Harry (Wild)
Harry Symes-Thompson is Head of Growth at Wild Cosmetics, a sustainable natural deodorant company. Having had explosive growth direct-to-consumer, Wild has just been rolled out across 280 Sainsbury’s superstores.
This blog series is going share the stories of startups’ sustainability journeys, hoping to encourage more companies to think about their climate impact.
At ScholarTribe, we’re supporting our clients’ sustainability journeys by connecting them with brilliant climate academics for freelance projects.
Tell me about your journey to join Wild
I didn’t really know what I wanted to study at university. I fell into studying business and got lucky with my course at Bath Uni. It was very practical, consisting of two six-month work placements, and then an academic exchange abroad.
My first work placement was at a company called Hello Fresh. At the time it was a scrappy startup, probably like ten or fifteen of us in the UK. Being such a fast-growing company, it was such an epic and challenging environment to work in. My role was going up and down the country to run events and build a guerrilla marketing team. I absolutely loved the experience of feeling the brand come to life.
After Hello Fresh, I did a placement at a bank, which I realised wasn’t for me. I just wanted to wear a suit for a bit and see how it felt. It made me realise that I wanted more of an entrepreneurial life.
Graduating in 2017, I was fortunate enough to get a job at Google in Dublin. Dublin was was an awesome place to live and Google was a fantastic place to work. My first role was looking after small to medium sized businesses, consulting on their digital strategy. I then moved into the accelerated growth team, which was something I absolutely loved. It combined my passion for startups, fast growing businesses, and digital growth. I basically got to cherry-pick the fastest growing businesses in Google’s digital ecosystem and work with them on transformation strategies across digital media. I built a great network.
Two and a half years into Google, I wanted to get back to London. As I started looking, Freddy, my boss from Hello Fresh, was setting up Wild. It was just a vision at the time, but I was bought into the idea. I researched the natural deodorant market and there were some amazing success stories from US. I knew it would be great working with Freddy again. I eventually took the leap of faith and joined Wild.
Could you tell us a bit more about Wild?
Wild’s purpose is to reduce single use plastic in the bathroom. To achieve that you need to be born out of sustainability and innovation.
When you look around the bathroom there’s so much plastic. I used to be guilty of that, using shampoo, shower gel, shaving stuff and everything else packaged in plastic. You look at the kitchen and everything is thought through and recyclable. We want to change the culture and change people’s habits in the bathroom, but also bring a bit of style, a bit of sexiness, a bit of like fun.
It erupted when we launched our refillable deodorant range. It’s a case, which is to last a lifetime, and then you refill the deodorant. It’s packed in bamboo pulp, which is biodegradable and compostable. It’s full cycle sustainability for that deodorant product.
Sustainability wise, what’s the biggest challenge for Wild?
It’s convincing everyone in the category, as well as the mainstream market, that this transition needs to happen. There’s still a lot of plastic products that are priced very cheap, so it’s convincing retailers and customers to invest a little bit more up front to save money in the long term. It’s a constant battle of trying to encourage and educate as best as we can.
The same goes for natural products. A lot of people don’t know what they are, I certainly didn’t before I joined Wild. I’d look to on the back of my deodorant can and wouldn’t be able to pronounce a single ingredient.
The other challenge is executing the product well enough. You can’t sell a sustainable product if it doesn’t work or if it’s not convenient for customers to switch to. Ultimately, if your deodorant doesn’t work like it says it does, or if it doesn’t fit into people’s lifestyles as easily as it should, then people don’t care how sustainable it is.
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