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press: print
Qantas in-flight mag, January 2010
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ARTICLE COPY/
"Turning Trash into Cash
By recycling unwanted materials, this green entrepreneur proves one person's garbage really is another's treasure.
When Scott Kilmartin offers up his tale of entrepreneurial success, he tells it like this. You'll hear none of those stories of how he turned his big idea into millions of dollars or how the world embraced his clever concept for an eco-friendly street brand.
The winner of the 2008 City of Melbourne Business of the Year, who is often invited to mentor start-up entrepreneurs or speak at business functions, prefers to talk about the journey: the years he spent running his business as a sideline from a garage, working after hours to make it viable; how, when customers were unable to pay him, he delivered doughnuts from 2am to 7am to keep operations running.
He explains how his first idea, making photo albums from licence plates, was a beggining, but not his best work, and how he made a wrong call by having a "save the planet" angle as the selling point for his products - cool streetwear and bags made from rubbish. "True environmentalists are not big consumers," he came to learn.
Kilmartin, 40, can afford to tell his saga this way because after a decade of trial and error he has created a brand that plays into the zeitgeist for artisan-created goods that are not only edgy in design, but recycle materials such as truck inner-tubes, rubber printing blankets and billboards. He sometimes even sells the new products back to the original owners of the trash.
After several years of selling online and through a retail outlet in Melbourne's North Fitzroy, Kilmartin's label, haul is on the cusp of becoming a global brand. With another shop set to open in Melbourne's CBD (TOWNhaul) and one planned for Sydney midyear.
haul - so named because it offers many products that carry tings, such as laptop sleeves, messenger bags and tote bags - is a business moniker apt for punning. "It has been a long haul," he observes.
In his late twenties Kilmartin returned to Tasmania, where he'd grown up. While running bars in Los Angeles, he'd attended many an event at which outstanding entrepreneurs told "fluffy, PR-driven" success stories that showed there were jobs other than the corporate kind. He prevailed on his father, a now-retired sheetmetal worker, and mother, a seamstress, to help create products out of pre-loved materials: first the photo abums, then wallets, belts and bags. Today both parents remain involved - his father with the market stall and his mother sewing samples.
Kilmartin is a realist who admits that in establishing his business he made choices that created challenges. "What makes us special tends to make things difficult; the ipside is also the downside," he says. For example, one of the prevailing difficulties with the materials used is that most sewers don't want to sew them. "Our products take a lot of research and development."
His biggest breakthrough was the realisation that billboards are made of vinyl. He thought they were paper until one day he saw one flapping in the breeze. What's more, they went into landfill. What if he was able to make them into products and then sell them back to the original advertiser? A canny idea, but it took 18 months to secure his first order, from online job site SEEK, to turn it's distinctive pink-and-white billboards into laptop bags and document satchels as corporate gifts. Next Jetstar had pencil cases designed as prizes in a schools eco-innovation competition. Then the concept took off. Under sub-brand Riveting, the company has created co-branded products for a raft of corporates from AGL to HP. Billboards have been used to fit out a bar and more recently to supply bean bags to Google.
Web presence has been pivotal to haul's growth: the site offers between 2000 and 5000 products. "No two products are the same. They are unique," says Kilmartin. "The term has been bastardised. So many people who make that claim are not selling one-offs."
As web designers grappled with the magnitude of the site, the one-off nature of the products complicated stick management. With the shop and website working simultaneously, there's also the need to avoid duplicate sales. "We have to ensure that when someone in, say, Norway selects a product, the one they click on is the one they get in the mail."
These days, even in-store sales happpen through the site to avoid the irksome possibility of double-ups - an approach Kilmartin has managed to turn into a marketing plus. "When you show customers in the shop their product on the site, they tend to go back to their brand or graphic design studio and show the others."
Another snag with selling one-offs, he points out, is when a courier loses one. But there has been plenty of good news in Kilmartin's haul. His early adoption of social media, particularly Twitter, has proved a boon for viral marketing and has helped with scouting for new premises. Not one to waste resourses, he has even managed to find a role for his dog, the none-too-vigilant Gus, who has his own Facebook page, business cards and has launched his own range of dog collars and a beefcake calendar. Gus the Boxer was recently fired from his security role after several computers went missing.
The global step is exciting, Kilmartin acknowledges, but it will inevitably involve pragmatic decisions. To date he has managed to keep production local, but substantial orders pushed costs to the limit. Asked to created 50,000 luggage tags, Kilamrtin went exploring for more economical offshore production options and had to convince Indonesian authorities he wasn't planning to dump defunct billboards. He'll be bringing back everything - even the offcuts, he insists. Growing your business when you're green, it seems, definitely isn't easy."
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