and pretty much got that. We exhausted the people we knew who might invest,” Duffy explains. “I got married in 2007, and we managed to get some investors in New Zealand, including a really successful entrepreneur who made lots of money doing retirement homes. I met him in a pub. I mean, I sort of knew of him, but he arranged to meet me in a pub.”

“If you can’t be the share leader, you want to be the thought leader”

Setting up Bulldog was a learning process in more ways than one, he admits. “The most naive notion was that first year. You’re making all these different decisions. I remember thinking to myself: ‘It’s so busy now. But once we get the products into store, what are we going to do? We’ll have so much time because there’ll be nothing to do.’” He was disabused of that notion after the 2007 launch, when keeping the brand running became “an all-encompassing challenge”.

The six-strong debut range for Bulldog Natural Grooming – as it was then called – was a mix of shave gel, post-shave balm, facewash, moisturiser, shower gel and shampoo. “We didn’t have enough focus to begin with,” Duffy concedes. Plus, the differing margins on each SKU were “a drag”.

Change of direction

Something eventually had to give. “About two years in, we were like: ‘We have to be focused on one thing and do it really well.’ We decided to do skincare, which is the tip of the arrow in terms of expertise: it’s easier to go from skincare to deo or shower, but it’s hard to go from shower or deo. And it also meant we had a clear route to breaking even through the skincare model, rather than, say, the shower gel model.”

This change of direction also meant a change of name. “We became Bulldog Skincare For Men. And then towards the end of our journey, we just became Bulldog Skincare.”

Throughout the brand’s journey, that founding principle of sustainability remained a constant. “It was always front of mind,” says Duffy. “We were the first brand to do plastic from sugar cane.” There was also a bamboo razor handle and outer packaging was recycled materials. “We used to say: ‘If you can’t be the share leader, you want to be the thought leader.’”

Duffy and Ferrier have taken that attitude into Waken – and it’s paying dividends. The brand’s mouthwashes and toothpastes boast listings with the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and overseas retailers.

They’ve also attracted celebrity attention: TV and radio presenter Rylan Clark this month joined Waken as an investor and creative director. “He’s a big Waken user and fan, so it felt like an authentic thing,” Duffy says. “He’s hands on, as well. He wants to roll his sleeves up and be involved in the discussions and come and meet the retail buyers.”

Clark’s appointment coincided with a revamped portfolio for Waken, featuring redesigned, mainly white packaging and a new focus on functionality rather than the fancy flavours of before. There are now just two flavours, spearmint and peppermint, across variants like Sensitive Care and Whitening.

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That overhaul was fuelled by a crowdfunding round last autumn. Waken raised £950k on a valuation of £5.1m – much to Duffy’s satisfaction. “It gives us the ability to do some more aggressive marketing, develop more products, expand the team,” he explains. “We’re just looking to scale, so we feel really encouraged.”

Waken is still a small player in oral care, Duffy admits. Since launch, it has generated £6.3m in net sales globally. For comparison, mouthwash leader Listerine rakes in about £264m annually in its US homeland alone.

But given Waken’s fast growth, that gap will eventually narrow, Duffy predicts. “Five years from now, I think we can be a huge brand. We want to be relevant, a serious challenger. We want to create a massive oral care brand. We want to be the next Colgate.”

There’s one small sticking point. Retailers typically merchandise mouthwash alphabetically, says Duffy. That means Waken often finds itself on a low shelf. “We should’ve called ourselves Awaken,” he laughs. “But it’s too late for that.”