Seattle entrepreneurs are saving forests one square of toilet paper at a time

A pair of Seattle entrepreneurs are doing their part to save forests with a creative alternative to typical toilet paper.

“We make a line of tree free, 100% bamboo, sustainable paper products, right now being toilet paper and paper towels,” Cloud Paper co-founder Ryan Fritsch told KIRO Newsradio.

When he and Austin Watkins — both University of Washington grads who got their start in “Seattle tech” — decided to build their own company, they wanted to make a difference, and determined that toilet paper needed changing.

“Toilet paper was invented just about 100, 150 years ago, and we’ve been cutting down trees ever since,” Fritsch described.

They looked for a more sustainable option, and bamboo was the answer.

“Bamboo is actually a grass,” he noted. “Some people, especially here in the Northwest, kind of consider it a weed, because it does grow very quickly.”

Much faster than your average tree, which is an advantage.

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“In terms of harvesting bamboo for products like toilet paper and paper towels, bamboo grows to harvest maturity about 20 times faster than trees do,” he described.

In addition to bamboo being a quickly regenerating resource, “in order to fuel that rapid growth, it sucks up a lot of carbon and releases a lot of oxygen, more so than any other plant.”

Fritsch says they offset the transportation cost of importing bamboo from Asia by funding programs that plant new trees. Even the packaging is made of recyclable and compostable material.

But if you really want to wipe out the competition, you need more than good intentions.

“It needed to be a high-quality product,” he clarified, which, he says, it is.

Plenty of people found out just how quality Cloud Paper’s products are during what Fritsch calls the ‘TP craze of 2020,” where people bought up toilet paper in bulk in the early months of the pandemic.

When they started the business in 2019, they planned to sell products to restaurants and hotels.

“When the pandemic hit and all those businesses shut down and everyone wanted toilet paper and other essentials delivered to home, we pivoted the entire company — literally in hours, or days — into this kind of direct-to-consumer model that you see now, where we actually pack and ship smaller quantity boxes directly to folks’ homes,” he recalled.

And business, he says, is still on a roll.

“The vast majority of people that came across Cloud Paper during the TP craze are still actively subscribing,” he said.

The company has also caught the eye of some high-profile investors, including Jeff Bezos’ company, Bezos Expeditions.

Flush with cash, Cloud Paper is hoping to expand.

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