Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 💎 free edition💎 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook, listen to a category design jam session, or upgrade to a Founding subscription to ask the Pirate Eddie Bot your category design questions.
On August 26, DUDE Wipes declared war on toilet paper.
In five cities—Chicago, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Cincinnati, and Bentonville—700 digital billboards lit up for 24 hours. Each one smeared the toilet paper category with cheeky lines like:
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“Toilet paper is for quitters.”
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“Friends don’t let friends dry wipe.”
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“TP accident? Reader end defenders.”
Lightning Strikes like this are what DUDE Wipes does best.
Let’s break it down:
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The Timing: National Toilet Paper Day (August 26th) is a manufactured cultural moment. For most companies, it’s a throwaway PR hook. For DUDE Wipes, it was the perfect time to throw a punch at the existing category. They turned a “holiday” nobody cares about into a word-of-mouth marketing event.
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The Geography: The target cities were not ordinary markets. The Dudes zeroed in on competitor HQs, where toilet paper executives drive to work, and retail power centers. It’s one thing to run an ad online. It’s an entirely different thing to put a billboard outside the Procter & Gamble headquarters.
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The Message: Commercial toilet paper has been around for 168 years. Everyone uses it, but few questioned—until DUDE Wipes. They framed TP not as the default, but as the enemy. That’s the core of Category Design: Make the old way look outdated so the new way looks inevitable.
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The Cost: Ryan Meegan, the CMO of DUDE Wipes, is a master of doing more with less. This wasn’t a seven-figure Super Bowl play. It was a one-day, six-figure strike with an outsized cultural impact. The DUDE playbook is to take advantage of underpriced attention, move faster than incumbents, and turn strikes into word-of-mouth drivers.
DUDE Wipes can’t outspend Charmin’s bear butt commercials.
But they don’t need to.
Lightning Strikes don’t reward the biggest checkbooks—they reward category leaders with a different point of view.
The goal of this strike was to make toilet paper executives squirm in their chairs. To force emergency meetings. To plant the thought that toilet paper’s monopoly on the bathroom might not be safe.
That’s what Lightning Strikes do.
They change perception in the market and behavior inside companies.
A few weeks ago, we sat down with Ryan Meegan to get his strike playbook.
We’re sharing his perspective, frameworks, and stories in upcoming mini-books, so you understand not only why to plan a strike but how to make it work for your category. We’ll cover how to think about budget, how to spot strike opportunities, and how to turn a little momentum into a massive WOM event.
You don’t need a billion-dollar budget to win.
You need the guts to pick your moment, launch the strike, and build momentum.
Arrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
This Lightning Strike just happened, so we’re sharing what we know in real time. We’ll dive deeper into the results and practical frameworks in upcoming mini-books.
