I’m a senior in college, but I took a much different route than most in terms of my degree and my path to graduation. When I was a freshman there was program named the Innovation Academy, the goal of this program was to support students of all disciplines that were interested in starting a business. A large percentage of businesses are started by entrepreneurs with no previous business experience, so why should the business colleges be the only ones with programs that support students entrepreneurial activities? I love this program, I was actually the first student to ever sign up for the program. The Innovation Academy became my home for the next four years…in college finding your place is essential to your success, some kids have athletics, some have greek life while others have academic clubs, my place was the Innovation Academy. This college supports the kids who have a different view on what education can be, those of who are smart kids but fall between the cracks from an academic standpoint. My first two years of school were difficult, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in life but I was stuck in classes that meant nothing to me. My sophomore year I had an idea for an app, I called it Pencil-In…I had no idea what I was doing or how to build an app, the challenge of bringing together all the resources needed to build a piece of technology, develop the business model behind it, and figure out how to get people using it intrigued me. I started to hyper focus on these problems, because of this focus I started falling behind in my classes which ultimately led to me failing core classes I needed to get into business school. At the time I didn’t know what to do, at first I was just going to drop out and pursue my Pencil-In. Fortunately for me the dean the of the Innovation Academy was also dean of the liberal arts college. We kind of had an idea to test out a degree path where students who show serious interest in a business venture can take course credit and get credit for their running their company. For the past two years I have been the test dummy for this program, it’s shown result. After not having the prerequisites to get into the business school I competed in the business schools business plan competition where I took second losing to a PHD team, from another school. Pencil-In then went on to be featured in a national news documentary, acquired around 10,000 users and then sold the company. In the middle of all this I started a company named Shutter Bombs, all we did was take a smoke bomb and attached a cool brand to them. The idea is to take a normal smoke bomb and sell it in a way that is attractive to photographers, videographers and other types of content creators. We played a huge role in making these smoke bombs a mainstream item in photography and even pop culture, one of the creators who has used our smoke bombs is Drake…he used them in the music video for his part in the song Sicko Mode, that video has over 20 million views just on Youtube today. This brings me to the current day, what if I could put my knowledge behind a meaningful cause to build a company around something that could have a positive impact on the world. I have the ability to build the business around plastic reusables, more importantly I want to test my abilities in the branding marketing area around these issues. The goal is make plastic reusables mainstream.
A viable starting point for this project is the movement behind the straws we are giving away, this campaign is a great way to position ourselves in the market and generate some vitality behind the movement. With the low cost of the straws we will be able to keep our cost relatively low, t-shirts sales will hopefully offset the cost of straws but we are not depending on it. So if we give away 35,000 straws that will do a couple cool things, the first is saving the use of 20,400,000 straws per year…on top of that it will build a lot of awareness around the plastic in the oceans along with awareness about Fvck Plastic. This moment will hopefully give us a lot of influence in this space, after this campaign we plan to use our influence to run a fundraiser that will allow us to give donations to other organizations that are fighting for clean oceans, we can also use the funding to develop our own plastic alternative products.
If you’re interested in becoming a volunteer or working with Fvck Plastic, feel free to reach out at ops@fvckplastic.org. For the time being the biggest thing we are looking for are influencers and micro influencers. We need all the attention and eyes on us we can.
