Somewhere in the house — in a changing bag by the door, in a pushchair pocket, on the shelf above the nappy bin — there is almost certainly a pack of WaterWipes. If you have young children, or have visited anyone who does in the past several years, the odds are high. Two ingredients. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent water. A trace of grapefruit seed extract. That is the complete list.
What most of the people using them don’t know: it was invented in Drogheda.
Not sourced through Ireland. Not adapted for the Irish market. Invented here, from scratch, by a man who made cotton wool for a living and got fed up watching his baby daughter’s nappy rash refuse to clear. WaterWipes is now the brand leader in the UK and Ireland, the third-ranked baby wipe in North America, and the number-two baby wipe on Amazon globally. Three million packs leave its cleanroom facilities in Drogheda every single week. In December 2024, the company received a €145 million investment from 3i Group — the first outside capital it had ever taken on — with the stated goal of reaching a billion dollars in retail sales.
All of it traces back to a father, an ingredient list, and a very specific exasperation.
The cotton wool man
Edward McCloskey founded Irish Breeze in 1993. It was not a glamorous business — cotton wool, soaps, basic skincare products — but it was a serious one, and it gave him something more useful than a chemistry qualification: sixteen years of reading ingredient labels. He also, separately, owns the Boyne Valley Group, which holds some of the most familiar names in Irish food retail: McDonnells curry sauce, Chivers marmalade, Erin soup. These are brands built on household trust. McCloskey understood, from the ground up, how consumer goods companies earn the right to sit in someone’s kitchen — or bathroom, or, eventually, changing bag.
When his first daughter was born and developed a persistent nappy rash, he did what any parent does: he tried different brands, bought different products, waited. The rash stayed. A health professional’s advice eventually cut through — use cotton wool and water, skip the wipes — and the rash cleared. Quickly.
His reaction was not simply relief. It was the more uncomfortable question: what was in the wipes that had caused the problem? He looked at the ingredient label on a standard pack of baby wipes — products marketed specifically for the most sensitive skin in any household — and found a long list of preservatives, fragrances, alcohol compounds, and stabilisers. He was, by his own account, appalled. The ingredients were not there out of negligence; a wet cloth in a sealed pack will grow bacteria without antimicrobials. The industry had solved a real engineering problem. But the solution it had converged on was not what a health professional would have chosen for inflamed infant skin.
McCloskey’s question was whether it had to be that complicated at all. He had a factory in Drogheda. He had more than a decade in personal care manufacturing. He had a precise product brief: a wipe that worked the way water and cotton wool worked, because water and cotton wool had worked.
The problem with pure water
The concept fits on a napkin. The execution took years.
Water, in a manufacturing environment without chemical preservatives, is a contamination challenge. Microorganisms grow in it. A damp cloth sealed in a pack and sitting in a distribution warehouse for weeks will not stay pure without either additives or a fundamentally different approach to production. The solution McCloskey and his team built was to bring in cleanroom manufacturing — the kind of controlled environment used in pharmaceutical and semiconductor production — so that the process itself provided the protection that other manufacturers achieved through chemistry.
The product that emerged had two ingredients: 99.9% water, and 0.1% grapefruit seed extract as a natural skin conditioner. No parabens. No fragrance. No alcohol. No chlorine compounds. No preservatives. By 2008, it was on the market.
Irish Breeze, the cotton wool company founded in 1993, had made the simplest baby wipe in the world.
Building without a war chest
For a company that would eventually compete with Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark in their own category, the WaterWipes funding history is strikingly restrained. The company was self-funded from the start. Profits went back into the business rather than to shareholders. No venture capital. No private equity. No external shareholders of any kind until December 2024 — sixteen years of building, entirely on retained earnings.
Ireland was the first market. The UK came next, and the UK proved something important. It is a large, price-competitive baby care market dominated by global brands with deep distribution and serious marketing spend. WaterWipes didn’t try to outspend them. It had one advantage that money couldn’t replicate: an ingredient list nobody else in the category could match for simplicity, and a founding story — a father, a rash, a decision to just use water — that resonated with exactly the parents who read labels. It became the brand leader in Britain and Ireland. The company then started looking further.
Fifty countries from two buildings on the Boyne
International expansion beyond Britain and Ireland began in earnest from around 2017. The approach was patient and distribution-led rather than capital-intensive. In Sweden, WaterWipes entered through a distribution partnership that placed it in ICA, the country’s largest grocery retailer. The Nordic markets — where consumers have a demonstrable appetite for premium-positioned, sustainability-led products — proved receptive. The company worked with Enterprise Ireland on market entry strategy, treating each geography as a separate problem to be solved rather than a monolithic rollout.
In the United States, the trajectory was slower and then suddenly significant. WaterWipes built from a niche premium position to third place in the baby wipe category overall, and second on Amazon. The American baby care market is enormous and deeply brand-loyal; reaching the top three in it, from a base in Drogheda, with a product that had never taken outside investment, is a number that takes a moment to absorb.
By the time the company was operating in more than fifty countries, its annual international revenue had passed €50 million. It had achieved a compound annual growth rate of more than 20% since 2017. Nearly four hundred people, representing thirty-five nationalities, worked for the company, with regional offices in the Netherlands, the United States, and Singapore managing what had become a genuinely global commercial operation. The manufacturing never moved. Three million packs per week, two cleanroom facilities, all of it still in Drogheda.
In November 2025, Edward McCloskey was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in Ireland — recognition that might seem surprising for a man whose product category is, at its core, something you use once and throw away. But that framing misses what WaterWipes actually built. It didn’t just make a wipe. It made a specific, evidence-based argument that the existing category was using unnecessary complexity to solve a simple problem, then it manufactured that argument at industrial scale.
The detail that tends to stop people
Neonatal intensive care units use WaterWipes.
This fact lands differently once you actually sit with it. A baby in a NICU is among the most physiologically vulnerable patients in any hospital. Premature infants have incompletely formed skin barriers; they absorb substances at rates that full-term skin does not. The threshold for what is permitted near them is not the same standard applied to the consumer baby aisle. Conventional baby wipes — including many marketed as “sensitive” — do not meet it. WaterWipes, with its two-ingredient formula and pharmaceutical-grade cleanroom production, does. Healthcare professionals and skin health institutions have given the product formal endorsement, precisely because the formulation that started with a domestic problem in Drogheda happens to be the formulation that clinical environments require.
This is not a marketing claim worked backward from a press release. It is the direct consequence of the original design decision. When you build a wipe intended to be safe for the most sensitive skin, and you enforce that with manufacturing rigour rather than chemical additives, you end up with a product that health systems trust at the level where the stakes are highest. That is a long way from a supermarket shelf in 2008. It is also, in retrospect, exactly where McCloskey was heading when he read a label and decided something was wrong.
The next chapter, still from Drogheda
The 3i investment in December 2024 changed the shape of what comes next without changing what the company is now. McCloskey retained a significant minority stake. CEO Paul Heeringa, who leads the global commercial operation, reinvested alongside the rest of the leadership team. The manufacturing stays in Drogheda — McCloskey has spoken openly about the deliberate choice to keep production in Ireland, both because the intellectual property is embedded in the process itself and because keeping it in-house means keeping it proprietary.
The €145 million is pointed at Latin America, Asia, and the gaps in a fifty-country footprint that still holds genuine white space. The company is also expanding beyond baby wipes — into adult and convenience categories — taking the same core argument (the fewest possible ingredients, made to the highest possible standard) into adjacent markets. The €12 billion personal care wet wipes market, the 3i analysis concluded, has significant premium-segment growth still ahead of it, driven partly by a post-pandemic shift toward ingredient awareness that WaterWipes had been building its brand around for more than a decade before anyone started talking about it.
The billion-dollar target is ambitious. It is also, given where the company started — one man’s observation about a rash, and a cotton wool factory on the Boyne — the kind of ambition that arrives with a certain credibility. WaterWipes did not get here by spending its way to market share. It got here because the product brief was correct, the manufacturing was serious, and sixteen years of self-funded patience turned out to be a more durable foundation than anyone outside Drogheda was watching for.
Most of the parents tearing open those packs in Atlanta and Amsterdam and Osaka have never thought about where they were made. They just know they work. Which, when you trace it back to where it actually started, is probably the most Irish possible outcome: the thing that works, made here, recognised everywhere else only after the fact.
Tours & experiences you might love
Powered by Viator. Some links are affiliate links — we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Secure Your Dream Irish Experience Before It’s Gone!
Planning a trip to Ireland? Don’t let sold-out tours or packed attractions spoil your journey. Iconic experiences like visiting the Cliffs of Moher, exploring the Rock of Cashel, or enjoying a guided walk through Ireland’s ancient past often sell out quickly—especially during peak travel seasons.
Booking in advance guarantees your place and ensures you can fully immerse yourself in the rich culture and breathtaking scenery without stress or disappointment. You’ll also free up time to explore Ireland’s hidden gems and savour those authentic moments that make your trip truly special.
Make the most of your journey—start planning today and secure those must-do experiences before they’re gone!