We were lucky to catch up with Anthony Garza recently and have shared our conversation below.

Anthony, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The original idea of our company left us unsatisfied because the goal of Kol’Ory was to address a major environmental issue. We wanted to fix a problem around us on a local scale so the company could inspire the nation. While brainstorming the company’s next product, a moment of clarity hit during class. The image of the end of the school year. that is often seen in pop culture, is at the end of the school year students throwing away papers, textbooks, and workbooks, this event is not just common practice for students but for school districts as well, textbooks are often outdated, damaged, and ruined to the point that they can no longer be used. A common practice of school districts is to discard old an unused textbooks. Kol’Ory aims to address this issue by providing an alternative solution for landfills. After coming up with many ideas, we came up with our Wrk-sheets, a product that fixes an environmental problem and inspires creativity.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hello, my name is Anthony Garza, I am a scholar enrolled in Beta Academy and a founding member of Kol’Ory. Kol’Ory was developed with the help of Junior Achievement at Beta Academy, Frost Bank, and our teacher, who guided us so that we may grow, become leaders, and cultivate a passion for entrepreneurship. Kol’Ory developed the product Wrk-sheets, a sketchbook that is repurposed from recycled textbooks and inspires creativity. At Kol’Ory, we pride ourselves on solving the environmental issue of schools throwing away textbooks every year. Discarded textbooks cause a large amount of paper and plastic waste that is harmful to the environment. What separates Kol’ory from other companies is that we focus mainly on fixing the problems of textbooks discarded by school districts and preventing them from ending in landfills. Our company wants our clients to know that we are trying to solve environmental problems while also inspiring creativity in others. Kol’Ory also strives to have a fun and stress-free environment for our employees, by celebrating all of our accomplishments.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

A story about my resilience was when The Junior Achievement company I was leading experienced a big change. Originally, Beta Academy was home to two Junior Achievement companies Tote-lly Cool and Myro Charm, the companies focused on art and creativity, and in order to combine our strengths, people, and resources the companies merged together. The merging of the companies was a difficult challenge for me because I went from managing 20 people and one product to managing 40 people and 3 products. Handling the daily tasks of a growing company was difficult for me because it had only been 5 months since the beginning of the company and this was a very big shift, on top of my dual credit and regular classes I was having difficulty with balance. In order to deal with the large amount of work I encountered, I learned the valuable leadership skill of delegating responsibilities to others by establishing executive positions. These new executives would not only decrease the workload for me but would also help others in the company grow alongside me into strong leaders. As the CEO I decided to help foster a company of leaders, rather than focus on myself and my own benefits. Kol’ory is now a company that finds scholars that are struggling in developing themselves in their skills and promotes them towards success by offering leadership and collaborative opportunities.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Kol’Ory manufactures our own paper and sketchbooks in order to regulate the amount of waste produced during the process. Since Kol’Ory strongly believes in decreasing the amount of waste, we control all aspects of the manufacturing of our products. To come up with a solution to the textbook waste problem in our nation, we put together a research team dedicated to developing the best product with the least amount of waste. After researching many different types of products we could make by recycling paper, we decided to create sketchbooks. At first, we did not know how to make our sketchbooks, but we learned how to effectively research processes for our new products, how to effectively manage our finances, learn from the mistakes of our prototypes, and the importance of planning so that we can minimize waste. At Kol’ory we feel that outsourcing our manufacturing process brings with it many unknown factors concerning waste. As a company we want to hold true to our vision, mission, and goal; controlling our manufacturing process not only ties into our beliefs but fosters a culture within our community.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @_kol.ory_
• Youtube: Kol’ory https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC2iOuQ4xwQ22o_OpaW-6JQ/featured
• Other: TikTok: @kol.ory

Image Credits
Pictures provided by Aaron Cox.