WaterWipes’ CEO on her clean break to come home
The last time Orla Mitchell was interviewed by the Irish Independent she was a high-flying executive with Mars, based in Chicago and heading up global marketing for the Wrigley brands.
Returning to Ireland was something she talked about as a retirement plan.
Fast forward four years though and the Longford native is newly installed as chief executive of Drogheda-headquartered WaterWipes, a fast growing and ambitious but still relatively small domestically owned Irish manufacturer.
After an impressive career spanning two decades and continents with Mars that followed what had been a highly relevent Master’s in Business Studies and International Marketing from UCD, what brought her home?
Mitchell is up front about the decision to leave Mars.
“There was a change in structure and being transparent, I lost out on what would have been the natural role at the time,” she says.
“So, I took the decision to come back to Europe rather than stay in the US and took a decision to leave Mars, which was highly amicable.”
Taking time out to reassess, Mitchell contemplated taking on non-executive roles before she got a call about WaterWipes.
Originally focused on baby wipes, today the company has baby, body, and face wipes.
The Irish company’s unique selling point is the claim to produce the world’s purest baby wipes, an edge in a tough market featuring global giants like Johnson & Johnson and big supermarkets and pharmacies own brand alternatives.
Initially Mitchell’s conversation with WaterWipes was around becoming chief brand officer.
“It was quite an unusual one because in many respects, obviously it was a much smaller role – I don’t say that kind of arrogantly – and had certain kinds of ramifications and I thought, you know, ultimately I’m making a work-life balance decision that I want to get back to Ireland, I want to give something back,” she says
She met WaterWipes founder and, at the time CEO, Edward McCloskey who set up the business 11 years ago after his own daughter suffered badly from nappy rash.
“I really liked what I saw,” Mitchell says.
“[It’s] another family company. Mars is a family company as well and typically family businesses can be very much long-term focused. I’ve been lucky, Mars is very purpose driven, and WaterWipes was born out of purpose.”
The company, which sells into 50 different markets, is “at a very interesting stage in its evolution”, according to Mitchell.
“I accepted the role of chief brand officer and joined in February and I was six weeks in the office before Covid hit.”
Months later McCloskey decided to take a step back from his CEO role and become chairman of the company.
Mitchell put her hand up for the top job.
“I went through [the interview] process. That culminated in the end of August and I was offered the role,” Mitchell says.
The lack of pure finance in her background is not something that concerns Mitchell, as she explains,
“I’m very lucky that financial acumen was very highly valued in my Mars days. I would be very familiar and very capable around a P&L, but obviously, I’ve had less experience interacting with banks and so on.
“I think it would be very arrogant for anybody to say, no matter what stage they are at in their life, they don’t have a learning curve to go on. But you know, let’s be truthful, the pure operational side of the business, and indeed, some of the financial aspects of the business will be the higher part of my learning curve, rather than what I would call the demand side is businesses, marketing, which is very much my backbone.”
With 300 employees, compared to the 130,000 staff at Mars, WaterWipes is a very different animal.
Yet, Mitchell is quick to point out the similarities.
“Family businesses have been much more purpose-driven, very much taking decisions with the long-term in mind, not just what the latest quarterly results are going to be,” according to Mitchell.
“WaterWipes is very results focused and very growth driven, as indeed is Mars. But it’s done very much with the sense of principle of doing the right thing, and not taking shortcuts. It’s not just growth for growth’s sake, it has to be growth that fundamentally will endure, and at a certain level, does good,” she adds.
And when it comes to growth, the WaterWipes story is “phenomenal”.
“Particularly within the last number of years, the company has got used to high double-digit growth,” she says.
The markets that the company currently sells in include America, Australia, Singapore, and the UK, as well as the domestic market here.
Mitchell is often asked what she feels is the biggest difference between working for a huge, global company and working for WaterWipes.
“A fast-growing company doesn’t necessarily have the same time to design processes. So as complexity grows, there is potentially a need now to bring in fit for purpose or right sized processes that you would typically see in a bigger company,” Mitchell says.
However, the main contrast she has found since returning to Ireland is not between the two companies, but rather it is the difference in attitudes to success here and those in the United States.
As she explains: “I think there’s more of a real delight and desire to see people succeed in the States, where sometimes you kind of come back to Irish society [and] at times there is a bit more begrudgery and a bit of averaging of everybody. And sometimes it drives maybe a kind of sense around status that I wasn’t expecting, some people like their titles, and so on, which surprised me a little bit.”
Nonetheless, she says it’s great to see “a can-do” attitude here.
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the company getting a bump in business as consumers focus more on their health.
“Very much my plans are to continue scaling the business,” she says.
“I don’t think necessarily our focus would be on much more geographic frontiers, it’s more or less to scale what we have, to continue to focus on core baby [products], but also to look at potentially other adjacent areas of innovation.”
While the product is aimed at the baby care market, around 30pc of wipes are used by people for non-baby usage, according to Mitchell.
Next year the company plans to roll-out biodegradable wet wipes, a plan that was temporarily put on hold because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That’s been quite a technical challenge, we don’t want to go biodegradable at the cost of purity of our product, so ensuring that we keep the core performance and 100pc purity of our product and become biodegradable.”
With the global pandemic dominating headlines, Brexit has taken a back seat on the news agenda for the past number of months.
However, the end of the UK’s trading relationship with the European Union is a concern as the Brexit talks endgame unfolds over the remainder of 2020 .
The company is “planning for all eventualities across our business”.
“Obviously, if there is a no deal, we don’t necessarily believe that our category will be one for very high tariffs, but you never know,” Mitchell says.
Between Covid-19 and Brexit means “it’s going to be quite a volatile year”.
“But all you can do is plan as best you can and take it as it comes with the teams and be agile in your response and be very transparent with your customers.”
‘I joined in February & was six weeks in the office before Covid hit’