Wild Refillable Deodorant: redefining a category
There is a version of this story that starts with a £100 million acquisition. But the more interesting version starts five years earlier, in a design studio in London, with a brief that nobody had managed to crack.
When Wild Cosmetics co-founders Freddy Ward and Charlie Bowes-Lyon approached Morrama in 2019, they wanted to do something that refillable deodorant brands in the US had been attempting for years without success: create a deodorant refill with no plastic whatsoever. Not less plastic. None.
What they got was that, and considerably more. A case design that turned a bathroom commodity into a desirable object. A product architecture that unlocked a direct-to-consumer subscription model. And, three years after launch, a redesign that fixed what early scaling had broken. It is that second chapter, the quieter and more methodical work of improving a product already on shelves, that this piece is largely about.
Below, we walk through both phases of the project: the original design brief and how Morrama solved it, and the 2022 redesign that reduced material usage by 18.4%, cut cost by 12.5%, doubled grocery sales, and helped position Wild for acquisition.
The Brief: 9 months to do what nobody had done
Wild came to Morrama in July 2019 with a clear goal and an aggressive timeline. They wanted to bring a refillable deodorant to the UK market by spring 2020. Nine months away. The objectives were straightforward on paper:
- The refill must be completely plastic-free
- The case must feel premium and desirable
- Refills must fit within UK large letter postage limits (max 2.5cm thickness)
- User experience should mirror single-use stick deodorants
- Product on market by spring 2020
Refillable deodorants existed in the US, brands like Myro and Humankind, but none had achieved a plastic-free refill. That was the problem Morrama had to solve first.
Designing the refill
The conventional architecture of a refillable deodorant placed the twist mechanism inside the refill cartridge, which was precisely why plastic-free refills had not been achieved. Morrama moved the mechanism into the case instead.
With the twist function removed from the refill, the cartridge itself could be made entirely from paper. The team settled on pulp moulding over a rolled paper approach for stability and consistency in manufacturing. It also introduced a meaningful UX benefit: because the mechanism was now in the case, users could wind the deodorant back down, something that matters when you are asking people to change a routine they have had since adolescence.
Designing the case
For the case, Morrama chose aluminium. At a £12 RRP against the £2.50 of a typical single-use stick, Wild could not compete on price. Desirability was the only viable strategy. Aluminium could be printed, anodised in a range of colours, and engraved with a customer's name. It turned a commodity product into something people would want to keep on their bathroom shelf.
Physical prototypes also played a direct commercial role early on. Renders can communicate a concept, but it was the prototypes Morrama produced that helped Wild secure their first £500,000 investment in January 2020.
The first 10,000 units went through production and reached the market in nine months, launching into the UK's first pandemic lockdown in spring 2020.
Early success and emerging problems
Despite launching into one of the most disruptive periods in recent retail history, Wild grew fast. By 2022 the company had 2.5 million customers and a £26 million annual turnover from a single product. In 2023, revenue grew 77% to £46.9 million, and Wild posted its first pre-tax profit of £509,000.
But scale had surfaced problems. Customer feedback, gathered through thousands of reviews and ethnographic research footage of real users, pointed to consistent issues:
- Difficulty using up the last of the deodorant in the refill
- Fiddly side buttons, particularly challenging for users with limited dexterity
- A case that felt slightly too large for daily use
- Unit cost too high for retail expansion to work at margin
Wild returned to Morrama in September 2022 with a revised brief: reduce cost, fix the usability issues, improve accessibility, and maintain full backwards compatibility between new cases and old refills, and vice versa.
The redesign
Morrama took twelve months to go from concept to production on the updated design, launching online in December 2023 and into retail in January 2024.
The side buttons were removed entirely. In their place, Morrama engineered an internal locking mechanism that allowed the base to be pulled out once wound down. The case could now be operated one-handed without a pinch grip, making it more accessible for users with age-related hand weakness or limited dexterity.
Addressing leftover deodorant required two separate interventions. The case redesign resolved the issue for new customers. For existing customers using the original case, the team reworked the refill geometry, altering its shape while maintaining complete compatibility with every case already in the market. Getting the paper moulding consistent at scale required months of close collaboration with the supplier.
The redesign also reduced the overall height from 111.7mm to 106.4mm, softened the edges of both lid and base, and removed the need for adhesive by introducing a snap fixing that can be disassembled by the customer using a teaspoon or pair of tweezers, allowing the aluminium and plastic components to be separated for recycling. The fixing is deliberately visible, designed to be seen rather than hidden.
Material reductions from the redesign:
- Overall weight saving of 18.4% per unit
- Aluminium content reduced by 16.5%
- Plastic content reduced by 20%
- Combined saving of 8.8g aluminium and 13.7g polypropylene per case
The results
The updated case and refill launched online in December 2023 and into retail in January 2024. The results were immediate and measurable.
The cost saving was $0.285 per case, a 12.5% reduction, bringing the per-unit case cost down to $2.05. After accounting for tooling investment and design fees, the updated design saved Wild over £200,000 in 2024 alone, and £1.54 million across total orders to date. The retail price of the starter pack has not changed since launch. It is still £12, more than five years on.
Customer complaints about leftover deodorant dropped immediately after the new case launched. Once fully rolled out by mid-2024, complaints related to the issue fell to fewer than one per month.
Deodorant sales in UK grocery doubled within nine months of the updated design reaching shelves, reaching £14.9 million. Wild was named the fastest growing personal care brand in the Sunday Times Top 100 in July 2024.
In 2024, Unilever acquired Wild for a reported £100 million.
For context: combined design and engineering fees across both phases of work were under £110,000.
Wider impact
Wild's acquisition by Unilever is perhaps the sharpest measure of the product's success, particularly given that Unilever had launched and then quietly discontinued their own refillable deodorant under the Dove brand during the same period.
Beyond Wild itself, the product's influence on the broader market has been significant. Brands including Fussy, Sol de Janeiro, Estrid, La Roche-Posay, L'Occitane and Kiehl's have since launched refillable personal care formats. Industrial design studios that had no refillable products in their portfolio five years ago now consider them a standard category. Morrama receives approximately one new brief per week from brands looking to enter the refillable personal care space.
To date, Wild have shipped 40 million refills to approximately 10 million customers, saving an estimated 720 tonnes of disposable deodorant packaging. They have planted nearly 450,000 trees through their ON A MISSION partnership and offer a recycling scheme for old cases through First Mile, made significantly more viable by the snap fixing introduced in the redesign.
"Morrama are a very dynamic team who really helped us push the boundaries of what we thought was possible on this project with very tight deadlines and limited budgets. To create the first refill solution globally without plastic is an achievement we are incredibly proud of, and working with Morrama was the key to our success."
- Freddy Ward, Co-Founder, Wild
Morrama is an industrial design and strategy studio based in London. We work with founders, brands and corporates to design products that are desirable, functional and built to last.
