Let's talk about toilet paper... laterally and literally
The toilet paper we know today has been around since the 1800s... and has seen little innovation
First off, today’s little lateral thinking brain teaser:
The police find a man who hanged himself in a wooden barn. He is hanging roughly 3 feet above the ground. There is no object to stand on next to him and the nearest wall is at least 20 feet away. You cannot climb the walls or rafters. The only notable thing is a puddle underneath the man. How did he hang himself?
Answer at the end of the email.
If you feel you’re more creative in the shower or on the loo, you’re not alone. Science explained it, but to summarize it, it’s because happy chemicals that we all know (yes, dopamine is one of them) tend to jump around in our brain when we’re relaxed, happy and feel safe.
It’s why taking breaks is so important in fostering new ideas and looking at things differently. Because if your input is always the same, don’t be shocked when your output doesn’t change.
Or, to paraphrase my favorite Far Cry villain:
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Now let’s talk about something we do over and over again, wiping our butts. If that’s not an Oscar winning segue, I don’t know what is.
The history of the toilet paper is messy, pun intended. Humans have been apparently using “toilet sticks” for over 2,000 years, but we can trace back the first mention of toilet paper back to 589 A.D China. The modern version of butt-wipes dates back to the 1800s. Here’s the entire history, if you have nothing else to do while sitting on the toilet.
Riveting, I know.
Despite being around for a long time (pretty much since butts were invented), toilet paper has not seen a lot of modern innovation.
Imagine being the CEO of a company that produces toilet paper. You’d mostly work around improving production cost, distribution and probably play around with branding. Most of us would think the same and most of us would be right.
The problem with most people thinking the same is that you run out of ideas pretty fast. Toilet paper marketing plays around with tongue in cheek concepts, but the main business revolves mostly around distribution and cost optimization.
After all, what product differentiator can you truly have? How many plies can one add before going insane?
A Royal Flush.
Enter AquaTube. Yeah, the flushable toilet roll.
This is purely a personal opinion, but AquaTube is one of the most brilliant product innovations I’ve seen from a lateral thinking standpoint. Not because of its utility (there’s plenty of discussion around that - France is pretty pissed) or because it saves a company money (it’s actually more expensive to make).
But it completely redefines a category because someone looked at toilet paper and instead of seeing the paper that we all use, he (or she) saw the roll and said “what if we do something about that?”.
The thought process behind that is inspiring. Looking at something as basic as toilet paper, eliminating the basic train of thought (make it softer, make it smell better, make it look better) and realizing there’s an untapped problem to solve - the fact that you can’t throw away the core the same way you throw away the paper.
The madlads even tried to patent it, not sure how that went in the end.
Despite not changing the world, AquaTube did refresh an industry by giving people something new to talk about.
This, for me, is a reminder that there’s always an angle you haven’t seen, even if humanity has been looking at a specific problem for +200 years.
But the act of thinking about old things in new ways is a beautiful exercise that keeps your lateral thinking sharp.
Answer: the man stood on a block of ice until it melted.