Who Gives A Crap is loved by eco-friendly customers for its 100% recycled and bamboo toilet paper in Australia, the US and the UK.

But with one million trees destroyed each day to manufacture traditional toilet paper (according to the Toilet Paper Environmental Sustainability Report, 14 April 2022), much more is needed to highlight the impact of deforestation.

Who Gives A Crap needed to break people from their destructive bathroom habits and get them to update their loo roll from traditional to recycled.

With a limited production budget of US$55,000 and only six weeks from concept phase to live date, we had to produce and launch an idea that would be picked up by the media and resonate with an international audience.

A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) books are the most famous children’s books of all time, particularly across Who Gives A Crap’s three markets. The story follows Winnie-the-Pooh who is a good-natured, yellow-furred, honey-loving bear who lives in the forest surrounding the Hundred Acre Wood with his friends. He is a bumbly, well-natured and endearing self-described “bear of very little brain” who gets himself into all kinds of entertaining and sticky situations.

Targeting environmentally-conscious toilet-users across the US, UK and Australian markets, we created Winnie-the-Pooh: The Deforested Edition, a first-of-its-kind reimagining of the iconic children’s book, highlighting the impact of deforestation across the globe.

A rare edition rather than a new story, we kept the original narrative completely unchanged, retaining the magic of Winnie-the-Pooh and A. A. Milne as the author.

The book’s illustrations were reimagined to represent the impact of land cleared every day to make traditional toilet paper: where lush trees, home to furry friends, were replaced by felled tree stumps, with Pooh left looking on, confused and glum with his famous expression.

The revisions also extended to the Hundred Acre Wood map found at the start of each book, depicting the widespread environmental impact of deforestation on all of Winnie-the-Pooh's friends.

We left A.A.Milne’s original text untouched, but ‘deforested’ every relevant illustration in the book. We then coloured in all 114 illustrations to ensure the tone remained hopeful.

Inspired by the 1926 First Edition, we designed a linen hardcover embellished with delicate gold foil stamping. To land the deforestation idea quickly, we blind debossed a healthy tree into the design. Such an emotive part of the narrative took time and plenty of testing to align the layers with precision and purpose.

To dial up the rarity of this limited-edition classic, 250 physical books were made without cutting down a single tree and produced in a 100% Green-e certified facility, using only renewable and carbon-neutral energy. The books contain 100% post-consumer recycled paper and board and 100% cotton EU REACH-certified cover materials. Finally, Ostrom Climate's programs have calculated and offset all emissions from the sourcing, production, and recycling of waste.

With no paid media support, the book generated both strong commercial returns and lasting environmental impact:

- Books sold out in under 48 hours.

- Global headlines reaching over five billion with 420 individual media hits, made it the brand’s best-performing campaign ever.

- Coverage in Tier 1 global media titles including The Washington Post, NPR, Daily Mail, The Sun, The Mirror, The Australian, and Sky News.

- 100% of coverage included brand call-to-action to switch to recycled toilet paper.

- In just one week of the campaign, 3000 new customers were acquired equating to saving *107,719m² of forest and offsetting *632,182kg³ of carbon dioxide.

(*Modeling based on new customers acquired for the duration of the campaign (with an average of a 60 month purchasing lifecycle) with the amount of trees saved from switching from regular toilet paper calculated to determine carbon dioxide offset.)