Faced with our collective vulnerability and our growing isolation from each other, it is time to celebrate a common thread and the hope that we can all find strength in our softness.

We all bleed, we all have had snot drip down on us, we all have barfed, or been barfed on, we are all messy and, yes, we all have to use the toilet. It’s these realities that unite us all. That’s what make us beautiful. It’s these moments that we are in service of. Now is the time to unapologetically celebrate our humanity.

We transformed a category built on shame and avoidance to raw, honest and celebratory of humanity, simply by speaking to the actual uses of the products in an epic ballet of striking imagery paced to a raspy acoustic version of ‘Human’ by the UK’s Rag‘n’Bone Man.

Two core insights informed Unapologetically Human.

First, toilet paper shortages defined the start of the pandemic. What caused the rush to toilet paper was an unparalleled sense of collective vulnerability. Our greatest fears existed in protecting our human dignity by keeping ourselves clean. We could alleviate these fears by celebrating the beauty of the functions and fluids that ultimately define our humanity in a way that paper products never have in the past, because all of our products are ultimately in service of them.

Second, many brands were in the market parroting the common phrase “we’re all in this together”, which consumers would quickly reject as a false promise as the pandemic wore on. We leveraged research to determine that this would define a growing consumer cynicism towards brands who manipulated media, but reward the raw, honest and the vulnerable brands who reflect the reality of the world at large.