Imagine a world without toilets!
Sounds crazy, right? Yet, billions of people still don’t have access to safe sanitation. On World Toilet Day, we’re not just celebrating toilets—we’re fighting for dignity, health, and equal rights for everyone. And behind this global movement is a man who’s literally changed the world with his vision: Jack Sim, aka Mr. Toilet.
From a poor kid who failed at school to a global game-changer, Jack Sim used one simple thing, gumption, to spark a revolution. Check out this powerful excerpt from his book, The Gumption of Mr Toilet where he breaks down exactly how he made toilets—and a whole lot more—matter.
Since the founding of the UN on 24 October 1945, the first UN Water Conference was held in 1977, and the second one was in 2023. It’s appalling to see an important agenda such as Water be made a low priority. But if you think Water has been neglected, you should know that Sanitation is even more neglected. That 2023 UN Water Conference devoted only about 5 per cent of the sessions to Sanitation and Hygiene and less than 1 per cent to Menstrual Health, which is a big taboo as well. We live in a world where agendas are addressed according to their charisma. Corporations love green and blue agendas like Environment, where they can use trees, rivers, coral reefs, pandas, and polar bears in their publicity material. They avoid ‘Brown Agendas’ like Poop, Diarrhoea, Polluted Rivers, which are equally important.
Therefore, in order to succeed, we have to make sanitation sexy, and we have a secret weapon. Since it is a taboo and has been unspoken for such a long time, it has news potential. We created new narratives that helped the media attract massive readerships and advertising income, and the global media took our stories by storm. As we take charge of the narratives, we command the attention of the world.
The World Toilet Organization was founded on 19 November 2001. Our founding day has since been adopted unanimously by all 193 countries of the UN General Assembly as the official UN World Toilet Day. We broke the taboo on the Sanitation Agenda. In 2010, the blockbuster film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was launched globally and was trending at the fourth position on Twitter (now called X) on 19 November, while World Toilet Day ranked fifth. But Harry Potter invested multimillion dollars in publicity while we did it at zero cost. We saw Justin Bieber was trending at the sixth position and catching up with us. So, we tweeted that ‘Justin Bieber is doing worse than Shit’. This single tweet sparked a furore of attacks by Justin Bieber’s fans, and it boosted our visibility causing us to trend even higher. Suddenly, a lot more people learned about the existence of World Toilet Day.
This is how guerrilla marketing works. We leverage anything and everything, making the irrelevant become relevant to our mission. There is no such thing as bad publicity with an agenda like Sanitation, which is a taboo itself.
I created the World Toilet Organization with the WTO acronym to play a pun on the World Trade Organization. I was hoping that the WTO would sue me, then I’d be famous. It turns out that they didn’t sue me, but we became known as the other WTO forever. Nothing sells like contraband. Either way, I won. Eventually, the journalists started calling me Mr Toilet and that moniker created another intellectual property for us with highly sticky brand equity. The most elegant thing is we achieved all this without paying a cent for media publicity and have never paid marketing dollar in the last twenty-four years. When you have no money, work around it.
The Gandhians said: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’
Ten years later, I met Pascal Lamy, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization at the World Economic Forum in 2011 in Jakarta. I introduced myself and he exclaimed with some jest: ‘Oh, I know you. Yours is the more important WTO!’
_________________________________________________________________
From toilets to global sanitation, Jack’s journey is a testament to the power of vision, grit, and gumption—that unstoppable drive to turn an idea into reality. On World Toilet Day, let’s remember that every small action counts.
P.S. You can win a copy of the book and a special tote bag. Head to our Instagram now.
