Talking Crap...Scientifically of course

Talking Crap, Crypto & Clever Design with Lesley Beech from Splash About

In this jam-packed episode of Aquatics Only, Luke flies solo (with David off enjoying Bali) and welcomes the show’s first international guest. Lesley Beech, Managing Director of Splash About, joining from the UK with a glass of Savvy B in hand.

From morning sunrises in Brisbane to dusky evenings in Yorkshire, this global chat dives deep into what makes Splash About’s iconic Happy Nappy such a game-changer for swim schools, recreational pools, and the planet. Lesley shares the wild journey behind creating the Happy Nappy DUO, a four-year science-backed mission to combat cryptosporidium outbreaks, reduce pool closures, and keep kids (and water) safer.

We also chat business smarts, sustainability stats that’ll make your stomach turn, and the surprising environmental toll of disposable nappies (spoiler: it's a lot). There’s plenty of laughs, a few poop jokes (naturally), and even a “poonami” reference or two. If you’re in aquatics, parenting, or just love a story where science meets entrepreneurship, this one’s for you.

Plus, Lesley and the Splash About Australia team are headed to SPARK Conference, so listen in for a sneak peek at what’s to come.

A-O? Let’s go!

Transcript

Luke Daly (00:00)
Well, one day, I think I'm going to get David back on the podcast. He's been holidaying over in Bali. So you heard from me last week and you're hearing from me again now. If I end up publishing the video, you'll see that there's a bit of a sunrise behind me. That's because it's super early in the morning for some, pretty late in the morning for me, frankly, there's been a lot that's happened already. But the reason I'm recording so early is because we've got the Aquatics Only first international guest joining us.

all the way from the UK. We have Lesley Beech, Managing Director of Splashabout on the call today. Lesley, what time is it where you are? Are you on the coffees as well or are you drinking something different?

Lesley (00:35)
I'm on the Savvy Bee and it's half past nine here and if you have a look you can see that it is dusk here where I am.

Luke Daly (00:44)
There you go. I

like that dusk because at 9.30 at the moment here in Australia, it is winter. So 9.30 PM is well and truly night time, not even dusk. So we've got a sunrise and you guys have got a heat wave at the moment, I think.

Lesley (00:56)
Yeah, it was 34 degrees today. It was beautiful.

Luke Daly (00:59)
Well, for all our Melbourne listeners or Adelaide listeners, that would be pretty envious at this point, which is probably why a lot of Australians do head overseas or to the Northern hemisphere for your summer to escape our winter. But I'm a Brisbane boy, so it's actually fairly mild at 11 degrees. So, hey, thank you so much for staying up late and talking to us. I feel like we're both in our element. You're a bit nocturnal. I'm a morning kind of person. So I'm on the coffees, you're on the wines. This could be an unfair advantage to you at this point.

Lesley (01:28)
Yeah, it's wimbled in here as well, so good pun.

Luke Daly (01:32)
everything's going on, hey? So tell me, tell our listeners a little bit about you. Why are you on the Aquatics Only podcast today? Who are you? Where have you come from? And what's your aquatics journey?

Lesley (01:42)
Okay, so I'm Lesley Beach, Managing Director of Splashabout, as you said. Firstly, I'm a mom and a wife, and I'm also an entrepreneur and businesswoman. I joined Splashabout in 2011, and prior to that, I worked predominantly in mergers and acquisitions and performance improvement in the food industry and FMCGs here in the UK. In 2011,

So 14, 15 years ago, I joined Splash about and as an investor and at that time I knew very little about the aquatics industry. I joined because I saw that it was a great company. It had a

a swim nappy and it sold the products to swim schools predominantly. And in 2014 I had my daughter and that's probably really where my aquatic journey began.

Luke Daly (02:35)
Beautiful. So we've had a lady named Sarah Morgan on this podcast before and her corporate comms agency is probably the best way to classify it. Was also born out of her having her daughter, probably around the same time actually. it's a, I'm always surprised and impressed at what can be done when you take that kind of pause to have babies, baby, whatever that might be. And the ideas that can happen by, and you highlighted earlier, you're an entrepreneur.

Lesley (02:57)
huh.

Luke Daly (03:02)
And entrepreneurs fundamentally, it's a badge that gets thrown around and used too regularly, but you are a true entrepreneur in that sense because an entrepreneur finds a problem and solves it. Like fundamentally, that's what an entrepreneur does. And I think that's what you've done. What's the kind of headline product for Splash About? What would we all know Splash About for and what was your involvement with that?

Lesley (03:19)
Thank

Splashabout is probably most famously known for its swim nappies, particularly the Happy nappy. And we have two Happy nappies. As I said, when I first joined there was a nappy available in the company and it wasn't until 2014 when I started to take my own daughter to lots of swim classes to learn more about the swim schools and the aquatic industry as a whole that I found that that nappy itself, although good, could be made better.

So I essentially reinvented that product into the product that is on the market today. And that nappy is the number one swim nappy in the world. And it's insisted on by swim schools all over because it actually works and it stops stalls getting in pools. And then in the UK in 2018,

We were approached by lots of swim schools who were losing mental space in hydrotherapy pools because there was a concern over outbreaks of cryptosporidium and the risk to users of hydrotherapy pools because the users of hydrotherapy pools tended to be rehabilitating or had illnesses. So we set about trying to solve that problem for swim schools.

First of all, we tried to create a watertight nappy. So my poor daughter was our little experimental muse and we tried everything. So we tried to make a nappy out of silicon, out of latex. I've actually got some prototypes. I'm going to bring them with me to Ather in August. So anybody who wants to try one on can try it on. Yeah, I've got some adult ones as well as some junior ones.

Luke Daly (05:01)
Adult size are you talking about? ⁓

Lesley (05:06)
and babies. But we didn't think that there was going to be a market for that. Nobody really wants to try and squeeze the baby into a latex little rubber nappy. also, I don't know if you know, but the little spinal groove on your back, that still let water in and out. So that didn't work. I tried to tape it with 3M tape. I've got some really bad photos of my poor daughter with the tape. And we thought, again, I'm not sure on the commercial viability of this.

Luke Daly (05:06)
⁓ wait.

Lesley (05:32)
And I also even tried to have a little vac pack station tool where you could vac pack and make it airtight as a nappy. and then one day over lunch, one of my colleagues and I were talking to her brother-in-law who's a scientist and we were explaining this problem about awkward babies coming in different shapes and sizes and some with chubby legs and some with skinny legs and it was impossible to get it watertight.

And said, if you can't contain it, you should kill it.

So yes, the problem that we were trying to solve was the risk of cryptosporidium outbreaks in pools. So he said, if you can't contain it, you should kill it. And referred us to look at various different products. And one of those was silver technology. So we went away giddy after a few savvy bees and also safe in the knowledge that my daughter was not going to get experimented on anymore.

and thought we would just buy some off-the-shelf products that claimed that they had antimicrobial properties. so we bought some athlete's socks because they all claimed that you're not going to have stinky feet and that the silver works as an antimicrobial agent. And we found a scientist who was one of the leading cryptosporidium scientists in the UK at Edinburgh University.

and asked her if she would test if the product did what it said it did. And when she rang us back, we were confident that we'd cracked it and we could just turn this product into a nappy. But when she called us back, she actually said that instead of killing the germs, because you can't actually experiment on cryptosporidium, because it is a parasite and a controlled parasite at that, we had to experiment on E. coli.

with the scientist to start with. And she actually said that it bred the bacteria. So we were back to the drawing board. So we found the Institute of Fabric Technology and Design in Taiwan and a leading fabric specialist company and started our journey on trying to create a new fabric that didn't exist, that actually would kill.

cryptosporidium and that process took four years to try and find it because of you we have to a it has to work in chlorinated water and chlorine is a killer it also has to not release the silver because of that wouldn't be great either but it has to have the right concentration so that the ions

on the fabric move enough so that they are effective and they can build the crypto. So that took a lot of research and development and eventually we had the balance just right. So then we had to test it on real live cryptosporidium. But in the UK there isn't a lab that has the specialist microscope that allows us to view that.

So then we had to find a lab in the US that specialized in nanotechnology and pathology. we sent our fabric, some crypto. We had to get special government sign-off to send the crypto sample. We had to put our fabric in an airtight box so that it couldn't get contaminated in any way, because that would mean that the experiment was void. And then we waited with baited breath.

to see if it would get the same results as our scientists told us that it would get. And eventually, after a few hours, we got the call that the sunshine had gone out. And what that meant is that cryptosporidium has a hard shell, an oocyst, and inside the oocyst are the sporozoites, and it's the sporozoites that cause the infection. And what had happened is that our fabric

had broken down the shell of the cryptosporidium, which then allows the normal chlorinated water to penetrate that shell and the sporozoites are weak. And so as soon as the chlorine was in contact with the sporozoites, it killed them. And hence the Happy Nappy duo was born.

Luke Daly (09:35)
Heck it's that.

So it's working in conjunction. you're effectively, the nappies taking that hard shell off the cryptosporidium, getting into those sporozites and just the natural disinfection of a pool is killing that infectious part. Is that correct? Jeez Louise, who would have thought there's so much flipping science behind a nappy? Now it begs my question though, because hearing this whole story, hearing that timeline, four years, five years of development just to get to this stage.

Lesley (09:45)
Yeah, breaks it down.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Yeah, that's right.

Luke Daly (10:05)
Are you like on a crusade at this point? as in during this whole process, are the knockbacks, I suppose, in the technology or those walls that you're running into, are they just motivating you at this point? Are you just like, I'm gonna get this done, I'm too far in? Because four years, and I'm assuming none of these processes are free at zero cost either. So I'm assuming there's a heap of investment, capital investment in this product as well, not just time.

Lesley (10:23)
Now we're on.

Luke Daly (10:30)
Your daughter is probably 18 at this point, joking. I know she's not, but like this whole research period to get it to market, that's to me, that takes such determination. Why? Why? Why? Why?

Lesley (10:43)
Because we knew it was a problem. And it's not just a problem here in the UK or for swim schools. It's a problem for all recreational pools. It's a problem for everywhere. In Australia last year, there were 12,000 cases of cryptosporidium. And that was up 300 % on the year before. So all over the world, we know that there was this problem. And we hoped that nobody else was trying to solve it. So we persevered.

with the science and with the technology. And we knew that we were onto something. As soon as we killed the E. coli, we knew that we were onto something. We know that chlorine kills E. coli, but chlorine's not in a fabric, okay? So we knew that we were onto it. We knew there was a need, there was a market need, and we just persevered because it just creates a much safer environment for swimmers. And what it does for the people that we work with.

is it means that they don't have to worry about that. They know that if the swimmer is wearing Happy Nappy, the chances of contamination in their pools is vastly reduced.

Luke Daly (11:47)
So I'm glad that you've persevered with this product. My boys are a little bit older now and I didn't know about the product prior to meeting you and coming into this job and thank goodness they were out of swim nappies at that point. But.

I just, it's such a long time, so I'm glad that you persevered. I think it's a really cool product. Splashabout are partners of ASSA. So I've learned a fair bit about you and the product and Kylie from Little Togs which you being Splashabout went through the acquisition of last year. So that's really cool and the rebrand of Splashabout Australia.

Lesley (12:11)
you

that's fine.

That's right, yeah, so we now have our own facility in Sydney, which is great.

Luke Daly (12:24)
You do, and there's a lot of innovative stuff happening out of there from a business perspective as well, right? I suppose what I want to understand is from the business perspective again, and I've got a bunch of other things, so buckle up. But I want to understand from that perspective, some people jump into businesses and they just take off and they just keep going and they keep going and they keep going. And it's almost an unconscious market research by just default. How much market research did you do globally? Like you understood that there was a problem with crypto's sputium.

Lesley (12:44)
I'm just not.

Thank you.

Luke Daly (12:50)
You understood that there could be

a solution to it, but how much market research was conducted, I suppose, show the minimum viability of the product initially, because you have a lot of other products as well, but this one in particular.

Lesley (13:03)
Yeah, a huge amount of research, technical research, went into the product about how long it would last, how it would be effective, how it would work with chlorine. Market research in terms of the needs, we're probably selling 50 countries across

the world. This wasn't the case when we first started the journey with the duo. So at that time we were much smaller. But we were talking to pool owners, pool providers, swim schools all of the time. And this was a recurring theme that crypto was a problem.

Luke Daly (13:40)
Yeah. And it's just, it's for me, it's such a cool product. I never would have thought of it. So I'm glad that you have. Let's talk crypto for a bit longer because I have two sons like I've highlighted. And so talking about poo and poo jokes in our house is one of the funniest things. Arguably, I've had a lot of feedback about this podcast, not this episode, because this is blowing my mind scientifically. But David and I get accused of talking a lot of crap.

Lesley (13:56)
Yeah.

yeah.

Luke Daly (14:06)
as well. So today we're actually talking crap. You do, but this is, this is your scientific topic as well, not just a business topic and not just what you do after a couple of Vino's. So pool closures can occur off the back of crypto outbreaks in a pool. And you've given me some stats here around the cases that have been reported. And like you highlighted before, they're significantly up ⁓ nationally in Australia. So let's zoom in here on my homeland for a second, but up

Lesley (14:06)
Lovely, I love talking crap.

Yeah.

Luke Daly (14:32)
from 3,717 in 2023 to just under 12,000 in 2024. I mean, that's massive. So I'm not going to ask you why you think that is, I guess, but let's talk about the business effects or what happens if there is effectively a code brown, which is one of the official names for them. But yeah, what happens?

Lesley (14:40)
Yeah.

If it's

a Diary of Co-Brown, that can result in a complete pool close down. And that costs the pool operator thousands of dollars. When we're working with schools, this means lost lessons. This means that they have to rebook the lessons that set the pain for the teachers. They're having to rebook everybody in and all of the cleaning costs and the downtime.

it's a huge cost. And so a typical closure can cost $2,000. I'm just translating pounds and dollars in my head. Yeah, or more. And especially when you take into account makeup lessons

Luke Daly (15:34)
Yeah, that's right. So it's not just the cost on the day. It's all those other costs where you've got to fill them in. You've got that reputational piece. You've still got to pay your teachers and all that kind of thing. So if we just simply lean into the swim school side of things, I want to kind of use two stories that I've found in the marketplace even from my travels to some of the swim schools. I was chatting with one, this is back like my first couple of months at ASSA I reckon.

And I was chatting with one of the biggest swim schools around Sydney. And I think it was the first week back of term. So everything was kicked off, ready to go. know, pool was clean. There was a new pool plan equipment in there as well. And 8.30 on the Saturday morning, boom, a little floaties coming through out into that water there. And that resulted in the pool being shut down for the rest of the day. Saturdays in our world are obviously the busiest day.

Lesley (16:02)
Awesome.

Yeah.

Luke Daly (16:20)
And so 8.30 in the morning, this one happened. And so boom, pull shut. So it was significantly more than that kind of 2000 that you referenced before. It could almost be 2000 pounds. And it's just insane.

Lesley (16:28)
Of course, yeah, it is. Yeah, no, if

it's in a recreational environment where you've got people paying to swim all day long, that figure is vastly more. Yeah, vastly, vastly more.

Luke Daly (16:41)
Yep.

And then I love hearing the business cases of our swim schools as well. One in particular, and I know she'll probably listen to this podcast and hopefully not be embarrassed by us shouting her out, but Erin from Swim Experts. I just love this story because in our industry, sometimes we're very conscious of not putting the prices up too much and stuff like that so that it doesn't put too much of an imposition on our.

Lesley (17:04)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Daly (17:05)
on our clients and we do work in a competitive landscape. But I love what Erin does where she charges an admin fee when a family or a kid first starts. But it's not just an admin fee for the sake of an admin fee, it's an admin fee and by extension of that, if they're in that kind of nappy age, I think it's three, that she does it to, she gifts them a happy nappy. So I think there's a lot of client delight in that as well because they're getting something for that admin fee. But also,

Erin's getting her pool protected at that point from those who are most risky in terms of leaving a little floater. She's insulating her own pool against that to prevent downtime. So to me, that's just genius. To me, that's masterstroke. And I know it's simple and often some of the best things are that simple, but it's an all rounder. It's better for her swim school. It's better for the clients and where I want to lead into now, because I do love talking about the business component and the scientific component.

Lesley (17:39)
Thank

Thank

Luke Daly (17:55)
But let's lean into the sustainability component for a second. ⁓ Because without knowing about your product in particular or other nappies, reusable ones, we ended up with those awesome ones that are, you know, fall apart like paper. They're only one degree better than a standard nappy. Yeah, don't judge me, all right? Don't judge me. Yeah, I know, but don't judge me. I didn't know you, okay? I would be remiss if I did it now and I fear that I would get...

Lesley (17:58)
Yeah.

are looking.

They're not even that. They're not even that. Yeah.

Luke Daly (18:22)
probably heard, but tell me a bit about the sustainability element, because they are reusable, obviously. They are for me. So we use them. We retail these products a little bit at some of the expos that we went to. And they were, they were awesome from a just having their, they're physically beautiful. They're quite stylish. They have lots of different sizes. They're at a price point where people were just buying them because they're buying it. I reckon we sold half of them were sold as gifts.

for someone that came along and said, this would be great for these people. Now I know there's a whole fitting process and stuff that it's important and Kylie was the best at that when she was here. But let's just focus in on that sustainability piece for a second because some of the stats that you and I have discussed before, frankly, they freak me out. ⁓ I'm massive into the sustainability side. I think we can all make better decisions. And I think this is one of those easy decisions that we can make. So freak us out a little bit, Lesley with the sustainability.

Lesley (19:03)
him.

Luke Daly (19:14)
statistics. can't even string my sentence together.

Lesley (19:15)
So, So at Splashabout, we are passionate about sustainability and taking disposables out of the pool. In Australia, one child can use between 4,000 and 6,000 disposable nappies until the point of toilet training.

And each one of those nappies can take 500 years to break down, which is a huge environmental impact. Making that change from a disposable nappy, which is completely ineffective. If a child has a poop in a disposable nappy, that poop is coming out. All the disposable nappy does is catch it and then it's going straight in the bin. They're where it wants. It's completely terrible for the environment. There's...

There's garbage waste that's the size of a certain ocean. have to look it up now. I should have got this stat ready. That's just made up of plastic waste. And the worst offenders in all of the waste is the nappies because they really do not break down. In order for them to be effective, they have to contain plastic and it does not break down. So in Australia, 3.75 million nappies go to landfill every single day.

It's just huge. And like I said, yeah, it's huge. And in swimming, it's completely unnecessary. It's completely ineffective and just unnecessary. And a reusable nappy, particularly ours, because we're really passionate about making sure that the quality of our products is there. So with a happy nappy, parents can hand it down to the next child, to the sibling.

Luke Daly (20:26)
That is freaky.

Lesley (20:48)
It took us a long time to reinvent the original nappy and we used a specialist fabric because chlorine eats fabric. If you ever go, like all the people who are regularly spending a lot of time in the pool know this. So we had to make sure that our fabrics are incredibly durable. And because they're so durable, they can be handed down, which means that they last not just for the journey of that

child but they can be handed down to a sibling as well and they'll last as long as they fit and then they can fit again so it's like a circular economy as well as taking the disposables out of the water.

Luke Daly (21:24)
It just makes sense to me. And every time I spend more time with you or Kylie for that matter, I just learned so much more and it just makes sense to me. And I don't know why I haven't used them before, but I do because I didn't know about them. But yeah, that whole circular piece, that sustainability piece, and it just works for everyone. From a client to the baby, they're more comfortable too. Like those disposable nappies, they're not comfortable, I'm sure.

Lesley (21:47)
No, they're shockingly bad. I don't know if you've seen, you often see children in pools on holiday and just in their little disposable nappies sagging off their bottoms. yeah, they're gross. Yeah, they're little gross. And that's where you get the punamis.

Luke Daly (21:59)
Yep, pulling them under. Yep, they are gross. They are. And I think...

The what?

Lesley (22:08)
The poonamies. The poonamies come from... So when we were doing the research, most of the accidents that were happening in the pools were from disposable nappies. And when children were falling down or sitting down with a giant poop in the nappy, it would create these poop explosions. so hence poonamies.

Luke Daly (22:09)
Tell me more about the hose.

I mean, I do like watching those

little reels or videos on Facebook. I do find them quite funny. I did not find it funny when it happened to me when my oldest son was like two years old, but I do enjoy laughing at other people in that respect. So ⁓ for me, Lesley, and we'll draw this to a close pretty soon in the next few minutes, it would be remiss of me not to include some of these quick facts that more for a laugh than anything else, but you know.

Lesley (22:39)
Yeah.

Yay.

Mm-hmm.

Luke Daly (22:56)
We like to give practical advice on this podcast and absolutely useful things that people can take into their daily lives. So some of these things I find pretty amusing because obviously I have a juvenile sense of humor. The poop is 75 % water with the rest of it being bacteria, viruses and parasites. It's kind of gross. Given that between 100 grams and half a kilo of this stuff is produced per person per day.

Lesley (23:02)
Yeah.

It makes growth untrue.

Luke Daly (23:23)
And I can tell you now that my sons would probably be on the upper side of that number. Like that's horrific. mean, I'm, yeah, now I'm glad that we have good plumbing here in Australia. So crypto is chlorine resistant and the filters don't catch it. That's because of that hard shell that we talked about. So we've got to break down that hard shell, which the material does. This one, I'm never gonna like, I don't think I can recover from this one, but one in six mobile phones,

Lesley (23:43)
It's almost pretty gross.

Luke Daly (23:46)
is contaminated with fecal matter.

Lesley (23:48)
Yeah. Don't swipe and wipe.

Luke Daly (23:48)
Like I don't know what I'm going to do. Don't

swipe and wipe. Come on. Like, I mean, what else do you do? Anyway, like I just, I'm mortified at this point. I'm never touching someone else's phone, let alone mine. Like, I don't know how I'm going to function in life, but that is full on. That is not a great way to start my day, given that I've just left the gym where there's an abundance of towels, goggles, lockers, equivalents. I'm done. I'm done with that. Like that's, yeah, that wraps up my day.

Lesley (24:03)
is yeah one in six

Luke Daly (24:13)
So that is the perfect way to finish this podcast with some fun, fast statistics. You've taken us on a journey from business sense, from a sustainability sense, and we've learned a bit about you, which I find the most fascinating. I love hearing about the people behind the products or the people behind the services that we bring and the advantage that Happy Nappies bring to our pools, both recreational, swim schools, and even private pools.

Lesley (24:37)
Please.

Luke Daly (24:38)
I love the circular economy and the sustainability.

I love the science. I love your dedication and investment in the product as well, because I'm sure those early years were not easy. I'm sure they took a lot of time, or profitable for that matter as well. So how do our audience get in touch with you and Splashabout to find out more about the range of products you guys have?

Lesley (24:48)
or profitable.

Well, firstly, I just want to say it's been an honor speaking to you. We love the industry and I was delighted when you asked me to join this podcast. And secondly, for the viewers in Australia, they can get in touch with us at www.splashabout.com.au and that's where they'll meet the glorious Kylie, who is even more of an expert than I am in all things poop and swim and aquatics.

Luke Daly (25:24)
Yes, that is perfect. And Kylie Hadid, for those of you who don't know, Kyle's, she is a very vocal advocate of the product and no one knows more than her and how to sell it, how to retail it. I think I've bought 10 nappies off her at this point, just because every time she talks about it, need to buy one. I don't even need one at this point, but just the way that she's able to present it and demonstrate it to us is really cool. And we will see you.

and Kylie and the rest of the Splash About Australia team at the Spark conference coming up 12 to 14 August, is that correct?

Lesley (25:53)
That's correct, we can't wait.

Luke Daly (25:54)
Are we seeing live demos this year as well? Well, not actual live demos, but like an example.

Lesley (26:00)
We are going to do a poo demo, yes? And we've got some little poop emojis to give away.

Luke Daly (26:02)
Beautiful, hey?

We do love a good poop emoji. Well, thank you for talking about my favorite topic, Thank you for talking crap and crypto with me on Aquatics Only today. And we have a tradition and I missed it on our last podcast and I've been kicking myself ever since. But when David's here, one of us says, A-O, the other one says, let's go. And seeing he's not here, you get to do, which one would you like to do you choose?

Lesley (26:26)
I'll tell you later, girl.

Luke Daly (26:27)
All right, all right. Are you ready? As we leave this podcast, Lesley, thank you for staying up late, joining us. We will see you very soon. But for the meantime, Ayo. ⁓

Lesley (26:37)
Let's go!

Luke Daly (26:38)
Beautiful, hey there we go, the perfect AO. We'll see you soon.

Lesley (26:42)
Bye.