When toilet paper flew off the shelves in 2020,
desperate shoppers grabbed whatever they could find in stores,
including tissue made out of stuff like bamboo. I
don't know. It looks pretty soft to me if
someone gave me this, I don't think I would
be able to tell the difference. Two years later
, it's still selling. Why? Well bamboo is
finally becoming as soft as the real thing, giving
players in the space a real boost. Let's do
it together. It is tree free, It is
made from bamboo. Isn't that nice. This isn't
normally where I put it to, we went,
you know, from$230,000 revenue in 2017 is like
kind of like a startup And by the end of
2020 we had grown to around 2.5 million. Almost
overnight, we had enough orders. We could have
sold out our warehouse kind of several um, several
times over toilet paper sold as sustainable isn't new,
recycled bath tissue has been around for decades, but
it has fallen short of the softness. Americans expect
we want to make sure that our customers don't feel
like they're making a sacrifice when they're switching the cloud
paper, enter bamboo manufacturers are pitching us on the
idea that toilet paper made from trees is bad for
the environment, but that's not all bamboo has longer
fibers and consumers like that. It makes for softer
tissue paper than recycled. It's been a long journey
for bamboo, toilet paper. Some manufacturers have created
dozens of versions of the product to make sure it
was exactly what consumers wanted. Also keeping prices competitive
with traditional options is key because big brands can easily
outspend them on advertising and startups can always lose clients
that just switch back to toilet paper made from trees
were in a commodity market. So there's a lot
of price sensitivity and tree free fiber has historically been
quite expensive. Startups are also leaning on emotion and
creativity, including cheeky commercials deep in the downstairs bathroom
, Maggie is making the world a better place with
her toilet paper. Moreover, many roles come packaged
individually in wrapping that is colorful and artsy, which
has led some people to display them openly in their
bathrooms and even post pictures of them on social media
. Today, these companies make up a tiny sliver
of the market but they're looking to show that the
business is viable. Which could help prove to bigger
brands that making tree free toilet paper is worth it
Kimberly Clark, which is one of the largest toilet
paper makers in the world, launched a bamboo bath
tissue in Australia in 2021. I believe that there
is tremendous opportunity because forests are friday night, we
have to find a better solution