FLINT STILL DOES NOT HAVE CLEAN WATER

Genusee

Company Co-Founder (2016-2019)

Genusee is the first circular economy eyewear brand. Made from recycled single-use plastic water bottles in Flint, MI, each eyewear purchase upcycles 15+ water bottles. Committed to building social and environmental impact through business, design, and collaboration, Genusee focuses on hiring and training displaced and returning citizens to create products of purpose and need.

As a co-founder of Genusee, I designed the circular business model and oversaw its implementation. I directly managed funding strategy, product design, PR & marketing strategy, photo and video shoots, art direction, manufacturing systems, supply chain, hiring freelancers and fulltime positions, brand partnerships, as well as being involved in all other day-to-day operations. Maneuvering from micro to macro throughout all parts of the business provided an opportunity to build a more holistic and ethos-driven company that valued people, impact, and community over profits.

Better Business By Design

From Crowd-Funded To Venture-Backed

Over the course of my two years at the helm of Genusee, we went from an idea on a post-it to a fully funded and operational company. The initial barrier to entry was overcome by crowd-funding raising over $120,000 through the initial offering and lens upgrades. Once the company was made viable through pre-sales we sought investments and mentorship from people and organizations that had similar visions to ours. These investors helped bolster Genusee’s foundation and set the company on a positive trajectory.

Disrupting the status quo by bridging the gap between customer and company, the circular economy buy-back program allows Genusee to do business differently and put it’s values to the forefront. When we buy a pair of glasses back from our customers we’re not only increasing our customer retention rates and decreasing our customer acquisition costs, we’re also learning how they use our product and where might have space to improve and create products with greater longevity. One of Genusee’s goals is to make things that fail slower, on a long enough timeline everything breaks or become obsolete, but leveraging Genusee’s vertical integration manufacturing systems to adapt quickly and efficiently we are able to conform to the relational needs between our customers and the products we produce.

Redesigning The Single-Use Lifecycle

Single-use is crisis’ bandaid, wherever crisis is being managed so too is the deployment of temporary fixes. Inevitable and almost as predictable as crisis might seem the solutions have hardly advanced in the last 20 years. Short-term solutions and quick-broad-brush reactions often have lasting impacts and ramifications that affect those managing the healing and those that are themselves still healing after the damage is done or the world moves on. In this case, the simple solution was to deploy millions of cases of single-use water bottles to the roughly 100,000 residents of Flint who could not drink, bathe in, clean laundry with, or wash dishes with the water coming out of their taps. People were using 200 bottles per day just to maintain their lives.

• There were 400,000 single-use water bottles used daily in Flint during the height of the crisis.

• Less than 13% of water bottles are being recycled.

• It takes 450 years for one bottle to break down in a landfill.

Create Living Wage Jobs

In early 2016, my co-founder, Alicia Rose VanOverbeke and I interviewed people walking on the streets, in hospitals, in coffee shops, and bars; we spoke with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, organizations training and teaching returning citizens, NGO’s managing relief efforts, artists, and start-ups, all of whom said that “FLINT NEEDS JOBS.” Researching the current job statistics, we found that over half of the working population was making less than a living wage. So, it was at this time that we decided to use the plastic water bottles to make jobs.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 45% of Flint residents lived below the poverty line in 2016, up from 42 percent in 2015. Flint also had the highest rate of childhood poverty with an estimated 58 percent of Flint residents under age 18 living below the poverty line. The national rate is 18 percent. (1)

($14,765 per capita income, 2015)

Despite having five universities in the city of Flint less than 12% of the residents had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Over the past fifty-years the number of high-paying and skilled manufacturing jobs has dwindled from over half of Flint’s residents to just over 12%. Flint still has a large population of skilled labor workers waiting for the jobs to return, few of whom have up-skilled and are now making watches or computer parts and the vast majority have turned to alternative lower-skilled labor outside of their trade.

We decided to create jobs that anyone could be trained to do and have an evolving growth space where our employees could teach and learn from and with each other baked into our employment structure. Centering our hiring strategy toward returning citizens, we partnered with M.A.D.E. Institute to help find candidates and to help us understand how to be better employers.

Circular Economy Buy-Back Model

In its purest form, the circular economy helps companies be responsible for their products in the ecosystem.

We are currently living in a glutenous time of late stage capitalism epitomized by linear economies— buy, use, and throw away with little to no curiosity or knowledge of where our waste ends up, or it's impact on the worlds around us. It's more than recycling, circularity is designing products and systems from the onset of ideation to be closed loop. We wanted to make participating in and access to a circular systems as easy as possible for our users. So, we focused our efforts on finding a community of consumers with like-minded ideals to help shape and inform incentives that might encourage people to engage with our buy-back program. The result was a sketch on a napkin listing that those who buy our glasses return them and receive money that they can use towards another pair. Keeping it simple and easy was critical to its success and has helped us continue to learn how our products are used and where we can iterate and improve them.

Democratically Designed Eyewear

Creating measurable impact through consumer packaged goods means making and selling as many products as possible and, in turn, creating a product that many people want and need. Developing frame shapes and additional offerings to accommodate the broadest range of consumers is paramount to increasing impact. Designing a product of need, like eyewear, in shapes that many people want meant that we had to A and B test products to understand what worked and what did not. We studied the best-selling styles on the market to understand what features seemed most desirable and laser-cut hundreds of heavyweight paper prototypes that dozens of people with different face shapes tried on. Once satisfied with the paper mock-up trials, we 3D printed 23 of the most successful frame styles and wear-tested them to evaluate fit, form, and their functionality as optical and sunglasses on a range of faces. The arduous selection process led us to our first frame shape, the Roeper. The Roeper looks great on a many faces and people love many colors it is offered in.

Manufacturing Made Simple

With the bulk of the work (craft, fulfillment, and assembly) happening at Genusee's downtown Flint location, the supply chain is a mere 188 miles at its longest. The frames are injection molded off-site and brought to the Flint headquarters for final shaping, buffing, and assembly before installing the lenses. Injection mold manufacturing, a low-to-no waste production method, has a much higher initial cost and much lower lifetime cost than other eyewear production methods frames like the most common, computer numerical control (CNC) cutters. Additionally, the CNC production process wastes more than twice as much material than are contained in the finished frames.

Designing the manufacturing systems in reverse by starting with how the frames would be disassembled provided a unique opportunity to alleviate manufacturing challenges from the onset rather than retrofitting and accommodating less-than-ideal methods that opposed our ethos. For example, making the material separation process easy was critical to crafting a sustainable take-back process. This allowed me to collaborate with industrial designer Arian Ghousi to investigate the needs of our materials and the capabilities of various (de)construction methods. The glasses are made of three separate components, each of different materials; the injection-molded frame fronts and temples are rPET, nickel hinges, and polycarbonate plastic lenses that need to be entirely separable for a fully circular manufacturing system. As it turns out, designing for disassembly reduces the assembly time from 1-1.5 hours for typical cellulose acetate to 15-20 minutes for a pair of Genusee glasses. 

By engineering the lens groove, a recessed area that receives and secures the lens, slightly wider and shallower than the standard 1.5mm, we could cold-snap the lenses in and out of place. Typically cellulose acetate frames are warmed in a heated silicone bead bath before lenses are set into frames, but this process is easily removed when the dimensions of the frames are better configured.

rPET is a far more heat-stable material than the commonly used cellulose acetate and, used properly, can hold shape longer and better without wire temple hinges. By adjusting the thickness of the injection-molded temples, we were able to use this to our advantage; our molds were designed with hinge graves for riveted hinges, and, with proper equipment, the hinges could be installed and uninstalled with ease.

People & The Planet

Doing good for people and the planet was the first of Genusee's goals and is baked into its ethos as a registered benefit corporation. Since the first sale in 2018, Genusee has provided over $15,000 to charities working to mitigate the lasting effects of lead poisoning in the children of Flint. By donating a minimum of 1% of all sales, we directly connect our customers to the most vulnerable populations affected by the Flint water crisis. Beyond donating funds, we have organized, managed, and distributed over 40,000 cases of water to Flint residents and helped install countless water filters in Flint homes. Water is a right, and lead negatively affects the youth and aging population at a far greater rate than other age demographics.

Many Flint residents have fled the community seeking places that are not struggling with contaminated water and leaving vacant homes and properties to be destroyed by the city. Vacant lots, rubble, and burnt homes were a common feature of the city when we began this work, and knowing the power that trees can bring as a former sawyer, we decided to have a tree planting in derelict areas every year on earth day. As a result, there are now thousands more trees in Flint, cleaning the air and a testament to the residents' resiliency.

With many recyclers unwilling to take plastic bottles, the blight of single-use plastic water bottles cluttered Flint streets. Residents spelled their thoughts, hopes, and laid claim with their names by fitting bottles in chain-link fences throughout the city. We worked with a local recycler to set up collection stations that would eventually feed into our material stream, further simplifying our supply chain. Genusee has diverted over 300,000 single-use plastic water bottles from being downcycled, incinerated, and landfilled by upcycling them into products of purpose, need, and longevity, proving that these materials have an intrinsic value. The material is the message, plastics were designed to last many lifetimes, yet they are the leading occupant of landfills, just behind food waste.