Environmentally Impassioned Citizen Designs Plastic-Free Bags

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

If your motivation is to do good or otherwise advance a social cause, why would you want to start a for-profit business? Or as we call them here, side hustles. Well, because sometimes you can do more good through a for-profit model than you can through a nonprofit. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

And today's story features a Washingtonian who carries her passion for sustainability on her sleeve with a line of eco-friendly grocery bags. She learns to design, print, and sell these bags. And after a successful crowdfunding campaign and first phase of launch, she's now recouped her costs and is moving on to stage two. I'll tell you all about it after this quick word from our sponsor. [Music]

The idea for Gabrielle Jacobson's Side Hustle blossomed when she was doing a simple routine task that most of us do each week, grocery shopping.

This trip to the market was a little different though. Gabrielle had recently read some startling statistics about the harm that plastic bags can do to animals in the ocean. This thought in mind, she attempted to collect all of her food without using any unnecessary plastic bags. Unfortunately, this noble attempt just resulted in a mason jar shattering to the ground as the rest of her groceries fell to the ground beside her. But something else happened as she walked away carrying her bruised bananas.

She realized that most people needed some kind of bags to carry their groceries. So she became determined to make sustainability more accessible. Naturally, Gabrielle started with what she already knew. She worked as a designer, so her day job easily translated into her side hustle. She first began building a grocery bag prototype out of scrap materials around her house.

And she wanted to follow two important principles. She would bootstrap the project and not go into debt. And even though her first motivation was to encourage less plastic usage, she'd operate this project as a for-profit business. At the beginning of her design process, Gabrielle also set some design standards for herself. She wanted to limit the materials she used, and in fact didn't want to have any plastic at all in her bags.

This presented some challenges. It was hard enough to make sure none of the fabric she used had plastic in them. Then another issue arose when she realized that most clasping mechanisms involved plastic of some kind. Even metal zippers, for example, are woven into plastic thread. Ultimately, Gabrielle decided to enlist the help of a professional seamstress.

This helped her to finalize her design, which, by the way, she had made over 100 versions of. And thank goodness she didn't bag the project because Gabrielle was eventually able to achieve a product that was essentially waste-free. Not only were the materials high quality, but once the bag reaches the end of its lifespan, it can actually be cut up, composted, and returned to the earth. This is, of course, after prayers are offered by the bag's owner's preferred priest, minister, rabbi, or imam. But even though Gabrielle had her design in the bag, she was still far away from being able to launch her product.

Even with bootstrapping as a core value, she knew it was gonna cost thousands of dollars, so she decided to create a Kickstarter campaign. As a refresher, Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding service where people can advertise their ideas and hopefully raise money from the public to bring those ideas to fruition. Typically, the owner of a Kickstarter promises to give the donors something, whether it's the product they hope to make or another gift in return for investing in them. Here's another refresher. Gabrielle suggests seriously researching Kickstarter before creating your own campaign.

And keep in mind that it's a business tool, not an automatic way to fund your entire project. It's not for everyone, but for her, Kickstarter was exactly the right move. She was able to raise all of the initial manufacturing costs, including the LLC, initial marketing, and prototyping. These costs amounted to a little under $8,000. From there, she contacted the manufacturer she had worked with to build her final prototype and actually began to produce her bags.

She now sells them on an eco-focused blog called Green Upward and at Farmer's Markets. Within four months, she had already made over $8,000, which you might recall was a bit more than the amount of money she initially invested. She even sold out of every grocery bag on her website at one point. Now, speaking of that manufacturer, even before she launched her business, Gabrielle was forming a relationship with them. Over the period of a few months, she was able to learn about the facility and the materials they used before officially committing.

The manufacturer could also see how serious Gabrielle was about her products. She says that many manufacturers are not looking for one-time production efforts, but rather long-term mutually beneficial relationships. So when you go to talk to one, you should have plenty of questions lined up. That way, you won't be wasting their time and they'll be more likely to want to work with you. So Gabrielle has now had a very successful first round of production.

She's using her profits to expand Green Upward even more and she looks forward to creating more than grocery bags. Long-term, she envisions it as a cutting-edge design company with a variety of eco-friendly products. She says she has dozens or even hundreds of new ideas already. Through this adventure, she's learned to follow that classic motivational advice to think outside the bag. [Music]

Okay, so here's the question.

If you've got a charity or a cause or some kind of social good project that you want to advance, like we have in this story, why not just do it as a charity or as a nonprofit? Like, why not just save the whales? If you want to save the whales, why not just focus your efforts on saving the whales? Like, why go through the process of creating a sustainable business model? Well, the answer lies in those last three words, sustainable business model.

So in this story, if you were Gabriela, you could spend your own money to make 100 bags and give them away to people. Now, first of all, a lot of people wouldn't actually use them because you just gave it to them and people get free stuff all the time. They don't tend to value it that much, but let's say just for the sake of argument, even if 100 out of 100 people did use them, that's great, what would you do next? Well, you can't just keep spending your money over and over, you're gonna run out of money. So in a traditional charity or nonprofit model, what you would do is then you would start asking other people to contribute.

And that's fine for lots of things, like I support charities and nonprofits, we have a lot of people working for nonprofits listening to the show. They don't tend to get paid very well, which is why they want to start a side hustle. But for our purposes here, for something like a reusable bag that has really nice design, which by the way, it looks quite modern and fashionable. It's not like a dumpy old bag, like it looks like something you'd want to carry around. For this kind of product, wouldn't it be better if you made them and sold them?

Then you could keep bagging up sales, expanding your product line, reaching more people, while you advance your cause even further. So in this case, it doesn't have to end when you run out of money or when you make your first 100 bags. So you can in fact do good and do well, and hopefully this illustrates why in a lot of cases, the best way that you can save the whales is to think about what the whales want to buy. Okay, actually that last part doesn't quite work, but everything else does. The point remains, keep it in your bag of tricks.

And don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Thank you for listening today. I hope you enjoyed this one. If you'd like to check out the show notes and maybe check out these bags, just go to sidehustleschool.com/524. That is for episode 524.

If you've got a comment or question, you can reach me at sidehustleschool.com or on the Hustle Hotline at 8449 Hustle 844-948-7853. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.