Eco Flowers Dilemma

Have you heard of the tv show Shark Tank? It's like Dragons' Den, basically a group of self made investors look for new businesses to invest in and then business owners come and present their products or services to convince the investors to get them to invest. I love watching Shark Tank, I love the investors and how they became so successful. I watched a lot of episodes and most of the businesses do not prioritize sustainability or they don't even mention about it while pitching. However there was this one company that claimed to be sustainable and it's Eco Flower.

On her pitch, the owner of Eco Flower presented the company as being very sustainable, they offer flowers made from recycled materials and they are so pretty. She talked about how people are sick and tired of receiving and buying flowers that go to the garbage for every occasion so she wanted to create flowers from recycled plastic. That's awesome, good for her.


But after she pitched her business, two sharks said that they would prefer receiving real flowers and find them more thoughtful than fake flowers. In my opinion, I don't have a preference, I don't really mind my boyfriend buying fake or real flowers for me, I think both are thoughtful gifts an it is nice to have an alternative made from recycled materials that would reduce the waste. But then I thought, wait what?

This woman created a sustainable product that is supposed to be an alternative to an already 100% compostable products that are flowers. Flowers die and they mix in with soil. A recycled  bouquet of fake flowers won't. After all, fake flowers will eventually end up in landfills. It is a good idea to take waste and do something with it, but why not produce something that can be an alternative to an unsustainable product? For example, use recycled materials to make plastic containers instead of using new materials. But when it comes to flowers? They're already compostable and not harmful for the environment.

Adding Eco in front of your brand's name is a big deal and in my opinion it comes with a lot of responsibilities. In my opinion, it's too big of a claim for this flower company.

I can see this company has good intentions but to me it has no point. It was still nice to hear a sustainability conversation at my favorite tv show Shark Tank. What do you think?

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