It’s always been our goal to bring the refill revolution to the mainstream so it was only a matter of time before Wild made its way from cyberspace to the glimmering aisles of your favourite shops. In the last six months, we’ve been fighting against bathroom plastic on the shelves of Sainsbury’s, Booths, Selfridges and, most recently, you can now get Wild with your weekly shop in Boots and Waitrose!
Just like trying to navigate the self-checkout, getting Wild into your favourite shops is a bit of a journey. From convincing the decision-makers at the retailers to stock us to setting up new processes to ensure the safe delivery of deodorant to the shelves, there are a lot of steps to go through. So if you like a good story, read on and find out how Wild went from being just a digital deo to supermarket staple.
How it began
Cast your mind back to 2020 when Parasite is the only film on everyone’s minds, Harry and Meghan have decided to take a step back from royal life and, erm, there’s a global pandemic and the UK is in lockdown. Whilst all this was ensuing, the sales team at Wild held their first meetings with the Future Brands big wigs at Sainsbury’s. Luckily, they were lovely and, even more fortunately, huge fans of Wild’s sustainable mission. After some good discussions, the decision was reached to invite Wild onto their coveted Future Brands programme - a scheme to get up and coming start-ups into their stores.
This set the wheels in motion for our creative and operations teams to roll full steam ahead on getting the appropriate packaging ready. Did you know there are a whole set of other retail-specific criteria that product packaging has to fulfil to be sold on shelves? No? Neither did but we got there in the end and on May 17th 2021, another milestone was achieved in the Wild journey when we had our first ever sales take place on the aisles of Sainsbury’s superstores across the country.
It went well and as retail was probably going to be a bit of a big deal for us, we recruited our first ever retail hire. Fresh faced and armed with the conviction that Wild being in stores meant that we would be able to save even more plastic and disrupt more bathroom habits for the better, she would do anything it would take. The first task? To carry a massive Wild branded wooden shelving unit to the local Sainsbury’s and install it on the top shelf without anyone questioning it. The mission was successfully completed and the Wild takeover had begun.
Since then, the retail team has grown and so has our ambition with what Wild can achieve out in the wild! Whilst we’re available in these stores for now, rest assured the takeover is only just beginning so please send us photos when you spot us out there in the retail jungle!
