October 19, 2009, U.S. – ECO Inc., a maker of environmentally friendly and multifunctional packaging, debuts its first product, the GreenBox.
The GreenBox is a pizza box made from 100 per cent recycled material that also breaks down into serving plates and a storage container for leftover pizza.
William Walsh, CEO and founder of ECO Inc., got the idea to make a fully recycled-materials pizza box that was multifunctional during college, when the fridge and trashcan he shared with his friends became cluttered with boxes. Walsh said he found the entire experience both wasteful and unwieldy.
“(The industry is) mowing down tree after tree for boxes that are used for 45 minutes and then thrown away,” Walsh said. “I wanted to make something intuitive, easy to use, and that had some value. … We made it multifunctional so it was more than just a delivery device, and came up with this design.”
The GreenBox has perforations that allow its bottom to be turned into several cardboard pizza plates. Its top detaches and folds into a pizza storage box for leftovers.
Equally as innovative as the company’s design and vision is the way that ECO Inc. started marketing their materials, sending celebrity Twitter fanatic Ashton Kutcher a tweet about their wares to get things off the ground.
“We’re new to Twitter, but we knew it was something that could help us with our marketing,” said Jennifer Wright, the company’s CFO. “So we sent him a tweet, ‘check out the Greenbox’ and he (published a tweet) that said, ‘Smart,’ and a link to the YouTube video. And that night we had well over 20,000 hits from that; following that, it got picked up by Digg and became a viral hit, and had thousands and thousands of people going to our site.”
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