The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2021
Who Gives a Crap hides a loo in every wrapper to fund toilets worldwide
A Where's Wally-style limited edition hid one toilet in each of 12 illustrated wrappers, tying bathroom fun to sanitation funding.
Who Gives a Crap
What it had to solve
Who Gives a Crap, an Australian B Corp, sells bamboo toilet paper and gives 50% of its profits to sanitation projects, yet the scale of the problem — billions without a safe toilet — is easy to forget between the product's jokes. For a limited edition it wanted packaging that made customers play with that mission.
How it works
Who Gives a Crap, an Australian B Corp, sells 100% bamboo toilet paper and gives half its profits to sanitation projects worldwide — the mission that started when its founders learned that billions of people have no safe toilet. In 2021 it wanted a limited edition that carried that mission in the product itself, not in an ad.
The brand commissioned South Australian illustrator Owen Lindsay to draw 12 fantastical wrapper worlds — from New York City to the Great Wall of China, under the sea to outer space — each hiding one tiny toilet among easter eggs, characters and location jokes. The ecommerce shipper repeated the artwork on its inside, inviting families to colour it in, and the 48-roll edition sold worldwide.
The hunt made a distant statistic personal: while customers searched the wrappers for the hidden loo, they were reminded that billions are still searching for a real one. The edition became one of Who Gives a Crap's fastest-selling limited releases, returned by customer demand in 2022, and appears in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- The hunt happens in the one place — the bathroom — where toilet access is already the topic on the user's mind.
- Where's Wally-style art rewarded close looking, so customers spent real time with the brand's message instead of skipping it.
- Half of profits funding sanitation gave the game a truthful engine rather than a token cause.
- Colour-in characters on the delivery box extended the idea past the roll to the whole unboxing experience.
What it did
Hunting for the hidden toilet made toilet scarcity personal at the moment of use, and the playfulness did the selling: the edition became one of Who Gives a Crap's fastest-selling limited releases, returned by customer demand in 2022, and appears in the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
Put the mission inside the product's own mundane moment: the wrapper you read on the loo becomes the place the message lands, and play turns a global statistic into something customers join.
Since then
The 2021 edition became one of Who Gives a Crap's fastest-selling limited releases, and hundreds of customers asked for its return before the brand re-launched the twelve wrappers in March 2022. The packaging also appears in the D&AD awards archive.
Sources
- Where's the Loo | D&AD awards archive
- Cheeky Toilet Paper Packaging Helps Wipe Out Toilet Inaccessibility
- One of Who Gives A Crap's most popular limited editions is back, Where's the Loo re-launches
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