Spencer Brown: Thinking Outside the "Box"

Vince Thompson: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony, I'm Vince Thompson. Moving can be a nightmare. It's timely, it's costly, and all those cardboard boxes, well they're actually hurting the environment. Spencer Brown is the founder of rentagreenbox.com and the inventor of the Recopack, an alternative, he believes would eliminate the need for standard cardboard boxes when moving. Welcome to Dog and Pony.

Spencer Brown: Thanks Vince. Thanks for having me.

Vince Thompson: Will you go a little deeper. Help us understand the genesis of your company and what it does for consumers today.

Spencer Brown: What we do is we reinvented the cardboard moving box from plastic trash we buy from landfills. We agree on a date and a two-hour window time and then our truck that drives on waste vegetable oil and bio-fuel, will show up at your location, we give you a packing demonstration and we see on the next stop, so where you move 'till we pick them back up.

Vince Thompson: How many boxes would I need to move my 2,000 square-foot house?

Spencer Brown: How many people living in your house? That's the first question we ask. So if you have two people, about 25 boxes per person and we make three sizes. So we have boxes for your beddings. We have boxes for your books and we have boxes for everything else.

Vince Thompson: Okay, so I've seen them on the website, they look like plastic boxes.

Spencer Brown: Right.

Vince Thompson: But they are not.

Spencer Brown: There's some difference in plastic. Not all plastics the same. What we're doing is taking a plastic bottle from the landfill, which is a bleach bottle. So the plastic that they've made to contain bleach is like a miracle plastic. So what we've been able to do is take the plastic out, clean it sort it with lasers and then I apply NANO technology to the plastic making it really strong and then we're able to squeeze out these boxes. But the beauty is they last four hundred times.

Vince Thompson: You started out as a product designer.

Spencer Brown: Right. Still am.

Vince Thompson: So was this all about building the world's best box before the business model, renting and shipping boxes around?

Spencer Brown: As that crazy. I believe in making something remarkable. And that as authentic approach to product design is what's missing in a lot of our products because people are just have that disposable mentality.

Vince Thompson: Are people motivated to choose your service because it's green or because of the other value that it delivers.

Spencer Brown: Our customers aren't even green. I am their first green business experience, so I take that very seriously. People are not conditioned to buy green. Maybe in twenty years, they'll have a full understanding of what it is to buy green, but people wanna save time and money and we provide that. We're gonna -- the average two person residence will save twenty hours with my system. You can stack eight-high in the truck, so now you don't need a big truck, you can have the smaller trucks saving you money.

Vince Thompson: How did you capitalize the business?

Spencer Brown: I made a lot of money on my other inventions. Truly to be an entrepreneur, you have to be at that point where you put it all out there. It makes me wake up in the morning and I think, don't I think I need my money back. I think I am out there and it's motivating.

Vince Thompson: What's the company gonna look like in another four years?

Spencer Brown: We're gonna eliminate the cardboard box. Five years, ten million boxes for sure. Detox the landfills. We provide people with solutions. We save them time and money and they get a feel-good about doing something for the environment.

Vince Thompson: After you solve the cardboard box problem, what's next?

Spencer Brown: For the company, what we've solved is a lot of other problems. We've reinvented the moving pallet made from baby diapers called the Poppy Pallet. And now this pallet is being talked about around the world because it eliminates the need for a wooden pallet. Trash, I said, I've got a few million bottle caps made from plastic. I'm making zip ties from it. Recycling newspaper creates a lot of sludge. So I reinvented a compostable packing peanut. It's called the Recocube. You pack, you move, you throw it in your garden, feed your trees it breaks down. And then we've made a bag out of used sailboat cloth and then we take aluminum cans and make dollies. So we have 9 products made from trash.

Vince Thompson: That's great.

Spencer Brown: Now, okay what's next is we're gonna take the plastic, the patent and we're going to apply it to a cardboardish type box and we're gonna sell advertisement on the outside and we're gonna flood the marketplace for Amazon, Fed-Ex, UPS, DHL, all the big carriers will get behind it.

Vince Thompson: What worries you?

Spencer Brown: What worries me is that we just can't keep up. I know that now. I'm scared. I wasn't scared until about 6 months ago. I'm scared now because we have people from all over the world from Dubai and France and Canada and we've had people fly in. We've had some very famous people fly in and just wanna see what we do.

Vince Thompson: Have you ever been compared to Willy Wonka?

Spencer Brown: No.

Vince Thompson: You have Umpa Lumpas helping you out somewhere.

Spencer Brown: I wish, but they'll be green, so we have to have a different name. I think I take the most pride from this business for every hundred Recopacks that I rent. We check out 500 pounds of trash. We prevent 350 pounds of trash going in the landfills. We save 50 gallons of gas, 300 gallons drinkable water and we eliminate 2500 pounds of carbon dioxide emission in the atmosphere and we save three trees. People think what a brilliant idea and that's the biggest compliment I can get.

Vince Thompson: That's fantastic. Spencer Brown, thank you so much for being at Dog and Pony.

Spencer Brown: Thank you.

Vince Thompson: As always if you have questions, comments or ideas, please e-mail info@dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson. Thanks for watching.