Episode 71: Kill the laundry pods and jugs! Dehydrated laundry sheets are the future

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week I’ve got a start-up that could help you with your holiday shopping, actually but it’s much much more than that. Generation Conscious is a company that’s created mini vending machines for college dormitories that dispense dehydrated laundry detergent sheets – essentially soap dried onto paper.

Here's why that’s a thing: About 60-70% of the environmental impact of consumer products comes just from packaging and disposal. By removing water and plastic packaging, these detergent sheets have 97% less environmental impact than traditional detergents. 

But this is also interesting because it’s about reimagining how we access basic goods right now, these machines are in universities across 12 states … and the goal is that they’d be part of any multi-unit building in a dense housing environment 

where building owners PROVIDE amenities like this because they attract tenants and save money on maintenance and utilities. Looooots of layers here … 

Let’s dive in. 

Greg Genco 

So my name is GL Genco. I'm the founder of Generation Conscious. And in its simplest form, we create a mini vending machine that goes inside laundry rooms and dispenses accurately sized pre-portioned laundry detergent sheets. So just think laundry detergent dehydrated on paper.

Molly Wood 

There are so many good questions packed into there, and I want to ask about laundry detergent sheets. But I know, because we have had the pleasure of meeting before, that you have a great origin story. So I'd actually really love to start there and tell us how you started doing this.

Greg Genco 

Absolutely. I mean, all of this is informed by my lived experience and me and my family suffering through the climate crisis. So I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, where there were nine waste transfer stations processing about 15 to 20 % of New York City's waste before it was sent to a landfill in upstate New York, like Niagara or in Pennsylvania or an incinerator. And as a result of my proximity to these waste transfer stations, I contracted asthma.

Now, about five years ago when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was reading the IPCC report that helps coastal communities extrapolate weather data and help them better understand how to protect themselves from all of the risks of climate change. And I have 15 cousins and six aunts and uncles who all live in Trinidad and Tobago and are at risk of displacement from rising sea levels. Now that's not gonna happen today, it's not gonna happen tomorrow, but it is something that, you know,

generations from now is a real possibility. But for me, I have the privilege of growing up right here in the United States. And in my first job ever, I started as a high yield credit trading desk analyst for UBS covering consumer packaged goods in retail companies. So why is that interesting? About 75 % of everything that we throw away, which is solid municipal waste, comes from fast moving consumer goods.

And that's mostly food and beverage, but a bunch of that is your everyday hygiene, personal care, beauty products. And there's a few challenges when you start to think about how do you actually eliminate that waste? And the first one is cost. If you ever go to a zero waste store or you want to buy a sustainable product in store or online, it's typically very expensive. And what we call that is eco-classism, right? Where we shame poor people for not adopting more sustainable behaviours when in reality they're priced out of the market.

the cost of a heat pump, insulating your home just so the heat pump would then work, an EV car, not having a gas stove, but something that is electricity. If you go to a package free shop to refill your everyday hygiene products, you you're looking at something that is four to six times more expensive than what you could get packaged in single use plastic from Amazon, Walmart, or a local store. So how do we start to really think critically about this infrastructure, but also the macroeconomic trends of where people are living?

Greg Genco 

they're moving to cities, right? Maybe in America, we still have people moving to the suburbs, but there is a massive demand and need for people to move even to smaller cities. And so when we're thinking about this rise in multifamily buildings, the growth, you the lack of supply of, you know, apartment buildings and the way that we're even changing zoning laws now to provide more apartment buildings, how can we start to make sure that there's a new distribution system that is cheaper, more convenient, more accessible for the everyday person?

so everyone can participate in a zero waste economy.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Hence the vending machine idea, it sounds like.

Greg Genco 

Yes. So.

Molly Wood 

Right, you were looking for a solution that would sort of work in these kind of multi-family or multi-person scenarios? Dense living scenarios?

Greg Genco 

Totally. So today, if you want to order an everyday product, whether it's soap, laundry detergent, you're going to go on Amazon one-click shopping, or you're going to go out to the store, get in your car, drive somewhere. If we could set up a mini vending device that is for all dehydrated products, conveniently inside the laundry room, we could create something and meet you right at that point when you're actually washing your clothes that is cheaper, has the same efficacy, same quality.

but is more convenient than having to wait for a shipment to come to you or have to go to the store and buy something. And so just off that value proposition alone, we've been able to really scale this from one university client that we started with to now 21 across 12 different states.

Molly Wood 

So how long ago did this start?

Greg Genco 

So I came up with the first idea when we were investing.

Molly Wood 

When was this realization?

Greg Genco 

Came up with this idea around 2020 and incorporated this business one month before COVID. But in many ways, I actually tell people COVID saved our company because we started with liquid products. We actually built a vending machine for liquid products. And it was actually through several pilots at universities where we discovered the number one product that young people wanted to refill to eliminate waste was laundry detergent. It wasn't even a product that we started with. And then when we tested

laundry pods, liquid laundry, powder, sheets. The sheets were the number one most demanded product by young people by 64 % than any other form because of its convenience, ease of use, and quality. And come to find out really why we even tested sheets, because it really wasn't that popular four or five years ago, my mom's best friend who grew up in Iran during the revolution was telling us that there was no access to soap in schools.

So they used to coat surfactants onto cellulose and you'd have booklets of soap and they were made that way so school girls wouldn't forget their soap with their textbooks. So you rip a little piece of the sheet off, go to the back of the school where the hose was and wash your hands and come to find out there's actually a company in India called Bufin, B-U-F-I-N, you can still look them up. And in 1973, I believe, they invented soap strips and they're the first company I've ever found online.

And the story kind of goes when poor farmers were moving to the cities for jobs, there was no access to soap. And so this doctor is like, know, viruses are spreading. How do we really start to solve the hygiene insecurity? The fact that people don't have access to hygiene. And he comes with this idea of like, well, let's make soap paper. And then he created a little matchbox that had 10 mini Post-it notes and each mini Post-it note was one wash of soap. And so he started setting up shops at railway stations to distribute and sell these.

Now he runs a massive, massive company. The irony of all of that is that we could have been using these products 50 years ago, but at the same time, big brands were adding water to your products to create bright packaging, to create an emotional connection with that housewife who in the seventies during the expansion of the suburbs was doing all the shopping for the family. And so we see this rise in consumerism. And so you really need to build something on the shelf that stands out. I mean, it makes sense, right? You're a marketer. You're like, how does my product differentiate from another one?

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Greg Genco 

But when you start to add water to your products, you're creating all this excess and unnecessary single use packaging that none of it's ever going to be recycled. And, you know, we all know the stats. I don't need to repeat them all, but it creates so much more waste. And as we'll get into it, it actually is creating so much waste. It's actually costing building owners like tons and tons of money in routine maintenance and utility expenses.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

OK, now, yeah, now we're really layering on. Let's let's back up. No pun intended. We're really layering things on. Let's back up to this idea, literally just a dehydrated soap products. I love I love the fact, by the way, that kind of like it's like all cars used to be electric, turns out, you know, and then we sort of evolved into a less climate friendly version for people who aren't familiar. Talk about the problem of putting all this water, it's it's packaging and waste, it's weight.

It's the water itself. Like talk about sort of the climate impact of dehydrated soaps.

Greg Genco 

Yeah, I mean, to your point about EVs, we also had EVs back in like the turn of the century in the 1900s, and then fossil fuel car companies bought the patents and stopped them from growing. Pretty crazy.

Molly Wood 

It's OK to repeat the stats, by the way.

Molly Wood 

Also, I read this amazing piece about how it was mostly women who drove the electric cars. And so they became associated with being like a women's product. And so our fear of the feminine also contributed to, because it was more macho to roll coal.

Greg Genco 

That's crazy. So obviously, when we were first thinking about obviously creating this vending device and just thinking critically about the embodied energy of all of these different materials, we first actually said, you know, we need to bring on an advisor who's been doing, you know, 50 to 100 of these life cycle assessments. And so we actually hired as our first advisor, Dr. Lauren J. Bush, who leads natural carbon sequestration through soil.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, I'll send you that article after after this.

Greg Genco 

at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And she's published over 50 life cycle assessments and techno economic analysis, really utilizing science to justify and validate the types of research that we should be doing and the types of materials that we should be investing in. And as we started to calculate the embodied energy of all these different materials that are utilized to package everyday hygiene products, it became really clear that about 60, 70 % of the embodied energy of any product

just comes from the packaging and also the end of life of that product. And so when you're thinking about how do you actually start to reduce that packaging, you start to see, as I was mentioning earlier, all of these innovations in dehydrated products to make it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to distribute hygiene products to those in need. And so we found hygiene products as sheets and discovered when you look at the embodied energy from extraction to manufacturing to...

the shipping and the consumption and the end of life of a product, sheets are the most viable, have the highest efficacy, the highest quality, and they're 97 % less embodied energy per load than liquid and pod detergents. And that is probably gonna be the same as we start to expand into other categories. That is a lot, a lot of wasted energy and wasted money.

Molly Wood 

That is wild. And I feel like the efficacy thing is worth pointing out before we talk more about the business. I switched to Sheets and my son, my teenage son who stinks up his clothes is like a little skeptical or was, you know. And I feel like because we have all been trained with such effective marketing to think that only like a big jug or a couple of pods will work. I feel like it's worth noting. It's the same stuff.

Greg Genco 

It's all the same stuff. It's all the same stuff. mean, ironically, the big players have been investing for well over a decade in liquidless dehydrated sheet hygiene products. So Procter & Gamble actually invented what's called EC30, which is an entire line of liquidless hygiene products. And this is my personal opinion. I believe that they're waiting until that there's enough consumer awareness to these products so they don't have to invest in all the marketing.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Genco 

And then they're going to start to rebrand each one of those dehydrated sheet products as one of their subsidiary products or subsidiary brands like Tide, whichever ones that they own, like Native, because they have body washers sheets. They have toilet cleaner sheets. These products again have been around for 50 years. It's really what does that distribution system look like?

Molly Wood 

OK, well, let's talk about the distribution system. So you have this idea for the vending machine. It sounds like doing a lot of testing and kind of realizing that laundry sheets and specifically universities are the right sort go-to-market, right? Talk about that journey.

Greg Genco 

Yeah, I mean, really, when I first started this, wanted to work with public housing building residents. And when we started testing the hygiene products, specifically laundry detergent and sheets, we discovered a movement kind of among Gen Z. So they were about 54 % more likely to go out of their way to continue to use laundry detergent sheets than people even aged 25 to 40. And what we discovered is that once people hit 25 and they're living on their own, they're paying their own bills, they're working full time.

They just don't have the time to educate themselves and go out of their way to do the right thing. And so being convenient, being, I mean, more convenient than what's out there was always going to be paramount. But actually starting with the demographic who was most passionate about this was totally, absolutely critical to this being successful. And to be totally frank, most reuse refill models have failed previous to generation conscious because they are predicated on what's called the tote bag problem.

If you have a liquid product that needs to be refilled, you have to remember a container. And if you're going to the store or you're going down to refill and you forget your container, now you have a second container. How many tote bags do you have at home? Because when you go to the grocery store, you forgot your tote bag. And so by eliminating the need for a container, because it's totally dehydrated sheet products that don't break down in your pocket, like maybe like a tablet, you can fit a month supply in your pocket, in your purse, in your wallet.

Right. And it doesn't erode any of the efficacy. And so by eliminating all the friction points to reuse and refill, we have really been able to scale this without any marketing.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood

Amazing. talk about the buyer side then, because the other thing that you mentioned in talking about that larger packaging and the water is the cost to ultimately the business owner. Is that cost in disposal? What's your pitch basically to these universities?

Greg Genco 

So today, a lot of these same big brands who are making, you know, big liquid pod detergents, they're over sudsing these products. They're also intentionally designing for overuse, which again is not their fault. They're a public company. Their shareholder agreements say they need to maximize profits for shareholders. Therefore, they have to intentionally design these products to maximize profit. What does that mean? When you use a liquid measuring cup and you fill it up more than say half the way or even half the way.

you're starting to create excess suds that clog the washing machine pipes and break them down. And that requires a facility manager to go into the washing machine pipes and unclog them. The second issue, pods, oversuds, there's 40 ingredients in them. You start using multiple pods, three, four pods, which is way more than you need, but people sometimes think, hey, Michael's are really dirty, I have a ton of clothes. You really don't need more than one. You don't need more than one. And the liquid measuring cup, you don't need more than an eighth of that cup.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Greg Genco 

Same issue, oversuzzing, and we discovered that they're losing 21 hours a week, unclogging these washing machine pipes, which equates to almost $40,000 a year just in the wages for a facility manager or facility coordinator.

**MW VO:** Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about how Generation Conscious plans to jump from universities … to apartment buildings … and change the entire market for consumer hygiene products. No big. 

**MW VO:** Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Greg Genco of Generation Conscious … back to it. 

Molly Wood 

OK, so currently, let's walk through the kind of the product as it currently exists and as it could exist. So currently, is you're focusing on vending machines that dispense laundry sheets. But it sounds like in the future, there's potential for all kinds of other hygiene products that might offer the same benefits in multi-unit buildings or universities.

Greg Genco 

Absolutely. Think about the long tail of this business, right? So we have a 20 inch machine today. It's a 20 inch box, right? Which is 90 % smaller than every single reuse refill vending machine previously. And you can fit a thousand loads of laundry detergent sheets inside that box. Those thousand loads actually only weigh five pounds. And you can store a year supply of laundry detergent sheets for a building of 400 people with two square feet of space. And so...

This is a massive savings when you think about, you know, climate emergencies, just having that in stock as inventory for your community is a massive win, let alone all of the savings on maintenance, on waste. You're reducing all the health and safety risks, not just in the laundry room, but any potential climate disaster that could happen in the future. So just having that in stock is massive. Second, any hygiene product, cleaning product can be dispensed as a sheet. And so today, when you think about

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Greg Genco 

you know, from the business perspective, if you want to reach your customer, you always have a middle person. You have a retailer or you have to advertise through Amazon, Meta, Google, all of which are currently under investigation from the DOJ, right? And so it's really hard when you have to depend on a middle person for your products or for your community, you don't really own your community. They own your community. And so by having this new distribution system, meeting people right at the point where they're living through many vetting devices that don't take up

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Greg Genco 

any space for the landlord and you're able to actually reduce the health and safety risks on site, you're able to save them on maintenance and utility expenses, and you're able to improve the tenant's quality of life, improving the chances of resident retention, it's an overall net operating income win.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. And then just to clarify, you said you moved to a model where the users don't pay, at least at schools. And so far, so the building owners pay. Yep.

Greg Genco 

Correct.

As about a year and a half ago, no end user pays today because there's so much more, there's multitudes, exponentially more savings when tenants utilize this, at least 50 % of them.

Molly Wood 

And then of course, I mean, the university angle is delightful too, because you're creating then a generation of future consumers who know about these products and want to go out and use them. Because I could imagine, you know, frankly, I could imagine Procter & Gamble being like, we don't care for this company because it's training.

people not to buy our product. But in fact, there's an argument that it's training people to buy a better future product.

Greg Genco 

100%. And when you think about the long tail of that business, as you build that relationship and that new behavior with young people, as they move into cities, they're going to be the ones asking their landlords, hey, where is this product? And even today, we're 100 % grassroots word of mouth spread. Students are the ones who are sharing it with their students who are then bringing it to their administrators, who are excited to implement something that a student demanded, but also is going to save them money on maintenance and utility expenses. And so they're, as we're starting to validate

the maintenance and utility expense savings, we really don't have to spend any money on marketing. We have actually sold all of our machines for 2024, and we have about 40 new laundry rooms that are on our waiting list with 12 that need to be deployed next year. So we actually can't even keep them in stock at this point.

Molly Wood 

And this is fully word of mouth from students telling each other on whatever social network they're using these days. Are they like Instagramming about it? Like how are they finding out?

Greg Genco 

100%.

And it's been so successful, frankly. Email, text, email, text. Social media is good and acts as a source of authority and validation, but we invest much more in in-person text messaging and email. As I was mentioning to you earlier, the more that you depend on a third party for access to your community, one, the lower your margins, but two, the less control you have in being able to mobilize those people, but also monetize them.

Greg Genco 

Email is your best friend.

Molly Wood 

All How you mentioned utility. Man, email is so not my best friend. But OK, good to know. All right, OK, I can shift my thinking on this. You mentioned utility savings also. Where does that come in for the building owner?

Greg Genco 

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of venture investors are weary of hardware as they should be. However, they understand that we're utilizing laundry detergent as a data transfer. So when you go to our refill station today and you're the end user, you're the tenant, you're the student, you put your email, your student ID into validate one of your 10 refills, you click sent it or unsented. But before you get your sheets, there are two multiple choice questions that you have to fill out before you get your sheets.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Greg Genco 

And after interviewing dozens of facility managers, the number one pain point around utility expenses is that most people default to hot water instead of cold water. Cold water has higher efficacy to remove blood, food and beverage stains, but hot water is 93 % more energy than cold water. So the delta between a hot versus cold water is about 64 cents per load.

on average across the United States. And if the average person does a hundred loads of laundry, that's $64 per person. If you have a building of, we'll call it like a thousand people, right? That's $6,400. The cost to provide them free laundry detergent is a fraction of that from our vending machine. And so when you start to extrapolate that out, once you've established, say this behavior over the course of six or nine months, we can now start to think about

you know, what are the other pain points? And we know what some of those are that can help to educate, but also incentivize and reward those tenants for doing the right thing. And so as we build out this next phase of the refill station, that tenant will have a user account where they earn points for refilling for correct educational environmental answers and creating like a really fun process around like using detergent where you can meet, you know, your intentions with your actions and do it in a seamless zero friction manner.

It's kind of revolutionary. The last time we had a free public good. Go ahead.

Molly Wood 

So the machine.

Yeah. No, please continue.

Greg Genco 

The last time we had a free public good was like a hundred years ago when the US government mandated that all public businesses provide hand soap because it was going to save them more money on healthcare expenditures. And it was going to actually save more people from like getting sick, reducing their productivity. And so in the same ways, we're now finding all these inefficiencies because of shareholder agreements that have optimized for reporting every three months.

and being able to then mobilize a group of young people who are so passionate about this. You even before we did this, there were running campaigns to ban single-use plastic on over 500 university campuses. You have 750 universities committed to carbon neutrality and 90 % waste diversion, but 90 % of their students are still buying single-use plastic products. So, you you're solving so many wins for the school, both on cost savings, changing student behavior, and also giving a massive ROI.

for the students who otherwise would have to spend four to five times more money at a local store for the same product.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, I feel like the more you dig into your solution, the more layers you uncover. the unspoken part of this about completely shifting the process of consumption from an individual buying their own laundry detergent.

to an expectation that if I live in dense housing in a multi-unit building, which is going to become more more common, and we already know is more efficient than single-family homes, that there's a completely different expectation about how I will access and consume these hygiene goods. Like, we should put a fine point on that because it's a bit of a revolution.

Greg Genco 

It's 100 % a revolution and it's exciting to be at the very forefront of it. We're definitely a first mover and we've been so successful at doing this that the largest third party independent verifier of universities carbon neutrality claims and their climate goals is an organization called AESHI, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. So think US Green Building Council, their lead certifications. AESHI has the STAR certification.

for universities and every other year about 650 of their thousand plus members file for sustainability ranking, self-reporting how successful they've been on waste diversion, renewable energy, educational campaigns to change student behavior. We are now the only for-profit person sitting on this board of 13 people that's making these rules for the next five years for all universities.

Molly Wood 

That's awesome. That's amazing. Okay, tell me a little bit more about the hardware because you've sort of hinted at the idea that it's got an interface and that interface could be used, for example, to say like, you should totally use cold water. Like talk about that product a little bit more.

Greg Genco 

I don't want to get too much into it because there is some IP around what we built, but it's not too innovative, I'll say. That allows for a simple, simple cartridge-based dispensing system and an interactive touchscreen that has a computer, small computer, a dev board on the inside, and connects to the cloud. Each time that you go to put in your student ID or email your phone number, it's authenticating that in the cloud, capturing all of your server responses in the cloud. And that way, as you come back, we know

what you've answered correctly, what you haven't answered correctly, so then you can start to move on to the next set of environmental questions and start to move you in a direction, again, that is focused on saving the building owner money, but also it's mostly in line with like actually saving you money too, because you also share some of those utility expenses.

Molly Wood 

Sure, right. The more expensive it is for the school, the more you're going to pay in tuition down the road, presumably.

Greg Genco 

And when we first started, honestly, we started with a really simple paper towel dispenser that you get inside the bathroom. The one challenge was that people were stealing them. And we're like, okay, we need to create a system that authenticates a user to be able to dispense these so that you can avoid that free rider problem where people just abuse this public good.

Molly Wood 

Mm hmm. Totally. And then.

Greg Genco 

Because believe me, we wanted to avoid as much as possible over engineering this.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. What is the question flow? Like what else is in there? There's, it sounds like water usage. What other kind of right or wrong environmental questions are there?

Greg Genco 

Right now it's all focused on the consumer psychology of getting you to understand that, you know, on the multiple choice question, the first one says, hey, cold water is better removing which stains? A, food, B, blood, C, beverages, D, oil. And then you select all of them except for oil. The thing about oil actually is that oil can only be removed if the water is boiling. And so, and then the second question to reinforce that psychology says how much energy

is now saved when you use cold water instead of hot. A, 5%, B, 50%, C, 75%, or D, 93%. And so you've just figured out that cold is better removing most of the stains that are on your clothes. And then D, or question two, that it's going to save you a ton of money, both here, you know, for the school, but also as you graduate and go into your own department building, you have to pay for that energy.

So these are lessons that they can take with them for the rest of their life.

Molly Wood 

fascinating.

And then what do, where does that data does, does it, where does it go? You sort of alluded to that maybe being part of your investment pitch.

Greg Genco 

It goes to a portal. Yeah. So it goes to a portal where we can track the health of every single machine. We can track all of the server responses, utilization in real time. And then we aggregate that on a monthly basis and spit it out to all of our clients so that they have more actionable data about, you know, which tenants are utilizing this, who are the highest engaged tenants. And as we start to grow with those tenants, we can start to say, Hey, actually, what are your biggest complaints in the building? Are there leaks? Are there issues that you want fixed?

And really starting to better understand some of those issues that, you know, as multifamily building owners, developers move towards centralizing a lot of their property managers and not having one on site all the time, really allowing them to have a more effective way to manage that communication. There's a lot of startups doing that, but we already have 60 % utilization in many of these dorms in these buildings where it's free. so thinking about, again, the detergent sheet as it almost as a Trojan horse to get that data transfer to build this relationship.

is very innovative in the way that no one else has really thought about it or has done it yet.

Molly Wood 

Yep. And then finally, where are you getting the laundry sheets?

Greg Genco 

Yeah, so we currently actually private label the detergent sheets. Our goal is to build our own facility around Q2, Q3 next year when we close the seed round to make that in either Alabama or Georgia.

Molly Wood 

you want to make the detergent sheets yourself. Also.

Greg Genco 

my gosh, of course, the goal is to always be vertically integrated. But you've got to do one thing at a time. You've got to do one thing at a time.

Molly Wood

I love how G.L.' like, are you even an investor? Like, yeah, own every part of the stack.

Greg Genco 

We have to, we absolutely have to. mean, once we do that, you we'll see our gross margins, which today on the sheets are already at 80, 81%, you know, go up another five to 10 % and give us the flexibility to start testing way more hygiene products as sheets through those machines.

Molly Wood 

Amazing. I feel like don't go asking your building owners for this yet because currently, GL is just trying to fill the orders that he has. But maybe do, maybe do. But it feels like, I mean, it feels like even if you're not in a university or a multi-unit business or multi-unit building, like there are clearly lessons that every consumer can be taking right this second, which is these products exist. Use cold water.

Greg Genco 

Yeah, send us an email.

Molly Wood

like, they, the soap bars exist, you know, we've talked about some of these consumer products, but like, for the most part, they're out there.

Greg Genco 

Yeah, and I would say, look, don't overthink it. If you're tight on money, buy what you can. It's really not your fault. We haven't set up the systems and structures to make the right options the default and easy option. So to the degree that you have capacity to do it, you should 100 % do it. And even do your own research and figure out what is the origin source of this product. But for the most part, we try not to be too pushy about, yeah, go buy this. This is going to save the planet. No, like.

We need the systems and infrastructures to be there to make it easy, accessible, and the default option for all people.

Molly Wood

I love it. However, I will also play the role of being the pushy one because like, listen, rich people, this is your freaking job. Drive the price down for everybody. Get after it.

Greg Genco 

We sell it direct to consumer on our website. I'll say we passively make five to 10 % a year from students who graduate and then purchase subscriptions from our, from our website. So, I mean, the long tail of this business is very exciting, both from how we build that relationship, both with the tenant, the student, and then also the building owner who is now getting all this actionable data and insights that they can then inform their renovations, their capital expenditures purchases.

and they're saving money in the process. So it's kind of a no-brainer. Again, we're operational across 12 states with no marketing. So I think we're going to continue to let this ride.

Molly Wood 

Love this. GL Janko, thank you so much for the time. really appreciate it. Generation Conscious is the company.

Greg Genco 

Of course, I appreciate the time. look forward to following up.

Molly Wood 

In fact, I'm going to say [generationconscious.co](http://generationconscious.co/) is where you can find more information and sheets if you want to.

Greg Genco 

Yeah, send us an email info at [generationconscious.co](http://generationconscious.co/), conscious is spelled C-O-N-S-C-I-O-U-S. I say that because everyone gets it wrong whenever they say it.

**MW VO:** 

I love a founder who literally spells it out for you … am I right? 

Ok, that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. I can personally attest that I switched to laundry detergent sheets and it confused the heck out of my teenager but he gets it now and it’s so much less weight and mess and work to do laundry … 

And they work great. Holiday GIFT GUIDE anybody!? I’ll have some links to some product options in the newsletter this week … which you can subscribe to at everybody in the pool dot com. 

Thank you so much for listening … I appreciate you. 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. Because together … we can get this done. 

See you next week.