From eco-friendly to money in the bank, Marlies Bron on turning her passion into a business
BLAIRGOWRIE – Marlies Bron is the founder and owner of The Unwrapped Co., an online zero-waste store. With a baby on the way, she shares how she runs her passion project as a business.
Marlies Bron bounces into the eclectic café with an ebullience.
With a bundle-of-joy to-be in tow, she settled into a bright pink chair with a sigh of relief. Bron is the founder and owner of The Unwrapped Co., a sustainable lifestyle online store which sells zero-waste products.
“At the end of the day, driving around to get things which are waste-free was actually causing excess waste… it’s just the impracticality of it and my friends were like ‘if you’ve got such a problem with it, why don’t you start something’, ” Bron said, recollecting the sequence of events which inspired her to start her zero-waste store, making her personal journey more accessible to all.
The Unwrapped Co. opened in November of last year for non-food products, with foods introduced early this year. Bron finds inspiration from the Facebook Group, Zero Waste Journey in Southern Africa, as well as author Bea Johnson’s 5 R’s to a zero-waste lifestyle.
Born in Holland, Bron has lived all over the world and chose to settle in South Africa after meeting her husband. The pair have three children, their boy just born. Bron does most of her work after her children have been put to bed at 7pm. “I genuinely love what I do and when I started, I never thought that I would end up being a business.”
Bron draws inspiration from this quote by zero-waste chef Anne Marie Bonneau, “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero-waste perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly,” and admits that she ‘still has a lot to learn’ herself, and that nobody can ever be perfect.
Have a look at The Unwrapped Co.’s catalogue online and on Instagram at @unwrapped_co and take your first steps towards a zero-waste lifestyle.
Separate Information Box for Bea Johnson’s 5 R’s for a zero-waste home:
- Refuse what you do not need
- Reduce what you do need
- Reuse by using reusables
- Recycle what you cannot
- Refuse, reduce or reuse
- Rot (compost) the rest
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