Episode 14 Transcript: We’re Drowning in Gift Wrap

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I’m your host, Molly Wood.

This week we're talking about a hidden cause of trash and waste and pollution that's such a fun and easy fix: gift wrap! We’re heading into fall and I know at least some of you are thinking about holiday shopping … I know this because stores are already trying to tell me it’s Halloween and pumpkin spice season and putting out Thanksgiving decor. IT IS AUGUST, PEOPLE. This is the consumption mindset that is killing us!!!

In the U.S., between Thanksgiving and Christmas, according to a Stanford study from last year, Americans generate an extra 25 million tons of garbage. Much of that is boxes, plastic wrapping, and yes, gift wrap. MILLIONS of pounds of gift wrap. Now, there’s a lot we can do here to reduce this burden of trash, like giving fewer more thoughtful gifts with far less packaging and also re-usable gift wrap! That’s fun and wonderful and beautiful and delightful!

That gets me to my guest today…

Megan Downey:
My name is Megan Downey, and I'm the founder and CEO of Shiki Wrap, a startup on a mission to change gift giving for good and solve problems for eco-conscious gift givers.

Molly Wood:
Tell me how you chose this particular kind of lane of the climate crisis to tackle.

Megan Downey:
Yeah. So, it was not in the plan at all. For many years I worked for mission-driven organizations, much like your mom. I had had some experiences in my youth that had led me into working with nonprofits and had just thought that that was my lot in life. But through a number of, I call 'em like a deus ex machina, just situations that were completely beyond my control. One federal project was abruptly defunded by the prior administration. 

Then one of my largest clients got shut down because of Covid. And I was like, you know, maybe I should find some stability in starting my own business, which is pretty laughable at this point. But, yeah, and gift giving has always been a passion of mine. I am, this is product founder fit, like I am the target customer. I am not crafty. I could never make my own gift bag or sew anything. 

And after I spend hours trying to select the perfect gift for someone that I love, I don't wanna wrap it in newspaper. That's just me. This is a yes and thing. You know, there's no judgment to people who wanna use their kids' drawings or butcher paper, whatever you wanna do. That's all fine with me. But yeah, that led me into the journey of being obsessed with reusable gift wrap.

Molly Wood:
I love it. How, what is the, how do you quantify the carbon impact of gift wrap? This is a way bigger deal than I thought it was.

Megan Downey:
Yeah. So this is a place where it's very important that everything we do as a brand is very credible. So I actually had an intern from the Grossman Business School here, a master's degree student, do some research for me. And what he was able to calculate is that at a minimum, 10,000 tons of carbon emissions annually, only from the manufacturing. 

So that's not from the distribution, that's not from the customer going to pick it up. That's not from the disposable. And the 2.3 million pounds that end up in landfills just from the U.S. market alone annually, every year. And then the 27 million gallons of water that it takes to produce gift wrap again in the U.S. annually alone. So you can kind of pick your metric. It's definitely time to move away from paper gift wrap, much of which is not recyclable 'cause it contains microplastics and all kinds of bad things for the environment.

Molly Wood:
I mean, that is the annual, the biannual, the every holiday dilemma, right? Is that you're looking at this paper and it's kind of shiny and it feels like it has a slightly different texture than paper, and you put it in the recycle, but you kind of know it's not that, and that's presumably before you even get to ribbons and all of that, and tape, right?

Megan Downey:
And the product actually solves problems I wasn't even anticipating it to solve, for example. There are a lot of people who don't have the dexterity to wrap a gift. There are a lot of people who have anxiety around wrapping a gift and how it's gonna look like deep anxiety. And then there's also this storage space. I don't know about you, but as a mom, you know, for years I had this huge tub in the basement that I'd have to lug down and, you know, just so much headache and time and hassle and waste. 

So we're trying to remove all of that and solve real problems for consumers. And we also have some other plans to provide some highly customized, personalized digital gifts as well. 'Cause we know that our customers want that. But right now we're just sticking with shifting consumer behavior away from single use paper gift wrap into reusables.

Molly Wood:
I just have to tell you that I'm sitting here in my own shame right now as a person with four tubs and a drawer of gift wrapping material, and as much as I try to harvest it and save it every year, I mean a lot of it. And it's, it is, it is shameful. Okay. Well, so now is the perfect time to talk about the product. What have you created and tell us about the specific genius, which is like, it just tells you how to do it.

Megan Downey:
Yeah. So I was initially, you know, I'd always had this problem, but then I was volunteering for my daughter's school fundraiser where they have the kids sell stuff to raise money for the school. And we were trying to find a replacement for the biggest seller, which was gift wrap. And so, that's how I initially learned about Furoshiki. 

And Furoshiki is not the only fabric gift wrap around. There are many cultures that have used cloth and textiles in their gifting. But when I saw it, I was like, of course this is a no-brainer. Never thinking I was gonna make a thing. Just trying to figure out where can I buy this stuff and source it 'cause I love it.

Molly Wood:
What is, wait back up a minute. What is Furoshiki?

Megan Downey:
Furoshiki. So it's the Japanese tradition of wrapping gifts in cloth. It's actually, it has a rich and beautiful history. And when I actually decided that there wasn't anything on the market that actually met my needs, that was stretchy, that was easy to use, that had the designs that I wanted. One of the first things I did was I reached out to a group of Furoshiki experts in Japan, being a white female founder, of a product deeply inspired by Japanese tradition, and one of the whitest states in the country. 

By the way, Vermont. I wanted to reach out to experts and so they were so generous. They actually took the initial products and studied them and wrote a report and invited me to come and learn from them. There's so many beautiful ways that you can wrap gifts. You can make funny ears, you can, you can do all kinds of gorgeous things with Furoshiki. It's, it's like a whole thing. I just wanted to, you know, could I, if I made this thing, would people like, other than my aunt buy it and then figure out how to use it? Like, could you just tie two knots? That's really all you need. And now you, you can even just use a hair tie if even tying the two knots scares you.

So it's incredibly easy to use. Works for gifts of all shapes and sizes. I will say I do feel like I went to market with my second product first because the gift bag is really the go-to for a lot of us consumers. And so we just completed a second Kickstarter campaign to fund the reversible reusable gift bags as well. And if I could just talk about the materials and sustainability for a minute.

Molly Wood:
That is exactly my next question. You're just like anticipating.

Megan Downey:
You know, like I have heard you talk about, no matter, even if you have the best intentions, there's always gonna be unintended consequences or you have to consider all of the consequences of your product. No product is gonna be perfect in every way. So you really have to weigh the pros and cons of what you're doing. 

And so when I started just with the wraps, I knew I wanted them to be fabric and I knew I wanted them to be stretchy, and turns out the world of textiles is really complicated if you're trying to truly have a sustainable textile that you're using. And also, by the way, when you're a startup founder, without a whole bunch of capital to work with, you're reliant on what's widely available with wholesalers. 

You're not gonna get have access to what Stella McCartney has, right, initially. So I discovered this fabric that's derived from recycled plastic. And I also went down the rabbit hole and learned that there's actual greenwashing in the world of recycled plastic. 

So it was important to me that I started with certified fabric, meant it was very expensive to use. But actually the dying process is super eco-friendly of this fabric because it uses no water or very few chemicals to no chemicals. And the patterns are actually sublimated into the fabric, so they're never gonna chip or wear away. 

So it's an incredibly durable product that people use for things that are not gift wrap, right? So we have customers that are going through chemotherapy that because they have a natural cooling effect, we'll use 'em as head wraps. One of my friends, her daughter broke her arm and her mom had grabbed a Shiki Wrap. Disclaimer here, this is not, we're not selling it as a medical device, but I mean, it's super versatile and durable, which is great.

Molly Wood:
Where do you create it? Where is it manufactured? This is a fascinating process of, it sounds like just figuring out how to make fabric and make it beautiful, and then meet all of those requirements around sustainability. How long did that take?

Megan Downey:
Uh, well, I'd say it's still a work in progress. We've got plans for how it will change that the unit economics can get even better. So it can be more accessible to customers. And also I will say we're talking with some possible strategic partners about sourcing dead stock, which would be awesome because that's fabric that's already made, doesn't require any more carbon emissions or energy or resources to produce. 

But right now, for the core product, the recycled plastic, I'm the plan is to work directly with Mills. I wanna make the product as close to the customer as possible. We are manufacturing completely domestically right now. It's very expensive to do that, but I didn't have it in my savings and my bootstrap startup budget to be able to hire a consultant overseas to make sure that the claims that I was making to my customers here in the US were true. 

So, I've been fortunate to find some great partners and when Business Insider called last year and said, Hey, we think what you're doing is cool, we'd like to come and document your entire process and your supply chain. I'll tell you, I was really happy that I had made all of these hard decisions along the way because even though they were more expensive, it was a lot easier to be transparent. And so that was wonderful.

Time for a quick break … when we come back … more on what and how Shiki wrap works … how much it costs … and how it’s created.

[Ad break]

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

Welcome back! We're now going to jump into the second part of our interview with Meagan Downey from Shiki Wrap.

Molly Wood:
Alright, so let's talk about the product. So the bag is coming or the bag is already here?

Megan Downey:
Yeah, so the bag, I thank you to our Kickstarter backers for funding the development of a bag. And this is another situation where I was like, wow, I didn't think this would be complicated, right? This seemed like a no-brainer. But my vision for the gift bag was that it would be better than a crappy gift bag in that I wanted it to be sustainable materials, of course, and fabric that I felt would, particularly for going to market, with retail. 

I believe that this would easily read as a more sustainable alternative on the shelf to the paper gift bags that usually look crappy after three uses. But I wanted mine to be reversible. And also to have like this pretty handle so that it's elegant and be truly, truly functional. Turns out this is a whole lot more complicated to make than you'd think. But I'm treating that as a competitive advantage 'cause it'll be hard for others to copy.

Molly Wood:
Amazing. Alright, so then what, so we'll start with the bag, second product first. What sizes does the bag come in? Like what's it meant for?

Megan Downey:
So this holiday season, we will have a wine bag, a small bag, and a medium bag. We have a larger bag, but we need to do some tweaking to it before we go to market with it. And we've just started to open up some accounts with some retailers, smaller retailers. We are on macy's dot com and amazon.com. 

And planning would love to be mass retail one day, but right now I'm really focused on getting the retail relationships right, making sure that customers are happy with the product. You know, via e-commerce we have a less than 1% return rate, which is really important. And making sure that things, like I'd mentioned, the reversibility and other features of the product are really important to the customers. So we're staying really. Also, if you go too far into retail too quickly, you can really lose your relationship with your customers. So I love our relationships with our customers.

Molly Wood:
And then tell me about the wrap itself and the more old school, the Furoshiki, like it's these beautiful squares or rectangles and you tie them with knots. Talk us through that.

Megan Downey:
So Furoshiki, it's genius. It's a square piece of fabric and it can come in various sizes. So Shiki Wrap offers an 18 inch, a 28 inch, and a 36 inch square, and all you do is lay your Shiki Wrap out in a diamond shape, you center your gift, and then you tie two knots or you gather up the fabric and you use a hair tie. And then here's the beautiful part. 

People say, well, do I give it as a gift or do I take it back? So traditionally, in the Japanese tradition, you would take it back and that wouldn't be a thing. Well, here in the US that's not very common. You wouldn't take it back. I would say for me, like as a mom, 50% of my gifting happens in the home. It's like Father's day birthdays, you know? And so I'm taking it back anyway for a lot of them. 

And, guess what? It's not such a pain to store. I can just fold it up and put it away. But it also can really just elevate the gifting and again, be what we're trying to do is be, if you think of the brand swell and what they did for reusable water bottles, that's what we're trying to do. There were other reusable water bottles on the market when swell came out, but they really crushed it when it came to design and actually the functions that that water bottle needed for that founder, who I actually had the opportunity to speak with last week, and she's pretty awesome. And yeah, so that's what we're trying to do. Just like people say we're the Uber of whatever, we're the swell of reusable gift wrap.

Molly Wood:
I love that because it's, it really is a, it's just like make it beautiful. It makes it better. It's just a better experience. It's easier. It's prettier, it's classier. It models the kind of life that you wanna live. You may it sounds like every once in a while lose a Shiki Wrap to your friend.

Megan Downey:
Yep. You have to buy more. And the other thing that was a surprise to me is that kids love it. So, you know, one of the questions I got, not from a customer, it's interesting the questions that other people have when they're asking me about the business. Well, aren't people gonna miss that feeling that the noise and the excitement of tearing open the gift? 

And some of us grew up with that and may have strong associations with that, but our kids really don't necessarily love that. And actually because it's so soft and stretchy, kids will often take it and put it in their dress up closet or repurpose it in other ways, which is kind of fun. So lots of surprises on this journey with reusable gift wrap.

Molly Wood:
How does, I mean, wrapping paper is not as cheap as people think, first of all, and it's a one-time use, but how does the cost compare? Like how much are the squares?

Megan Downey:
Yeah, so they start at $14. And then I've been selling collections. My hypothesis has been that I really wanna start with the people who really have this problem, right? That have a lot of gift wrap for all kinds of reasons. So while we do offer single wraps, and if you wanna just sort of test it out, shikirap.com is where you can go, or you can also find it on amazon.com and macy's dot com. 

But by selling fuller collections, it also allows like a repetition. It allows people to kind of get comfortable with the product, really find the joy with the product. And I haven't done, again, every statistic I give, it's really important to me that it's credible because if there's any hint of greenwashing or lying in this space, like you're dead. Your brand is dead. So I haven't done a full accounting of what the paper wrap versus this. 

All I know is that if you're reusing something, you're not having to go out to the store to buy it again, and I know that the cost of making paper, even though some gift wrap is recyclable, a lot of it is not. It requires so much energy and water. Even though there have been advancements around paper making it, it's not easy to make paper not as friendly. Even though we may feel like it's great 'cause we can, like you said, put it in the recycle bin. A lot of it can't be recycled. And even that, that is it. 

Takes so much energy to do that. So this is another place we're using either the recycled plastic or there are other awesome, like Tencel now has a stretchy fabric. I'd love to learn more about that. And of course, sourcing the dead stock would be awesome as well.

Molly Wood:
Tell me about the customers since you have, you know, since you know about them or you know them. What, why do they tell you they're buying it? You know, is it sustainability first? Is it beauty? Is it to stand out?

Megan Downey:
Yeah. Well, there's a lot of education before someone becomes a customer. So last year I did that thing where you just stand at like festivals and holiday markets and you just stand there with your sign and your product and you talk to people. 

And another thing that was surprising, it takes a long time for people to even understand the concept of reusable gift wrap. Like, so there's definitely some education that has to happen there. And then when the person, usually, they're very excited if they are an eco-conscious gift giver themselves. They wanna know more about the tradition. 

When they buy it, a lot of times people, they care deeply about the planet, but they also care about their recipient and they want to do a good thing, and they see this as an option to, you know, make one change that's better for themselves, their relationships, and the planet. And to not have to have a trade-off of having something ugly, they can give a beautiful gift to their recipient.

Molly Wood:
Do you imagine, I know you are, it sounds like being very intentional and trying not to grow too fast and get over your skis, but do you imagine a universe, like when you said you were on amazon.com and macy's dot com, I thought, oh, awesome, I could select that as a choice. Like is that the, is that the big goal? Is that everybody will, everything will come and Shiki Wrap?

Megan Downey:
Yeah, this is, this is where, you know, there are other competitors out there that are really about their designs or their artists or, and we care about our artists. All of our artists, by the way, are either women or BIPOC folks. Like we care about that. 

But our focus here is on the customer and about really driving this shift in the category as a whole. So it's not about meeting the current reusable gift wrap market. It's about growing that market and scaling this product. So yes, I wanna be very aggressive in how we do that and that. This is another thing, to be honest. 

When you put yourself out there as a sustainable brand, and you talk about selling on Amazon, you know Amazon, some people say, well, why would you ever sell on Amazon? Honestly, there's market share on Amazon, and if what we're trying to do is drive cultural change here, that's an important place to be. So that's how we're making our business decisions.

Molly Wood:
Yeah. Everywhere. What's, you know, I mean, this is, it's interesting that you say that though, because this is how I think about climate solutions generally, and I feel like Shiki Wrap is a perfect example of when you look around the world that you live in. 

If I look around this room, there are 10 to a hundred new businesses that could be built around improving everything from the Zoom lights to the Kleenex box to the pillow behind me, and gift wrap is one of those segments. And then of course, it has to be distributed everywhere because we need everybody in the pool.

Megan Downey:
Exactly. To me, it's such a no-brainer. And you know, I know some of the awesome companies that even you've had on the show, they might be a consumer product, but they might have a data play. Or if you think about McDonald's and they had a real estate play, which is fine. That's great. My story to investors is the same story as it is to consumers. 

This is just a no-brainer change that needs to happen. I'm a founder with a group of advisors and others that are lined up that are ready to do this, and we need to just do it like it's stupid. I mean, I know there are cool startups out there creating new forms of energy. That's all great. More power to 'em. This is my one area of the world where I think we can drive this change and I really appreciate you shining a light on it.

Molly Wood:
I love it. I mean, I think it is. It is beautiful. It is versatile. It is fun to wrap gifts in this way. And I say this as an inveterate gift wrapper, like I'm the problem. I need to have a theme every year and a this and that. Like this is, you know, I sort of feel like this is one of those scenarios where it's like, yes, you turn the gift wrap power user, and then you have it forever. How are you reaching consumers is my last question. What's the kind of branding strategy? Is it super D2C?

Megan Downey:
Mm-hmm. It was. But if you think about gift wrap, gift wrap is a convenience item. People need it on the shelves when they want it. So, that's why I know that we need to get on those retail shelves and that's what raising this round will help us to do. But funnily enough, they say, you know, when you start out do things that don't scale. 

Right? And so one of the things that I've been doing that I know won't scale but has given me ideas is I get calls from usually men, excuse me, men who have so much anxiety about gift wrapping and they want gift wrap on demand as a service. And our local mall used to offer it and they stopped offering it last year. So I got all these calls and so I met them here at a work out of a coworking space, beautiful Space Hula here in Vermont. 

And I would meet them here and I would wrap their gifts for them and sell them a wrap. But part of why I wanted to do that is to learn more about the psychology and the demand for gift wrap as a service and how does it really work? And I think there are terrific opportunities to partner, if you imagine like a TaskRabbit or an Uber, to distribute this more widely. And that's in the plan as well.

Molly Wood:
I love that. That is genius. Also, I really, for some reason in my mind, the perfect partner and hopefully someone listening, knows someone or works there, is the Container Store. Like I want to see. This just feels like the most natural thing in the world to find at the Container Store and be thrilled by.

Megan Downey:
Totally, totally.

Molly Wood:
We're gonna make that happen.

Megan Downey:
That's the plan. Megan Downey, tell people again where they can find you.

Megan Downey:
Please come to shikirap.com. You can sign up to be on our email list. You'll get notified of all of our exciting partnerships and nonprofit collaborations and be a part of our story as we scale and do this.

Molly Wood:
That's wonderful. S-H-I-K-I W-R-A-P dot com and of course there will be a link in the show notes. Megan, thank you so much. This is absolutely delightful.

Megan Downey:
Thank you so much, Molly.

And that's it for this week's episode of Everybody in the Pool. Yes, sometimes it can really be just that simple. Every choice adds up. The more of them you make, the bigger the impact. But everyone can find action in the stuff they do every day and that’s one of the things I find so wonderful about Meagan’s journey. 

Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can find my newsletter at mollywood.co and email your thoughts, reactions, and ideas to in@everybodyinthepool.com. And if you’d like to support the show directly and get an ad-free version, you can subscribe at the link in the show description in your podcast app of choice. And thank you to those of you who already have! I appreciate you. 

Together, we can get this done. 

See you next week!