Sustainable Kitchenware: Why Utility and Aesthetics Matter ft. Avishai Greenstein (Bamboozle Home)

Welcome to The Resilience Report. Today we have a truly special guest who’s making waves in the homeware space while redefining what it means to create eco-conscious, functional, and stylish products.

Joining us is Avishai Greenstein (or Avi for short). 

Avi is the innovator behind Bamboozle, the brand that helped composting become an urban household must with its eco-chic countertop bin. 

Before launching Bamboozle in 2016, Avi innovated a new plant-based material that would become the essence of the Bamboozle brand. A repurposed bamboo mold supplemented by melamine, this bamboo fiber became the first ever sustainable and biodegradable plastic that was both cost effective and dishwasher safe. Following Bamboozle’s success using this in their compost bins and dinnerware, Avi continued to pursue more effective solutions to drive the company’s sustainability mission further forward. By mixing bamboo and a 100% plant-based plastic, Avi invented a revolutionary material called Astrik.

Astrik is made from raw material that is grown and harvested, not extracted. It emits a fraction of the greenhouse gases as petroleum-based plastics during the manufacturing process, is dishwasher and microwave safe and is 100% biodegradable in just 2 years. Avi continues to be a leader in his industry by listening to others and honing in on the details that can transform an idea into a reality. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in entrepreneurship and businesses management from Rochester Institute and Technology, as well as a culinary arts degree from Johnson and Whales University.

In today’s episode, we’ll dive into the creation of Astrik and the innovation it represents, explore the inspiration behind Bamboozle’s chic, at-home composting bins, and hear how partnerships with major brands like The Kitchn have expanded the company’s reach. We’ll also uncover the careful balance between durability and eco-friendliness in product design, learn how Avi selects design and manufacturing partners, and get a sneak peek into exciting circularity projects on the horizon.

For our entrepreneurial listeners, this episode is packed with insights—from standing out in a crowded market to pivoting into sustainability and staying resilient in the face of challenges. 

So, let’s jump into this conversation with Avi!

*
[Host: Lauren Scott] For many of us interested in sustainability, especially in the B2C space (so business to consumer) we often feel like we have to choose between something that is environmentally-friendly OR aesthetic. But very rarely do we see companies successfully manage to do both. Which is why I am so excited to have our next guest, who truly has proven that it is possible, and has specifically done so in the kitchenware space. So with that, welcome to the show, Avi! 

[Guest: Avishai Greenstein] Thank you very much for having me.

To start things off: prior to founding Bamboozle, you created a revolutionary material called Astrik. What was the white space that you were trying to fill in creating this material, and what kind of R&D had to go into it?

Sure, Astrik is kind of an evolution of materials that have come before it—materials that we have developed as well. By being out there in the market, we understood what was necessary both for the customer—whether it's a brand, retailer, or even you using it at home—and what we desire the material to become. So, we were always pushing for more usability and more sustainability. The process to make a new material could go as deep as the material science, but we don't have all those capabilities at our fingertips at all times. Our process was iterative and more of an engineering focus. So we took a lot of off-the-shelf parts, basically, for lack of a better word, and combined them to create a composite. Our composite is a mixture of bamboo, PLA, which is a starch-based plastic, and we add a little bit of calcium in order to allow the product to retain heat a little better so we could throw it in dishwashers and things like that.

So, it was really a process of taking those three things, coming up with those three things first of all to make the product that we want, and then taking those three things and first changing the ratios and then perfecting the art of injecting it in the machines. It's all about a little bit of heat adjustment, a little bit of speed adjustment, and doing that over and over again. The big investment is really that you're taking a machine that should be producing thousands of pieces and you're basically taking it completely offline for experimentation purposes. Thankfully, we have unbelievable manufacturing partners that are willing to do that over very long periods of time to get that balance perfect and constantly push for every generation of product to become better and we see an improvement in the performance of the product instead of just a falling off, which you sometimes see when you're trying to scale something from a very small amount to a mass amount.

And then once you had your material what as the process like to create your beautiful (stay with me here listeners!) countertop compost bin? While I have a mini compost bin in my kitchen provided by my city, I will be the first to say that it is a) not that attractive and b) well hidden under by counter. What made you think when you were creating this material, let’s turn this into a chic compost bin?

Yeah, so we actually started mostly in the kitchen and tabletop space. It was actually one of our customers, a customer that has an independent store in Canada, that suggested, 'Hey, you're in the sustainability space, and I know a lot of people who compost. You should make a compost bin.' She had returned to us multiple times with this idea, and eventually, we just said okay, like we're developing a new group of products for another line, let's add a compost bin. Funnily enough, she never purchased this compost bin, which is always the kicker of this story.

But what did end up happening is that we came into the market with a compost bin exactly at the right moment where composting became very popular. Our goal was to look at all the compost bins that are out there and ask, 'Okay, so why do people not put them on their countertop, and what can we do to make sure that people do want to do that?' So of course, the smell, which we have the filter for, the aesthetics, which we've worked on quite a bit in order to make sure that people really are going to proudly display it. It's a conversation piece that I think helps the proliferation of the idea of composting. People come to your house, they see it on the countertop, ask why is your countertop being dominated by this thing, and then you can explain composting to them, and maybe they too will attempt it.

That totally makes sense as well in that people who are composting at home probably actually care about what the bin is made from. And speaking of things that go well together, one partnership that was really important was that you partnered with The Kitchn, and for our listeners who are less familiar with this, that's actually a really big deal because they are the largest independent food site in the US. What was that partnership like, and what did that entail in terms of the development of a line with that them?

Yeah, it was a lot of fun, personally. I'm a big fan of product development, that's my favorite part of the job. We had had already the kind of shapes complete for our line, and they wanted to pick their own colors that would represent them the best. So the process is actually pretty simple, especially when you have a team on the other side that's energetic, has a lot of great ideas, and makes decisions quickly. So we had sent samples over, they had given us a few colors to try, we sampled those colors, and then we went through the process of seeing whether or not the samples we created were worth their while. Luckily, they were. So we actually do this process, we've done this process with a few other people in the past, and it's one of our favorite things because we feel like somebody can put their mark on our product, we can bring our product closer to their customers or users, and they can kind of put their mark on something that's really special and different.

That's really creative and a nice way to have that iterative product development that is not one and done. When you do these different partnerships, you get to see the different outcomes. You did mention at the start too when you're developing the material, the Astrik material, that then went into these products, that you're very thoughtful as to the different pieces, and part of that is making it biodegradable, which I think is really, really fascinating and really important for a lot of our listeners. If, for example, they do have your products or any products, are there important considerations for us as consumers to keep in mind when it comes to the end of life of that product?

Yeah, so biodegradability is a very tricky subject; it's really complex and has a lot of caveats. We try to be as clear as possible with those caveats. We obviously do not want to greenwash; we want to tell people what we are and what we aren't. The situation with biodegradability is that PLA, which is what our product is mainly made from, is biodegradable in particular environments. Now, it is biodegradable in all environments, except for certain environments where nothing is biodegradable, like in a desert, for example, where there are no bacteria to break things down. But in particular, in the right environments, it is biodegradable, and then it's compostable, which means it biodegrades very quickly under a certain amount of time, that's what it needs to be to be considered compostable in industrial settings.

So that means that to properly dispose of the product, you have to find out if your industrial composter in your municipal area will take PLA. We understand that that is very difficult and very annoying to do. That is why we are working on a program of repatriating a lot of the material to us, where we will take care of that final step. So, for now, the advantage is that instead of putting a plastic out there that will last for thousands of years, we're putting a plastic out there that, even in the worst-case scenario where it really doesn't go to the right place, it only lasts a few years. When we finally get to the point where we can request the product back, and we are, there is no huge rush because we're putting this product out there, and we're hoping that people are going to be using this for the next decade. So, at the end of its life, we'll bring it back here, and we will turn it back into soil, and we have a few great plans and ways to do so, but that is the overall picture of what we're trying to do in the long term.

I love that, and I think it really embraces this concept of progress over possibly perfection, and I think that's where so many of us need to operate in terms of sustainability. It's not black and white right now, and thinking forward-looking, how can we do this? 

We are huge proponents of 1% change every year is a much, much more significant improvement than trying to find that silver bullet and saying, 'not good enough, not good enough.' I see that in sustainability. I think we probably lost decades of progress to the attitude of 'not good enough.' It has to be good enough. We have to do something every year that improves, and sometimes those years are going to be quantum leaps forward where we're really, really changing the paradigm, and sometimes those years are going to be, 'I shortened the production chain by x amount of miles, and therefore, I have reduced the carbon that I'm putting into the atmosphere.' You know, both those things are extremely valid and necessary to move forward. I fear that sometimes, and as somebody who's very much in the sustainability space, it sounds very strange to say that I fear that sometimes the regulation around sustainability is forcing us to find the perfect solution and frankly, demotivating enterprises who are trying to find a good solution by saying, 'well, your solution isn't good enough, so might as well not try.' It's creating a lot of kind of doom and gloom instead of a forward momentum, which is what we really need in order to get what we want. 

That totally makes sense, and gets to the root of concerns around paralysis by analysis when it comes to sustainability in business. And so we talked about your product being sustainable as well as aesthetic, but it is also really functional in that it is both microwavable and dishwasher safe. With time being one of our most constrained resources, I really love this. Was this always part of your plan, and what was the process like to ensure that this durability was possible?

Yeah, it truly is actually our guiding star because the way we see it is two ways. First of all, we have to meet the customer where they are. Most people can be, let's say, nerdy about three things in their life and obsessive about three things in their life, and if you're not one of those three things, they're not going to spend the extra money on it, and they're not going to sacrifice pieces of their lives to make it happen. So we have people who are fantastically sustainable in their everyday life, and they will make sacrifices for it, but that is not the majority of the population, and the change has to happen in like the middle 80 to 90% of the population that's really, they want to do something more, they want to do something positive, but if you don't give them the opportunity to do something positive, then, you know, they will just choose whatever is the easiest.

The other thing, and this is really core to our philosophy, is that the most unsustainable thing that you have is the thing that you don't use. So you can get yourself an absolutely beautiful, let's say, wooden bowl from a managed, sustainable forest, fair trade, everything's absolutely perfect about this wooden bowl, and then you use it, and then you realize I have to handwash it, I have to oil it, so you pull it out during the holidays and then you put it in your cupboard, and it just gathers dust. We all have this piece; every single one 

Thanks, Avi. I feel really targeted!

No, no, I am targeting myself; we all have this piece. The question, and it's a tough question to ask, the question is like, why was that tree cut down in the first place? Like, the utility I'm getting from that piece, how much is that utility? So the way we see it is, we want a product that you can use every single day, you can chuck it in the dishwasher, you can drop it on the floor by mistake, you can throw it in the microwave. You know, some people don't use any of those things, but the idea is that we hope that the product will be there every day for you, for thousands of days if you're using it literally every day for thousands of days. While the act of creating something is always, let's say, on the negative sustainability aspect, you know, there's always some cost to creating everything, you are chopping that cost into so much utility that it's worth it. So our job is basically to make sure that cost is as low as possible by using the right materials, the right manufacturing processes, trying to close down the amount of travel the product takes, and on the other aspect, our job is to make sure that you use the material as much as you possibly can. And then the, essentially, the carbon per use cost of the product becomes so infinitesimally low that it was really worthwhile to do.

That makes total sense, especially when you think about it per usage. Earlier you were talking about when you were even doing the testing that you had some great manufacturing partners. In knowing that you have such a beautiful product. How do you go about selecting your manufacturing and design partners? Is that in-house or outsource, what does that look like?

So with manufacturing, we're extremely loyal to a fault. We have a great partner that has helped us develop this material, and they are manufacturers. We are, you know, best friends, as close as possible can be, and we continue to push forward with them, and they understand that they have to bring a better level every time they make a new product, and they have constantly done so. You know, we're so close that it's surprising that we're different companies; it's just that we have very different functions as companies, so we're different companies. The design aspect, what I love to do, and this is kind of goes into like hiring practices as well, is I like to hire for attitude. So what we do is we seek out young, brand-new designers that maybe have a little bit of experience in the houseware space, which is not, you know, there's not that many people that have experience in the houseware space, and we kind of ask them to sketch out their dreams because we are small, and we have the opportunity to kind of do whatever we want, for lack of a better word. We don't have to appeal to the most broad audience possible; we have to kind of inspire the future instead of kind of speak to the past. So what we have done is we bring people in, you know, they design for us, and they really push the envelope of what's possible and what's cool, and we try to be as faithful in our actual adaptation to their original concept. The original compost bin, however, was a little bit different; that was almost a mistake. Like, I did not, so technically, I designed it. I have zero design background. Technically, I was sitting there with a CAD artist who is fantastically talented to put together CADs but not necessarily a designer in their own right, and we were kind of just going back and forth trying different shapes, trying different ideas, looking at inspiration, or mood board, and eventually, we came up with this shape that's not quite, I feel like, no designer would have come up with that shape only because it's not quite contemporary, it's not quite old school, it's probably violates a bunch of rules that if I was educated in this, I would say absolutely not, but we put it together, and you got a really good reception. So it's funny to me that one piece, which is our most popular piece, I'm the author of, which is, I shouldn't have been. 

Who knows? Maybe your next chapter will involve designing all sorts of new products! I am sure that you are involved in so many interesting projects, but are there any specific ones that you have on the go at the moment that you are really excited about?

Yeah, so we had just finished the cycle of as you're working on Astrik essentially now, you know, we have our Astrik products, we make Astrik products for other brands and retailers as well, simultaneously, and Astrik will have a multi-year life of being highly supported, and new products will be coming out in Astrik. We are in the, essentially, it's there's two major projects. 

One is what I was talking about before, which is finding the best possible solution for taking product back and turning it into soil, which we have a few machines that can work for that, and we're hoping that maybe within a few months, we'll be ready to unveil how that works. The other project, and this is truly in its infancy, is basically the next material because we don't stop. The hope with the next material, let's just say the grand vision of the next material, is for it to compete toe-to-toe with certain plastics that are very heavily used in housewares, for example, melamine, which is such a fixture of our lives, it's in everything, but really, it's a very legacy material that shouldn't be in our lives anymore, for a lot of reasons. We're basically gunning for melamine, and the melamine industry is a massive, massive industry. It's about $850 million a year right now and, crazily enough, this 100-year-old plastic is scheduled to grow to 1.5 billion by 2030. So somehow this old, very polluting plastic is doubling in size over the next six or seven years. There has to be a replacement; there has to be something different. And to do that, we have to be able to create a material that scales even farther than what our current material does, is cheaper to make, and frankly, our hope is to also make it here in the United States that both can reduce the cost and also reduce the carbon footprint of the final material. Again, from bio-derived materials, which means that the hope is that you create a material that perfectly fits into that circular economy where we grow them if you could imagine growing the feedstock here in the United States, turning it into raw material, turning it into product, sending it to people here in the United States, and eventually it goes back to into the Earth here too, as well, and creating that perfect cycle. Those are the big hairy goals that we're chasing for over the next five or so years.

Taking on a hundred year legacy industry and turning it into circularity. Sounds like just a really small little project you're working on.

Tiny project! I mean look like we, um, what is it like aim for the stars and burn up the trees if you don't succeed, like it's basically our mantra here. 

Well, super exciting, and I do want to switch gears a little bit too because I'd be remiss not to ask you some entrepreneurial questions. We do have a number of entrepreneurs who tune into the podcast who are either already in the sustainability space or kind of thinking about dipping their toe into it. You have had a lot of traction in getting the word out there about your products. What marketing tactics have you used over the years, and how have you stood out (especially at a time where many are uncertain about the validity of green claims)?

Yeah, so for the first question, discovery is by far the most difficult thing in the modern industry, any industry, sustainability not sustainability, for people to find out where, who you are like, that's something that we still struggle with every single day, especially because there are extremely large companies that have taken up so much of so much market share that there is no real room; it doesn't feel like there's room for you to even exist. 

My suggestion is, first of all, whatever amount of time you think it's going to take to be successful, it's going to be five times more that absolutely, and you should be ready for that. There's this saying that I'm a real big fan of, which is like, 'may we have the resilience to stay with it for long enough but may we be innocent enough to start in the first place.' So you kind have to pretend that it's going to take very little time but in reality, it's going to take a very long time.

And you have to fail small at first, fail cheaply, fail small, be out there with something that's easy for you to put out, and take your time. This is kind of what we had to do, we had to put some products out there, start selling them slowly, we're completely self-funded, we have not taken any money from anybody else yet, and we essentially have to trade our way to where we are today, and that takes a long time. That took us eight years, and look, we're eight years in, and I would guess that most of your listeners have not heard of us before, so that just shows you how long this takes. Of course, you can take a large investment and plaster yourself over, you know, in every media feed and everything that you can possibly do, but you can get lucky and hit the traction point during that time, or you can have spent all that money and not gotten anything on the other end. We believe slow, organic growth. In our industry specifically, when you're talking about housewares, there are no companies in housewares that are really, really popular, that are not at least decades old if not centuries old. This is a long-term industry where you kind of people know your brand because they ate off of that brand when they were kids, so then they grow up and eat off of that brand. 

This is why we do sustainability in this because we believe that if we can kind of invade the heart of your home with a sustainable product, we're teaching you that this could be like the basis of your life from this point on like you have a very intimate relationship. You don't think about them too much but you have an extremely intimate relationship with your plates, with your bowls, with the things that you touch every day, and you use over and over again, and if you grow to trust the ability that a sustainable product will carry your life, will feed you, will nourish you, basically then over long periods of time.

The transition will occur and sustainability is complicated and the world frankly is not you not ready for it yet. It is people like us are talking about it, people who are like listen to this podcast think about it and talk about it but the average person wants to do the right thing but is not seeking it out per se so it's about taking a really long view having a really clear big goal very far out and asking every day what do I need to do to a get to that goal. And keep myself sane while going to that goal because that sanity aspect is everything which is sanity is just like getting small victories and setting small victories for yourself to get and not getting too bogged down by the enormity of the challenge of what we're trying to achieve. 

And can you remind me what the second question was?

Of course. It was more around how you have woven in the consideration of greenwashing considerations when you are messaging, and you are trying to be mindful of consumer concerns. The reality is that many of us as consumers are uncertain as to what we can trust when we are out there shopping for products. 

Yeah, so greenwashing is obviously a problem; it's a strange problem because I don't know why somebody would do it, to be honest, because I feel like the highly active sustainability community is one, so critical, and two, is not big enough for you know, somebody to push to completely change their attitude. I can understand maybe in the investment circles, you know, you want to check some boxes, so you'll create that image, but for the consumer, in fact, I was watching one of your podcasts, and I believe you're talking about the concept of, was it green hiding? 

Green hushing.

Yeah, green hushing. I feel that's what I do more so, like the way I see it, like we were talking about the utility, the utility is for the customer, the sustainability is actually for me so I can sleep at night, so I can know that I'm doing the right thing in the long term. I know that the average person is going to pick up my product and look at it and say, 'oh, this is something that I want,' and then maybe when they get home and they read the back of the box and they realize they just bought something sustainable, then they'll feel very good about themselves, they had made a good choice without even knowing that they had made a good choice. But in terms of how do we, us who care, look into it, it comes down to research, comes down to research and what institutions you trust. There are all kinds of good marks and certifications that you can take a look at, some of them, you know, you have to kind of go a little bit deep to understand what actually it takes to get that certification because occasionally those certifications, I'm not throwing shade on anybody today, some of those certifications are legitimately just like pay us and we'll make sure that you get it, and some of them are very scientific, and the ones that are scientific that are done through, um, third-party laboratories, for example, biodegradability claims, that's or compostability claims, those are scientific things, those are, you cannot fake them. I mean, I guess you can forge a document, but in reality, like if you go, you can always, if somebody shares their documents with you, which we're happy to do so, for example, if somebody asks us for our documents, we do so, we send them to them. If somebody takes that document and goes to that third party, you can say, 'Hey, I have document number this, is this a true document?' You can actually do that yourself, not everybody has the time or care to do that themselves, but because that layer exists, we can kind of stay honest.

That's really helpful, and I do want to come back to the quote, I'm going to have to look up the official quote that you're talking about, but the “ Innocence to get started” and if we do have entrepreneurs who are thinking of getting started in the sustainability space, do you have any recommendations for that transition of getting started and getting it off the ground?

Commit, commit, commit, commit, that's a piece of advice that I try to follow myself, unsuccessfully sometimes, but that's a piece of advice that carries you through your entire entrepreneurial journey. Do all your research, you know, we live in a very research-full time because we have the internet, we can go out and try to gather as much data as humanly possible. In fact, because of that, we have probably lost a lot of this intuition concept that I think people in the past have had had to have, sometimes you just didn't have the research, it didn't, it wasn't within your reach to find that research, you do not have the money to pay a consultancy to get you that research, you just had to make a gut check. So we have all this research, and we probably have more research than we've ever had in the history of humankind to be able to make a decision, and then we don't make a decision, we don't make a decision because we're doubting ourselves. The question is by saying I'm going to do that decision in two weeks, or 3 weeks, or four months from now, is that actually going to be better, like am I going to make a better decision 3 weeks from now? 

If you are really confident, if you have read everything that has to be read about what you're doing, or at least anything that you have access to, then you have to make the decision and you have to get going. That applies when you're starting for the first time and that also applies when you are sitting there with maybe in a cash flow crunch and you're wondering should I invest in a new mold, or should I invest in this type of marketing, or should I, you know, do this kind of sampling, or try another type of product. If you have done all the work that you've done, delaying your decision by a few weeks, a month, two months, a year is a mistake, it's a mistake, and sometimes that decision will be a mistake, but you have to stick to it, you will make a ton of mistakes, there's no doubt about it. You know, for every successful product there's a thousand, a thousand failures in that company that have led to that successful product. So, commit, fail, commit again, fail, commit again, finally get something that you want out of it. Being able to do that constantly is, I believe, what allows the like the “stick-to-itiveness” that creates successful long-term companies. 

I think this, we all kind of idolize the fast mover, the person who kicked the door down, made it into the market, and somehow within two years turned a massive profit, one I think 90% of those stories are actually somebody who's been going at it for 10 years and you just knew about them in the last 2 years, and there is a small percentage of people who just got lucky because there is an aspect of luck. We are rolling the die every single year, is it a good year, is it a bad year, is it my year, is it not my year, and your goal as an entrepreneur should be to roll those that dice as much as possible, like how long can you survive to keep rolling that dice because how many products are there that seem like a of course we need this product it makes perfect sense, but they had been selling that product for decades prior to that and nobody cared because every product has its time, has its place, certain retailers have to be in alignment, there's just so many factors that have to be in alignment, and you need to make it to that to your year basically and to do that I'd say start small, take baby steps, and just go confidently. 

It gives all of us a lot to think about, and your experience definitely shines through. One element of your experience too and just you're mentioning it before that even if it's not necessarily the number one reason why your customers are buying your products, it could be, but that sustainability element is so important to you, has that always been the case, or was there a point in your career when you started caring about it?

For a long time, I've been caring about it. I started caring, I remember the moment that I started caring about sustainability, I had just started driving, um, this was, what is this now, almost 25 years ago, I had started driving, and it was right around the early 2000s where gas went from a dollar to $3, like it's been a dollar for like six decades, and then it's $3 somehow, and you know, it affects you because you're, it just started driving. And I started asking questions, it kind of like shook me awake to ask questions, where is this coming from, why are we using this, how does this improve, you know. So I went into the very much through the mentality of energy, can there be an, like what's the deal, why are there no electric cars like gas is expensive, and but electricity is still cheap, like you start you start asking yourself these questions. So that's, you know, focused me down on to thinking about it.

Even the opportunity to work in this particular space was something that I would have never assumed that I was going to be doing, but once you know it was basically come work for a housewares company, I said well I don't want to make plastic stuff like I've been thinking about the sustainability for a long time, and at that point, they had already been working on the materials, and I was saying to myself okay so if I'm ever going to work in sustainability this is my opportunity to work in sustainability which is why I'm here. It's really this like just leaving myself open for random evolutions that has allowed me to be where I am.

Indeed been remarkable. Part of this has included your academic background with both a degree in entrepreneurship and business management, as well as a culinary arts degree. How do these worlds come together in your day to day work?

So, culinary was an interesting diversion it happened during the 08 recession. I had actually, when I was in college, I started a company - it was a database IT services company that specialized in a very specific field. It was basically an internship that turned into a company, because they needed what I what we were doing past the time when I went back to school so I just hired my friends and we did it so like the entrepreneurial drive has like always been there. And then, in 08, like everything kind of went out. I mean all of us who are old enough to remember it don't want to think about it at this point it was crazy. Like Covid makes' 08 seem like a walk in the park, but in it, it was really bad. So it was a really question of what can I do with myself, how do I move forward, how do I do something with my day? 

I've always been interested in cooking but I went and did a 9-month course at culinary school which is basically like, if you had already done the normal education, like at another college you can just do just the culinary stuff which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it and I went into the culinary world and the culinary world is crazy. It's crazy; it's very difficult and I had stayed in the culinary world for 6 years until I joined here. Has it informed me? I mean I work in houseware so I kind of think about what do we do in the kitchen quite a lot so that helps. So it does help inform things but during the time where I was in the culinary world the questions around sustainability became extremely important. The Farm to Table movement happened while I was in culinary school, so you know the thought process, the conversations we were having there were very much focused around the idea of “okay how do we evolve this industry into something that has some stewardship towards the environment?”  So it's really work to reinforce my will to find better ways to do things.

The culinary world and entrepreneurship: I don’t think you could have chosen more stressful areas! In terms of being an entrepreneur and managing a team, it is not always the easiest path. Do you have any tools in your toolkit that allow you to keep on coming back to the work?

Yeah this is a very like a “know thyself” kind of thing. You need to know what truly makes you happy and organize your life to be able to provide that for you, whether it's family or some type of entertainment or sports or whatever it is. You have to know what it is that makes you really happy; not like I have to do it happy. Because there are the things that seem really fun but you're not you're just doing them because they seem fun not because they're actually like for you they don't nourish you need to have that.

And you have to keep the rest of your life so extremely stable, because there's this myth that like entrepreneurs are unstable people because it's kind of like you have to be - there's so many ups and downs, so much craziness. That infiltrates into the life around you. My thought processes is that, whether you're stable or not, your life at the office is going to be unstable because just the nature of not knowing if you're going to last another week another month another two months. So, the rest of your life needs to just be so super grounded, frankly so boring. I'm not kidding! Like it has to be boring: that keeps you happy, keeps you ready to come back. 

And then you need to love the work environment that you're in. You, as an entrepreneur, as you build a team, you get to make these essential decisions: who do I get to work with? When you're in the corporate world, you don't get that choice, so you get some characters you're going to love and some characters you're going to despise. If you hire somebody that you're not going to be happy with, what are you doing? Why would you do that to yourself? You should aim for never having the “Sunday scaries”, you should aim to always want to work excited to go to on Monday, see the people that you made the decision to bring in. Enjoy the company with them when you're having that meeting, have that random chat that you have before the meeting, you know really chilled out into the day and be excited to conquer whatever challenges have, horrifying challenges have popped up over the weekend that you somehow have to deal with now. So, it's like you're - for the lack of a better analogy  - when you're an entrepreneur, you're at war with the world, you're trying to stake out your claim and you need to have a squad with you that you trust and love frankly. And if you don't have that, it's going to be impossible to fill your cup because it's going to be drained constantly and there's no way that you can even keep the water level stable for long enough to fill it up. It will just be like there's no bottom.

You're given us a lot to think about here! I just appreciate you joining so much and sharing not just about your work but all of that experience. If our listeners would like to learn more about Bamboozle and the Astrik material, where would you recommend that they check out?

They can always come to our website Bamboozlehome.com in that you can see our products you can see our material. We explain it very thoroughly, we have a great Q&A. As well as a Blog that kind of goes into why we do what we do and some sustainable living tips as well. We try to give as much education as possible on our own website.

And we always like to end every episode with the following question, which is: what do you think it will take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward?

To be resilient… wow that's the toughest question you've asked me! I think to be tried and to rise to the occasion and then continually doing so every single day. I mean, I guess that's just the definition of resilience, but I think that resilience is something that's you could say taught but really earned. Like I know I earned my resilience: I think people tried to teach it to me but really I didn't get it until I was I was beaten down essentially. Hard times make strong people and I think that right now we're living in a very difficult time - it's not comfortable that's for sure. I mean we are comfortable but it's also not comfortable and this is the moment in which we can really prove to ourselves that we can be resilient. And if companies and leaders make the decision that they're going to even try, they'll become more resilient.

Thank you so much Avi. I can't think of a better way to end the episode so thank you so much for joining us today.

It's an absolute pleasure, thank you so much.