Bubble Wrap for Little Feet

In this article, we interview Nicholas De Luca:, the founder and CEO of LIttle Feet Packaging in Monterey CA.  Their first product is biodegradable bubble wrap called “Pubble Paper”. 

Each year, we use enough plastic bubble wrap to go around the Earth 250 times.

SCWorks: Welcome, Nicholas. What is your background?

Nicholas De Luca: I got started in packaging a long time ago when I was a student at MIT and was very involved in air packaging to replace plastic polystyrene peanuts. A lot of those bubbles of air that you get now – we built some of the very first, very high speed machines to produce them and founded a company called Novus Packaging.  Later I was involved in a packaging company called Sealed Air Corporation.  

SCWorks: How did you come up with the name “Little Feet” for your company?

Nicholas De Luca: Little Feet Packaging is really about protecting the future of the little feet that are in our lives today. I have five kids. As I watched them grow, I see the impact of trash grow. I have no memory of as a kid of going down the highway and seeing plastic littering the sides of the street. It was just not part of my life. Our trash footprint over the last 40 years has sadly increased. It's time that we fix that problem. Anything we can do today to help reduce the trash impact helps those little feet in the future.

SCWorks: Wonderful! Tell us about the company. 

Nicholas De Luca: Our signature product is Pubble, a replacement for polyethylene bubble wrap. There were several driving factors in developing the product. First, primarily and foremost we are trying to make a dent, no matter how small, on the use of a single-time plastic in packaging. Almost all of the approximately 65 million tons of single-time plastic used in packaging – all goes to landfill. If you were figure out how much bubble wrap is used each year and equate that to a twelve inch wide strip it would go around the earth about 250 times every year. That means plastic is ending up in our oceans or on our lands and even in the air we breathe as micro plastics. So there is a real focus on trying to replace that market segment with something that is recyclable, that can be made from recyclable materials, that is paper, and that is compostable. 

Second, the worldwide market for bubble wrap is about $3 billion per year. A worthy business proposition.

SCWorks: How long have you been in business? And what are some of the challenges you've had?

Nicholas De Luca: We've been doing this for about two years. We started selling at a very small local store with small ten foot rolls of Pubble next to the plastic and people very much were buying it, using it, and it was safely protecting their products for shipment. So then we took the next step: I delivered the product to numerous stores, sometimes while holding my son. Finally I got a company in San Francisco to handle distribution while we built the equipment required to scale manufacturing. With our current equipment, we are able to deliver up to 5000 miles of product - still a long way from going around the earth but our systems and quality procedures maintain the quality over eventual larger runs.

We're a small team, we've got about five people involved on the team but we have an amazing group of advisors as well.

SCWorks: How are you funded?

Nicholas De Luca: I funded the organization at the beginning. We had one key angel investor who came in about six months ago. We are now starting a SAFE round for $1.5M. We are very close to securing our first angel on that and hopefully a couple others in the next coming days.

SCWorks: What can you say about the people who are investing in you? 

Nicholas De Luca: Our investors fundamentally are really committed to the cause of reducing the amount of plastic, especially the single-time plastic. There is also a focus on the bottom line – this will not be successful if it's a charity. Our investors need to see very healthy profit margins, systems that are scalable, and a strong capable and committed team.

SCWorks: How will you scale?

Nicholas De Luca: There are various market segments for the product. One is on the retail shelf. For B2B businesses, there are lining envelopes with the product or making thermal protective packages to replace polystyrene. We have a patented system for making the product, which involves basically a separation between the creation of the core material, the core paper based material using a patented die cut system that creates the bubble, then placing in compostable and recyclable adhesive within the paper, and finally taking that compact unit and shipping it. We can do this in two steps that allows us to transport a compact roll to an end customer or deliver it to a certain geographic area and then create the volume at the customer site or in an area – thus reducing shipping costs. 

SCWorks: Future products?

Nicholas De Luca: We are working on on-demand units for large e-commerce facilities and mom and pop store packaging facilities.