Conversations with our hotel client have been really positive in the last few weeks. Right now, we’re looking at doing another single-use hotel pilot with one of their locations for a 12-month contract.

This will be a part of the hotel’s much bigger sustainable vision. And the good news is they should know if they’ll deploy this to all their properties soon after it starts.

The biggest challenge for us now is finding the cash to pre-pay for a year’s worth of packaging from overseas. The minimum quantities that we need to get to a reasonable price point is 20,000 units of each design. That’s 80,000 units of sitting inventory.

At least by doing just one hotel and not all of them at the beginning allows my soap maker and I to figure out how to scale productions and packaging with a smaller order. It’s obviously a bigger risk to an investor or bank if I ask for $500,000 for machines and packaging rather than just $50,000. So, this is very doable.

If we do get the larger contract, my plans right now are to spin-off Harvestcare as a new company and bring my soap maker on as a business partner to run our operations. This is exactly the incubator model I had in mind when I started The Refoundry. So, it would be great to get this first fruitful idea out there fully.

In the meantime, there’s a lot to do for this single-use hotel pilot including a decision about whether or not the hotel uses our State Circle brand or our consumer Harvestcare brand. If they choose the Harvestcare branding, it would be like free marketing for our consumer-size products. So, I really hope they choose that one as we’ll definitely sell more overall.