Repurpose Global has acquired Bluebird Climate to extend its offerings for companies looking to take sustainability action.
Founded in 2016 by Svanika Balasubramanian, Aditya Siroya and Peter Wang Hjemdahl, Repurpose Global has worked with over 300 brands and retailers, including KraveBeauty and Ursa Major, to measure and reduce plastic footprints. It also works with them to fund the recovery of plastic waste worldwide and estimates facilitated the removal of over 50 million pounds of plastic waste from the environment.
Similarly a business-to-business platform, software platform Bluebird was started in 2021 by Jamie McCroskery, Anisha Gupta and DJ Lee to enable brands to decrease the cost and climate impact of packaging and keep up with retailers’ sustainability standards. Formerly senior product manager at Glossier, McCroskery has assembled a strong roster of beauty brand clients at Bluebird, including Dieux Skin, Glow Recipe, Versed, Rhode and Glossier. Bluebird previously raised $2.9 million in funding.
Svanika Balasubramanian, founder of Repurpose, says, “By integrating [Bluebird’s] solutions into the Repurpose ecosystem, we aim to help consumer brands meet the growing demands in a more holistic and comprehensive way both on the policy side from regulators and policy makers and on the vendor side from retailers as well as, of course, the consumer pressure.”
Bluebird co-founder Jamie McCroskery adds Repurpose’s purchase of Bluebird will provide brands a “360 view across compliance for climate and waste and recyclability and action.” He says, “Brands don’t want multiple tools. They’re just trying to do their job, get products out the door and tell a good story, so having a compliance tool and then an LCA [life cycle assessment] tool and a widget tool, it just isn’t really amenable to how brands want to work.”
Bluebird’s co-founders will serve as advisors to Repurpose. McCroskery says all seven Bluebird employees have been offered jobs at Repurpose.
“Brands don’t want multiple tools.”
The wheels for Bluebird’s sale to Repurpose began turning as Bluebird was pondering whether to do another fundraising round. McCroskery recalls thinking, “Hey, we could raise millions of dollars more, build out a lot of the feature sets that people want, get deeper into beauty and go across categories as well, or we can just work with a company that’s already done it, and it’s going to take us there way faster.”
There are plenty of questions around the effectiveness of consumer packaged goods’ sustainability initiatives, including refills that can lead to more packaging rather than less if consumers aren’t sufficiently using them. However, Balasubramanian emphasizes shifting to eco-conscious packaging alternatives is important, while underscoring the investment in those alternatives has to be thoughtful.
Balasubramanian says, “The single best thing that we can do for the environment is making sure that, if we are extracting resources from the planet to create something, we get as much use out of it as possible before we discard it, which inherently means increasing the amount of reuse and refill strategies that we have.”
McCroskery believes the beauty industry is only in the infant stages of harnessing software and other digital tools to improve its sustainability profile. He predicts retailers such as Sephora and Credo will turn to them to conduct life cycle assessments in the future. McCroskery says, “By giving brands database tools, they can actually sift through all of the fads and make sure they’re moving in the right direction.”
In addition to assisting Repurpose’s onboarding of Bluebird and advising its business, McCroskery will be offering free consultations for brands founders via his website over the next two weeks. For founders interested in speedier consultation, he’s built a tool with ChatGPT to answer common questions about sustainable packaging, customer messaging, return on investment and more he typically receives from brands.
McCroskery says, “I just want to essentially give my knowledge back to this space before I go on and work on other projects.”
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