Marcus Richards
At S’wheat our core mission is to restore our natural environment. That’s why we created the S’wheat bottle, the world’s most eco-friendly reusable bottle.
We’re driven to help individuals, businesses and organisations make positive environmental and ethical choices.
As a certified social enterprise, we use our profits to support our 3 key impact pillars: Trackable Tree Planting, Ocean Restoration and Social Good Projects.
Tell us about yourself?
My background isn’t very relevant to what I do now, I went to university to study sociology and psychology, however when I was there I started to notice more and more frequently that my classmates were always getting new bottles, even though they were meant to be reusable, my co-founder Amee had also noticed the quick waste that was happening from reusable bottles being thrown out because they were hard to clean, or easily breakable.
So we got thinking, what if there is a new way to tackle this problem and keep plastic out of the picture? This started our research journey and what eventually turned into the S’wheat bottle.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
If I could go back a year or two, I would tell myself to seek out mentoring within the early stages and find likeminded individuals to help you learn and grow. Networking is incredibly important for business and to find good mentors and people that are happy to help you learn is priceless.
What problem does your business solve?
Our business tackles the large issues of climate change, we aim to stop plastic through the use of our plant material, restore forests and support restoration projects and protect our oceans and sealife.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We started S’wheat in 2018 with a mission to reduce the world’s single use plastic bottle pollution.
We wanted to create an innovative reusable bottle that was designed with sustainability and practicality in mind, something that is useful and long lasting, but won’t harm our planet.
What is your magic sauce?
How we differ from the competition is through our unique material and mission. We have spend years researching to ensure we create a product that is high quality and will positively impact the planet.
Our mission is very dear to us at S’wheat, we want to restore the ecosystems that have already seen so much damage, clear plastics from our oceans and replace the need for single use plastic.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Over the coming years, we are focused on growing our social impact by working with more organisations to reduce their plastic use and waste, to plant many more trees and participate in further restoration projects.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The biggest challenge so far I would say has been funding, to start the business it took two years to gather enough funds to pay for everything that starting a business involves.
We started from a pre-sale crowd funder campaign back in 2019 which thankfully allowed us to produce our very first production run. Securing funding can definitely be tough, but there are organisations out there to help you make your way.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We would love to hear from any large organisations looking to reduce plastic waste by switching to our S’wheat bottles which can be co-branded.
Any company looking for a sustainable branded gift that comes with positive environmental impacts should reach out, we have a co-branding section on our website where you can enquire; https://www.swheatbottle.com/pages/co-branded
