These suckers are onto a sustainable winner
Forget about metal and plastic straws. Two Canterbury side hustlers are blowing plastic out of the water with glass alternatives. Carly Gooch reports.
Acouple of Canterbury blokes are suckers for a side venture, and while they admit there have been a few “fails”, their foray into glass straws is proving to be just what sustainability ordered.
Sucker NZ founders Cam Morrow and Matt Jensen hit it off when they met at Lincoln University about five years ago while studying agriculture, and from that moment, they were “always trying to start wee side hustles together”, Morrow said.
“We were always floating ideas about different products – most of them failed.”
Selling wallets on Amazon, firewood and Christmas trees – they gave them all “a crack” before the ventures “fell over pretty quickly”, Jensen said.
That was until Jensen researched glass straws and realised no-one was selling them in New Zealand.
Since launching their smartly packaged washable straws – good enough to wrap for a gift – 18 months ago, the guys have been wondering if Sucker’s success is all a dream.
“If you’d asked us to guess where we’d be a year ago, we never thought we’d be where we are,” Morrow said.
“We keep pinching ourselves,” Jensen added.
“It far exceeded any expectations we had of it. We were nervous at the start but soon realised, they’ve been way more popular than what we thought [possible].”
What started out as a product the partners were going to sell online became a nifty gift or kitchen addition stocked in about 100 retailers across the country, Morrow said, including Superette and Flo and Frankie.
“There’s been a bit of a snowball, which is really cool.
“The online business is a bit of an afterthought. We don’t spend any money on advertising, 95% [of sales is] through wholesale.”
With their product on the shelves at Christmas, sales “exploded”, Morrow said.
“It must’ve popped up in just about every Secret Santa in the country.
“We had Snapchats from all our friends in Secret Santas around New Zealand.”
He said at one of the Secret Santa exchanges, eight people were involved and three of them got Sucker straws.
“It is a great wee $25 to $30 ... present.”
The coloured and transparent glass straws are available in a variety of lengths and shapes, and come with a cleaner brush.
Single-use plastic, including straws, began being phased out by the government in July last year, seeing paper straws replace them in many establishments.
Morrow said plastic was doing “terrible things to our planet, so it’s cool to be able to do something that helps mitigate that problem”.
To support our environment, the pair have committed to donate 10% of their net profits to Our Seas Our Future organisation, which aims to protect and preserve the health of ecosystems in New Zealand’s waterways and coastlines.
As successful as Morrow and Jensen, both 25, are becoming, it’s still a side hustle, and they remain hands-on with packaging, marketing and attending every trade show they can.
Morrow works full time as an agronomist in Ashburton, and Jensen, who grew up in Hawarden, in the Hurunui District, recently moved to Australia to work in agriculture full time.
Their next goal was to capture the Australian market before finding another venture, Jensen said.
“It’s going to do its dash eventually, and we want to be ahead of that with new products.”
Do you have an innovative business? Emailcarly.gooch@stuff.co.nz