28 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Batiz dropped out of college and got
married; by the time she was twenty-
seven, she’d had two kids and two di-
vorces, and had declared bankruptcy,
after a bridal salon that she bought with
her first husband failed. For the next
twenty-one years, she worked in retail
or recruiting full time, but was always
launching one side hustle or another.
By 2006, when Batiz had the din-
ner-party conversation about bathroom
odor, she had begun mixing essential
oils as a hobby. She couldn’t get the idea
of a smell-trapping spray out of her
head. She began experimenting with an
oil mixture that, when sprayed directly
onto the water in a toilet bowl, would
suspend on the surface. To test the for-
mula, she followed family members and
house guests to the bathroom. Batiz’s
husband, Hector, was her official tester.
(“Which made her the official sniffer,”
he told me.) Nobody thought that the
business would work; it seemed like just
one more in a long line of crazy ideas.
Batiz’s son C.J. said, “I thought that she
was completely nuts. She’d be chasing
us to the bathroom all the time, and
she’d be, like, ‘Hey, go in there and smell
the bathroom.’ I’m, like, ‘Mom, you’re
insane. I’ve got to pee. Please let me
pee.’” Then, one day, Hector burst out
of the bathroom, shouting, “We’re going
to be millionaires!” Batiz didn’t know
what he meant. He said, “Do you real-
ize what you’ve done? You’ve taken the
smell out of shit!”
Batiz shared ten bottles of the spray
with friends, and Hector built a Web
site. The first shop to sell her product
was owned by a friend of a friend. The
day she delivered the spray, there was a
customer in the store—“a woman with
a mink headband and a Louis Vuitton
bag,” Batiz told me. The shop owner
asked Batiz to tell the customer about
her product, which she’d brought in a
plastic milk crate. “I go, ‘Poo-Pourri! Two
sprays before you go, nobody will ever
know!’” Batiz said. “And she looks at me
and goes, ‘That’s clever. I’ll take four.’ I
was freaking out. And then the next day
another store called, and then another.”
Poo-Pourri’s breakthrough came in
2013, when the company’s first com-
mercial, “Girls Don’t Poop,” went viral.The commercial featured the company
spokesperson, Bethany Woodruff, a
pretty Scottish redhead with a convinc-
ingly posh English accent, sitting on a
toilet in various locations, primly ex-
tolling the product’s benefits in shock-
ingly scatological terms. “You would not
believe the mother lode I just dropped,”
she says conspiratorially. “And that’s how
I like to keep it—leaving not a trace I
was ever here, let alone that I just birthed
a creamy behemoth from my cavernous
bowels.” Potty humor is so prevalent at
Poo-Pourri that it took an outsider to
see how over-the-top the commercial
was. One of the commercial’s writers,
Daniel Harmon, added the line “Yes,
this is a real product, and, yes, it really
works,” so that people wouldn’t mistake
it for a comedy sketch.
The response to the commercial—
which claimed that Poo-Pourri had bet-
ter Amazon ratings than the iPhone 5,
and which was eventually viewed more
than forty-two million times—was
matched by the response to the spray.
Kathie Lee Gifford mentioned it as one
of her favorite things on the “Today”
show, and the media started to pay at-
tention. Customer reviews were giddy.
(“Nose and ‘Family’ saver,” one read.)
Within days of the commercial’s release
online, Batiz had four million dollars’
worth of orders. The sudden success
was chaotic. “We only processed, like,
a hundred orders a day,” C.J. told me.
“We could only print out as fast as the
printer could go. We were screwed.” The
bookkeeper quit on the spot. Batiz slept
in the warehouse on a bed of empty
boxes and bubble wrap.
That year, Batiz gave a talk at the
Harvard Business School Club of Dal-
las, and people waited for hours after-
ward to meet her. They wanted advice
on how to tap into a new market. Batiz
felt that she didn’t have answers, and
decided not to speak in public again
until she did. Then she saw a political
ad in which a candidate used the met-
aphor of doors being slammed in her
face to talk about the experience of being
a woman in the military. “It just clicked,”
Batiz told me. “I was, like, ‘Her through
line is doors, my through line is shit.’”
In a spoken-word piece that Batiz wrote
for Hustle Con, a startup conference,
she uses the word “shit” a hundred and
twenty-one times, in every imaginable“He can’t have salsa’d far.”