Why Dude Wipes Drives Its Own Website Traffic to Walmart and Amazon

Bryan Mahoney

Welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce podcast, where I get an opportunity to sit down with truly some of the brightest minds in commerce behind today's iconic — or as I like to say, next-to-be-iconic — brands. Right off the bat, Dude Wipes is easily, for me, one of those, if not already iconic, right on the precipice of that unofficial category. Joining me today is Joey Thomas, VP at Dude Wipes. Joey, welcome to the pod.

Joey Thomas

Thanks, Bryan, thanks for having me. Pumped to be here. I'm up in New York City — I live in Dallas, but I've been working from New York the last couple of months.

Bryan Mahoney

I was in New York for about six years, and for the era I was there it felt like the epicenter of direct-to-consumer — an awful lot of commerce still runs through New York. Being there today, is that still true, or has commerce gone everywhere?

Joey Thomas

No, absolutely — every time I go to dinner or a happy hour, there's a bunch of founders represented, and it's such a small world at the end of the day.

Bryan Mahoney

It is such a small world, and I've always found that helpful — even if you're a quasi-competitor, people are willing to share. It's like a genuine curiosity, a we're-all-in-it-together mindset, especially in New York. Speaking of shared war stories — you've had a really amazing career before Dude Wipes. Take a couple minutes and tell us what got you here.

Joey Thomas

So much of my career is right place, right time. Out of school I went to work for 3M — they make anything scratchy or sticky, so sandpaper, tape, a bunch of consumer-facing brands. I focused on one called McGuire's, a super-premium car wax brand based in SoCal, and covered Latin America as my sales territory, selling to distributors. They asked me to move up to Seattle, and in 2010, 2011, they needed some support for Amazon, and I was just in the right place at the right time — built a career in e-commerce from there. Went to work for BIC, the French, family-owned lighter, pen, razor business — they'd grown up with big mass concentration in office supply stores and needed somebody who understood e-comm. Back then I was the young goat on the team — nobody had sold to Amazon before. Got to grow and scale that business, which was easy to scale, because you take a household name and put it on the internet and everybody buys it. Then went to work for a fishermen's brand called Wild Planet — really expensive, pole-and-line-caught tuna. Fourth in market share in the U.S. — Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist are the leaders, and those three together are about three billion in annual sales. When I joined Wild Planet it was sub-$90 million, so tons of runway. They'd gotten some private equity, and private equity said, you need somebody who knows e-commerce. Grew that, and then helped them sell to a group in Italy called Bolton, which owns the StarKist of Europe, called Rio Mare. Met some guys from Dude Wipes in that process — I'd seen Dude Wipes on Shark Tank, Mark Cuban had invested in 2015, I was already a consumer of the brand, huge Mark fan, it was the feather in his cap from Shark Tank. I was like, absolutely, hell yes, I'll help these boys scale. Joined at the very end of 2021 and been riding ever since.

Bryan Mahoney

That's amazing. For those who haven't seen the brand yet, or didn't see it on Shark Tank — what's the story of the brand? Give me the two-minute version.

Joey Thomas

This is a true story — three of the smartest guys I've ever met, living in Chicago in 2011, have the idea of selling flushable wipes, because they were using baby wipes after eating things like Chipotle or Taco Bell.

Bryan Mahoney

It's like the best-kept secret — we're using baby wipes, but we don't have babies.

Joey Thomas

Exactly — it's great when founders actually had a need and solved it for themselves first and foremost, and that's what they did. They started selling flushable wipes online. One of them, Sean, went to an e-comm incubator down in Austin that taught him how to sell stuff on Amazon, went back to Chicago, built listings from 2012 to 2015, and they were struggling for sure — Sean will tell you the war stories of living on twenty grand a year, working fast food jobs — and then they made it onto Shark Tank, and Mark invested in the brand. That was huge awareness. The brand has always grown up on the back of e-comm — Amazon, up until 2025, was the largest channel for the brand. Now you can find it at mass, grocery, club. That's very much the philosophy of the brand — even when we spend on marketing, it's let's grow the brand and not judge the consumer for where they buy. We're not a DTC brand, we don't try to force subscription. We let you find us and buy us where you want.

Bryan Mahoney

You've got to be where your customers are. I love that story — it's not an overnight success, it's founders who really believed in it and kept grinding away until they built a product, a brand, and a following. As I said during warmup, I think the brand personality is amazing, and that's how you stand out — the product is great and differentiated, but what really attracts me is the personality, and the fact that you've anchored it in humor. You can see it in everything, whether it's the PDP copy or the blog content. You started on Amazon and diversified over time, but there's a real storytelling component. How important is storytelling to your ability to keep being successful as, in your words, the e-commerce guy?

Joey Thomas

Storytelling is everything in e-commerce — it's the beauty of a product detail page versus a can of tuna. On a can, you can only say so much about the brand, and when the customer finds you at Whole Foods, how are you able to tell them that story? You have to be really selective about what you say and don't say. Online, you've got a whole page, videos, pictures — you can really romance and tell the customer who you are. The beauty of Dude Wipes is we want our customer to feel something when they buy us — you don't feel much buying a Cottonelle or a Charmin, they have to go too wide with their messaging. But when you're a disruptor, you're able to make a customer feel something and express their identity by having your product in their household. Having a pack of Dude Wipes on the back of your toilet says something about you, and we lean into that — e-commerce is the best place for us to do it.

Bryan Mahoney

Back of the toilet — my next question was, thinking back to the origin story, these guys were using baby wipes, and I'd imagine they did not have baby wipes on the back of their toilet. Now it's almost a statement — I go into people's houses and Dude Wipes is proudly displayed. Is that because the product is really good, or because you've built this connection with the customer where they're proud to say, ask me about this — or something in between?

Joey Thomas

It's the latter for sure — we've built a brand that says something about you, that's humorous, that talks about the things big CPG can't. We'll talk about poop, we'll say things in our marketing that big CPG can't, and that's why the consumer's proud to have it. It's also an advantage over toilet paper — you take a roll out of the pack and put it on a dispenser, you don't know what toilet paper it is. You'd have to be a real connoisseur to know it's Charmin. But a pack of wipes on the back of your toilet, it's very evident what you buy, and if you're buying a private-label equivalent, that says something about you too. So the product is better, the experience is better, but at the end of the day it's the brand that resonates so hard.

Bryan Mahoney

It's a conversation starter for guests in your house — pretty amazing. You mentioned you're not exclusively direct-to-consumer. I've been in commerce since the late '90s, and I don't remember a time with such a seismic shift in how we approach commerce and talk to customers as 2025 to 2026. But I haven't changed my point of view that every brand needs to be a DTC brand — that doesn't mean you need to exclusively sell online, but that's where you have the opportunity to do storytelling and create a connection. As you've moved from, okay, Amazon is going to be our connection to the customer, do you agree every brand needs to be DTC, and how has your point of view changed on what that means?

Joey Thomas

We're for sure peers — I was in commerce in the early 2000s too, I'm 42 today. For the first big chunk, I was obsessed with DTC — you wanted to own the consumer data, get the email, get the phone number, enroll them, drive subscription, get them back to the website. What's struck me over the last four years is: why is the customer coming to your website at all? If you're selling Q-tips or toothpaste, are you really expecting an independent shopping trip to your website versus adding it to cart with everything else? Do you absolutely need a website? A thousand percent yes. Do I want to make commerce as easy as possible for the consumer? A thousand percent yes. If you come to dudewipes.com today, I'm driving you to retail — through Mikmak you've got the option of Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, Costco. And with Stackline I've got a 1P Amazon integration, so you can log into your Amazon account on my website, I can store your credentials, your email, your phone number, enroll you in a CRM — but you still make your Amazon 1P purchase, Amazon fulfills the order, and you never have to leave my website to do it. Customers coming to dudewipes.com may be coming for humor, for education about the wipes, curiosity about the origin story, or price comparison — they're likely buying wipes when they buy other things for their household. I want to make sure I'm in mass, in club, on Amazon, now on TikTok Shop — available wherever you shop — but yeah, there's the option to come to the website if you want to.

Bryan Mahoney

So you're not fighting the instinct that they're going to buy you alongside something else — you've got them on the website, you're capturing first-party data, and there's an opportunity to email them about product innovation and make checkout as frictionless as possible. Fair to say?

Joey Thomas

A hundred percent, and build community — you're probably curious what we have to say, we're going to email you once a week and tell you things about poop, why it turns green, why you're constipated when you travel. We're happy to interact with you that way if you want to be part of the community.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that — it's an opportunity to reach out and talk to your customer in a way that's not 'we're 20% off this week,' but something that cracks them up or answers a question they were actually wondering about. You stay top of mind, and it's a foregone conclusion that when you're out of wipes, you buy from Dude Wipes because you've created that connection. That first-party data, used for the right reasons, is going to be the difference between being an iconic brand and being something that disappears and no one remembers.

Joey Thomas

Could not agree more. The thing that resonates most with us these days is top of mind. We're big Byron Sharp guys — we all went to his school on how brands grow, we all read the book. The consumer is not as in love with you as you think they are — they're, as Byron says, polyamorous. If they need a wipe, they're probably going to buy a wipe, even if Dude Wipes isn't on the shelf that day. We recognize that. So how can I make sure that when you're thinking of flushable wipes, I'm top of mind — join my community so that when you're in the market for my product, you think of me first, and maybe I'm not as replaceable as I'd be otherwise.

Bryan Mahoney

Or that you tell someone else about your experience. I'd imagine that's a risk of introducing a whole new segment of the market to a new way of using wipes — once you've convinced them it's a thing, how do you convince them to keep buying that thing from you? I think it comes back to community and to just automatically buying the brand because that's how it works.

Joey Thomas

Agreed, and we're hyper-focused on staying focused. In the early days at Dude, we were tempted to become a men's grooming brand — ball powder, body spray, deodorant, because we'd scaled enough that maybe we could leverage the brand. But there's so much more power in becoming category king of a very specific vertical, so we cut all the noise and went back to just being a butt-wipe brand. That makes it a lot easier for the consumer to know immediately who you are — if we were 'Dude Pro' with a deodorant and a body lotion, who are these guys?

Bryan Mahoney

I get it's tempting — you've established trust with the customer, especially for anything you'd put on sensitive areas. But that discipline is interesting — we don't talk enough about the discipline of not trying to conquer every category just because you could.

Joey Thomas

For sure. Big CPG just throws their brand onto everything — there's a Cottonelle flushable wipe, a Charmin flushable wipe, they play in the space too, but they're not heavily focused on it like we are. That's how we've become king of that specific vertical — we're the omnichannel market-share leader in flushable wipes today because of the focus.

Bryan Mahoney

We talked the other day about TikTok, and I think that leads into channel expansion and how you measure these channels working together as you build community. TikTok Shop has really exploded the last couple of years — how important is it for you, and what's it actually doing? Customer acquisition, community, top-line revenue, something else?

Joey Thomas

It's definitely customer acquisition and it's providing omnichannel lift for us. TikTok Shop, for perspective, will do thirty billion dollars in retail sales this year, up from eighteen. We launched on the platform in January 2024, so we've had two years to figure out how to scale it, and I made all the geriatric-millennial mistakes at the beginning — I approached it like Amazon, spending on ads to drive customers to my TikTok Shop PDP to convert. That's not how the TikTok Shop consumer behaves on the platform at all — they're being influenced by affiliates and creators they already follow. It really becomes networking with those affiliates and creators. I've got a broker, Rico, who learned TikTok with me over the last two years, and he's tapped into what we call creator farms — networks of creators who'll all publish content about your brand at once, for a commission, instead of ad spend. We've gotten an insane amount of trial of the brand and product that way. The margin isn't amazing — it's fulfilled by TikTok, and Dude Wipes is a low-price, heavy commodity, a pound a pack for three dollars — you're not going to make a lot of money shipping that around. But we're able to stay margin-neutral, and with Centilla we see a massive lift happening at Walmart and on Amazon, which justifies the spend on TikTok that's benefiting the rest of the business.

Bryan Mahoney

That's interesting — in traditional performance marketing, if a channel isn't first-purchase profitable, you'd shut it down. But you're spending against commission, acquiring customers, and seeing the lift on other channels — having the instinct to keep your foot on the gas because it's rising all boats.

Joey Thomas

That's exactly it. We know the brand is sticky — we're a hundred-million-dollar business on Amazon with a 64% repeat purchase rate, so if you buy me once, there's at least a 64% chance you buy me again on Amazon alone, which means you're probably buying me somewhere else too. That gives me justification to say, yeah, I've only got a 2% repeat purchase rate on TikTok Shop, but 98% of buyers are buying the brand for the first time on the platform and then going somewhere else and buying it — so I'm happy not to make a ton of margin on that first purchase, knowing the repeat is going to be there. I can trust that.

Bryan Mahoney

What's your approach to data? What advice would you give other brands scaling as quickly as you are, with that same omnichannel piece? Are you hyper-focused on multi-touch attribution, or thinking about this in more of a blended way? Give us the secrets behind the scaled success.

Joey Thomas

The big secret is scared money don't make money. You've got guys sitting around asking, should we do TikTok Shop, I don't know — and you're two years late. The way I launched TikTok Shop in January 2024 doesn't work in February 2026 — you've missed that window, and now you've got to adapt, because all the winners have already figured it out. We don't have a giant data team — up until a year and a half ago, I was the entire e-commerce and club team for Dude. We very much trust our gut, spend some money, and watch. I've got a brand that's not scared, so I can do things like go dark on Amazon ad spend for 60 days and just watch what happens to my sales — that's a better metric for me than watching ROAS on a single channel.

Bryan Mahoney

I think about the difference between being data-driven and data-informed — too much data can result in paralysis. Being data-informed means you look at the data, it's inconclusive, but you go with your gut, or you look at the data and think it's this, so you take a chance.

Joey Thomas

Yeah — I like brands that are courageous, that just try things and put money behind it. That's how you go from selling nothing to selling a ton and having that following.

Bryan Mahoney

I want to talk about this new emerging channel — Agentic Shopping is getting a ton of buzz. I think of it as another channel, but one where we have even less control over how the brand shows up, since it's never been our four walls, and agents are harder to control than ever. Are you thinking about this channel yet, and if so, how are you thinking strategically about applying the same instincts — trusting your gut, trying it, measuring it?

Joey Thomas

Yeah, I am thinking about it. You want to be ahead of big CPG — they typically give you a 12-to-18-month window before they're reactive to these things. A year ago I'd have said the future is social commerce, TikTok Shop and affiliates selling to consumers, and now it's like, maybe the future is ChatGPT, these AI platforms that are going to recommend product and build carts — and you've got Amazon rolling out Alexa Plus across all their devices, which is going to have a massive impact on what's being recommended. The early steps for us are making sure our SEO is optimized, making sure we're saying the right things about the brand in the right place, and enough about the brand. Somebody who runs Neptune gave me this advice — seventy percent of ChatGPT's information is actually coming from Reddit. So we're investigating how we can pad Reddit with a lot of information about the brand early on, so when ChatGPT goes to pull, it's able to say, all right, flushable wipes, Dude Wipes is a category leader, they have these different flavors. About eight months ago I started having people on the team go into ChatGPT and ask about Dude Wipes, trying to preemptively see what it says. I feel like it'll evolve over time, there'll be more offerings, but it's important for us to be ahead and be courageous and willing to take the first step.

Bryan Mahoney

It's funny, hearing you talk about that feels like fifteen years ago with SEO, creating content and backlinks and figuring out how it ultimately works — the willingness to experiment, but still rooted in being where your customers are. If they're shopping with Alexa Plus or ChatGPT, make sure the brand shows up and is relevant. What about agentic ops for brands on the back office — how can we use AI to get the kind of leverage a huge CPG company has with a bigger balance sheet and more headcount? Have you found any tools where you're like, holy cow, we can do way more than before?

Joey Thomas

Small teams can do amazing things — I was one of the first ten people at Dude Wipes, and we scaled to maybe a $200 million business before we added the thirteenth person. It's about focus more than any AI tool we've plugged in. But on TikTok Shop specifically, we use a tool called Euka that lets us send something like 1,500 messages a day to creators — it'd be a lot more expensive to hire a person to send custom deals to that many creators, so it alleviates work for the brand team, building these armies of creators. When it comes to questions being asked on the platform, there are AI tools, but we're pretty passionate about interacting with our consumers, so we're not going to have a bot in the comments — it's going to be Sean, our actual CEO, sitting there trolling Wendy's or Tabasco. We want to make sure we're the actual humans speaking to you when you talk to us as a brand. Now it's really about the data-mining piece — whether we integrate AI into forecasting, what PO should we expect, all the POS or gross sales data feeding future forecasts and production. That's way over my pay scale, but we are looking into it.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that — you're a product that would be easy to treat as a commodity and just automate, but hearing the founders want to be in there, maintaining that connection with the customer while being thoughtful about the tools, is exactly the exciting thing: how do we use AI to make the humans in the loop even more efficient, so you can do the things you love to do. I'm sure your customers love watching the founders troll the brands. This is a great place to wrap up — thank you so much for coming on and being honest about what's working and what you're excited about.

Joey Thomas

We're a big fan of your podcast, so thanks for having me.

Bryan Mahoney

I'm a huge fan of the brand — I'll leave us there, and I'm definitely cheering you on. Thanks a ton, Joey.