University of Utah students Kelsie Lee, Sam Lagoy, Joe Wassweiler and Gabi Siu are the cofounders of Scrap, an online platform that allows businesses with excess materials to contact other businesses that are in need of those excess materials. “It’s the collaboration point for business-to-business material sourcing solutions,” Lagoy said. Lee and Lagoy are both sophomores and second-year residents at Lassonde Studios and take advantage of many opportunities offered there in order to stay involved in the community.
The Scrap team is a participant in the Company Launch program at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute. That program provides student startup teams with office space and other resources. “The program is huge motivational support,” Lagoy said. The team also benefited from the connections provided by the Lassonde Institute.
Scrap is an online platform that allows businesses with excess materials to contact other businesses that are in need of those materials.
The Scrap team met in an entrepreneurship class at the David Eccles School of Business, which is also where they were inspired to create Scrap after they realized they all had interest in sustainability. “We wanted to do something where materials wouldn’t be thrown away, so it would create less production of new materials and more incentive for recycling,” Lee said. The team said the idea for Scrap was fostered from a group project in which they were required to design jewelry out of recycled materials, and as a result of the open discussion environment in the class, they immediately began thinking about where the materials would come from in order to construct all of that jewelry.
“We have a super diverse set of majors,” said Lee, who is majoring in peace and conflict studies and political science, tying a social element into the company. Lagoy, an entrepreneurship major, helps with the business-related aspects of the company, while Wassweiler and Siu, multi-disciplinary design majors, bring an element of design to Scrap. “We definitely push each other at times,” Lee said. “We have a really good group dynamic.”
After being inspired by their jewelry project, the team began doing research on platforms and businesses related to recycling. They discovered that there were many small businesses that would recycle or repurpose specific materials, but there was nothing that brought everything together into one platform. “We want to make it easy, and we want to make people want to recycle,” Lee said.
Learn more about Scrap at savescrap.com.
