Business Reflections Podcast Episode #21 - Creating Sustainable Products with EQUO
Episode Transcript
Meredith Matics: Welcome to Business Reflections with your host Meredith Matics, and we are here to reflect on the business topics that are affecting you today and how you can better run your business. Today. I have Marina Tran-Vu, CEO of EQUO International. Hi Marina.
Marina Tran-Vu: Hi, how are you doing?
Meredith Matics: Good. I'm really excited to have you on today cause you have some really interesting products. But before we dive into that, I was wondering if you could tell me about what led you to starting EQUO.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. For me, you know, before I actually started EQUO, I wouldn't say I was the most green or sustainable person there was around. It was a very new world for me, but my biggest motivation, what kind of started things was two things. It was going back to Vietnam. I was born and raised in Canada first-generation and I went back to Vietnam about two years ago. And I did kind of what everyone did when they went to Vietnam is visit coffee shops.
The country is famous for it. That's when I saw a lot of this great innovation especially our first line of innovation, drinking straws. I saw straws made of grass and rice and all sorts of things. For me, it was something that was completely new so I started to pursue this a little bit more and actually around the same time my nephew was born and before that, you know I had never really thought much of kids.
I didn't really have a lot of interaction with them, but my nephew kind of changed my entire world. After he came in, I saw he was so helpless and I realized I wanted to do something for him and not only him, but other future generations too. And the best way to do that was kind of combining this new discovery and innovation with my desire to build a better, more sustainable world for them.
That's really where my journey started.
Meredith Matics: Your company creates and sells eco-friendly and sustainable straws, correct?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yes.
Meredith Matics: Okay.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah, and we're trying to foray into other different products later on like utensils and dishware. That's also disposable too.
Meredith Matics: I, I mean, I really liked that cause I know it, I mean, not that it should be trendy, but it's trendy to be eco-friendly but also it's just so realistic in today's day and age.
I would not have thought about some of the unique, like sugar cane is one of the ones I was seeing that your straws are made of, correct?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. Correct. It's actually something that I've been hearing kind of over and over again. It's there are these things that you never thought could be turned into sustainable straws or utensils but it's actually amazing the great innovation and honestly, the great talent that you're seeing come out of Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
That's also something I wanted to bring to the forefront and show people that there are really, really great things that can come from the other side of the world.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. What was the process like for figuring out your product, creating it, bringing it to market?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah, I think the first thing that we did and I personally did is I approached the entire sustainable industry, just like a person that was kind of new to it.
In general, you know, it can be a little bit scary trying to figure out, Hey, how do I become more green or more sustainable? Or how do I do better? Sometimes it's actually not even very easy. There's a lot of different recommendations. Sometimes there is a little bit of an all or nothing dogma. It's like, if you don't do everything sustainable, you're not doing great for the planet or not a good person.
So that's how I approached it. I approached it as someone who's like, you know, I want to do something. I want to do something simple. Maybe not compromise so much in my life, but do something better.
That's how I approach the brand, in general. First off, we wanted to be very welcoming. We try to incorporate that in our packaging, be very bright and, and almost like an optimistic take on sustainability. That's reflected in a lot of our colors and, and how you see us and how we actually talk to our audience as well.
And then secondly, it's really focusing on something that differentiated us. We wanted really easy, sustainable solutions that don't ask you to compromise your lifestyle or your behavior. I think there are a lot of great solutions out there, like, you know, the metal and the glass straws, which are sustainable, but for some people, either the price point might not be realistic or it might cause a little bit of inconvenience having to carry it around or having to even remember to wash it.
We thought that in order to appeal to a lot of different people. We had to have something that was a bit more accessible in terms of price, but also that really was a convenient solution for them.
When I was trying different bamboo straws and metal and glass straws, I think these are amazing innovations and it's kudos to those people who started those because it really led this entire wave of sustainability.
I think what we're trying to do is not downgrade any other options that are out there, but really look at different aspects of what is available and how can we make things even more accessible. How can we build off of what great people before started and continue that on, while appealing to an even larger audience?
Meredith Matics: Yeah. My mom and dad are both very eco-friendly and they first, since I was a kid, we've always saved straws and washed them. I'm used to the idea, but I like the idea of having one that's semi disposable or disposable, just in case you did forget to wash it and now it's moldy.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. I mean, that was my mom too. I'll be honest with you. My mom, she loves those like big bubble tea plastic straws, and she used to take them and then reuse them because she makes her own juices and smoothies. When I was going out, I was like, you know what? It's not actually that feasible when you're out with your friends.
Even when you're ordering something in a restaurant, they're not gonna be like, okay, here have a glass straw, and then come back, in 10 minutes or 20 minutes when you've taken it away to drink in the park and give it back to us. This was kind of our bridge to try to solve that little gap.
That's in the market on a feasible solution for restaurants, for takeaway, for small coffee shops where they may not be able to utilize a reusable straw.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. That's definitely a great point because especially now with COVID, you wouldn't want to go to a restaurant and be like, how many people have used this last straw.
Marina Tran-Vu: Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's kind of relevant now. Originally when we started, it was actually right before the whole COVID thing happened. And so it was a bit timely, I would say in terms of the need, maybe not in terms of the timing for starting a business, but definitely in terms of the need.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. What were some of the challenges you experienced with creating a sustainable product?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. I would say the biggest one, and this is probably what most people will say being the category in the industry is just costs. Right now, if you take a look at plastic straws, they're really, really inexpensive, a 10th of a cent or less.
You can get them next to nothing for a thousand or 10,000 straws. Then you have paper straws, which are kind of the secondary wave and the second generation of straws which are averaging anywhere from two and a half cents or so. Then the sustainable options that are actually around twice as much and the materials themselves are, are a lot more costly.
That was our biggest battle is how do we create a product that was again, accessible to a large audience and available to them in a number of different countries and in different channels as well. But how do we make it cost-effective enough for them to adopt it? That's our biggest challenge, what I'm trying to do and, hopefully have other people in the category who are building sustainable businesses do as well. It's hopefully if we can get together work to try to get a lot of people to adopt it on mass, then that amount of volume in terms of usage will help us lower the cost for the category in total.
In order for any sustainable products or categories to continue to be viable as an option for consumers, we have to lower the costs at least maybe year over year on our products.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Do you have resources or tips or even recommendations for small businesses that are trying to become more sustainable or at least trying to create products that are sustainable?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. Well, I would say first off my biggest tip for any business just in general, starting out is take a look online at all these different Facebook groups.
Oddly enough, Reddit is a great place too. Search different groups because there's so much support out there. I was very, very surprised. I didn't realize this until kind of midway through starting the company, but there's a lot of support groups out there.
I'm part of actually one support group. It's, it's a very funny name, but it's called Asian Hustle Network. They're amazing, you know, it's everyone who started their own business or thinking about starting their own business. That one is so, so supportive. There's female entrepreneurs worldwide, all these different support networks that can give you resources for little to no cost.
In most cases it's all free or they can connect you with people who've already been there and they can help you on your journey very, very much so at the beginning when you're first starting out.
The second thing on the sustainable side, if you're looking to start a sustainable business, same sort of thing, there's a lot of sustainable groups out there, newsletters that you can subscribe to that tell you a little bit about people's journeys around the sustainable space. The biggest tip I would have is when you're looking at the sustainable space, make sure that you keep in mind that you should be able to do what you can, not do everything completely perfectly. One example is I've seen a lot of sustainable companies, they're really, really worried about how their product is packaged or shipped out or working with Amazon.
Note for us, that's a huge concern too. We don't want to like go against what we stand for with providing a hundred percent plastic free items and then having them shipped in like an Amazon mailer that's plastic. It's definitely not something that we want, but what we can do is make progress on that, make little steps, advocate Amazon to try to go and move towards plastic free packaging and mailers.
I would say make sure that you don't be too hard on yourself for not doing everything perfectly and perfectly sustainable at the beginning. Just do your best.
Meredith Matics: I think that's a huge point. You've brought it up twice now. The concept that it's, a lot of people think it's all or nothing. It's making small differences every day is what's going to be important in the long run.
Marina Tran-Vu: A hundred percent. There's a saying out there that's very popular in the sustainability community, but it's better that we all do sustainability imperfectly, rather than a small number of people doing it perfectly.
Meredith Matics: Definitely. Looking over your company's website I really noticed that your company has really set in specific missions and values. I was wondering a couple things. One was what set that tone for your business? How did you narrow that focus?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. I would say one of our biggest values is zero impact. I set that primarily because it's not like we're 100% doing everything around zero impact right now, but I think it's important to make sure that you lay out those goals and lay that out publicly and are very transparent that this is what we're working towards as a company. We want to try as best as possible to source from things that are existing on the planet. We don't want to create new things. We have enough stuff on this, on earth, to be honest with you. There's so much stuff that is existing. We can use that. And so, in some of our products that we're creating they actually use agricultural waste that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill to create our products.
Again, it may not be entirely perfect process, but at least we have that goal down that we're working towards. Another value that I would kind of highlight is just the level of fun and optimism that we try to take on with our business. I think I mentioned before, sustainability can be a little bit intimidating to try to get into especially for first time eco-friendly consumers.
Meredith Matics: Yeah.
Marina Tran-Vu: We want to try to take a take where it's a little bit more optimistic. We're a very bright colored brand, which is amazing. We're brightly colored because, we thought it was a little bit again, intimidating, like all the browns and the greens. It might've been a bit tough for people to say, okay, you know, I don't know if I have to be 100% brown and green and serious in order to approach the sustainability category so we tried to be bright and welcoming. But also our tone. We try to appeal to an audience less on the whole idea of if we don't do this, the world's going to end in 50 years, rather than that, we want to say what you can do today is instead of using that one straw, use something else.
And what you're going to do is you're going to divert one straw that otherwise would have been on the planet for like 500 years, that sort of tonality, that I think is a bit more optimistic and kind of needed in today's world.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. Can you share more with us about the process it took to actually launching your business? Cause I understand that you're international, correct? Yes.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. We're actually based overseas in Ho Chi Minh right now. That's where really where a lot of our production and operations take place. We do have operations in the U.S., Canada, and Australia as well.
Meredith Matics: So how's coordinating all of that, the logistics for putting together an international company?
Marina Tran-Vu: It was very, very difficult. The way we started out is, I started out the company launching on Kickstarter trying to really gauge and validate our product propositions. I'd seen so many different products on Kickstarter and I'll be honest, getting on Kickstarter and doing the whole crowd funding thing was an experience and a learning all in itself that I could probably write a book about, but it was very, very interesting. It allowed us to really understand like, okay, is there an appetite for our product? Do people really want this or need it? Is this the right time? And through that, we were very fortunate enough to get over 300 backers and getting people to try them.
We caught a lot of early feedback. We got a lot of people testing them out, telling us their thoughts. Every single opinion helped us shape our business later on. For example, things like closing up the packaging. Originally, we had a window which allowed people to kind of look and see as like, oh, what is this new product?
But then COVID hit, and everyone was very concerned about potential germs and things like that. That's the reason why we decided to move towards a closed packaging and transitioned towards that. After doing the crowdfunding campaign that's when we were like, hey, we really need to build our business, get certain things right. Because we want to launch correctly in the market.
We took a couple months and then also COVID happened and that impacted our business greatly, communication, logistics, production. It was pretty horrendous and the way it impacted our small business so I can only imagine other people's.
We finally launched officially in the market in mid November with our products. That was our journey. I would say it was very up and down and wonky. Unfortunately also a lot of waiting because of COVID, a lot of time spent trying to wait for either our product or waiting for our products to be sent to our customers.
There was a lot of delays, so we learned a lot very early on.
Meredith Matics: I don't think I've actually talked to anybody who's started with a crowdfunding campaign. Do you mind if we talk a little bit about that? I've always been curious about it. So can you tell me a little bit, you don't have to go into big detail, but I'm just curious about the process.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah, so If you think about Kickstarter, one thing I would say is think about it as an actual marketing campaign.
The way it's similar to that is that you do have to take a lot of prep and time to create assets, to create a really nice video, to tell people about your product, to tell people about your journey, about why you've started it and there's a big investment there. But one thing, I was a bit unaware of when I started crowdfunding was you have to make sure you have a very large support community around you to tell people about the crowdfunding campaign. Kickstarter and Indiegogo themselves are actually micro communities within the entire kind of innovation space and entrepreneur space.
Those micro communities, they all usually have great relationships with one another, all the entrepreneurs in there. They're able to support each other to make sure that they really blow out their campaigns. Myself being quite new, I had none of this sort of information. I had no idea.
When I first started everyone's like, yeah, how, how long have you been planning for a campaign? And I was like, oh, about a month. They're like, oh, usually most Kickstarter campaigns start planning from six months to a year or up to three years. Yeah. That does show in a lot of their results.
They're able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had no idea. Here I was planning about a month ahead, hoping to get on there and hoping to appeal to groups. That's what I had thought originally, to be honest with you. That was a completely different experience altogether.
The one takeaway I would take from it is if you're going to go on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, it's not just as simple as just plopping something on there. It really has to be thoughtful and planned. If you're trying to raise, especially a lot of money, it has to be very thoughtful and planned. You have to have a lot of people supporting you and buying into it, months and months or years beforehand.
Meredith Matics: Yeah, it sounds like it takes a startup to start it up.
Marina Tran-Vu: Exactly. That's why there's companies out there to help you, you know?
Meredith Matics: Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting. I want to know what is one piece of advice you have received from someone that you want to share with a small business owner?
Marina Tran-Vu: I think the best piece of advice that I've gotten from pretty much everyone around me is that entrepreneurship, it is tough, but one of the things you have to do and you have to make sure you do is not burn yourself out and to take a break. It's probably one of the things that's counterintuitive to what people say you have to work the 24 hours or the 19 hours per day with like three hours of sleep, which is to be honest, what I had experienced as well. That's not sustainable. That's not sustainable in any sort of way for your body and for your business. Especially if you're a person who is employing a bunch of different people and a team who's trying to support you.
Take a break whenever you need to. Don't work yourself to the bone because if your health is not there, then there's no point in continuing on with your business.
Meredith Matics: I think that's huge. I think we hear it a lot as business owners, but learning to put it into practice is difficult. It's definitely something I still challenge with too. It is what it is.
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Meredith Matics: What have you done to kind of help yourself prevent burnout?
Marina Tran-Vu: Well, to be honest, I do little things throughout the day. With me and my team, they always push me to eat. They're like, if you don't eat, we're just going to buy something for you and we're going to make you eat it.
They were kind of nagging me like my mom. And, I appreciate that so much because not only does it show that they care, but it reminds me to take care of myself. So I do that. Sometimes while I'm working, I put Netflix on the background and have documentary playing or some of my favorite shows playing so I can listen in and have some enjoyment while I'm running through certain things like emails.
Those are the little things I do. During the weekends, I try to go out to eat or go rock climbing or play volleyball whenever I can. Those are my stress relievers.
Meredith Matics: That's good. Mine is so weird. I like to make juice.
Marina Tran-Vu: Oh, honestly, I could relate to that. I like to wash dishes and people think it's the craziest thing.
I can relate to that cause you probably have some sort of satisfaction seeing all the fiber, kind of being separated from the juice.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. And, that's what I do. I sit there and I cut the vegetables up and then I put them in there and I watch it go through.
It's very like rhythmic and meditative. And I try to think about not to be religious or anything, but how, in the Buddhist, they say traditions to say, to like try and find daily tasks that you can meditate over. Whatever your religion be, having your daily items that you can relax and focus on and relieve your stress. Whether it's meditate or pray or breathe. I think it's huge.
Marina Tran-Vu: I completely agree and I don't think it sounds weird at all. Like one of the things that I love about washing dishes is I get to see the soap suds on it. Then when I put it underwater to see everything fall off and it's almost, it's like very satisfying and I don't know why but that's what I love watching.
Meredith Matics: You can come over and wash my dishes any day.
Marina Tran-Vu: I'd be happy to do that. I love seeing like little bits of food just kind of wash off and then you being left with a clean plate. It's extremely weird. I understand. But you know what, whatever it kind of helps and whatever calms you down, I think is fine.
Meredith Matics: I think that's great. So Marina, how can our listeners find you and your company on social media?
Marina Tran-Vu: Yeah. So you can find us on Instagram at @EQUOINTL, EQUO International abbreviated, or you can find us on Facebook as well. Just type our name into the search bar. And on our website, www.equointl.com.
Meredith Matics: Thank you so much for coming on. I'm so excited to share your products with our listeners.
Marina Tran-Vu: Thank you so much for having me.
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