How It Started

It started with a trip to the bathroom. 30 minutes, 50 instagram videos and 20 YouTube shorts later, my wife had had it with me. I was hiding in there and it had been over 30 minutes so far. I knew that I had been in the bathroom too long, but I needed a break. With three young kids, breaks were hard to come by and we both felt at the end of our rope at least once during the day.

 It turns out, I wasn’t alone. Shortly after, I started to see reel after reel pop up on my social media feeds of husbands/boyfriends spending too long in the bathroom. Some of them had kids and some of them didn’t, but they all one had one thing in common - they wanted to relax. The bathroom was their place of relaxation and total privacy. Nobody could talk to them, ask them to do something, or bother them. I pictured their poor wives/girlfriends going through the same thing my wife was going through and couldn’t help but laugh at the mental image of husbands & boyfriends sitting in the bathroom for 30+ minutes hoping for some peace and quiet.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the last time I spent 30 minutes in the bathroom, and it wasn’t the last time my wife yelled at me for it either, but it was the day that started this whole thing. That evening, after having seen a dozen different reels of that exact experience we just had, I told my wife about it and we laughed at the absurdity of the situation. We laughed together at the thought of men across the country hiding in their bathrooms and the crisis that it was creating. We joked about the silly idea that their significant others might be able to control the amount of time they spent in there so that they never spent too long in the bathroom again and we could avert a national crisis. Jokingly, I turned to my wife and said “what if, in order to use the bathroom, men had to get a coupon from their wife that gave them an allotted time they were allowed to spend in there. They would be like pooping coupons. We could call them poopons. Poop coupons.” She laughed and said that would be absolutely ridiculous. But, that was it. Of course the idea of actually restricting bathroom privileges was ridiculous, but the idea that a couple could joke about something as bizarre as this got me seriously thinking about it.

 I have a background in finance, and silly gag gifts aren’t something I’ve ever even thought about, but I couldn’t get the thought of poop coupons out of my mind. I thought, if there are even 5,000 women across the country that could relate to my wife and had the same frustration of their man spending too long in the bathroom, then these poop coupons would be a hilarious way to either make each other laugh, or provide the chance to talk about something that was frustrating in a relationship and make it more light hearted. So, I put pen to paper and wrote down 6 ridiculous coupons that someone could use to either restrict or grant the other persons bathroom privileges. I showed them to my wife and she couldn’t stop laughing. They weren’t mean to ever be used, as most gag gifts aren’t, but her reaction was so positive that I decided to show them to friends and family. Their reactions were the same. Everyone thought the poopons were hilarious and I thought we might actually be able to sell them to other people. two months later, after jumping through many hoops, learning a lot, and making a lot of mistakes, I had 1000 poop-ons, the coupons for pooping in my basement ready to sell. The rest is history.