Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/01/wild-co-founders-sale-of-natural-deodorant-maker-unilever

I editorialized the article title, and I realize the article is a year old. But I only just found out about this buy out yesterday.

I have been using Wild's refillable deodorant for over 2 years. It has been great not throwing away a huge chunk of plastic, and instead tossing a small bit of cardboard into the compost. But now they are part of a mega corp.

I got my wife and daughter switched over recently, and my wife has been using their chapstick too.

My daughter found Fussy as an alternative. I saw a video showing that Fussy's refills fit into Wild's cases.

I will be making the switch as soon as I run out of my current stock of Wild refills.

It’s really hard to say no if a big company is willing to buy your company for a ridiculous sum.

Retire 30 years early and have a shit ton of cash?

Not saying it’s right, but I honestly don’t know if I could say no.

And sometimes the original founders go on to do philanthropic things.

This is what makes capitalism so insidious. The incentives it creates drive otherwise well-intentioned people to make immoral decisions.

It’s really hard to say no if a big company is willing to buy your company for a ridiculous sum.

absolutely! on top of that, you know that big companies don't play fair. they'll drag you through court, costing you millions, and take your IP for pennies on the dollar.

far better to sellout then be hungout.

at least then, you'll have something to show for your hard work. as Kenny said,

You got to know when to hold 'em

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away

And know when to run

You never count your money

When you're sittin' at the table

There'll be time enough for countin'

When the dealing's done

That is why we need to set up systems, to allow workers to buy out companies. They can cause a lot of troubles for owners as well.

Wild, An Almost Zero Waste Toiletries Company Sells Out To Unilever

At first I thought the first word was sarcasm and didn't realize the company was called "Wild"

I realized that as i was trying to write the title. But that was the best I could come up with since the guardian title was so shit.

This is why I wish we focused more on structural problems as a society. It feels easy to get stuck in looking at the superficial scale at which problems exist, without engaging with how the systems and institutions played a role in creating that reality at scale.

"This company sold out", "this cop did something bad", "this person committed a crime", etc.

Why did those things happen? They're all a part of a larger structural issue, and I think there's limited helpfulness in engaging with it on a case by case basis beyond righting wrongs. But our outrage and efforts really need to focus on fixing the structural problems that create all these small examples within the bigger picture

Not saying that to critisize op, I get thats not the point of the post. Just sharing what's becoming a big political realization for me as a learn more about politics and try to engage more critically with how we solve our problems :)

See: zero co. Company was doing fine, then decided to completely retool everything to single use.

It collapsed about a month later.

That’s assuming these people were well-intentioned in the first place. Capitalism also incentivizes greenwashing. It’s all about selling people the feeling that they’re making a difference, merely by being a consumer of your products, and getting them to pay a premium for it.

Heck, they may have been targeting a Unilever exit before they started the company! Serial entrepreneurs do this stuff all the time. They think of themselves as freelance marketers.

Wild, An Almost Zero Waste Toiletries Company Sells Out To Unilever

At first I thought the first word was sarcasm

Not in English. Not with that punctuation. You missing a tree? :-p

To be fair, the delimiting was lame, too, as it was missing the trailing delimiter; but in an objective guess where there was no (semi-)colon and the American Ghost Comma exists, that Ghost Comma is the likely case.

Reminds me of Marshall's career choice dilemmas throughout How I Met Your Mother

Is Fussy pronounced with a u as in "putt" or u as in "put"?

Yeah unless you are already at least independently secure it take an insane moral backbone to not take ‘go the fuck away money’ and then fuck right off saying goodbye to this bullshit. As others said, its part of why the system is so insidiously resilient