In the beginning.

7 years ago I was at an event in Napa called Mastermind Talks (MMT). This event is put on my my now good friend Jayson Gaignard.

It was here I met my 2 business partners, Jeremy and Brad.

Oddly though, the 3 of us didn’t all “meet”. I met them both separately at the same event.

It would be almost 3 years later that we chose to partner together in this venture we call Pela.

Back to where it all started...

Jeremy Lang founded Pela in 2009. He wanted to see if a new generation of plant based plastics could be used to make everyday real products.

That’s when he decided to settle on phone cases. Great margins, good utility and not a ton of innovation beyond “more protection!”.

While he started in 2009 and had a product by 2011, Jeremy’s strength wasn’t in marketing. The company struggled to find a channel for the product. Enter me.

I had been running my agency (now called Bounteous) and managed to grow it to about 90-ish employees and like a lot of agencies, it was a very profitable company.

I used some of that profit to start investing in Pela. I fell in love with the idea of what Pela’s materials could be used for and wanted to see if this thing could be a real business.

This was in late 2016. Honestly I thought this was going to be the first of many brands that I’d build/own and use my agency as a point of leverage to create them.

By mid-2017 we found product/market fit for the cases and began to throw some marketing muscle at it. However, I hadn’t expected Pela to take off in the way it did.

Pela Case went from 0 to multi-8 figures in revenue run rate inside of ~2.5 years. We broke everything along the way. People, process and capital.

Enter Brad, the 3rd partner in the original Pela founding team.

Brad had recently exited his toy manufacturing company and while he and I were stuck in Boston’s airport after our EO forum meeting, I was in full on commiseration mode about all the shit we were breaking while growing Pela.

Brad got excited. He could fix these things (product development, supply chain, operations).

By mid-2017 Pela was really growing quickly.

This was an Oh-shit moment. Not only was I not going to have the capacity to build more than 1 brand, it became apparent (to my wife at first...obviously) I wasn’t going to have the capacity to run my agency AND run Pela.

Fortuitously I had met Demac’s eventual acquirer around the same time.

Funny how the universe shows you the path when you’re ready to see it? A few short months later and Demac was acquired as part of a roll-up which is now known as Bounteous.

This let me go all-in on Pela.

In 2018 we met Jay Brown, Jay-Z and Larry Marcus at Marcy Venture Partners via an intro from our friend Tom at Kensington Capital in Toronto. Marcy offered to invest and Kensington followed, making up our Series A.

We had a profitable, bootstrapped brand and didn’t need the money.

Brad and I were also both flush with cash from our own exits, but we had a really big ass vision for Pela...so we took the investment.

I’m happy we did. That investment is what let us invest aggressively in product development/R&D in a way we couldn’t before...at least not as quickly.

That investment led us to the development of Lomi, our second major product breakthrough and growth driver.

Lomi started out as a really bad idea.

Pela had one problem though. Few commercial compost facilities would accept compostable plastics like our Pela Case (pelacase.com).

Why?

Money of course. You see, these facilities make their money by creating and selling compost as fast as they can. As you can imagine, making compost is a slow process. Somewhere between 3-6 months depending on facility to get the job done.

So if you introduce compostable plastics, that take longer to break down (6-18+ months), you are messing with their business model in a meaningful way.

We had a lack of infrastructure problem. No different than the lack of charging infrastructure that held up the adoption of electric cars, until Tesla came along that is.

Our original idea was to create our own large scale compost facilities around the world that would take in compostable plastics. Short story, the financial model didn’t work (they are expensive to build).

So we thought...if Tesla can put a gas station in your garbage (the home charger), why can't we put a compost facility in your kitchen?

Which lead us to the idea of Lomi.

In 2021 we finally launched , after 3+ years of development. We were getting ready to ramp up manufacturing and figured it was time to unleash our little machine.

We knew Lomi would do well, we just didn’t think it would do THAT well. The crowdfunding campaign alone brought in 19,000+ orders and $9.2 million from this 1 launch.

Lomi went on to sell tens of thousands of units in its first 6 months in 2021 after the crowdfund campaign and to this date continues to be a rocket ship.