 We really have to bring them into our process to get them excited about the future that we want to build with them. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, and we have a great show lined up for you today. We have Josh Dorfman, who's the CEO and co-founder of Planted on the show with us today. Josh, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thrilled to be here. Very excited to be chatting with you. You and I are just prepping a little bit in advance of the show for our listeners. Give us a little bit of overview of who you are, who Planted is, and how you guys made it into this crazy building products market. So my background is that I've spent most of my career focused on the intersection of sustainability and business. I've had two sustainable furniture companies. When I was running up in New York with showrooms in Brooklyn and Manhattan, very focused on design and the intersection of materials like reclaimed, recycled, responsibly harvested materials or bamboo, different types of panels, things like that. Out of that, and randomly, I ended up having a radio show and TV show for a while called The Lazy Environmentalists, series XM radio show, Sundance Channel, reality television series where I would travel around America helping lazy Americans go green, ways that fit their lifestyles. No one had to work very hard, sorry, American-centric kind of conversation. I went to Amazon, built a business within Amazon called Vine.com was like an online Whole Foods. Then I came down to North Carolina where we're headquartered, interested in building another furniture company. Eventually I did and I was interested in domestic manufacturing, strengthening supply chains, shortening supply chains. All of that was going well and we were actually starting to get a bump as the pandemic took root. We were making desks and cool stuff for homes and then my supply chain just dried up on me. I couldn't get material and when I did, the quality was going down, prices were going up and it really got me thinking about a bigger opportunity to run materials to drive the values that I care about around sustainability and really push that mainstream. In that moment, I connected in with our now CTO, Wada Tan, who had spent seven years at SpaceX leading the team that kept astronauts alive on the Dragon spacecraft, essentially designed the life systems, life support systems, and then met Nathan Silvernell who they worked in tandem. Wada is the responsible engineer designing the components, materials, systems. Nate is the build engineer, building the components, systems, the factories to actually build those things. SpaceX does an outsource a lot. It was a really interesting conversation because those guys were thinking a lot about keeping astronauts alive in a bubble that was essentially an SUV traveling around Earth. You have to regulate the amount of carbon in that very small atmosphere and it's a logical leap to then say, well, how do we regulate the atmosphere and make sure there's the right amount of carbon, you know, on spaceship Earth, 8 billion people indefinite mission duration? How do we figure out that challenge? So we came together and said, is there a way to rapidly remove carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into useful, durable materials in order to lock that carbon away? Could we identify a biomass and micro way faster than trees through natural photosynthesis? Just absorb more carbon. Could we design a new kind of factory and new mill, so to speak, to actually then take that whatever that biomass is turn it into something. And could we create a material that would delight builders in the process? And so that's the backstory on us and how we eventually arrived at planted. I love that. I think it's pretty neat. You're pulling all these different people from different subject matter expertise and you're trying to create this revolutionary product for listeners. Tell me like what planted does and who you're trying to sell through or sell to. So what we do is we take a full value chain approach to arriving at high performance structural building materials. So what I mean by that is we contract with farmers. We have identified this fast growing tall perennial grass kind of looks like if bamboo and sugarcane got together for a one night stand. This might be like what, you know, what got created. It's tall. It's strong. It has a lot of wonderful properties in terms of, you know, it actually fiber strength. So we we cultivate this grass. We then in our designing and building right now as we speak, essentially a new factory, a new production line. If you've ever been to a mill that makes OSB or plywood, you know, those are 150 to $300 million facilities, the size of small towns, lots of smoke stacks, you know, the advanced state of the art ones are pretty incredible. But we said if you were going to start from zero today, which is that what the factory would look like or is that what it would really need to look like. So we're designing a new factory that is a hundred percent electric powered. There are no smoke stacks. It's a much smaller, more modular line. You can actually put it right next to a residential development. If you wanted to, we've talked to some builders about doing that to shorten that supply chain, but it gives us the opportunity to actually start with the most fundamental ubiquitous engineered material. Seven sixteenth inch four by eight sheet for structural sheathing or roof decking and then expand and within the same factory from a next line over could be making three quarter inch subfloor and the next line over could be making, you know, an inch and a half thick engineered lumber or two by fours. Right. So it just gives us incredible flexibility from that. We get a new material. So this is a structural material. It's not OSB, it's not plywood because it's actually it's not oriented. It's a random orientation yet. It is twice as twice as moisture resistant as standard OSB about one and a half times stronger. And it is a direct replacement for a builder on a job site. There is no alternative technique to take a material that we say is carbon negative. And by that, I mean 80 percent of that carbon that we capture on the farm because we're getting about 20 tons, 15 to 20 tons of dry biomass, almost 30 tons of carbon off an acre of land. 80 percent of that is ultimately captured in those panels that go out the door. So what that means for builders, we're saying, hey, we're going to give you a higher performance product. And the more you install these in homes, the more we're actually removing carbon from the atmosphere, which is something we need to do to solve climate change and locking it away for a very long time. And so we're excited to partner with home builders and really with them come up with this very innovative climate change solution that turns new homes into frontline solutions for solving one of the biggest challenges of our time. That sounds incredible. And the way that you're approaching this kind of sells itself, you know, I know people probably tell you that how you're trying to approach sustainability and in healthy environment and also looking at supply chain makes a ton of sense. What I'm curious about is the high performance component of it. Talk to me a little bit about the challenges of selling high performance products and more importantly, how are you guys finding success there? So for us, that's it's even more fundamental than that we're trying to introduce a new structural product into the home building industry. Right. So we're aware of the the the challenges that come with that. So that's first and foremost what we've found in talking with builders. Of course, there's a lot of builders who are saying great, yeah, we're aligned with sustainability. Great. And then they say, okay, where are you on price? And we're designing this business to have the option to get to price parity. Now there are that our cost structure is such that we can we can compete with commodity products if we chose to. And then from a performance standpoint, though, the way to think about it is we take this grass. We can slice it. This is our proprietary technology, but we can slice it so thin that we can, you know, probably almost four or five hundred and thinner than you can with a tree that goes into an engineered material, wood that goes into an engineered material. So when you take more fibers and you press them together, you can use the same amount of resin, but design something that water just can't get into, right? Because you're you're actually able to press more fiber and so it's therefore stronger and more moisture resistant. What that means for a builder is that we're able to say to a builder, look, we're not selling you on sustainability. We're selling you on a higher performance material that can replace what you're using right now. And that has resonance. My experience having been in the field of sustainable business for a long time. It's not enough to simply say, hey, we have a product and it's even at the same price. You really have to like go for this model of like cleaner, better. If you can get to cheaper, great. We're not setting out to be cheaper just yet, but the full the full picture, right? To get someone to say, okay, I'm actually willing to change my behavior. Even for something I want to do, change is hard. So we're really trying to make sure that that performance is there to what message are you using that's resonating with builders to get in with them? You mentioned a few different value props. They're cleaner, better, cheaper. Yeah, you're reaching out to a builder does a hundred homes a year. Are you leading with the same message or are you adapting based upon what you know about that builder? The message that opens the door is around a carbon negative panel and for those who are attuned to that conversation, those are going to be our first customers, our early adopters. We're, you know, we then get into well, why is this going to be meaningful for you? And we and we will talk about, of course, we get right into performance. But the novelty I think really that people are grasping, you know, when they encounter planted is that we're doing something really unique from a sustainability perspective. So that's our way in and then we talk about performance. The other thing we talk about is the fact that since we own our entire value chain, right, it's our, you know, it's, it's the farms that we're contracting with, it's our factory. We say to builders, look, our price does not have to fluctuate with the commodity market. We can give you a consistent price so that you can plan and you know what's coming. And that's been like a revelation about how much pain home builders experience, right, as prices are moving. And so that's that's a huge draw for us. You know, the other thing that we see in the market, at least today is, of course, there's this core high performance builder, green builder who is attracted to our value proposition. We've also seen this bifurcation where the large publicly traded builders to some extent by virtue of the fact that they're public and are interacting with, with a lot of private investors who are questioning them around specifically climate change. Hey, what, you know, they own the conversation sometimes goes, Hey, we own your security. We own your company. We know you have exposure to a change in climate. We don't see yet a plan of what you're doing about that, but we own your risk. So we, so help us understand what you're doing and that opens some really interesting doors with some of the largest builders in the country as well. How are you stepping them through the education process? What are you guys doing to help these different builders in different constituents understand benefits, understand performance, understand how to use it. Talk me through that a little bit. For us, we are really a very engineering driven company. So introducing something that's novel is, is often about connecting builders into our, our process, connecting them into our factory of the future, you know, showing them the technology. If we can get them here, we're in Oxford, North Carolina, about 30 miles down north of, of Raleigh Durham, we took over a former facility that was manufacturing cigarettes. This is tobacco country. So tobacco farmers are, are growers. But we bring them here and we showed them the SpaceX, how we're applying SpaceX methodology. You know, for example, what we always show people is when we started two years ago, you know, if you think about building a material, really what you need to do is you need to take a tree or a grass or whatever and cut it, make it thin, you know, into thin pieces. You need to apply some resin to it. You need to, you know, form it up so that it's, it's uniform and then you need to press it down, right? Into like, it's not, it's a very straightforward process. But what we would do is we would bring builders in and we would show them how we were actually applying resin and what the guys from, from SpaceX did initially was they went out and they bought a 50 gallon pickle barrel, put wheels on it and attached it to a hundred fifty dollar used treadmill we bought off Craigslist and you put the resin in, you put the grass in, you run that thing on fat burn and you get just the right mixture of resin applied to your grass. Right? So we did that for over a year because it worked and it was dirt cheap. And so when you, so when builders are coming in and we're saying to them, we are going to, we are taking out cost. We are innovating all the way and they think like, yeah, but you guys are from SpaceX. You built rocket chips and they're like, and this is how we do it. Eventually we're going to get to these big shiny machines. That's when they light up, right? Cause they're like, I think these guys are going to actually pull it off and then we show them, we put in their hand samples and say, look, here is swelling tests of our material. Here's commodity. Here's, you know, a premium product, maybe a zip or something else. And here's what this looks like. And they're like, you know, having this very visceral experience of saying, holy cow, this is pain on the job site. And, you know, they then see our vision. And so as a young company, we really have to bring them into our process to get them excited about the future that we want to build with them. That's, that's the best way that we can sell. So you're trying to get most people into facility. Is that how you're trying to sell or is it, are you able to do that on a job site or and let's say, you know, at their offices or you finding here the biggest success is if they come visit us 100% biggest success is if they come to us. One of the things that we're trying to figure out right now is can we take this on the road? Right? It could, you know, how much, how might we actually take this on the road? You know, maybe press a panel of some smaller piece at a trade show or something where we're actually showing them these machines and showing them kind of how we got here and kind of the legacy machines and even though we're only two years old, we pride ourselves on, you know, our mantra is move fast and fix things. And I truly like with a SpaceX team, you can see some magic there. Right? So we went from small pieces that, you know, we built our first press six by 13 inch, you know, scaled that up a little bigger, got to one by twos, then we built full size presses to make four by eight sheets and we did all of that in like a year and a half, right? No one's built a press in America in probably 50 years, certainly not this century. And, you know, we did it very quickly. And so the more we can bring people into that and actually make that visceral for them, we can do it on a presentation and that has an impact. But when you really see it, it's just it is a kind of a while moment. And so we were trying to figure out, yeah, how do we really create that? Because I think that more than anything else is the cell for us. Josh, I really appreciate you joining us on the show here. If somebody is listening and you're like, Hey, this is really fascinating. Maybe they have a high performance product or trying to figure out how to market it. What's like the one piece of advice that you would give them? I think that there's so much you can do online. The most viral video we ever made was actually this very like low resolution video. We did probably three months into our, you know, into existence at the time we were looking at industrial hemp as our potential biomass. And we so we made some panels and we did this sledgehammer test where, you know, we just showed sledgehammer bouncing off our material, crashing through Commodio SB crashing through some other materials and we put it up. It's in now the Berlin Museum of hemp permanently. So I think you can get incredibly creative in your digital marketing, your online presence to have fun, not have to take yourself incredibly seriously, but do some things that will capture people's attention in unique ways that you can show your performance. That you know, it's kind of culturally interesting to I think really we have that opportunity as brands to kind of let folks and I do think it's let folks peek behind the curtain a little bit, right? Let them just let them see like, well, what's, you know, how do you make the sausage? So to speak. And so they they're they're more connected to your brand and your process. I think all of those things are opportunities that that we can be taking advantage of. Josh, someone's to connect with you after listening to this. What's the best way for them to do that? Our website is plantedmaterials.com. We do have this kind of hipster spelling of our name. There's no E. So it's P L A N T D planted materials.com. We are online. If anyone's listening wants to reach out to me directly on Josh at plantedmaterials.com are very easy to get hold of. Josh will make sure we link to that in the show notes for our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, check us out at venue.com slash podcast to subscribe to get more till next time. I'm Zach Williams. Thanks everybody.