She started at the bottom, now she’s changing the way we go to the toilet From the Kiwee Lifter to BDèt to Toru Roll, Billie Jo Hohepa-Ropiha has found her niche creating toilet-based innovations – but that wasn’t always the former journalist’s plan. “Dad was an inventor,” says Billie Jo Hohepa-Ropiha, recounting her childhood in the Northland settlement of Moerewa. It’s a US rust belt-style factory town, full of Māori families whose multiple generations have lived and died within a 5km radius of the Affco meat processing plant for the past hundred years. “Dad worked at Affco, both my grandparents worked at Affco, my mum worked at the local Four Square and I got my first job at the local Four Square.”