Decommodify the most boring categories in your life! With natural and clean taking a front seat at major beauty retailers, this personal care brand wants to make you rethink your everyday essentials. Wildist caters to those who care about natural hygiene, sustainability, and transparent ingredients.

Founder of Wildist, Aaron Paas came from a CPG background and views the world from a sustainable lens. He previously worked at Proctor and Gamble, with leading brand, Gillette and was able to understand the personal care industry better than most! “I get very excited about finding an opportunity through talking to people who are going to be using your product. With Gillette, I was leading their innovations team and focused on building products that would launch 7 years away. We did a lot of future forecasting and spent a lot of time looking at the Asian markets to see what was trending, especially in skincare.”

Working on futuristic products and goals that would then become arbitrary as launch date approached is something that frustrated Aaron. It is mainly due to the hierarchical nature of these large multi-national corporations. As a result, he left and joined Etsy. “I left Gillette around the same time the Dollar Shave Club popped up and saw the way consumers were shopping, needs were shifting, and felt that it was time for me to broaden my experience.”

“It was interesting to go from a place like P&G, where you had values posted on every wall, to Etsy, where values were just part of the conversation.”

During his time at Etsy, Aaron learned how to test concepts in the online world and more importantly implement values into everything you do. Today, he has carried this ideology into building out his own brand, Wildist.

“We built Wildist for progressive people and want to provide customers with a choice. Sustainability, transparent ingredients, and an inclusive brand.”

Wildist is a personal care brand that elevates your everyday essentials starting with natural toothpaste and deodorants. They value people, product and the planet, by transforming their packaging into pieces of art so that customers can reuse it and elongate its lifecycle. We were instantly drawn to their art direction and would describe their unboxing experience as walking through a jungle of colors, filled with surprises and curiosity (MUST TRY THEIR PRODUCTS!).

Not to mention, their containers are 100% recyclable (plastic is one of the biggest contributors to global warming! Please try to reduce your carbon footprint when possible, RADICHE loves you). Fun fact: most toothpaste tubes are not recyclable. By making the Wildist toothpaste tube out of aluminum, you can have mother nature send some positive vibes your way.

Why The Name

Why the name you might be wondering? They take their ingredients very seriously, hence, Wildist is a combination of wild + alchemist. Raw natural ingredients, repackaged in a beautiful way, for the consumer who wants to make a difference in this world with their purchasing power.

Aaron’s Errands

Rewinding to Aaron's childhood, in Canada, he believes that “growing up I always had an entrepreneurial bug in me. When I was really young my father started his own business, it was a bookstore and at the time I was 12 years old. He would call me his co-founder and I remember thinking that I was a business owner from a really young age. This outlook on life stuck with me forever.” Young Aaron would also earn extra pocket money by running errands for the elder and naming his “business” Aaron’s Errands (quite smart!). “Since the age of eight, I would always find operational inefficiencies and my first thought would be how do I fix this as well as make some money?”

The Takeaways:

Aaron had been working on Wildist, full time for one year before launching. It took him 6 months to perfect the product and test the market via blind focus group product tests. It wasn’t until his product would win first place, would he enter a production run.

“If you look at what P&G has done is they brought quality and consistency of a product to a level that is unprecedented. One of the things I brought to Wildist and was unwilling to cut corners on was the product. There is so much time being spent on brand, as there should be, but I think a lot of brands today tend to let the users down with product quality.”

When we asked Aaron how his past experience prepared him for his role as CEO today, he says:

If you do everything right and you deliver a good product, you have a lifetime consumer. So get that right!
Gone are the days where a subscription model is a value proposition.
Find a group of people that you take time to understand and identify how to create something that makes a difference. From a design perspective, create a safer, more natural, interesting product.
Enter people's lives in a meaningful way by finding real people and solving a real problem.

Wildist is a brand built on psychographics rather than demographics. Their products range from $7 for a toothpaste to $14 for a deodorant and can be purchased here. They are also celebrating their launch party tomorrow, Thursday, November 15th at 150 Franklin Street. We shall be there if y’all want to head on down and say hi.

Photo courtesy of Wildist.

Written by Alysha Malik.