Funding

I saw this in the recent spring brochure from the Wellington City Council and thought it might be worth us looking into:

Costs associated with business insurance

Business model canvas

I have gone through the process of writing up a new business model canvas as our idea has progressed. We are currently struggling with the cost structure of our business and need to work out the financial aspect to our business.

Week 6 Pitch

This is the written pitch that we presented..

Sam:

Slide 1: Hey guys! Tia, Gen and I are investigating waste in the florist industry. From our initial research we have found that many florists do not separate their green waste from their general rubbish, and that on average, Slide 2: they each produce 312 litres of green waste per week. We recognised that this issue was especially prevalent with inner city florists and have developed a composting service to address this. Introducing, offcut. Slide 3:

Gen:

Offcut is a service-based initiative that makes composting for florists in the city, easy. We propose to offer a monthly subscription based service whereby bins are provided to the florists for their green waste to be disposed in. We are in the process of considering different options for the structure of our service, and are currently looking at offering set prices for a small bin, or a large bin, and the option for these to be collected and replaced weekly or fortnightly.

Our start-up plan would be to partner with an existing operation to handle the actual composting of the green waste we collect, however, our long-term intention is to develop our own system of composting, and create a profitable product from this. We are exploring the possibilities of selling the compost in small packages designed for students/apartment dwellers, or turning our green waste into paper/cardboard and making it into wraps, cards, or other paper-based options to sell back to the florists.

Slide 4: From the florists we’ve spoken to, 13 were eager to support our idea, and the average amount they would be willing to pay for the service would be around $50 per month. Slide 5: Given that we are in the process of investigating the running costs and income potential of our business, we are assessing whether this figure is fair, reasonable and sustainable.

Our research has shown that whilst there are some great initiatives that address food waste, there has been little to no consideration of florists as a huge and unnecessary contributor to our landfill. Slide 6: We have used these alternative examples to help form our idea, and one of the great full-service food waste examples was Kaicycle.

Kai-cycle collect and compost food waste. They collect the scraps (on a bicycle) once a week and take it back to an urban farm where they compost it to fertilize the fruit and vegetables grown there. They charge a sign-up fee and then a monthly fee for providing their bin service. We are using this example to help establish the foundations of our similar service platform.

Tia:

Slide 7: Our service also encompasses an educational aspect as many florists believe their waste to compost in landfill anyway; however, this is a misconception as there is no air in landfill for the composting process to occur with waste instead rotting. Leachate is a natural occurrence when waste comes in contact with water. It can be very harmful and the rotting organic waste mixes with this. Alongside this, the nutrients from the organic waste never reach the soil due to the plastic lining of the landfill. This method of disposal for organic waste contributes to the larger issue of harmful methane gas which is given off by landfill.

Sam:

Slide 8: Our strategies for promoting Offcut will include a campaign to educate florists of the actual impact of their green waste when it goes to the landfill, as we believe this will be an important factor in encouraging the use of our service. We also want to develop a reward for participating florists that is visible and recognisable to both the public and other florists, that displays that they are a part of our initiative, and are addressing their environmental impact. This will be a key aspect of our strategy as we are aware that these visible displays are a significant contributor to behavioural change. Think of it as similar to the heart foundation tick, or Fair Trade badges.

We believe that Offcut is addressing an important environmental issue, and has found a nice gap within which it can make a difference.

Week 6 Pitch

We met up early this morning to prepare and design our pitch. Here is what we delivered:

Article about green waste in Wellington

This was a stuff article I found that was interesting - not directly relevant to our concept - but a valid read:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/91676943/Wellington-City-Council-looks-at-ideas-to-reduce-green-waste-going-to-landfill

Source

Simply by spending a little more time on sorting your rubbish and composting, you can reduce the rubbish you throw out by 65% - nearly two-thirds. That's really making a difference!

Source

The results of composting are positive:
- Less volume of rubbish in the landfill
- Fewer products that generate leachate in the landfill

Source

Waste Minimisation Fund

The Ministry for the Environment has a waste minimisation fund which we could apply for to help fund our venture as we are eligible for this. This could help fund the implementing of this system and help with funding our startup costs.






http://www.mfe.govt.nz/more/funding/waste-minimisation-fund/how-apply-waste-minimisation-fund

Landfill statistics

The largest proportion of waste going to the landfill is compostable. We feel that addressing the waste in the florist industry will help to impact the level of compostable waste in landfill.





http://www.mfe.govt.nz/sites/default/files/environmental-reporting/waste/waste-composition-2009/waste-composition.pdf

Branding and Logo initial ideas

These are some initial illustrations around our name and brand..

Meeting notes

We brainstormed name/slogan ideas:

And settled on Off-cut:

Then we planned out a journey map, promotion strategy, and did a SWOT analysis on our idea:

Logo work

After deciding on a style and font together, I started to put together some logo ideas:

These were developed as I sent screenshots to the chat and we ended up here:

Composting facilities

When brainstorming our idea we realise that initially we will have to team up with a place who is already composting to get rid of the floral waste.

These are some Wellington based composting services.

Reclaim



Wellington Office:
Building 15
476 Jackson Street
Petone
Lower Hutt 5046

Phone:04 5510242

pinterest board of branding ideas

The girls and I wanted to collate our visual ideas so created a pinterest board to gather them. Here are a couple of screenshots of styles we've looked at:

Looking at what we'd collected we decided that we wanted to do a clean white with mainly green "branch" or "stem" like imagery, and potentially have a highlight colour like orange or pick to use in our designs but only as a feature.

Feedback from florist contacts

We've had some really great feedback to our survey. These are a couple I received:

New canvas and 10 year plan

In this class I created a new canvas for our new idea. As well as this, we looked briefly at how our business might expand within the next 10 years.

Week 5 Class (2nd pitch)

We have reworked our pitch following our chat with Olly and his feedback. We have now split it up to give it some diversity.

I will begin with:

Gen will follow this with:

And Tia will conclude with:

Lyn's feedback:

Survey

These are the florists we have emailed our typeform survey to so far...

Week 5 Class

Today is pitch practice.

Here is our first pitch along with Olly's feedback.



We are now quickly changing our pitch so that we can re-pitch to Lyn in an hours time.

Primary research

After looking at the survey we sent out last week and the types of responses we got, we edited it to get better more specific information and have sent it out to a lot more florists in NZ.

This was the snippet we sent in the email accompanying the survey link:

Composting waste with pesticides

In working towards our new idea of a composting service for florists, we have done some research into the effects of pesticides on soil in composts as a large proportion (if not all) of the flowers sold by florists are treated with these (particularly those which are imported).

Studies find that "whatever traces of herbicides there may be in your compost are at such low concentrations that any impact will be far outweighed by the benefits of the compost...what has also been seen for the vast majority of these compounds is that plants do not take them up from soils."


"compost is a rich, dark, crumbly mixture of decomposed leaves, food scraps, and other organic matter (i.e., carbon-based, or derived from a living organism). Compost is much, much more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to fungi, worms, various invertebrates such as centipedes and beetles, and billions of beneficial microorganisms, that mix of nitrogen-rich and carbon-rich bits and pieces you toss on the compost pile—what those in the know call “feedstock”—is transformed into something else entirely."

"A literature review of more than 100 studies on pesticide biodegradation published in the journal Compost Science & Utilization in 2000 concluded in part that none of the composts analysed in the cited studies exceeded concentrations thought to affect human health or be phytotoxic to sensitive plants."

The findings from these studies means that there is no issue for us in composting flowers which have been treated with pesticides as they will not affect the soil.



Source

Typeform survey

This is the survey we sent out to florists all over New Zealand.