Building Banish: How Lottie Dalziel turned a New Years resolution into a sustainability startup

Download The Business Of podcast today on your favourite podcast platform.

Lottie Dalziel launched Banish in 2018. What started as an e-commerce marketplace for sustainable products has evolved into a business that’s centred on education and recycling initiatives

About the episode

In 2018, Lottie Dalziel scribbled down a New Year's resolution: Do better for the planet. Unlike most of us, she actually followed through.

Frustrated by the lack of practical and authentic eco-friendly products on the market, Lottie decided she’d take matters into her own hands. While most startups take years to refine their product, test the market, and strategise their launch, Lottie built 'Banish' – a marketplace and education platform focused on environmental responsibility – in just two weeks.

Her secret? A low-risk, cost-effective approach and a willingness to let her customers' feedback shape the start-up. This is how she turned a gap in the market into an expanding business.

This episode is hosted by Dr Juliet Bourke, with insights from Professor Barney Tan.

Want to know more? 

For the latest news and research from UNSW Business School and AGSM @ UNSW Business School, subscribe to our industry stories at BusinessThink and follow us on LinkedIn: UNSW Business School and AGSM @ UNSW Business School.

Transcript

Dr Juliet Bourke: In January 2018, 24-year-old journalist Lottie Danziel sat down and wrote a list of New Year's resolutions. There were the usual items; fitness goals, more travel, learning a language – but there was one particular item that stood out.

Lottie Dalziel: It was to do better for the planet. It was a time when we were starting to see those news headlines pop up, the things like, "there'll be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050" or that "we've seen a drastic increase in the number of animals that are going extinct". I'd read them and I'd feel really disheartened, and there was no one out there saying "here's what you can do about it". So I thought, why not create a platform that teaches people how to live more sustainably, but also connects them with brands and businesses in Australia that are doing the right thing when it comes to sustainability?

Dr Juliet Bourke: I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Management and Governance in the Business School at the University of New South Wales. This is The Business Of, a podcast that helps you stay on top of cutting-edge research and trends across the world of business.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Growing a business from idea to income is something every entrepreneur grapples with, and for Lottie Dalziel, it all started with a straw.

Lottie Dalziel: I was going to have a smoothie, and in that smoothie at home, I was going to put it in a single use plastic straw, so you can put two and two together and go, Well, I know, isn't great for the planet, so I just did a simple Google search which was best sustainable straw, and hundreds of thousands of results came back. There were so many different options out there. There were wheat straws, stainless steel straws, silicon straws, bamboo straws, glass straws, all of these different options, and it was really confusing and really hard to know what was the best one for me. Because I was a journalist, I loved doing the research, and I loved doing in-depth dives into everything. So I did full life cycle assessments of everything, tried to figure out what the best one for me was. Eventually, I figured out that a stainless steel straw was going to be the right one for me. I ordered a set of five from an online, what I thought was a sustainable business.  They arrived a couple of days later, individually wrapped in plastic. So I just spent all of this time, all of this effort. I've spent my money thinking that I was supporting an organisation that was doing the right thing. In actual fact, I'd been completely, what we would call green-washed

Dr Juliet Bourke: That must have been really disappointing.

Lottie Dalziel: It made me feel really disheartened, really honestly pissed off, and like there was no point in even trying. But I didn't really let myself sit in that despair for too long, because I went, Well hang on, I can actually see an opportunity here, an opportunity to teach people, because the everyday person is not going to do the amount of research that I did, but also to connect people with brands and businesses that were doing the right thing for the planet. Because when I was making other sustainable switches in my life, I was finding people who were hand knitting their own dishcloths from cotton, or I was finding people that were making cleaning products in small batches with organic ingredients, all of these great small businesses. But one thing that I noticed was a common theme with them all, is that they didn't know how to market themselves to large audiences. They were so focused on creating these products and creating amazing products, which is great, but they didn't know how to get out there to people. So I thought, why not create a platform that teaches people how to live more sustainably, but also connects them with brands and businesses in Australia that are doing the right thing when it comes to sustainability. Because there is no green tick of approval, there is no certification. So we set our own standards, and then had brands meet these standards, then they'd be individually vetted so people would know when they were shopping with Banish, that they would be able to support organisations that were doing the right thing without having to do the hours of research.

Dr Juliet Bourke: How did you communicate that at the beginning? Because if there is no market in that and you're doing something new, how do you create that market?

Lottie Dalziel: It was honestly just transparency and sharing with people what we were doing and how we were going about it. It was very organic, very raw, very behind the scenes, not pretty or aesthetically pleasing. But it was just showing people and documenting my own journey and going well, This is what I'm trying to do. It's the simple swaps that I'm making. I'd have people asking me questions, and then I'd do the research behind that, and then I'd be able to help them. So it was kind of quite an organic growth.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Did you have a following before you started Banish?

Lottie Dalziel: No, so it just kind of grew as I was on my journey,

Dr Juliet Bourke: The platform started in two weeks, right?

Lottie Dalziel: Yes.

Dr Juliet Bourke: How do you create a platform in two weeks?

Lottie Dalziel: I feel like it wasn't actually too bad. I feel like building websites these days is a lot easier than it used to. I'd had a couple of businesses in the past, so I was familiar with how to build a Shopify website and things like that. Then it was just about really convincing these small brands and businesses to take a leap of faith and be listed on the platform to start with. As soon as we kind of started to see the growth, it got a lot easier.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So would I be right in imagining that your own personal journey informed who was on the platform, you'd actually done some research by using it yourself, would that be right?

Lottie Dalziel: Exactly. so that was kind of how it started, and then it would grow and expand into different categories that I wasn't using those products, particularly like baby or pets and things like that. And then, yeah, it would just grow from there.

Dr Juliet Bourke: The way you did it, then might de-risk it in a way, because you had the sort of living proof that that was a great product, but the products that you weren't familiar with. You know, how did you make sure that they were the right ones for you?

Lottie Dalziel: Yeah, so we would use our set of criteria. So we called it the Banish Sin Bin, and then that was the list of criteria. So things couldn't include any palm oils or parabens or have any synthetic fragrances. There was to be no plastic packaging whatsoever, including in the shipping of the products as well. So back in 2018, this was quite a drastic thing. Often suppliers would fall at that hurdle. But then, I think the standards when we first set them were quite hard. You'd find some brands that would easily match them, then they'd go great, piece of cake. Then in a couple of years, we started to find that brands, as they were building, would be building to match our criteria, so that then they knew that they would be listed on the platform.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Interesting, a real draw to want to be sold by you. What was it about being sold by you, that really drew them to you?

Lottie Dalziel: I think it was the collective group and the hub, because I found with sustainable products and reusables. In particular, when you have a normal e-commerce brand. For example, say it's a fashion label or makeup or something like that. You really fight to get that first customer through the door, and then you can re-market to that customer over and over again, and then you can grow that customer over a lifetime. But with a reusable product, say, for example, take a reusable safety razor or the hand knitted dish cloths. A safety razor should last you your lifetime. The hand-knitted cloths should last you three to four years at least. So there's no need for a customer to sign up to your mailing list to follow you on social media. The journey stops right then and there. So the benefit of being on the platform was, yes, it was trusted, but also it was a collective group. So you could come online thinking you were going to buy the reusable safety razor, and then you could be upsold to get the beeswax wraps or something else, have a great experience and come back time and time again. So it was using the collective movement of these small businesses rather than having them fight one another for those dollars that were so precious from an individual, we could put them together so they could work in harmony.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So does that mean you would only have one product in one category, so there was no competition going on. It's more synergy than competition?

Lottie Dalziel: Yes, so we would have exclusivity over categories aside from skincare, because obviously skincare is very dependent. But we'd have one reusable coffee cup brand, one safety razor brand, one beeswax wrap brand, because as well as a consumer, you don't want to be making even more decisions than you have to and comparing what I would say apples and apples, if they're two really great brands. So that's why we'd only have the one.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So I assume then you would have been really dependent on customer feedback. If there's only one product in that range there, then you really need the feedback to know, is that the right product for us?

Lottie Dalziel: Yes, so we'd get so much feedback from customers, not only through social media, but through surveys and also online, through our emails

Dr Juliet Bourke: Did customers recommend products to go online as well?

Lottie Dalziel: We'd get a lot of people asking for things. In particular, a lot of customers saying, I really like this brand. Can you bring it on the platform and then we do research into it as well.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Tell me about funding when you started the business.

Lottie Dalziel: Yes, everything's been self-funded. We originally started as a drop shipping platform. That means that we didn't hold any stock. So how it works is, the customer would purchase from Banish like a normal online store checkout. Then in the back end, what would happen then is the supplier would then get a notification that there is an order that needs to be sent out on behalf of Banish, and they'll send it directly to the customer and then Banish pays the supplier for those costs of goods. So it was a really low-risk model for us, because it meant that we didn't need to order large quantities of anything. And it also kind of gave the suppliers a bit of peace of mind as well to kind of say, we can stop this at any time if it's not working, but we can also just test and then see what happens.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Experimenting with low-risk, low-cost processes is the bread and butter of every startup. Professor Barney Tan, The Senior Deputy Dean for Impact and Partnerships at the UNSW Business School, calls this frugal innovation.

Barney Tan: So frugal innovation is a philosophy that is all about achieving more with less, innovating at the periphery of your value proposition. Essentially, it can be anything that's related to delivering services that support your operations in a just as good way. So examples like software as a service platforms and what they provide. Well, these are examples of channels where you can look to pursue frugal innovation. When you're starting out, every dollar counts and you know that you simply cannot afford to make huge upfront investments without knowing if your idea will resonate with customers. So frugal innovation provides a low-risk pathway for you to experiment and learn, and by using platforms like Shopify or Squarespace, you can actually have a fully functional website up and running in a matter of weeks, rather than months, which is crucial for testing the market quickly.

With the drop shipping model, it also means that the business doesn't have to invest heavily in inventory. So this allows you to offer a variety of products without committing significant capital upfront for storage. This gives you the freedom to experiment with different ideas and iterate based on real customer feedback. While frugal Innovation is excellent for minimising costs and reducing risks, startups must remain focused on their core value proposition.

So the idea is to ensure that you have these elements that truly set your business apart, right? It could be related to your products or services, you have unique product features, you have a brand identity, you provide a really compelling customer experience. Well, that is your core and these are not compromised by the cost-saving measures that you're trying to implement with frugal innovation for the less strategic parts of your operations. So adopting this good enough approach is often sufficient. So essentially, while it's smart to use frugal methods to keep your overheads low and test ideas, you also need to know when to invest in the areas that matter to drive your competitive edge. So this balance right, ensuring efficiency with frugal innovation, without sacrificing excellence in terms of your core value proposition, this will be the key to building a sustainable and financially profitable business over the long term.

Dr Juliet Bourke: When I went onto your site, I could see that there were some fantastic recycled salad servers definitely caught my eye. Are you making those yourself?

Lottie Dalziel: So we make some of the products that are on the website. Most of the products that are on the website are from the plastics that are accepted through our recycling program. So BRAD is the Banish Recycling and Diversion program that helps Australians recycle, hard-to-recycle household items that can't go into your yellow bin. The whole premise is that you don't put them in landfill, AKA a big pit, you send them to the right Brad Pitt.

Brad Pitt: I'm the guy for this.

Lottie Dalziel: So those salad servers, for example, aren't made by us personally. They're made in the northern beaches. But then we've got things like the bread tag bowls, which are made in South Australia using our plastic bread tags that we collect through the program. We're processing our own materials in-house and turning them into things like pens or carabiners are about to launch laptop stands.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So you were originally just an online marketplace, but in 2023 you opened a retail store. Why did you want to have a physical presence?

Lottie Dalziel: The physical presence wasn't actually something that we ever planned, but we had a recycling program that was kind of, you could say, buzzing along in the background. It was kind of really making a racket in the background and growing quite significantly. So originally, we're operating out of a self-storage unit, and that was where we were operating the recycling side of the business, but then also having the recycling element too. So we'd have, we'd receive shoe boxes from around Australia, and then we'd have volunteers in to sort them into the different streams. As that program was expanding, we needed more space, so we were looking for something that was going to enable us to expand and grow both sides of the organisation. And the space that we were originally looking for was something like a warehouse or just something a little bit bigger. And when we were introduced to a property development company called Toga, they actually gifted us a space at Central Station, which was an abandoned pharmacy. And they said, "look, it's going to be knocked down in a couple of years time. We're waiting on DA approval, but you can have it as is". Pretty much, this pharmacy had walked out in the middle of the pandemic and had left everything. It was filled with stuff. It was dirty. There were shelves everywhere. It was just absolutely filthy. But for me, I went, oh well, there's shelves there. There's a central location here. There is an amazing space that's going to get a lot of foot traffic for us. So it allowed us to go from 23 square meters to 240 square meters, quite literally, overnight. So with that, meant that we had the space in the middle of the city to open up a retail space. It wasn't something that we planned originally, but we went, well, why not, we'll give it a shot. We'll open up. We've got the shelving, we've got the actual location, and let's see how that happens. So that was what led me to launch the sustainability hub at Central Station. So it was a hybrid space. It had 1/3 was retail, 1/3 was education, where we'd run the workshops, the talks, the pickling, and then 1/3 was for the recycling program.

Dr Juliet Bourke: And you don't have that space anymore?

Lottie Dalziel: No, so we moved from that space at the end of last year into a smaller space at Central Station. So we're still in the area. So now we're in a 130 square meter space that is now more purpose-built for us. There was no leftover shelving or anything like that in there. So we have a drop off for our recycling, we have a facility that we can host workshops at, and then we also are processing our own waste there.

Dr Juliet Bourke: It sounds like a very organic process to first of all, creating a business and then transitioning a business into a new form. Is that how you think of your style as an entrepreneur?

Lottie Dalziel: Exactly, I think we kind of meander and we go where the opportunity presents ourselves. We do have goals and ambitions and things that I want to achieve, but also so many opportunities present themselves to me that I don't ever imagine. So it's looking at that opportunity and going, well, what could we do with this and really dreaming big and making it happen. My vision for Banish is, for everyone in Australia to know about what we're doing and to use us as a trusted platform in able to take action when it comes to living more sustainably,. For people to look at their recycling bins and going, "oh I know exactly where to put this item because of what I've learned from Banish." Or when they're going down their supermarket aisle to go, "yes, I know the best purchasing choice that I'm going to make today" because of what I've learned through banish. So it's to be a trusted platform where people know that they can live sustainably, and we're helping them step by step. Because I don't think that we all need to be perfect, but I do think that we can all be doing a lot more than we're currently doing.

Dr Juliet Bourke: You keep saying "we". It's a lot about you, though, right? You're the founder. It's your vision. You've written the book. To what degree is this brand Banish you, and to what degree is it actually a business?

Lottie Dalziel: So I think a lot of it is related to me, and I think that as somebody who's growing and scaling, I refer to we, because there is a team behind us.  I think a big part of the recycling program BRAD is that it is driven by community. We have 500 volunteers come through the program last year alone. And yes, they came to us, probably because they found about us through social media, but that is the way, because it's the collective movement of individuals to make an impact. As one person, I don't think that there's much that you can do, but as a group and a collective movement, we can really strive for change. So I think that, yes, I've got a vision, and yes, I'm ambitious, and yes, I want to shift things and change things and do things differently, but I'm also supported by a team who helps me do that and enables me to do that as well,

Dr Juliet Bourke: Those group of volunteers, how does that work? As a as a model, making sure that they're doing what you need them to do, that you have a constant supply of people, was that always your vision that you would work with volunteers and paid people?

Lottie Dalziel: No, it was never the plan. So initially, when I started our recycling program, BRAD, it started in my backyard. The reason why it started was, I'd been living sustainably, I'd been doing everything that I thought I should be doing, and everything that I was preaching online.  I was still getting to the end of the month and having things that I had to throw into my landfill bin. Things like blister packs, like beauty products, like plastic toothbrushes. I was looking at these items going well, I can see the resources in this. I can see the plastic in this. I can see the aluminium in a blister pack. So why can't this be recycled? So I did lots of research into where all of these items could go, how they could be recycled, and when I contacted these large organisations, they said, Well, yes, we can recycle blister packs, but we won't take your two blister packs. You need to have 150 kilos of blister packs. So I thought, well, why not pull together the community's resources so that together we can get those large volumes to be able to recycle them.

Dr Juliet Bourke: By this stage, you'd grown a consumer base and a bit of an audience on social media. How did you go about marketing this to them so that people knew to send you their hard-to-recycle household goods?

Lottie Dalziel: The premise was, send us your pumps and sprays from your shampoo bottles and your plastic toothbrushes, and then make a switch to more sustainable options, say, for example, a bamboo toothbrush or a block of soap. So acknowledging that people still have plastic in their homes, but that when they're finished with them, they can responsibly recycle them and then change their behaviour. So that was why it started. It was very much a test, as all things are. In the first month, we received three shoeboxes in the mail that people had sent us from around Australia. And I went, okay fine, I guess you could say it's working. I'm not really sure yet, but we're just going to keep on going and see. Within three months, we'd received 70 shoe boxes. So they were starting to adapt to this and evolve quite quickly. And originally, everything was just coming to a parcel lock in in my house. I'd drive to the post office, I'd pick them up, bring them home, and then sort them into the different streams so that then they could go to the different recyclers. The thing is, they just kept on coming, and it was just becoming too much work for just me as an individual, and I was documenting everything online. I was obviously very excited about the fact that people wanted this service, and were very excited. But it was piling up and up and up in my backyard and taking over the laundry and things like that. And I had people on social media sending me messages saying, "hey, Lottie, I'll come over and help you sort through all of this recycling", which was so lovely at the time. I lived with roommates, and they were like, "please don't give out our address online."  And I was going, "yes, that's fine, don't worry. I won't." Meanwhile, kept on piling up and up and up and up. They got to the point where they said, "okay, you have to bring in some people to sort through this." So we started doing weekend sorting sessions. People would come over sort the shoe boxes, because you'd get a whole mixed bag of different items into the different streams. And then we did that for a couple of months. They just kept on coming. We moved to the self-storage unit. They just kept on coming. And then, now we do about three or four sessions a week where we have 15 people come into each session. They will open up the shoe boxes, sort the blister packs into one area, the plastic tubes into another area, the bottle top lids into another area, so that then they can be recycled.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So you started with 70 boxes in three months. How much ‘hard to recycle’ plastic does BRAD process now?

Lottie Dalziel: In the last 12 months, we had over 17,700 households send us their hard to recycle items in the mail. We've recycled just over 3.2 million blister packs, and we've been able to divert over 18 tons from landfill in the last 12 months alone.

Dr Juliet Bourke: You're doing blister packs...

Lottie Dalziel: Blister packs, beauty products, aluminium coffee pods, single-use cutlery, soy sauce, fishies, glasses, CD cases, plastic tubes, plastic toothbrushes, dental floss containers, webster packs, contact lenses. There's a whole lot of things.

Dr Juliet Bourke: You've mentioned social media a couple of times, and how important is it for you in terms of having that connection point to your customers, that engagement through social media, as opposed to any other kind of marketing?

Lottie Dalziel: I think for us, social media is so important because it's ingrained in people's daily routines, and we want to be ingrained in people's daily routines. It's a way that we connect and we educate people, I would say is predominantly through social media when we're looking at the acquisition of new volunteers or new corporate partners or new education partners. Often it comes through social media. So it's a really big point for us, because it helps showcase what we're doing. It also helps us communicate where all of our items are going, how they're being recycled. And I think the way that social media is now transitioned to be fast and digestible and bite sized works really well with what we're trying to communicate. Because I don't think you could probably get somebody to listen to a 30-minute video on how recycling works, but if we're providing just a couple of quick tips that people can take away and then implement, and then come back to us next week and we'll give them a couple of more.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So the business itself, it's taken some turns, you've been a bit organic, even in the way you started it up. What's next? Where do you see yourself going?

Lottie Dalziel: Yeah, so we actually did a really big business pivot at the end of last year, because Banish had been growing and we were not doing as much drop shipping. We're holding more stock. I was also writing a book at the same time, which is called '365+ Ways To Save The Planet And Your Money At The Same Time'. And as I was writing this book, I was quite repetitively writing the most sustainable thing you can do for the planet is to not buy anything. You can use everything that you've got at home. You can make your own cleaning products you can swap to a bamboo toothbrush. And in the six years that we'd been running Banish for, we were starting to see a lot of the major supermarkets starting to come to the table with some really great sustainable alternatives, which was a really exciting thing. So it allowed us to kind of go, "well, what's next for Banish?" What's next for what we're doing, and what has always been at the forefront of what we do has been education and teaching people how to live more sustainably. And I think we got so caught up in the growth of the online store, that we were kind of losing the education that we were doing so much and the staff were pulled away because they were so busy packing orders that they didn't have time to do the education work. We want people to be consuming less. So to have an organisation or a social enterprise that relied on people buying stuff didn't sit right with me anymore, so we closed the retail side of the business at the end of last year, and have transitioned now to selling just a range of products that are made from recycled materials, and focusing again, on the education. We're launching a virtual kids education program that's going to be rolled out through schools in the next couple of months. So it'll be a subscription model for schools to sign up that have access to really great information and resources, whether that be video content, worksheets, lesson plans to help make it easier for teachers to communicate sustainability better in the classroom. It's been really tricky because we've just pulled our biggest revenue source, but it's been a really rewarding couple of months as we kind of have transitioned into what we're calling Banish 2.0

Dr Juliet Bourke: So I'm just wondering about this pivot that you've done, because that's a big pivot, and as you say, your revenue stream was at risk. Did you bank enough money beforehand to enable you to do the pivot? How did you manage that?

Lottie Dalziel: So we did a bit of testing before we closed the doors, quite literally completely, and we started going out to people who were asking us to do events and activations, but we hadn't really given them the time or the effort to really plan out what that would look like. So we started really leaning on that more heavily coming into the what we would call our peak period, which is coming into October, November, December. We started getting some really great bookings from people, which allowed us to go, okay, great, there is a tangible business model there. Then, we also were able to then go, "okay, could this be an ongoing partnership?" And with some suppliers, they were saying, yes, this is what we would be able to give you over a 12-month period. So that gave us that safety net to go, okay, this is the right move.

Dr Juliet Bourke: What have you learned then, as a business leader, as your business has taken these twists and turns,? How has it affected the way that you lead a business?

Lottie Dalziel: I think for me, one of the biggest things that I've learned through this journey is that you can have a plan. You can have so many things written down and a nice, neat to-do list, but so many times, things don't work out how you originally plan them to and I think for me, something that I've become a lot better at is adapting and evolving to change and rolling with the punches and rolling with what happens and getting that feedback and going, okay, people don't actually like this, so let's change it. Let's shift it, and not being too set in our ways. Because there's been so many times where I've gone, this is where I think we should be going. This is what I think is the next thing. And we test it, and nobody responds well to it, or they start responding well to things that I didn't even think would go well. And it's about going well, we probably should be looking there. Then we should be relying on feedback from our community, because they are the centre of what we're doing, and they should be the ones that we're really looking to service.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Thanks to Lottie Dalziel for being part of this episode. Lottie has so many accomplishments under her belt. She was named the New South Wales Young Australian of the Year in 2023 and in the same year, was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30. On top of that, and all her hard work with Banish, she also has a couple of podcasts of her own, and they're all about sustainability. 

To stay up-to-date with our latest podcasts as well as the latest insights and thought leadership from the Business School, subscribe to BusinessThink.