What if you bought carbon removal, not as an offset, but rather as a gift?
This week we sat down with the founding team at Thanks a Ton (Laura Katayama, Tessaria Mihangel, and our own Siobhan Montoya Lavender), a carbon dioxide removal gifting startup on a mission to spread awareness about the burgeoning high-quality CDR industry.
“We take climate change very seriously, but try not to take ourselves too seriously” is a mantra the team lives by.
Thanks a Ton offers a platform where you can send the gift of carbon removal via a digital greeting card. Although the team admits that they are still circling product-market fit, they have had little problem securing high-quality project developers and have gotten a lot of attention for their fun-loving and often striking artwork.
In this episode we dive into this scrappy startup and the surprisingly robust platform they’ve built to engage non-insiders with carbon removal.
More from the show
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Thanks a Ton platform
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. We’re going to pretend none of that happened. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders. I’m the director of creative and marketing here. We’re the carbon removal marketplace in Seattle, WA. Today I have with me a very regular co-host of mine, Siobhan Montoya Lavender.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Hello. Hello, Ross. How you doing?
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thanks for joining us for the nepotism special that we’re doing today.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: It is. Today we’re actually talking about Thanks a Ton, which is my company. And at first I was like, well, I can’t interview people, they’re my own — this is my own team. But then I remembered that, Nori, you actually interviewed various people at Nori. But [unclear]. Our guests today: we have Laura Katayama, co-founder at Thanks a Ton. And we have Tessaria Mihangel, also a co-founder. So we’re going to introduce — I think I’m going to take that and then I’m going to grill you guys with some questions. Ross has been wanting to do the show for a while and we’ve just been kind of flitting around the edges. And I’m like, is now the moment? And then, you know, is Thanks a Ton still going? Ross always asks me — I come to meetings, he’s like, are you still doing that?
Ross Kenyon: Well, you told me that at times it’s felt like maybe it was time to conclude and to move on, but then new wind keeps gushing into the sails and then something will take off. Is that correct?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Oh yeah, we get into wind. I’d say our most intense burst of energy was Tessaria joining us, which happened about a year ago. Right, Tessaria? When was that?
Tessaria Mihangel: January.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: OK, so in January. And I think Laura and I had been doing this for a year and about at that point, and you know, we were feeling a little burned out, and Tessaria just came in with all this fresh energy and perspective and that made a real difference. And then I also think of all the skills we have in our team at Thanks a Ton, one of our most crucial skills is our ability to attract interested people to help us. I don’t know why people just keep volunteering to help us, but they do. And so we keep getting new energy and new perspectives and keep trying to make it work. So here we are.
We are Thanks a Ton. We are a platform for gifting carbon dioxide removal, so if the listeners are carbon dioxide removal fans, they may have heard of us. We are rather prolific within the CDR industry, but not as much outside it as we would like to be. And what we do is, we decided that carbon dioxide removal wasn’t really engaging with individuals, and when it was, it was really engaging on a remove-your-carbon-footprint perspective. And so we actually decided to take a different angle, which is not offset, not remove your footprint, but rather gift — give the gift, the action, of carbon dioxide removal. Laura, do you want to tell a little bit about our origin story? How did we come up with this idea?
Laura Katayama: Well, we were working in a climate hackathon with our other, now mostly departed, co-founder in Paris, and she quipped one day, thanks a ton, as we were talking about the voluntary carbon market. And from there the idea stuck and we coalesced around this idea of Thanks a Ton. It took a while, but we had all of these ideas about making carbon dioxide removal fun, and something people want to do instead of just clicking the off switch when they hear about climate change. We also wanted to make it educational, and the way we decided to do that was to pair it with greeting cards. Greeting cards are a great way to share with people that you care about them. And now you can also add climate action to your thoughts and messages of care.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah. Is there anything to add about how you found us and how you came on board? Because again, you were a burst of fresh energy and I don’t know why you saw us and thought, those are the people I want to work for.
Tessaria Mihangel: Yeah, well, Siobhan, that actually starts with you and me meeting through [unclear]. If [unclear] is listening, shout out to you for that internship after I was finishing up grad school. I met you as soon as you were starting Thanks a Ton, I think, or a few months into it. And so after I got let go from my other job doing delivery, I was like, oh, I really want to get into the carbon removal space, because it’s sort of a calling for me to be doing this work. And you were the first person I thought of. I was like, well, I already have a connection in the space. Let me reach out and see if they could use some help. Like, I’m going to work for free.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: So what’s that? I think my reaction was, yes, please help us.
Tessaria Mihangel: Yeah, I’ve been working for free for Thanks a Ton ever since. So that’s one thing that we’re all hoping to change in the future, is maybe to start making some money from this. But yeah, this is definitely a passion project, I think, for all of us.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. Why a seemingly B2C effort — business to consumer — trying to engage individual people? I think when people think about climate change, they often think that it’s only about scale, and B2C is pretty small. It might be only one ton or a fraction of a ton per card. Well, I guess, how do you see its value and where it comes from?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, well, I think you’re hitting on something we’ve been really struggling with, which is, are we a B2C company, are we a B2B company? The reality is a lot of our sales have come from what we call bulk sales, which is selling to one person who wants to send cards to their direct reports. Or AirMiners has been really supportive — if you attend some of their Ideas, Needs and Leads sessions, if you speak, you’ll get a thank you card from AirMiners with carbon removal. Our value in the ecosystem, what I always say to suppliers who reach out or people who want to learn about us, is that our value in the ecosystem isn’t necessarily to remove the largest, the most tons of carbon.
Our value in the ecosystem is to get the most people aware of and participating in carbon removal that otherwise wouldn’t be. And so even though most of our customers are buying grams — you know, they’re buying small dollar amounts because they’re sending a little gift — the philosophy, in my dream anyway, is that those people receive a card and go, oh, this is cool, what’s carbon removal? And they click the learn more button and then they have a positive association, whereas before they might have had either nothing or a negative association with CDR. So that’s kind of the goal. That’s why we built it. We see public awareness as this giant gap — we need massive public awareness and acceptance of CDR in order for it to scale. And once you get outside the climate bubble, or even the carbon removal bubble into a climate bubble, very few people know and understand CDR. And we’d like to change that. How’s that pitch? Did I sell you on the concept?
Ross Kenyon: Sounds good. I have a hard time believing people don’t know about carbon removal at this point, but then I hear stories from friends and colleagues all the time. I think Asa was just telling me because his parents or his grandparents, they clipped something out of the New York Times about wind power and were like, is this what you do, Asa? You’re on the right track, kind of.
Tessaria Mihangel: Yeah, I was reading a marketing report the other day and it said that people actually think that recycling is a carbon removal strategy. So it shows sort of how confused the general public is. And also to add to that, I do a lot of community work in Brooklyn where I live and it’s a lot of sustainability-focused stuff. And you’d be surprised, all these people are talking about climate and, you know, trash, picking up and keeping the streets clean. None of them really know about carbon removal. So it’s even in the climate space, the sustainability space, there’s a lot of education to do.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And so we decided that the way we’re going to do that was by this gifting mechanism. To Laura’s point, gifting we think is altruistic. It’s not like offsetting. It’s something you’re doing for someone else, right? And then also there’s two people involved. When you offset, you just kind of do that alone in front of your computer, and ideally when you’re gifting, you’re sharing it with someone, and then ideally they either want to tweet about it or they want to share it with someone else they know. And we kind of have this idea of this spreading of the information, awareness. I don’t know if that’s happening so far. I don’t know how well we’re tracking that, but that’s the goal.
Ross Kenyon: Do you get much feedback from either customers or the recipients of the cards?
Laura Katayama: Not enough. I don’t know, there’s never enough, that’s for sure. We did send out a survey a few months back and we found that most of the people who were getting the cards or sending them already knew what carbon dioxide removal was. So that shows that we haven’t really broken out of the carbon removal ecosystem. But also most of the people who got the cards said they felt happy, or some other positive emotion, when they got the card. So I think we are doing our part with that. They didn’t say that they clicked through a lot of the time though, to learn more about the method. So I don’t know if they’re actually being educated necessarily through our cards all the time, but they are, I think, in the back of their minds seeing it and thinking, oh, this is a good thing, I just got carbon removal.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I wonder how many people — if that’s a biased survey, because people, as you mentioned, are within the carbon ecosystem and so they already know what biochar is, for example. I have anecdotally heard some people say, oh my gosh, and I clicked through it all, I learned all about it. You know, for example, one of my friends at On Deck sent it to her mother-in-law for her birthday, and her mother-in-law is now like a convert. And who would have known that that’s how she got exposed to carbon removal? Laura, why do you think we decided to do the artwork, and why do you think art’s valuable or important? Or is it?
Laura Katayama: I think the artwork is definitely important. People do comment on the artwork, they love the artwork on our cards and want to see more of it. So we’ve been very lucky finding artists who are able to communicate our ideas of positivity and sharing in the artwork. I think it is one of the things that people come back to for our cards.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: For me, I think it was really trying to make this abstract concept seem tangible to people. And I don’t know that art is the silver bullet way to do that, but it’s something, right? It’s something to make this concept of, you know, sinking seaweed feel more personal, feel more tangible. Tessaria, you make some of these cards. We have some professional artists we’ve contracted with who’ve been terrific and have now become really interested in CDR, so that’s a plus. But then, Tessaria, you’ve made some of ours — some of my favorite cards you’ve made. What’s your thought process behind making cards for carbon removal?
Tessaria Mihangel: That’s a great question. It’s really very in the moment. Usually — I’ve never really sat down and planned a card. Sometimes it’ll be like 8:00 at night and this idea pops into my head and I just start going with it, and then it’s like 12:00 at night and the card’s done and I’m exhausted. So I don’t know if it’s as much of a thought process. It’s just like brute force flow.
Ross Kenyon: Which cards did you make? I have them up right now. If you’re listening, thanksaton.earth, you can go look through their cards. Have you lost track? You’ve lost track. OK. Not a single one. Am I putting you on the spot?
Tessaria Mihangel: Autumn Leaves, the one that’s up on the homepage right now. I made that one.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice. I like that one.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Tessaria’s also made — there’s like a custom collection which you can’t see right now, for AirMiners, and actually a couple of people. Oh, and we also made custom cards for us. So if you want to work with us and have a custom card, we do that.
Laura Katayama: Yeah, we also have a custom card for Farm.NYC. We do do custom cards. So we’ve worked with some people and companies, and we can make you a custom page with your logo on it and you can send that out to all of your employees or whoever you’re trying to impress or build relationships with.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: On the AirMiners custom cards, there’s a Back to 350 ppm — and it’s probably, I don’t know if it’s legal that we’re doing this right now, hopefully someone yells at us someday — but it’s in the stylized Back to the Future text and I just adore it. I love that card.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of my favorites. Very clever. I like the switch to — I mean, it’s kind of obvious that B2C there’s a lot of competition for, and that’s tough. I think a lot of offsetting does focus on — and not gifting of offsets, but B2C is pretty popular for that. But I like the idea of offering this to events or to organizations as thank you cards. I’ve certainly worked at companies before where you get a shot glass, you get something like that that has the brand on it, but it’s mostly just stuff that’s going in the yard sale that you don’t really want. I would much rather get an experience, or just have something that represents something I care about. How long into things, what time did it take you all to figure that out? Was that a while? It’s not unusual. It’s not even a criticism. This happens at every company.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Well, we built — so we built like a free MVP platform and then kind of scrapped that, because we made a lot of first-time mistakes, and then rebuilt. And that’s kind of when we were realizing that B2C is really hard to get, but that we didn’t want to lose the option for B2C people to come on if they’ve received a card themselves and then buy one. And so, yeah, we’ve been going after more of a B2B audience. You know, if you want to thank speakers for events or attendees, instead of, as you say, giving them just a shot glass, they can have some carbon removal. I don’t know though, man, because we did — what did we do, Laura, like 85 customer discovery interviews?
Laura Katayama: Oh my gosh. At least. At least that many.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: And we found that even though the majority of people that we talked to said that they don’t want just kitschy stuff — to your point, Ross, that we often get, they don’t want that — but they do feel like they have to give that to other people. And I don’t know where the disconnect is there, but all these people that said, I don’t want the candle or whatever you’re going to send me, I’d rather a climate solution, but then they want to send the candle themselves. And so I think that’s something we’re circling, kind of the product-market fit there. Like, is this the product that is the right thing for the market? Would it be a tangible card, would that be better? Would this product paired with tangible goods, like chocolates or whatever the thing is, is that kind of the way we want to go?
But right now we’re just trying to make this MVP work, which is, you come on our site, you pick a card design. Let’s say you have a birthday — people send birthday cards a lot on our site. You want to send somebody a birthday card, you pick the card, then you get to pick the method of removal. It could be, you know, biochar. It could be direct air capture. We really have been meticulous about picking who we partner with. So it’s really, in my opinion, the cream of the crop of great carbon removal methods and projects. And so you pick the removal method and then you pick a price point and you send the card, and then when people get it, they get a little — it’s a little bit like Paperless Post, that’s certainly something we’re looking to — of like the experience of opening a card, and it kind of flips open and you see the artwork and you see the message. But this one comes with carbon removal.
Ross Kenyon: And who does what exactly?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Well, to be honest, Laura and Tessaria I feel like have been really commanding the ship the last few months, and I’ve been, you know, less valuable I would say as a team member. But in the beginning, and leading up to now certainly, doing like working together to find our suppliers and getting great suppliers on the site, talking about branding, brand voice, doing a lot of the copywriting, doing a lot of the social posts before, and trying to get kind of, again, the awareness component and the science communication component. Tessaria actually does a lot of that now, I would say, in terms of writing interesting things that we can put out there to try and educate the public. And then Laura is just like, does all the business stuff. Do we do any of the business stuff? Tessaria, I feel like Laura just holds the entire company with her bare hands.
Laura Katayama: Yeah, definitely. Well, we’re a tiny team, so everybody’s got to wear every hat. So that’s one of the challenges of being a tiny startup, but it’s actually something I really love about the company. Every single day is something new and different. I like the variety.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is a fun part of a small company. The line for this too, as it grows, you have to give away your Legos and choose which of those things you like doing and which ones you’re comfortable giving away. And sometimes that can be painful.
Laura Katayama: It’s nice being flexible. It can also be kind of distracting too, though. [unclear], but we’re all laughing, because that’s always an ongoing thing in any small, smallish company, I think.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Absolutely true. I think there’s lots of — Tessaria has kind of got their hands in everything a little bit too. And we had some great people out of the EU come in and do a whole SEO strategy for us. So if you type in Thanks a Ton now, we will come up on the first page, which is great. Google wins, small wins. And then we’ve had some terrific interns helping us out. Shout out to our interns if they’re listening to this. Man, it’s amazing how people can just come through for you that way. And I don’t know, we just keep it kind of afloat little by little.
We’re super lean, Ross. We keep it lean. And so in theory our business model is high volume, low overhead, right? Because we want to contact as many people as possible and reach out to them, and also because we don’t want to take a really big cut of the carbon removal — we want most of the money to go to carbon removal. So we’re quite lean and we’ve just kind of managed to keep it going this far. I don’t know, what do you guys think? Like, are we — I mean, we’ve been in this for quite a long haul already. And I keep saying, like, ah, this season we’re probably going to have to close up shop, but then we just keep going. We keep getting customers here and there and we keep getting new ideas coming and we keep going.
Tessaria Mihangel: Yeah, living on a prayer. That’s how we keep it going.
Ross Kenyon: Well said, Tessaria. So what — do you get like just big buyers or partnerships come through? What does keep it going exactly?
Laura Katayama: Well, we’ve had a number of bulk orders come through and that helps a lot. And so total cards we’ve sold so far are 600 cards, 430 of them since we opened our new website on Shopify a year ago. The carbon impact of that is we’ve removed 227 tons of carbon with our card sales. So the impact isn’t zero. We are trending more towards selling $5 and $10 cards now and they have smaller carbon removal quantities, but we’re selling more cards. So that’s our goal, is to reach more people in that way. I think we’re accomplishing that goal. We just need to grow it.
We are, however, really ready to scale. Our website is built, looks great, it’s working great. The one feature that we’re still working to add is a customer-facing bulk order feature. Hopefully we’ll have that up and running by December 1st. That’s our goal. But with that built, we can handle big orders if they’re ready to come through. We could fill an order of 500 cards, 1,000 cards, building up to 10,000 cards. We’re ready to scale.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening and you have an event — I mean, the holidays are coming up. If you do something for your employees, it seems like a pretty nice little treat for them, I imagine.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, yeah. Is the pitch coming? I think that’s our goal. And again, I think it’s tricky to figure out how do people want to engage with carbon removal, how do they want to engage with climate solutions. We have gotten feedback. A lot of the new things we’ve built for our site, like the delayed send feature, was because we got feedback on that, and feedback is so precious. I wish we had so much more of it. Anyone listening, if you just want to give us feedback on the site, feel free to use the contact page and let us know what you think. We want to make it something that people will engage with.
And so certainly, yeah, we think that instead of sending crap swag, you know, send some carbon removal to people. But I don’t know, maybe we’re really early to this, Ross, or maybe it’s a bad idea. We have some really diehard customers that keep coming back. Thank you, you know who you are. But I don’t know what we need to do to kind of reach that next echelon of really breaking outside of carbon removal and into the broader community of people who care about climate.
Laura Katayama: Personally, I’m really interested in finding that section of the market for small and midsize enterprises that want to take climate action. Small companies are usually more risk tolerant, more interested in trying something new, and our cards are just very simple climate action. And because we partner with such premier carbon removal companies, it’s a good value to send our cards.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I want to make sure everyone knows who’s out there listening: we focus on carbon removal. We don’t like to think of them as offsets — they’re really not offsets, they’re not avoidance offsets. And so in 2022 there was a report done by Carbon Direct and they found that only 3% of the projects that were on the market were pure carbon removal. The rest were either low-quality avoidance offsets or mixed credits. And so we try to focus on solely the high-quality projects.
Yeah. And again, we do that because, as you know, Ross, this is an industry that needs to scale. It’s supply constrained, but actually that hasn’t affected us too much because of a couple of reasons. One, we sell in really small quantities, right, so that helps. And two, we just have been really lucky in that suppliers reach out to us for the most part. In the beginning we had to say, hey, we’re starting this company called Thanks a Ton based on a pun. Do you want to participate with us? And thankfully, Nori was one of those generous companies that said yes, yes we will. But now we find that most people just reach out to us, and it’s really gratifying to see how many project developers like what we’re doing and want to be part of it. So the supply, I feel like we’ve got locked down. It’s just the demand.
Ross Kenyon: I love things that are pun based. I always like it when there’s a restaurant that makes use of the expletive or something, you know? I remember when I had a previous career, I wanted to break into screenwriting in Los Angeles. I put up a Facebook post once saying that I had written a pilot script that was sold to CBS for a new sitcom called Honor Among Steves, and his two brothers named Steve, and one was a criminal and one was a former cop who ran a pizza shop, and all their lifestyles — it was purposefully bad. But also with CBS, it was believable.
And people started commenting. I was like, this is so funny, this is so obviously a joke, people are going to go bananas over this. And everyone kept congratulating me. And over time I realized that everyone thought it was true, and then I had to take it down immediately and apologize. I was like, I’m so sorry, I did not sell a sitcom. I thought it was so clear. But that’s the thing, it’s too close to reality. So anyways, everything should be pun based, whether it’s a sitcom pilot, whether it’s your carbon removal greeting card company, whether it’s a restaurant. So I support that. I think that’s a good reason to start. Was that even the idea before Cara made that joke, or no?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, she made — she was actually thanking somebody and said thanks a ton, and then was like, oh ha ha, I made a climate carbon pun. And then it was her little brainchild and she was like, let’s build a company called Thanks a Ton. And then Laura and I were either foolish or brave enough to be like, yes, that’s what we’re going to do.
Laura Katayama: Literally, it did start from a pun. It really did. We did think about it for about a month before we actually started the company, but we had started with serious conversations right away, and how we could make this a reality.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, we just wanted to inject like fun. I mean, you get this, Ross. For our listeners who might be sick of hearing me talk about memes, but you recruited me to Nori and to do content and stuff with Nori because I was making memes for Thanks a Ton. And it’s because I wanted to put — we all wanted to put humor and joy into the space that’s kind of heavy and complex and can be overwhelming. And we were like, nah, let’s just make a joke about it. And so we always say that we try to take climate change really seriously, but ourselves not that seriously.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great line. Yeah, perfect. I think it makes it much more fun to work in this space. I always think people that do the easiest — the thing you can do on Reversing Climate Change is to come on working on a humorous climate communications project. Because I’m always just like, this is the most important thing that one can do. And I know, because I do it. But I think for climate change — stuff freaks me out a lot. I imagine you, all three of you, I’m sure, feel at points pretty overwhelmed by it. I’ll read a book or an article and think, oh man, we really don’t have a lot of time, and a lot of this is going to be pretty scary, or at least very painful and disorienting at the very least. Probably much worse than that. I think letting people, giving people permission to laugh about it a little bit, even if it’s inside baseball industry jokes, that allows us to —
One of the most deflating and humorous things that we came up with recently is the CDR Math meme that we made, Shiv. We went through a number of pitches. There’s this whole boy math, girl math — that was a dumb format, whatever. But we did, CDR Math is patting ourselves on the back for removing 36 seconds of annual emissions, something like that. And we are such a sideshow. It’s ridiculous. There’s all this posturing and patting ourselves on the back for literally nothing. So it won’t stay that way, and that’s good for the world and good for us. But also, there’s something that’s so fun to remove the arrogance or the grandiosity of an industry that is still yet to be properly born, I think, at least.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I think we agree. I think you said that really well. Tessaria, you want to pitch our climate anxiety cards?
Tessaria Mihangel: Oh, that was actually Laura’s idea.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, so instrumentally used my comments to pitch your own product. OK, let me pull these up too.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, we have a category that’s like climate anxiety cards that we’ve gotten comments on. I’ve had people in AirMiners and many other people say like, oh my God, I love that.
Ross Kenyon: I see them here. I see them under Shop, Digital Cards, Climate Anxiety Cards: World on Fire, Pale Blue Dot. I’m personally a bigger fan of the Arctic Animals collection.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Tessaria, I think he’s keeping us wholesome. Arctic animals? Oh yeah. Also Laura’s idea.
Ross Kenyon: Who made these? I like the sort of 2D element of them.
Tessaria Mihangel: Laura and I collaborated on them. She did most of the work, actually.
Ross Kenyon: Nice. Yeah, those are cute. I dig those.
Laura Katayama: Tessaria put the finishing touches on. Tessaria has a great, great eye for art. I can only do the basic stuff.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Do you want to poke any holes in our idea, Ross? We always welcome that. Or if listeners want to reach out — again, we love feedback, it’s precious and we take it seriously. And if people have any thoughts or ideas or strategies, or if they want to contact us with customers, please. You know, if you work at a company and you’re like, man, I bet the people in my company would love this as a gift for Christmas or whatever, please reach out and let us know.
Ross Kenyon: Any holes to be poked. I think it’s — I don’t know. What kind of margin do you make per card? Are you even comfortable saying that on the air?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Oh, for sure. I’m happy to explain that 60 to 92% of each card goes directly to carbon removal. So the $5 cards, 60% of that’s going to carbon removal, the rest of it’s going to the website basically just to keep stuff running. And then when you buy as much as a ton, 90 to 92% of that will go to carbon removal. So we’re still trying to figure out, like, what do we need to do to get paid. We don’t want to — if we didn’t have to pay ourselves, we wouldn’t. You know, if I didn’t have to pay rent and buy food, I would just do this for free forever. But we have to. But yeah, we’re trying to make this as much about carbon removal as possible.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, 60 to 92%. 8 to 40% goes to you guys. It’s a lot of cards to sell. You’d have to get some, yeah. And a lot of it is not likely to be automatically recurring.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, it’s going after new customers, and that’s tricky. We have to make about 470, or roughly maybe a little bit more than that, sales of at least the $5 to break even, and then anything beyond that we could actually start reinvesting in the company and whatnot. But yeah, so it’s really the bulk that is what we’re after right now, which is why we kind of changed the copy on our website to go after more kind of companies and corporate gifting. But also we, again, love the people that keep coming back for birthday cards. So don’t stop, guys. We love you, you know.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re always welcome to do that too. Yeah, I think that that was a really smart thing to do. One of my colleagues was telling me recently that they didn’t want to get their family physical gifts, and so they did some sort of charitable card, and my colleague’s mother-in-law was talking crap about this trend away from physicality and towards charitable giving. Then received her gift and it was an enormous disaster. But I wonder how — yeah, whatever, she deserved it. She didn’t sound very nice, to be quite honest. But this seems good. I would prefer this in general, I think. You know the whole, like, what’s it called? The death cleaning? Like cleaning your house out so your kids don’t have to. Like, how many company trinkets do you think are found in there? A lot. Wouldn’t you rather that money go towards something that would —
Laura Katayama: Oh my God, bro, I have been cleaning my garage for the last month for just that reason. We’ve collected so much stuff from so many family members and it’s a tough job. And now I’m like, I really don’t need all this stuff. I just don’t want more stuff. It’s too much.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: You were saying that if your kids bring home stuff from school, all you can see is microplastics too. It’s like, oh God, someone made this hideous device.
Laura Katayama: Yeah, and then it just goes in the garage or into a landfill or probably into the ocean. So wouldn’t you rather do something digital?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I like — although it might be fun to do some sort of hybrid approach too. I think I like having stacks of cards that are old that I will go through. So that’s kind of a nice thing, that maybe they could be printed and mailed potentially, although that probably you’d have to go to a drop shipper or something and they would eat into your margin, or you just upsell for it.
Tessaria Mihangel: Yeah, we’ve actually thought about doing seed paper cards. I’m making sure to use local seeds. So I actually know some people who do — I know a lot of people who do gardening in New York City. I’ve talked to them about potentially doing it. It’s a big process to get that going. But I can definitely see us, I guess, breaking into the seed paper market, doing some local cards and keeping the carbon footprint basically zero. By using, you know, locally harvested wildflower seeds, you can make paper out of cardboard and recycled stuff. So there’s definitely a path forward to physicality. We even thought about doing QR codes. Maybe someone else can speak on that, but that’s something we haven’t really put a ton of thought into yet.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: [unclear] if we want to pair. So we were connected with a sustainable wine distributor who thought that it might be cool to pair sustainable wine distribution with, you know, carbon removal as an added bonus, right? Kind of make their company stand out. And so in that case we’re thinking little QR codes that could be tried on the wine bottles, whatever it is. We haven’t built that yet, or that hasn’t come to fruition. But if anybody wants to do that, reach out to us — thanksaton.earth. We have a contact page.
Ross Kenyon: I like the idea of doing something local here too. If you were able to get seed paper and cards — you’re in Brooklyn, I think there’s probably enough density there to have some customer base. Deliver on a bike, or, you know, take the MTA.
Tessaria Mihangel: Absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Are you much of a singer? You could do a little singing telegram upsell.
Tessaria Mihangel: That’s so funny. I did that in high school one time for Valentine’s Day.
Ross Kenyon: Are you a gifted singer? Is that a thing that you —
Tessaria Mihangel: I’m not a singer, I’m a musician. But I did sing for the Valentine’s Day telegrams.
Ross Kenyon: There’s something — I like the idea too, because obviously greeting cards, there’s a fungibility to them. You go to Hallmark, there’s a million of them, but there’s something nice about them being very bespoke, very local. The idea of targeting a really specific market could be fun. That might compensate for some of the volume dynamics that you will face in a bigger market. That could be kind of fun. I’m trying to poke holes, or think about ways to get around some of the number barriers that I’m thinking about.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I don’t know. So far you’re just coming up with good ideas.
Ross Kenyon: I love business ideas, by the way, that go back to a way bygone era. Whenever we have a meeting at Nori for what should we do for customer appreciation — gift baskets, we’ve got to go [unclear].
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Let’s do it.
Ross Kenyon: I love something that’s been kind of out of fashion for a long time.
Laura Katayama: Yeah, well, fun fact, this is sort of a theme that’s been developing in Thanks a Ton. I think it sort of started this way too, like the retro theme. For anyone who doesn’t know, back in the 1980s — when was the last time our atmosphere was at a safe limit of CO2? 350 ppm. Siobhan and I go back and forth, like, was it 1987, 1989? It was roughly in the mid-1980s, around that time. So we do have sort of a 1980s theme going, and definitely we can get back to some of the stuff that was going on back then. I think the world would be a better place, I think.
Ross Kenyon: ’87 to ’89, that’s the era that we’re looking at. What was — yeah, I think classic Macintosh, Sony Walkman, Tetris, Pac-Man.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: When we originally designed Thanks a Ton, we wanted it to be like a vintage, complete vintage aesthetic. And we, you know, moved away from that for various reasons. But I think there’s still a call to this idea of, like, yeah, that’s like vintage 1980s.
Ross Kenyon: The only thing I can think of from that exact moment is Dana Carvey doing George H.W. Bush. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. A thousand points of light, doing that. I don’t know, I grew up watching those old SNL DVDs. But I don’t know, grunge is about to be born. I can’t even think of what else is happening then. I guess alternative music is taking off, new wave is dying, Reagan’s going out.
Laura Katayama: Yeah, end of the Cold War.
Ross Kenyon: End of the Cold War. That’s way better, obviously. I went for comedy rather than music, which is weird because I’m such a history person. Why am I not thinking about that?
Laura Katayama: Sort of, the Singing Revolution is happening.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Cold War is ending. Yeah. OK, cool. Thanks, Laura, for putting me well and truly in my place. Important history.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: So why not? Yeah. So should it be Cold War themed, is what you’re saying?
Ross Kenyon: Oh my gosh. You could do like a Gorby card, and then you could do like a Boris Yeltsin card. Tessaria, are you taking notes? You’re the resident artist.
Tessaria Mihangel: I can’t do that.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I don’t know if we’re ready to go full communist, but —
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, you can. Have you considered a full Socialist Realism vibe for carbon removal cards? Like showing the proud glory of the worker?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: We are going to make one just for you now.
Ross Kenyon: These ideas should earn me equity in your business.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Well, that’s all we have to offer right now. You’re that good.
Ross Kenyon: True. All right. Well, we always say that we should end right after the stupidest question we ask. I’ve just gotten there. I have not yet begun to stupid, Siobhan.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, that’s probably the end. It got too silly.
Ross Kenyon: I should probably have equity in your business.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you for being here, everyone. That was a lot of fun. Thanksaton.earth — the link is in the show notes. Is there anything else you’d like to point people to? Holiday cards?
Tessaria Mihangel: Holiday cards. Yeah. Follow us on LinkedIn. Follow us on TikTok. We’ve been very active on TikTok lately.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s cool. Is it working for you? Have you been able to find your way there?
Tessaria Mihangel: Oh my gosh, it’s such a rough climb. They changed the whole algorithm in the past year and it’s like you have to show TikTok for 90 days straight, two videos a day, like you’re committed to TikTok. So we’re kind of starting to break through now. It’s been like a month and a half. But yeah, it’s been rough so far, but we’re making some traction.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: We’re not active on Twitter anymore and we’re not really active on Facebook. So don’t follow us there.
Ross Kenyon: Are you thinking that — Tessaria, we’re going to un-stupid here, but are you able to identify B2B or B2C potential buyers on TikTok? Is that a good environment for your potential customers?
Laura Katayama: TikTok is potentially an SEO strategy. So if people start — if we can get a link in the bio and people start clicking on us, then when companies are looking for sustainable gifts, we’ll be ranking even higher in the search engine. So that’s sort of the thinking behind that.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: But also just general education and getting people excited about carbon removal, explaining it in a simple way. We all love explaining and talking about carbon removal, and addressing the hard questions even, and being very kind of self-deprecating and honest. We really enjoy doing that. So Tessaria has been crushing it lately. I had my hand at TikTok for a while, but it is exhausting. I’m going to come back on and help you somewhere there. Tessaria, I’m committing on air, you know, on public [unclear], so I have to do it.
Tessaria Mihangel: Let’s go.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve been toying with that idea forever, but heard similar things about the commitment TikTok requires, and also wondering, my God, can I just catch the next thing? But then I already missed Threads, so whatever is the next next thing, I will maybe, maybe, probably not do either. But yeah, I’ll look forward to my portrait as the General Secretary of Carbon Removal.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: So yeah. I think — Tessaria, I didn’t deliver it though.
Ross Kenyon: Don’t, don’t do it. I think I would be too humiliated to accept such a thing. It was really fun having you here. I think what you’re doing is important. I love it. I love all the cool artwork, humor, carbon removal content that’s out there. I think you do it really well, so I’m glad that Thanks a Ton, despite your best efforts, Siobhan, persists, keeps growing, finding customers. If you’re listening and you’re looking for a good gift for your employees or customers or something else that you’d like to show appreciation for, I think this is a really cool way, and also probably puts you in a nice leadership position too, because not a lot of people know about carbon removal right now. It is not a generic thing to offer any of those groups I named. And yeah, thanks everyone.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Thanks for being here. Thank you so much, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
