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On the website of Cathy's Crawly Composters is a cartoon titled "Getting Into Heaven in the 21st Century.
In it, St. Peter is querying a would-be entrant on his recycling habits. Did he recycle: "absolutely." How about composting? Well he lived in an apartment. Well what about using composting worms? Well he didn't have a balcony. What about your living room, asks St. Pete. "Worms in my living room? For Pete's sake!" answers our hero—before realizing he's doomed.
Humour helps when you're selling a product with a "yuck" factor as high as a pound of worms, says Cathy Nesbitt, whose Bradford, Ont.-based company has been selling "mail-order" composting worms since 2002 to apartment and condo dwellers as far a field as California. As does educating the public about how incredible worms actually are — and what they can accomplish with kitchen scraps. A pound of worms and their descendents — yes, they have sex, but smartly won't reproduce if there's not enough food — can transform a ton of waste a year into rich fertilizer. And that's handy since that's how much organic waste the average family produces a year, notes Nesbitt.
In fact, the new environmentalism has created an opening for entrepreneurs to capitalize on products people wouldn't normally want in their home — especially in their kitchen, where Nesbitt suggests the worms should live during cold months. At the same time the movement has also made people more open to natural — albeit messier — methods of garbage disposal.
For Nesbitt, then, the key to marketing her worms has been to explain the environmental benefits to recycling kitchen scraps into fertilizer that can then be used on gardens or house plants, and to make worms more acceptable—or "loveable," as she says, when she's trying to beak down people's natural aversions to the creepy creatures.
"Do you know worms have five hearts?" she asks potential customers. With that, they visibly soften, she says, noting: "My role is to make worms more acceptable."
To do that — and market the worms environmental achievements — she's gladly taken on the moniker "Worm Lady," carting her worms, and the bins and "bedding" they live in, to schools (9,500 students have watched her presentation), birthday parties, environmental and farmers fairs, and television and radio shows.
In the process, she's educating potential customers, not just about worms, but about environmental responsibility. "Worms, who 'walked' the earth with dinosaurs, have been waiting millions of years to serve their purpose — which is to clean up our mess," she says.
That consistency of message — it's all about the environment — is important when you're selling products people would normally have an aversion to, says Becky Reuber, who teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "You want your labels to look environmentally good (Nesbitt's environmentally worm reinforce her "green" message by being coloured green, as is her company T-shirt) and your packaging to be as environmentally conscious as you can," says Reuber. "You want people to feel good."
You also don't want them to associate "ick" with your product, she says — which can be challenging when your selling worms. "You don't want them to think they're bringing germs or toxins into their house," she says. "You want them to see a consistent, clean image. You want them to embrace it."
That's something Nesbitt literally does, lifting out her worms to get kids in schools and adults, who buzz around her booth at environmental and farm shows, past their aversion and, instead, into a sense of amazement of what these worms — not just any worms — can do.
Out of the 6,000 species of worms on earth, red wigglers — Nesbitt's babies — are the "perfect composting or recycling worm." That's because they're top feeders — they don't burrow like earthworms — and eat food scraps, which earthworms won't.
Nesbitt isn't the only Canadian entrepreneur to capitalize on the new "glam" factor of worms, or other unmentionables. Like Nesbitt, former Torontonian Tom Szaky was amazed at what red wigglers could accomplish, but in his case he focused on selling the worm's "casings"— or poop as he openly calls it — by putting his own red wigglers to work on garbage he's paid to recycle, then selling the worm's waste as liquid plant food under his now infamous product line TerraCycle (www.terracycle.org), marketed out of Trenton, N.J. (He was a student at Princeton University, in New Jersey, when he came up with the idea.) Sales last year were reportedly US$1.5 million, and Szaky is aiming for US$6 million this year.
Szaky has successfully kept his message "consistent," says Reuber, by ensuring his entire production process is environmentally sound. TerraCycle plant foods are sold in recycled soda bottles, and shipped in boxes rejected by other manufacturers.
That, plus the incredible growth results achieved with Terracycle, helps Szaky brand and sell his product —fertilizer.
But how do you "brand" worms?
Nesbitt, whose own company has grown from zero to supporting her and her husband fulltime as well as another part time staff member — with sales of kits of worms, bins and bedding for $74.95 a half pound or $89.95 a full pound, or just worms at $25 or $45, to 1,400 customers — believes it's the connection people who recycle with worms make not only with what they're achieving for the environmental movement, but in how their perception of worms changes when they begin to see what incredible natural recyclers they are.
In short, the "brand" is about feeling as good about what you're doing for the environment as you are about what the worms are accomplishing.
Red wigglers, for example, could create clean fertilizers from city "sludge," even, eventually, cleaning heavy metals from the waste. And Nesbitt's latest venture is selling her worms to horse farms and city dog owners, alike, who use the worms to "eat" dog poo and horse manure. "My worms are lively, healthy, and ready to eat copious amounts of organic waste," she says proudly. They can "reduce manure piles by 80 per cent."
And if you can sell that, perhaps you can sell anything.
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