Kat Nouri along with her Stasher silicone sandwich bag.
Kat Nouri has a love-hate relationship with plastic.
As an artist and product designer, she’s enamored with its transparency and the countless artistic makes use of for it. However as a mom, and an environmentally-conscious client, she’s disgusted by it.
“Plastic is a big part of our daily lives. There’s no denying it,” stated Nouri. “But every time we use more of it , we’re harming ourselves and Earth.”
So she’s doing one thing about it.
On Thursday, Nouri unveiled Stasher, a line of sandwich baggage made totally of silicone, a pure materials product of sand, rock and oxygen.
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Like plastic sandwich baggage, the silicone baggage characteristic the identical pinch-press, air-tight closure. However the comparisons finish there, stated Nouri.
Her silicone baggage are petroleum-free and include no PVC, latex or phthalates.
And whereas 20 million plastic baggage find yourself in U.S. landfills every day, Stasher baggage are reusable for a minimum of three years and may be frozen, microwaved or put within the dishwasher.
Clear Stasher baggage value $12.99 every. The luggage that includes circus, area and monster designs value $14.99 every.
With dry-erase markers, you may scribble notes and labels immediately onto the bag’s floor. Not feeling artistic? The luggage additionally are available enjoyable designs — assume circus, area and monster themes.
Stasher baggage will probably be accessible on-line in February and in retail shops in March.
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Nouri has been on a private campaign for greater than a decade to assist shoppers exchange on a regular basis plastic merchandise with safer silicone-based options.
She was partly motivated by her upbringing in Iran.
“My father was a champion wrestler and my mother has a PhD in nutrition,” she stated. “So I was very conscious about health and nutrition growing up.”
Nouri immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Space when she was 10.
“I became somewhat of a rebel,” stated Nouri. “I was just very creative and wanted to do things my way.”
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Nouri took a gross sales and advertising and marketing internship at IBM. “But I always had a little business venture on the side,” she stated. “People would constantly tell me I was a natural entrepreneur.”
Nouri launched her firm Fashionable Twist in 2005. The corporate makes silicone-based placemats, coasters and quite a lot of child objects, together with bibs, cups and meals containers.
“As consumers, we focus more on what we eat,” stated Nouri, who has three children. “To me, especially as a mom, it was just as important to evaluate where we are putting our food. I was packing three lunches a day in plastic bags.”
At this time, Fashionable Twist is worthwhile, generates about $10 million a 12 months in income, and its merchandise are offered in over 4,000 retailers nationwide.
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Nouri stated Stasher baggage are a pure evolution of her imaginative and prescient for a plastics-free world.
She spent three years and $500,000 researching and growing the silicon sandwich baggage. “It was a big investment for us at the time and I nearly went broke,” she stated.
The silicone baggage (which promote for $12.99 to $14.99 apiece) do value fairly a bit greater than a field of disposable plastic baggage. Nonetheless, she’s hopeful that the long-term financial and environmental worth of the silicone baggage will sway shoppers to purchase them.
Within the meantime, Nouri is already planning to develop the Stasher line with different sizes later this 12 months.
“I hope that these bags can become a symbol of how we are rethinking plastic and caring for our planet,” she stated.
CNNMoney (New York) First printed January 28, 2016: 8:00 AM ET
