Quarterly Publication - Ed. 02-May6 - Flipbook - Page 12
HOW TWO
SISTERS
TURNED
TEXTILE
WASTE
INTO A
SUSTAINABLE
AND
PROFITABLE
BUSINESS
By: Lindsay Lorusso, Co-founder and CEO
of Nudnik, as heard on LaunchPod
T
oday, business needs to start from a
place of sustainability. Consumer behaviour is starting to shift and brands
are being forced to catch up. The
benefit of being an early or idea stage startup
is that it allows you to get ahead of the curve
and integrate sustainability into your business
model from day one so that you can maintain
profitability AND make an impact. While scaling
Nudnik, I have learned how to navigate the
balance between sustainability and profitability.
Here are some crucial steps in that journey that
will help you to scale a sustainable venture and
drive profit:
1. DEFINE YOUR PURPOSE
Pick something close to your heart and fight
for it. There is no motivator more powerful than
passion. For me, protecting the people on the
planet and being able to be creative and create
products or experiences that ultimately don't
take away from the health of people or the
planet is exciting. Raising young kids in today's
world can be scary, with the ever-present threat
of climate change and the future health of our
planet and species at risk. So, what drives me
every day to not just be paralyzed in fear (“ecoanxiety” is a real thing!) is to be able to work on
something that is giving back positively as well.
If you’re driven by your purpose, chances are
you’ll be more motivated to successfully scale
your impact.
2. FIND A BIG PROBLEM AND VALIDATE IT
When we started Nudnik, it was almost
like a think tank – we identified textile waste
as a solvable problem in the world of waste
management and sought out the individuals
on the front lines of the industry to validate
and solve. We found that textile waste was
very similar to plastic waste in that it must
be carefully sorted to be recycled. Different
textile fibers must be separated, just like how
different colours and grades of plastic must
be. When you’re thinking from a macro-level,
this becomes a huge challenge for recycling.
There are so many different variations of fabric
across the world; either you have a synthetic
fabric or a natural fabric and those two separate fabrics need to be recycled differently.
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GRIT
When you combine them, it makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recycle. While working
in the waste management industry,
I had clients that were generating
textile waste here in Toronto, and it
was all going to landfill because it
wasn't able to be recycled.
Founders program in the summer of
2018. There, I had access to a room
full of founders who had already
established businesses that were
getting to or already at specific
scale and scaling even further than
that. Being able to learn from these
founders had a great impact on
"You can make a social impact venture profitable if you're
intentional about your business model from the start."
So, Nudnik started off as this
idea between my twin sister and I,
to solve this problem: How can we
take this textile waste that can’t be
recycled and turn it into something
new? How can we give it a second
life? From there, we worked with
designers. We got their end-of-roll
materials. We worked with print
shops that would give us t-shirts or
sweatshirts that they'd misprinted
that would have become waste.
We were buying 100 pound bales
of gently used adult sized t-shirts
and sweatshirts, laying out our little pattern pieces on them and
then cutting and assembling them
into new garments. This whole
process was using different forms
of textile waste and turning it into
collections.
That initial experience showed
us that people cared about what
we were doing and wanted to
support us by buying our products. Following this, we met Jeanne
Beker and got into the Joe Fresh
Center for Fashion Innovation,
two experiences which propelled
us forward… Our idea was timely
and on the verge of being SUPER
timely. That relevancy really propelled us to move forward with it.
We started to truly think about
scale when I came into the Next
the way we pivoted our business
model. Before this experience,
we didn’t yet have a sustainable
business model in terms of really
moving that business forward in a
global way. Turns out, this problem
that we found, textile waste, is not
exclusive to Canada. We started
to look at textile waste in larger
forms than our current outputs to
be able to put out a product that
was globally scalable.
3. IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES
THAT ALLOW YOU TO GROW
The first opportunity we identified was offcut fabrics. Offcut
fabrics are essentially the remnants
of when pattern pieces are cut
from stacks of fabric during large
scale production. There are always
gaps in that fabric and that fabric
always ends up either in landfill
or burned. The fashion industry
creates enough of this offcut fabric
annually to give every person
on Earth 6 adult sized t-shirts
every year! That is astronomical.
Even if we get better with our
post-consumer textile waste (by
donating etc.) and minimize the
pre-consumer end-of-roll textile
waste, there's always going to be
cutting waste because we're still
cutting from rows of fabric and
our pattern pieces are all different
shapes. There is always going
to be an excess of offcut fabric.
For us, that was the opportunity
we leveraged to really create a
product line that we could scale
and continue to scale.
The second opportunity we
identified was partnering with factories overseas. I mean, they have
the problem, right? They're either
dealing with an environmental
cost because they're burning it
or they’re dealing with a hefty
disposal cost because it costs a lot
to put fabric in the landfill. So we
partner with factories now where
we turn those offcut fabrics into
our Nudnik pieces. Here, we help
to solve their waste problem while
having social impact. It’s a win-win
for everybody.
You can make a social impact venture profitable if you’re
intentional about your business
model from the start. Build motivation by identifying a purpose
for your venture that hits close
to home, find a solvable problem
within that purpose and jump on
any opportunities that allow you
to scale.
Learn more from Lindsay and her
mentor Jeanne Bekker - Style Editor at The Shopping Channel, creative director, author and all around
Canadian icon. They discuss how
they've helped each other grow,
building a sustainable startup and
the future of sustainable fashion.
LISTEN ON
LAUNCHPOD
GRIT
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