Hello everyone!
Welcome to the first “Letter from the CEO,” a letter directly from Sierra (that’s me!). The letter will include behind-the-scenes of UP Cycle Design and share exciting updates so you’re the first to know. This letter features a blog change, exciting new vendor updates, and a milestone amount raised for nonprofits!
Blog
The first update is that we have moved our blog team over to marketing and sales to focus on bringing in revenue to create even more impact! While our blog has been an incredible place over the last several years for sustainability knowledge, resources, tips, and tutorials, we haven’t received many views for the amount of work that goes into each post. So, we pivoted, and the team is focused on how to expand our impact through building our community, brand, and potential customers for our excellent products!
Vendors
Speaking of new products, we have been hard at work partnering with sustainable vendors to add new upcycled items to our website! The long-term goal is to become the sustainable version of Amazon (an e-commerce marketplace filled with upcycled products!) focused on internal and external impact and doing good in the world. We will donate to nonprofits with each purchase and ensure our vendors use upcycled and sustainably sourced materials. This new focus will help us scale quicker than if we were continuing to make all of our items, so stay tuned for more exciting vendors that we are onboarding!
Team
I am so proud of our team for the incredible resiliency and enthusiasm that they have shown during our transitions over the past few months (with the blog team moving over to marketing and sales, our piloting a new professional development program internally, the summer dotted with vacations, team members stepping up to fill roles, etc.)! Everyone has stepped up and leaned into the changes, and I am so proud!
Events
On Sunday, September 18th, the UP Cycle Design team had a booth at Newark Community Day! This was an excellent event for our team to bond in-person (our team has been 100% virtual outside of events) and got great customer feedback on some of our new items and prototypes! New products included our amazing dog toys (that we almost sold out of!) and super-secret wolf wall hanging, manatee wall hanging, and kitty kick sticks that aren’t even on our website yet (coming soon!)!
Milestones
This last weekend (with the help of our Newark Community Day event), we passed an incredible milestone of raising $900 for nonprofits since we began! This is an inspiring milestone to pass, and we are so close to $1,000 raised! So if you’ve wanted to purchase an item, help us reach $1,000 raised by the end of this month!
Professional Development Curriculum
UP Cycle Design’s Internal Impact Coordinator, April, and I have been working on an internal impact program to support our team members with additional personal and professional development. We want to create as much support as possible for our team and have partnered with Margaret O'Dwyer from the Delaware Youth Leadership Network (huge shoutout!) on our first professional development curriculum starting in October!
Marketing
Last week, we hosted a giveaway with Pride Delaware, which was immensely successful! We added over 100 new community members on our Instagram and had over 100 responses, so we are very grateful to our community for making it such a huge success! The giveaway helped us reach a milestone of 1,300 community members on Instagram, and we are well toward achieving 5,000 by the end of the year! If you haven’t already, please follow us here.
Support
We could use support in…. looking for a new leader/facilitator for April’s position since she is planning on volunteering abroad soon (we are so excited for her!). Please let us know if you know anyone who might be interested (especially any UD students)! We can share a position description (just email up.cycle.sustainability@gmail.com).
Thank you so much for being on this exciting journey with us, and we can’t wait to share what’s next!
Let’s UP Cycle and Design A Better Future Together,
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