When Zoyee Kartalis’ first child was born, she saw first-hand how many gifts could come about and gather in her house. And as much as she welcomed everyone’s well-wishes for her newborn, the fact of the matter remained, there was a lot of wastage of paper.
“I am environmentally conscious and hate wastage,” Zoyee tells Neos Kosmos.
“I am very mindful of not throwing things in the wrong bin with recycling and I think when I had my first daughter, our lounge room was full of all these paper bags and they are too good to throw away but they’re all creased and ruined.”
The mother-of-two made it her mission to find a way to make the gift of giving eco-friendly. Wanting to make a positive difference to the environment, Zoyee launched her new eco-friendly, fabric gift bag range called ecogiftbags.com.au, selling sustainable cloth gift bags, that are designed to be reused and re-gifted.
Zoyee said she established the website with women as her main target market as she was filling a gap in the marketplace, because there was nothing like this available online for the environmentally conscious and stylish at heart.
And this way, the fabric gift bags can be circulated through family and friends, offering a new way to wrap your gifts without trying to recycle crinkled paper but also taking away the need for scissors, sticky tape and ribbon. For the bags are a little gift in themselves.
“Family and friends who receive the gifts can re-use the bags. We all like to re-use paper gift wrap and bags but they generally get crinkly and tatty after recycling – and there is also a certain level of embarrassment associated with this. The fabric bags are a gift that keeps on giving,” says Zoyee.
With a background in public relations and online marketing, Zoyee harnessed these skills and started up the online business three months ago. Already she has received positive feedback from people and companies who are green minded and looking for an alternative to constantly buying gift wrapping and paper gift bags.
“The bags are made of gorgeous fabric, no need to deck them out in ribbon, I was surprised to learn that an estimated 61,155 kilometres (38,000 miles) of ribbon is wasted each year – enough to tie a bow around the earth.
“According to experts in the US, during the Christmas gift-giving period five million tons of waste is generated and four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags alone. If only 10 per cent of Australians made a conscious decision to make the switch from paper to fabric gift bags, it would have a significant impact on the environment,” she says.
The gift bags come in all sorts of colours and six sizes as well, including bags for small gifts like jewellery but also bottle bags for wine. And all the different designs make it easy to wrap a gift for adults and children.
Now the Melbourne mum and businesswoman says even though she is busy concentrating on building the business, she has ideas of expansion and moving eco gift bags into the mainstream. She says she will be looking for opportunities to create partnerships and alliances with companies to stock the green friendly product.
“There is a shift with consumers who are wanting to be associated with green and sustainable companies,” she says.
She also wants to move into the area of creating gift packs with her products, such as gift packs for newborns – something she feels is a good fit for her brand. And she should know, after all, the business idea was spawned from the mind of a mother who wants a cleaner, brighter future for her children.
To find out more about eco gift bags and to purchase online visit www.ecogiftbags.com.au