Hi, my name is Kirill Popov, I am an entrepreneur and co-founder of the WonderWall project. But now I have a working project, but a year ago I wanted to… recycle garbage.
I recently published a post about how my team and I changed our minds about opening a coffee shop in Turkey. But besides the Big Smile Coffee franchise, I have another project – WonderWall. I will tell you how the idea came, how tests were carried out with smoldering cigarettes and why they left the b2b market.
I wanted to recycle garbage, but decided to sell clean air
The idea of recycling garbage initially seemed promising to me: you buy cheap raw materials, recycle, make household goods out of it, earn money and help the planet. But in fact it turned out that the production of recyclable materials is no more useful and no more environmentally friendly than from the primary.
It is bad to produce garbage, but to produce and sell products from materials that will be processed, regenerated and serviced by us from and to is another matter. We abandoned the idea of creating goods from recycled materials and began to think in which direction to move on.
It so happened that my friends are also fond of green technologies. Among them was Dima, a design engineer, and Katya, an interior designer. Once they invited me to visit them and showed me the “green wall”.
It was a vertical metal structure with holes for pots in which plants grew, inside a water tank and automatic watering systems for each pot
Dima said that there are many office and house landscapers on the Russian market, but they are all exclusively about beauty and decor. He talked with manufacturers, representatives of these structures, but no one could answer him exactly how green walls purify the air. The manufacturers did not have any mathematical proofs and numerical indicators of the result of air purification. Dima wanted to know more, but there was simply no Russian research, and foreign standards are completely different. So the project was born: we decided to assemble a scientific base on our own, conduct research and prove that the product will work.
Not only the air melts, but also the head
Have you noticed how hard it is to work in the office after lunch? My head starts to spin, I want to sleep, what kind of work is there. And it may seem that these are the consequences of stress or a heavy lunch, but in fact it’s all about the air.
We conducted a large study that showed that the air in most offices and premises is simply terrible. Somewhere they save a lot on ventilation, somewhere they use toxic furniture and finishing materials that emit formaldehydes and other harmful substances. The situation gets even worse during the heating season, when everything melts and the full tin begins. The study showed that in 80% of office premises, the air did not meet the SanPiN standards, indicators sometimes showed an excess of the norm by 5 times! It is not surprising that employees are nodding off and they have a headache.
Our idea was to let customers rent green walls by subscription. We completely assembled the model: a metal structure with plants, automatic watering and lighting systems and rented it out. When a client stopped subscribing, we calmly transported this rack to another client, and did not throw it in the trash — almost second-hand. And if the rack becomes unusable, it can easily be recycled, because the metal structure has a high turnover.
After calculating the cost, we engaged a financial specialist who counted several business model options for us: the option with sale and subscription. It turned out that you won’t earn much on a subscription, and the payback period is very long. Therefore, we planned to offer our customers three options: rent, purchase, and purchase in installments.
A source: https://vc.ru
