Toilet Takeover

The Brief 

Goods Not For Resale (GNFR) is the trade term for everything in a shop you can't buy - hangers, till rolls, cleaning supplies, the little wooden forks in the in-store cafe. All this and more falls to Cardiff-based CCS McLays, proud supplier to retailers worldwide. 

But in a category where every competitor was selling "consolidation solutions," CCS McLays had never presented itself to the market in a meaningful way.

…Gasp!'s strategy was to be "the normal ones" - personality-packed, honest, and obsessed with getting the job done. The tagline that held it together: 

The Detail Behind The Retail. 

With the brand voice established, the challenge was finding a moment to put it in front of the right audience - medium and large retailers, in one room, at scale. Retail Week x The Grocer LIVE was that room. The budget, however, didn't stretch to headline sponsorship. 

The whole voice hangs off the word "detail," leading to absurdly specific lines like 26,000 luxury sushi to-go boxes by 9am next Tuesday.

That's how we roll.

The Response 

…Gasp! spotted an opportunity nobody else had taken: the toilets. We worked with Retail Week to secure a sponsorship that had never been done before, making CCS McLays the event's first-ever official toilet sponsor- 1,109 sq ft of exquisite bathroom space, all theirs.

It was a natural fit on two counts. First, tonally: a brand with the confidence to peddle its wares in the bathroom was exactly the kind of audacity "the normal ones" positioning called for. Second, literally: CCS McLays actually supplies janitorial products and toilet paper to customers, so the sponsorship wasn't a stretch - it was a punchline with a straight face.  

We wrote around forty lines, making in-context gags across cubicles, mirrors, urinals, bins and beyond.  

On the cubicle door: It's a good job you're sitting down for this. We can save you a packet by consolidating all your bathroom supplies. Above the urinals, the pick of the bunch: Speaking to the C-suite while you're sitting on the wee seat. 

Even GNFR jargon like "consolidating" survived the cut - because it arrived wrapped in silliness, delivered deadpan by a brand not remotely embarrassed about where it was advertising. Every distinctive asset carried through too, right down to mints emblazoned with the brand's red swing tag for guests to take away. 

The Results 

The reaction was immediate - and came from exactly the audience CCS McLays needed to reach. 

Keynote speaker Andrew Busby, ReTHINK Retail Top 100 Retail Expert, called it the standout of the event across LinkedIn and X, singling it out above headline sponsors twice CCS McLays' size: 

"Take a bow Google and Co-op — however the man of the match award on day one goes to CCS McLays. Genius to sponsor the loos. Would love to have been a fly on the wall in the boardroom when that idea was pitched! Give your marketing team a raise - nailed it. I attend and speak at dozens of retail conferences around the world and that really stood out. Absolute genius."

Matthew Hall, Marketing Manager at CCS McLays, was equally pleased with how the wider brand and campaign work had come together around it - praising the level of detail applied throughout the diagnostic, strategy and execution phases, and describing the …Gasp! team as feeling like a genuine extension of his own. 

The idea proved itself well beyond one event weekend. It's since been rolled out as a recurring activation format across other major events in retail and hospitality - proof that the most effective opportunities aren't always the obvious (or the most expensive) ones.