Naked Paper reaches 30 million toilet rolls sold

Naked Paper started life in September 2020 with a couple of founders and a container of loo roll. Nearly six years later, in August 2026, we hit a big milestone: selling roll number 30 million.

That’s 30,000,000 rolls of soft, strong toilet paper delivered to the homes of our wonderful, curious customers. Thirty million rolls made without bleach, unnecessary harsh chemicals or plastic wrapping.

And as proud as we are of the number, we’re also happy to report that we missed the moment itself.

As we crossed the threshold, most of the Naked Paper team were away from their desks at our summer gathering in London. After a lovely evening together we returned to discover that the counter had ticked over and our 30 millionth roll had officially been sold.

We reckon a milestone is a milestone, even if you’re a bit late to notice it. So here’s a little victory lap to celebrate.

To the moon and back

Back in September 2020, when Naked Paper started, stockpiling toilet paper was still a relatively common occurrence. Even so, we doubt anyone’s hoard reached 30 million rolls. It’s difficult to even picture a number that big.

So we started brainstorming ways to put it into perspective. Here’s what we came up with.

If you stacked all 30 million rolls one on top of another, you’d create a tower nearly 2.9 million metres high. That’s more than seven times the distance from Earth to the International Space Station.

(Keeping the tower upright might be a challenge.)

If you unravelled every roll and laid the sheets end to end, you’d have around 1.1 billion metres of toilet paper. That’s enough to wrap around the world 28 times.

Or, if you fancied heading in the other direction, it would reach the moon, come all the way back to Earth and then get almost all the way to the moon again. Even before you consider the logistics, it seems like a terrible waste of perfectly good loo roll, but it gives us some sense of just how far we’ve come.

It started with one very full container

Before we had a big warehouse, an automated shipping setup and a growing team to keep everything moving, we had our founders, Tom and Leila, and one shipping container full of bleach-free loo roll.

Our first container held 548 boxes of 48 rolls and 1,179 boxes of 24 rolls.

That’s a total of 54,600 toilet rolls packed into 1,727 boxes. And every box had to be unloaded by hand and placed on the warehouse shelves.

It took Tom and Leila six hours to empty that first container. It’s an impressive achievement, but probably not one we’d have been able to scale.

Or could we? Reaching 30 million rolls made the rest of the team wonder how long it would have taken them to unload every roll we’ve sold in exactly the same way.

At the pace of that first container, unloading 30 million rolls would take Tom and Leila around 3,296 hours.

That’s more than 137 days of our founders lifting boxes around the clock, without stopping to eat, sleep or complain about their backs.

Naked Paper is an ethical company, though, so we would at least have allowed them to work sensible eight-hour days. In that case, the job would have taken around 413 working days. And that’s just to get the rolls into the warehouse. We shudder to think how long it would have taken to get them back out for delivery.

Thankfully, our warehouse operation has levelled up a little over the past six years.

The impact behind 30 million rolls

Drawing comparisons in time and distance helps us picture how far we’ve come. But for us at Naked Paper, the very best comparisons come when we consider the difference all these rolls have made out there in the world.

Every roll of standard toilet paper replaced with Naked Paper means less bleach, fewer unnecessary harsh chemicals and less plastic. And with all our products dried using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels, those 30 million rolls have come with fewer emissions too.

If you’re interested in the details, you can learn more about how we’re changing the standard formula for making toilet paper right here.

While we’re celebrating 30,000,000 rolls sent out, we also want to celebrate some of the wonderful places where they’ve ended up. We’re in the loos at the Eden Project, we’ve been to Glastonbury Festival, and we’re in cafes, offices, and refill shops around the UK. 

We’re also in UK food banks. Toilet paper is an everyday essential, but it can easily be overlooked when people donate to food banks. At Naked Paper, however, we never overlook loo roll. With the support of our customers, we’ve been able to donate 118,347 rolls through the Trussell Trust and other food banks across the UK.

Thank you

Choosing a different toilet paper is a small thing. In fact, we’ve built Naked Paper around the idea that more sustainable choices should be the easiest ones to make. But we always felt sure that, once enough people got on board, it would add up to something more significant.

Well, 30 million toilet rolls feels pretty significant.

With the help and support of our brilliant customers, we’ve been able to reduce the bleach, plastic and emissions that have been a standard part of the daily flush for far too long.

As a team, we couldn’t be more delighted to have come this far. Almost to the moon, back home, and out to the moon again. And Tom and Leila are especially delighted not to have unloaded them by hand.

Next stop: 50 million.

Want to join us on our journey?