We were lucky to catch up with Kayli Kunkel recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kayli, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
Our business sells eco-friendly essentials, but as a business, we are also zero-waste! We do this in a few ways. First, we thoroughly audit everything that comes into our store. We request packaging material that’s recyclable. If anything isn’t, we find ways to reuse, up-cycle, or share it with our neighbors who can use it. We have a TerraCycle box for any soft plastics which can’t be recycled. Ultimately as a business we have less than a trash bag of waste every single month.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My goal is to make sustainability the easy, obvious, and fun choice for New York City. We have two Earth & Me storefronts in Queens, NYC, and we are Queens’ first zero-waste store! We have more locations opening soon, too. I started Earth & Me because sustainability, quality, and affordability shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
It can be hard work to find essentials like toilet paper, toothbrushes, and skincare that don’t involve a bunch of extra packaging, single-use plastic, or unpronounceable ingredients in them. The ones that tick these boxes can be expensive and are often sold as luxury items with high markups.
Affordable goods are out there, but hard to track down across many small websites, markets, and shops.
In 2020 after being laid off from my full-time job, I saw an opportunity to source items from small-batch makers, while selling in bulk to reduce prices, packaging, and overhead. By curating the very best sustainable products made with integrity and love, our mission is to educate people on a zero-waste lifestyle. I believe this is what it takes to make change in environmental norms and policy: sustained grassroots pressure.
Our brick-and-mortar stores offer a full selection of zero-waste home and self-care products. We also sell bulk essentials in a bring-your-own-container system. We’re a community-based business, and we host events to educate and gather our community in sustainability and social justice initiatives!
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
I’m a big proponent of starting lean — that is, testing your idea in a low-cost way before going all in. For us at Earth & Me, this looked like purchasing a small amount of starting inventory, making my own free website and Instagram, and popping up my items all around my neighborhood. I made a lot of friends, met new customers, and formed businesses relationships in the process! I also saved up some money this way by doing everything low-cost and bootstrapped, like riding my bike around delivering items! I also reused everything that came my way to reduce costs.
Eventually I was able to open a smaller storefront, and I had a high level of confidence because I knew there was already demand, interest, and loyal supporters. Our first storefront had a line down the street most days, and this was during the winter and also during the first year of the pandemic!
Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses
I purchased a business in spring 2023. A friend who I had previously coached on starting her own business messaged me because she was looking to move on to something else. The overlap between our individual storefronts was high, and the customers and products we both catered to were in huge alignment! So I made her an offer to purchase her business and keep her mission of sustainability going. The process involved a lot of laying our cards on the table — what mattered to us? What were our long-term goals? — and we had a series of negotiations. We’re in the final stages now, and we plan to open the new storefront under our name soon!
Contact Info:
- Website: earthandme.co
- Instagram: earthandme.nyc
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