Held annually in New York, the Kairos Global Summit is a conference that brings together some of the brightest and most promising young social entrepreneurs. This year’s summit brought 50 new companies to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where their leaders and CEOs had the ability to network with Wall Street executives and seek out investment opportunities. The companies came from locations across the United States and Europe, and they arrived in New York with plans to hydrate crops, solve the global water crisis, monitor diabetes via smartphone apps, and make education more personalized, among many others.
One of the most interesting new companies on display was SmartDeco Furniture, a Los Angeles-based enterprise that was founded just last year by Trent J. Mayol, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California. SmartDeco Furniture seeks to achieve two objectives in its business. First, the startup wants to provide people with fully sustainable furniture options – in other words, to create furniture pieces that can be completed recycled. Second, SmartDeco wants this furniture to be low-priced and easily affordable, at least when compared with the other options out there.
So in starting SmartDeco, Mayol envisioned a line of cheap yet sustainable desks, bookcases, end tables, and dressers. His solution for accomplishing these two objectives? Cardboard. Specifically, all SmartDeco items are made out of enviroboard, a corrugated fiberboard that is strong, lightweight, affordable, and recyclable. To the untrained eye, enviroboard looks like a lighter, cleaner, and sturdier form of cardboard.
SmartDeco currently offers a nightstand, dresser, and desk. The desk is priced at just under $60, for example, a figure that makes it extremely competitive in a market where few new desks sell for less than $100. Since SmartDeco products are light and fully assembled, they have the added bonus of being able to easily ship or transport. This furniture may not provide the option of custom company apparel — such as a more intricate ornamentation or the embroidery offered by Chesapake Business Solutions — but you can certainly expect a sleek form and a dependable functionality in every SmartDeco Furniture product.
For their price and their portability, SmartDeco furniture is perfectly positioned to appeal to the college-aged demographic. Mayol, however, hopes to expand the product line and use his message of sustainability to attract a larger market. Either way, there’s a good chance that cardboard may soon be coming to a nightstand near you.
Article contributed by Jenna Smith