Up-Cycling Your Business, Pt. I: Who Does That?

This past Monday I competed in a new venture launch competition at the Four Athens tech incubator facility and got to see some great start-ups come to life in front of the judges. One in particular, named Butler Built, took pallet furniture to the next level. Taking advantage of local business' excess of wooden pallets as well as a family lumber company who had a surplus, this team rented a small workshop and began selling pallet furniture online. This rekindled my love for up-cycling projects and gratitude for reducing the amount of waste we put into our system, and also reminded me its a profitable business. 
So I'll be discussing a few things over the next couple blogs about up-cycling, how it started, what companies are doing it, and why it might be a great opportunity for your small business. 

The man to the left is Tom Szaky. He is one of my personal role models and he is an up-cycling entrepreneur. Simply put: up-cycling is taking any object or material who's normal useful life is over and extending that useful life by re-purposing the object or material. Zsacky decided that he could market his plant fertilizer, made of all natural compost, by bottling it in empty soda bottles. He then asked his customers to send the soda bottles back to him in order to keep the process going. TerraCycle, Szaky's company, went on to up-cycle juice pouches into handbags and other various projects. 

Many companies are picking up on this now. With the growth of social media sites like Pinterest.com and merchant sites like Etsy.com its vastly easier to market your up-cycled products in a place where they are appreciated and valued. Domino's Pizza has a distinctly attractive campaign called "Second Hand Logos." Realizing that in changing their logo they would have to get rid of any material baring the old logo and thus create a lot of trash, they decided to up-cycle it. Everything from old T-shirts to signs have been turned into works of art,, furniture, and other bits and pieces of memorabilia. Domino's commissioned 10 artists to create these pieces, some, like the one pictured below made of pizza boxes and non-toxic glue, selling for as much as $2,500.

 Hipcycle.com is another great example of up-cycling entrepreneurship. At this site you can search the inventory either by product or by the material its made out of. Literally a vast ocean of up-cycled products, you can find any household item made out of any other household item on this site. You will also pay (or charge, depending on the side you're on) a premium for them.