Since its start in 2013, Honeywrap customers have saved over 20 million metres of plastic wrap ending up in landfill and our oceans.
A small and somewhat battered strawberry-print beeswax wrap sits on the shelf in Honeywrap founder Tara Strahan’s home-office. It’s a cheerful reminder of how the Company first got its start.
“My five-year-old son came home from school with this reusable beeswax wrap he’d made as part of a class project,” says Tara. “I was so impressed by the concept that I invited Jo and Amy over to discuss the potential for turning it into a business.”
Over a glass of wine, Tara and friends, Jo Falloon and Amy DeMuth, agreed to make their own versions and take them to the local markets to sell. The response was amazing and the trio quickly realised that other people were just as passionate about doing something about their plastic usage.
“I think people feel like they are drowning in plastic,” says Jo. “and everyone we spoke to was excited about being able to actually DO something about it, even in a small way,” adds Amy.
Deciding that Honeywrap was going to be made from only organic cotton and natural ingredients was the easy part. “We experimented in the kitchen for months with different recipes and methods. I remember we tripled our production capacity when we bought a large grill off Trade Me” laughs Tara. “But we still struggled to keep up with the demand and regardless of how careful we were, we found making the wraps by hand resulted in too many imperfections.”
Determined to keep quality as high as possible, they took a number-eight-wire approach to the situation – pulling apart an old industrial size laminator and through trial and error, coming up with a way to not only get quality results consistently but to create larger quantities.
