Business at Tushy is booming.
While the circumstances that led to the boom are sobering, the bidet company needed to adapt its strategy after seeing an uptick in business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other companies in this cohort include video conferencing service Zoom, meal kit service Blue Apron and Facebook, thanks to its social network, video hardware Portal and Oculus Quest VR headset. These companies all have something in common — they offer solutions to problems that, until recently, were not all that urgent.
Founded in 2015 by Thinx founder Miki Agrawal, Tushy aims to replace toilet paper, CEO Jason Ojalvo tells TechCrunch. Ojalvo, who joined the company as CEO in 2018, says North America has been a holdout when it comes to bidets. As a result, the nation flushes about 15 million trees down the toilet every year.
Tushy, which has raised $2.9 million since its founding, has been profitable for the last two years. That’s in part thanks to the company’s focus on sustainability — not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a business one, Ojalvo says. That means not over-hiring or spending too much on marketing.
“We’re really careful about doing it in a way so we won’t explode like some other direct-to-consumer companies can do when they raise too much money and they over-hire and then they have to let people go,” Ojalvo says. “That’s just a debacle that I’ve seen first hand and I don’t want to be part of it. Not only do I not want to be part of it but I don’t want to be the leader of the company that does that.”
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Tushy saw its growth double year-over-year. Ojalvo says that’s partly been a result of having customers who evangelize on their behalf. Fast-forward to around March 9, when sales really started to double beyond the norm; a few days later, Tushy was having days where it brought in $500,000 in sales.
“We were doing like 10x our normal sales,” Ojalvo says. “We were having half a million-dollar days and had a million-dollar day. It was just crazy. And we’ve been having really good days ever since.”
The sharp uptick in demand has led Tushy to increase production in its factories in Asia and pull back on its normal marketing expenditures. With reports of toilet paper shortages and some media organizations pointing to Tushy as a solution, the company received plenty of earned media.
“So we pulled back significantly on marketing and diverted a lot of that budget over to customer experience,” Ojalvo tells us. “With 10x the sales comes 10x the customer queries. So we had to hire four new customer service reps and divert some of the full-time main team to spend a couple of hours of their week answering customer queries. It becomes more of a shift of resources.”
Still, many of Tushy’s products are on back order, but Ojalvo notes that he generally likes to underpromise and overdeliver. With the Tushy Classic, a single temperature bidet, Tushy told customers it would ship by April 20, but the company has already shipped out a bunch. Right now, expected ship dates for the two classic models that are available to buy are expected to ship by May 15 and June 1, respectively.
“It’s difficult, but I feel like we’re almost able to keep up with demand,” Ojalvo says. “There’s a little delay, but hopefully it’s worth the wait.”
In addition to adjusting to the demand, Tushy workers have an added layer of complexity, as many are working from home for the first time. One worker, for example, took home the 3D printer to help meet the short-term demand for smaller items, like attachments to ensure the Tushy works with elongated toilet bowls or specific knobs for people with disabilities who may have a harder time gripping the out-of-the-box knob.
“There has been plenty of work to do,” Ojalvo says of employees working from home during this time. “But everyone really appreciates that we’re in a very rare and very lucky position to be doing well.”
To mimic the in-person environment as much as possible, Tushy hosts Zoom calls in the morning and again in the late afternoon so employees can check in with each other. The goal is to ensure that people are working on what’s most important and see if anyone needs approval to move forward on a project. Team meetings also now focus less on marketing and more on shipping timelines, factory orders and customer service.
“Those are mostly work, but they also become a little social, which is nice. I think everyone is jonesing for some time with other human beings, so it always turns into what people are binge-watching. Just to keep sane, we did a prank where everyone wore wigs except for one person. Just more silliness like funny backgrounds on Zoom to kind of keep it light and have some joy in our day. That’s super-important because normally around the office, someone will point to a silly poop pun a customer wrote in their testimonial. There’s always laughter and I think everyone kind of misses that.”
Beyond these uncertain times that led to toilet paper panic-buying and increased sales for Tushy, Ojalvo says he’s hopeful that the new level of interest from consumers will persist. They already have a number of repeat customers — those who buy another Tushy for their other bathrooms or purchase additional Tushys as gifts.
“We’ve seen brides and grooms give them to their bridesmaids and groomsmen as gifts at weddings,” Ojalvo says. “It’s big on Valentine’s Day, it’s also big on Christmas for white elephant [gift exchanges].”
Beyond the bidet, Tushy has other poop-optimizing products in its portfolio, including a footstool, towels and bamboo toilet paper, which has sold out, perhaps unsurprisingly. Still, toilet paper is less of a focus for the company because it’s a bit of a mixed message, Ojalvo says.
Before the pandemic, Tushy planned to release more products in the coming year.
“Everything is in flux right now,” Ojalvo says. “We’re doing gangbusters business, so that’s really the focus. And all filming has been shut down, so the ads we were going to film are postponed indefinitely. So right now my goal is to just make sure we can meet the 10x demand we’ve been getting and continue to provide awesome customer service so that these customers become evangelists. That’s the core focus right now.”
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