S9 Ep12: Rethinking the Foundations: Sustainable Alternatives to Traditional Building Products with Gregory Wilson
“People want to know where your food comes from. Why shouldn't people know where your building materials come from?” —Gregory Wilson
Many of the building materials we use in our homes and workplaces can pose serious health risks. From toxic chemicals like formaldehyde to hazardous plastics, these materials can negatively impact indoor air quality and overall well-being. Therefore, it's time to rethink the foundations of construction and seek out sustainable, plant-based alternatives that prioritize human health.
Gregory Wilson is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of HempWood®, a company revolutionizing the building industry with its eco-friendly, carbon-negative flooring solutions. With over 28 years of experience in the field, Wilson is on a mission to provide healthier, more sustainable materials for residential and commercial spaces.
In this episode, Wilson discusses his entrepreneurial journey, the environmental and health benefits of Hempwood, the challenges of competing with cheaper but less sustainable options, and his plans for global expansion.
Connect with Gregory:
Gregory Wilson is the founder of HempWood®, a company that produces sustainable building materials made from hemp fiber and soy protein. He has a background in business strategy, financial modeling, and product development, with experience in setting up operations in the USA and China. Gregory is also involved in other ventures such as SmartOAK Pty Ltd and QPC Partners, focusing on innovative and eco-friendly solutions in the real estate and manufacturing industries. He holds an MBA from Frostburg State University and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School.
Episode Highlights:
01:47 Loving the Outdoors
05:40 The Only Carbon-Negative Flooring Company
14:00 Overcoming Challenges in Sales
18:49 Do Not Be a Minority Owner in Your Own Company
23:59 Expanding Global Reach
27:43 What People Care About Most
31:06 It's Not Easy to Do What's Right
Tweets:
It’s time for green home renovations. Listen in as @jreichman interviews @hempwood Founder, Gregory Wilson on his mission to disrupt the construction industry with plant-based, carbon-negative flooring. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #Hempwood #EcoFriendlyFlooring #PlantBasedBuildingMaterials #SustainableConstruction #CarbonNegative #GreenBuilding #BuildingInnovation #IndoorAirQuality
Inspirational Quotes:
09:48 “Having improved indoor air quality by not having any VOCs leads to higher cognitive ability and higher test scores.” —Gregory Wilson
13:23 “People went to luxury vinyl flooring because they didn't want to use more wood, and that's a lot more hazardous than the stuff they were using before.” —Justine Reichman
15:59 “When everybody along the line can make double margins on what they're doing as the natural products, then you don't have the reach.” —Gregory Wilson
16:47 “People want to know where your food comes from. Why shouldn't people know where your building materials come from?” —Gregory Wilson
18:49 “Use your own money as long as you can, because once you sell the majority of your company, somebody else owns you. So if you have your intellectual property approved, then all of a sudden your valuation goes way up, and you can raise capital to the tune of not having to be a minority owner in your own business.” —Gregory Wilson
19:42 “Always do what's right, not what's more profitable in the short term… It is always harder to do the right thing, but doing the wrong thing means you're not going to stick around for so long.” —Gregory Wilson
22:03 “It's equally as important to have an impact in the world as it is to make money.” —Justine Reichman
27:46 “What people care about more than sustainability is health. That's something that people go out of their way to look for.” —Gregory Wilson
31:55 “The world that we live in right now means that people buy fast food, people buy fast fashion, people buy all the junk that they don't need because it's cheap and convenient, and then it turns you into having issues.” —Gregory Wilson
32:32 “You always have to take into consideration, that your customer base is never going to be the majority, because it's easier to do something that's not right.”—Gregory Wilson
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Greg Wilson. He is the Founder of HempWood.
Welcome, Greg.
Gregory Wilson: Hey, thanks for having me.
Justine Reichman: I'm so pleased to have you here. I've heard so much about what you're doing, and I'm excited to share it with our community. Just now, you just told me that you were serious entrepreneurs. So from the get go, I'm curious. As a serial entrepreneur, do you just think it's in your DNA?
Gregory Wilson: Well, I'm not good at working for people. I gotta figure something out.
Justine Reichman: Have they all been in this space?
Gregory Wilson: Not all, but the most successful ones have been. I started in college working in building materials, studying engineering and Chinese, so I went over to China. And when I was studying there, I did an internship in a bamboo flooring mill, and that turned into coming back and graduating, selling my car, buying a plane ticket and starting a company that went public.
Justine Reichman: Wow, congratulations. That's a big deal. There's so much to go on there for the people that are listening and watching, and want to learn more about how to become a successful entrepreneur, especially when you started off while you're in college. But let's go back a little bit. Let's tell everybody a little bit about your background, and let's just kick it off a little bit with how you got into this specific industry today.
Gregory Wilson: Well, I've always been an outdoorsy person. I was always the kid that was in the creek catching crawfish and just wanting to be outside hiking, biking, camping and things. And then when I went to college, I did very well in math. I did not do well in the reading and writing part, and so they asked if I spoke a second language. The answer was NO so I took that as a challenge to learn Chinese, because I figured an engineer who speaks Chinese can write his own ticket. So that's how I got started getting into building materials coming from a building family, and then going to China while I was in college, and trying to solve a problem of how to make bamboo flooring harder so you could actually use it for flooring without having dings and dents in it.
Justine Reichman: I know that you do a lot in building materials, and I know from the limited conversation that we had before this that a lot of it goes back to being sustainable, and equally, some of it is around agriculture. I'd love to know how that fits into what you're doing, and why did you focus on that?
Gregory Wilson: Well, so loving the outdoors means that I wanted to do something that was more in the natural building material space, because I did an internship also in college working as a line engineer or assistant line engineer for vinyl siding. And I thought that that was actually just disgusting seeing all of the different petroleum and different stuff that they put into your home. I didn't think that was right, so I wanted to work on something that would actually be a solution. So I started working with the bamboo, and I actually got really sick from dealing with the formaldehyde that's used in wood flooring and bamboo flooring. Been hospitalized a bunch of times with my lungs because that led me to doing this one on my own terms, and using soy instead of formaldehyde as the bonding agent to hold together the hempwood.
So learning what I learned with the bamboo that was relatively successful, and then fixing the inherent problems in it of something that actually grows faster and is better for the environment, hemp rather than bamboo, and then using soy instead of formaldehyde, because I didn't want to have my coworkers getting sick like I did. I still have those respiratory problems. I'm still on a payment plan for my last lung treatment in 2021. And so when hemp became legal in the United States with the 2014 farm bill, I knew the process that we had developed, which is actually based off of the Fibonacci Sequence.
Justine Reichman: For those that are not familiar with the Fibonacci Sequence, can you just break that down for us.
Gregory Wilson: The Fibonacci Sequence is nature's algorithm. So it's the second most common number in nature. It's how every plant grows, every blade of grass, every leaf on a tree, because it's the most efficient use of space. So behind Pi, which is a circle, is Phi, which is the most efficient use of space. And so the Fibonacci Sequence is the carbon sequestration ratio of plants. 161% of carbon is required to grow one unit of cellulose, as well as the compression ratio for making all of the different products that I've invented, like the strand woven bamboo, eucalyptus, and smart oak. And now, hempwood.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So by making these products that are all plant based, what is the impact that that's having on the environment? Do you have any statistics you could share?
Gregory Wilson: You can talk about the environment outdoors where we're the only true carbon negative blowing material in the world, and that's because we use our waste as our energy source for the mill. So our bio burner uses our waste hemp to create our thermal energy, and then we have hydro and solar electric to power the mill. To the farming practices where you're not allowed to use fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides that you typically use in agriculture like row crops like corn, beans and wheat, because actually, the government hasn't regulated it to allow any of the approved products on it, so you technically have to grow it organically because you're not allowed to spray it with anything.
So the farming practices are regenerative, just in their inherent nature of being a net benefit for the soil and not spraying anything on it using a plant based adhesive to replace petroleum with the soy is upcycling soy. That after they squeeze out the oil for making biodiesel, we use the flour as our protein soy for our adhesive to inside of the mill, not having any of our employees getting sick from being around dirty chemicals, or the installers putting it into your home, as well as the people that are actually living in that home not having any VOC, Volatile Organic Compounds, that leach out into people's homes whenever you have dirty chemicals in there. That's literally the healthiest, most sustainable flooring in the world.
Justine Reichman: Wow, so you've been doing this flooring now for how long?
Gregory Wilson: My journey to where I am now began in 1996. So you're talking 28 years when I started laying flooring in our family business, because my family are builders. And so before I could drive a car, I was helping lug boxes of wood flooring into houses for the family business, and then learning how to install them. To study building material engineering in college starting in 2000, I actually went to an academy of manufacturing, so engineering High School on the STEM schools where I studied literally what I'm doing now. And then went to college and did the same thing, starting my first business in 2003 which is now 21 years ago or so, working with this strand of woven bamboo to then going to business school. I ended up going to Harvard and jumped out and started my own business. Because when I signed over the intellectual property from the first one, they agreed to pay me to go to school anywhere I could get into in the world. So in 2011, I finished there, and then invented hempwood in 2014. Filed the patents in 2016. Built the first mill in 2018. Built the second mill in 2021. And now, we're building a third one.
Justine Reichman: How much of the landscape of the country do you have that has access to this?
“Having improved indoor air quality by not having any VOCs leads to higher cognitive ability and higher test scores.” —Gregory Wilson
Gregory Wilson: So all of our raw materials come from less than 100 miles from our facility. Actually, we have over 80% of them that are grown right here in Callaway County in Murray, Kentucky. All of our soy which comes from the processing mills, they're within about 200 miles of us. And then some of our other components come from West Virginia, which is our neighboring state as well. So all of our raw materials come from within a short distance because that helps with your carbon calculation. And then we ship our product all over the United States straight to the job site. So instead of having a middleman that you have to sell it to a retail store that then sells it to somebody, we just find somebody who's really interested in healthy, sustainable materials typically for residential, somebody who's in the healthcare field that knows about all the dirty shit that they're putting into your out and say, I don't want to have that. Or commercially, we sell all over the US, and we're finding our best commercial customers, our universities and schools, because having improved indoor air quality by not having any VOCs leads to higher cognitive ability and higher test scores.
Justine Reichman: Amazing. So what percentage of the country do you have at the moment that has access or that is leveraging this? And how large is that pie that you still want to reach out to?
Gregory Wilson: We have sold to all 48 states of the lower states, as well as Hawaii. We also sell into Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan. So it's getting out there. This is technically our 6th year of manufacturing products. We've done about 1.4 million square feet that's sold out there. Probably 500 square feet is about the average job that you do. And so that means you've got a couple of thousands installs that have gone not only in the United States, but all over the place.
Justine Reichman: Do you have any additional information that you know besides yourself and the impact that you were having from all the stuff that was on all the other materials? So have there been any studies done, or anything further that you could share about the impact of being able to have better for you resources as you build out, whether it's homes, whether it's residential or commercial?
Gregory Wilson: We have our LCA, Life Cycle Analysis, and our environmental product declaration, which is key to proving your carbon footprint. We also have an HPD, which is a Health Product Declaration, that shows your off gassing standards and any sort of dirty things that might be in your product. As well as the declare label, which declares that I'm not using any forever chemicals. So for our product, we have all of these tests, and they're verified by ASTM, a third party. And then we actually team up with the United Soybean Board who sponsors a lot of our research for the adhesive, and the American Lung Association. So they send me to New York, California, all over the place speaking about this, because there are studies dating back to the 70's showing the effects of dirty building material inside of your home. And that's what has started to get a lot of the products that are cheaper and perform better in some element, but also cause cancer like lead paint, vinyl chloride, which is your LVP flooring,
Luxury Vinyl Plank flooring is actually made from one of the most hazardous chemicals you can deal with. It was developed for gas warfare in World War 1, and now it's in 60% of the flooring sold in the United States, and the EPA has finally declared it as a hazardous chemical even though they noted it under Nixon in 1970 that the off gassing from PVC or vinyl chloride is horrendous for you. So the words get in out there. They're having all of these tests and studies that are done by the National Institute of Health, NIH, Harvard Chan School of Medicine, and a lot of these different places that are saying, hey, look. Having dirty chemicals inside of your home, inside of your classroom, things like that are proving to be hazardous. And one of the reasons that all of these different asthma, allergies, cancers are coming about when people aren't smoking anymore. What the hell is going on? And the reality is that we've known about it for a long time, but it's a lot more profitable to do something else.
“People went to luxury vinyl flooring because they didn't want to use more wood, and that's a lot more hazardous than the stuff they were using before.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: It's interesting. One of the things is people went to luxury vinyl flooring because they didn't want to use wood, because they didn't want to use more wood and stuff like that. And that's a lot more hazardous than the stuff they were using before. And now, there seems to be, from what you're saying, an alternative that is plant forward that is healthier. I'm wondering, it took a while for people to get on board with the luxury vinyl flooring. What do you think the runway or the time frame would be for the majority of people to get on board with this? What are some of the challenges you face when you try to sell this?
Gregory Wilson: Price and profitability. So the reason LVP is everywhere is not because people want it. It's not because it performs better. Luxury vinyl planks cost between 40 and 80 cents a square foot to make, and people pay between $3 and $7 a square foot for it. So every time you have another link in the supply chain of selling a product, like flooring, you have a 200x multiplier. So if you have a factory in Cambodia or Vietnam where it's all made, because China has tariffs on it, and it doesn't fit that model of making so much money anymore. All the mills moved to Cambodia and Vietnam. And actually, LVP was invented by one of my bamboo customers.Very close with the son of them. They were bought by Shaw, and they sold their company for hundreds of millions of dollars, and then they stepped down when all of the things came out because (inaudible) actually banned (inaudible) chloride in use in public manufacturing spaces in 2020 as part of their Clean Air Act. And it was all moved to the Muslim region of China, the Uruguayans. And so the US has stopped allowing that material to come in because it's used.
I don't know how dirty you want to get into it, but it's using slave labor to make something cheaper, and then sending that compounded material to Vietnam or Cambodia to make the finished good, the flooring. That way, you get around the tariffs. So it's a money grab when you can make something for 50 cents, and the customer pays $10 or $5 for it. That means there's an importer, there's a distributor, there's a retailer, there's the contractor that's all making money along the lines there, and you make a lot more money doing things like that. And so that's why LVP is out there. It's not because it performs better, it looks better. Nobody says, I want to buy a house with plastic flooring. When you advertise your house, you say that it's got wood flooring, it's got granite countertops. But when everybody along the lawn can make double margins on what they're doing as the natural products, then you don't have the reach. It's the same way in foods. You probably see the same thing where you have the type of--
Justine Reichman: You're using hemp, I mean, you're using plants. It's just to create a different product. It's not to create something consumable, it's to create something that is sustainable that we live within, and we want to have a healthy life given your experience with your lungs. But anyway, my point was just that it's still food. It's still made with food, it's still plant forward, and it's part of that whole theme, and why many people are going back to that, because they know it's more transparent.
“People want to know where your food comes from. Why shouldn't people know where your building materials come from?” —Gregory Wilson
Gregory Wilson: Oh, absolutely. Everybody wants to know where their food comes from. We promote that exact same atmosphere. Because I live on an organic farm here in Western Kentucky, my wife and I live on a 171 acre organic farm. It's technically permaculture set up, fruits, vegetables, cows, pigs, chickens, berries, mushrooms, all these different types of things that actually are self-sustaining because I'm not really good at farming. But you can go out and take the same blueberries right outside the door there year after year. And so people want to know where your food comes from, why shouldn't people know where your building materials come from? Because if you don't know, that means somebody's probably doing something to make more money out of it that they're not telling you about.
That's the cold, hard fact where we live right now, everything is bought and paid for, whether it's your politician, whether it's your corporate CEO, or whether it's your local, I don't know which one your local stores like. The more local you get, the better it is because you can say, oh, those vegetables that I showed you earlier, the farmer who grew those vegetables also grew our hemp. And I stopped over to check on the hemp and they said, hey, here's some foods that weren't able to go to one of their larger buyers, one of the larger supermarkets around here. And instead, they said, you don't care what the food looks like here, this is free. And so I'm trading them some of the meats that we had here on our farm, and they give me vegetables on theirs. And you know who the people are. You know what they put on it. You know how it was done.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, that's brilliant. I'm curious, you built this company as your 8th company as a Founder. Was there anything you did differently with this company from lessons learned from the past?
Gregory Wilson: Absolutely.
Justine Reichman: Can you share one or two things with us that you think might be really important to other founders tuning in?
Gregory Wilson: Use your own money as long as you can. Because once you sell the majority of your company, somebody else owns you. So if you can develop your product or proof of concept and have your intellectual property approved, then all of a sudden, your valuation goes way up, and you can raise capital to the tune of not having to be a minority owner in your own business. So not everybody has the luxury of doing that right now. I haven't been paid for six years now, that's easier to say once you've done it a couple times before. But that is really, really hard. And so the farther you can take it without having to get investors involved, the more likely you are going to be running your own company later on.
Justine Reichman: Do you have one more lesson learned that you could share that you think would be pivotal?
Gregory Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. Always do what's right, not what's more profitable in the short term. Because if you do what's more profitable in the short term, then that will come back and bite you in the long term, and you won't be living and doing what you want to do because you're going to have compromised what your actual ambition or intentions were from the get go. And so it is always harder to do the right thing, but doing the wrong thing means you're not going to stick around for so long. Just like the vinyl flooring guys, the guys that developed that filled it up and got out quick. But now, everybody's starting to realize how dirty vinyl chloride is. Like that train that wrecked in Ohio last year, that was headed to a vinyl flooring mill, and that's what finally set off the EPA because of public outrage to say, hey, we shouldn't be having that material in our neighborhoods. And so doing what's right and not compromising your values is absolutely important, even if that does cause it to be more difficult than it could have been.
Justine Reichman: Thanks for sharing that. I'm curious what your thoughts are on B Corps, because many times, there's a lot of different ways to look at it. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are because it sounds like it may align or it may not.
Gregory Wilson: Everybody always asks me about B Corps, and the reality is, of what I'm doing, I have to stay laser focused on what I set out to do initially rather than going after a lot of the different things that become, I don't know if they're going to be a fad or if it's just a hot topic. But I've heard that, oh, carbon negative is a hot topic. We did it because it was right, not because it's going to make you more money or be a B Corp. People say, hey, why aren't you a B Corp? And I'm like, well, I set this one up the same way that I had always been, which is a LLC. And being the owner of an LLC is the way to make it work that I'm familiar with. So learning more about it would be better. I get asked whether I should be a B Corp regularly.
Justine Reichman: I know that there's a difference between, they have the B Corp and the Benefit Corp, right? And there's some nuance between some of that. What resonates with me is that, for me, it's equally as important to have an impact in the world as it is to make money. So as long as those things align for me, that works. But that's just a personal statement. Regardless of how I do it, I would do it because I want to have an impact in the world. When I get up in the morning, that's what drives me.
Gregory Wilson: Absolutely. And so a whole bunch of labels and things like that aren't really what we chase after. We just kind of try to make the healthiest, most sustainable product, and get it out there. More than that, it seems like you're trying to prove that you're something, rather than just go do it.
Justine Reichman: Yeah, I could see that. Many people talk about the community that you have there and the resources and access, but I think that it depends on the community that you're in. What resource that's going to be for you, and where your values find in line if you're focused on doing your business, which I respect, and I would want to do too. You have to decide. There's only so many of us in the beginning, and we're stretched thin. We're doing like 12 different jobs. I think there's a time and place that it could change as people go through the process as well as they get more they get larger. As they get more resources, and they achieve more, it's all about dividing and conquering in my mind.
Gregory Wilson: I always set up the companies too. Instead of having to raise capital, we have equity that is earned by our employees. So 10% of HempWood is owned by employees. We also have 10% of HempWood, which is earned by our advisors and our board of directors. Instead of raising money to pay somebody, I use that as incentive.
Justine Reichman: It's smart. So in the next few years, what do you hope to see, both for the company and the impact on a more global level?
Gregory Wilson: We are in the plans of building the HempWood in the Netherlands, in Europe. So that means you won't have to send something over the ocean. We're actually shipping a container to Belgium next week. So that is something that's really exciting being able to have it locally made in Europe.
Justine Reichman: Do you work with farmers over there already? What was that process like being that you're over here? Were some of the rules and regulations different that you had to accommodate for?
Gregory Wilson: No. Actually, they're a lot easier because hemp was never made completely illegal in Europe. So farming hemp was already there. We've literally had over 7,000 inquiries for license on intellectual property, and about half of those are from Europe. So one of the guys that I did the bamboo with, Tom Mathis, when he said, whenever you're ready, Greg, bring me on. And so I called Tom one day and I said, hey, I can't answer all these emails and phone calls coming from Europe and you said, when I'm ready. So here we are. And so he joined our team two and a half years ago, and has been working out how to license our intellectual property to be able to set up facilities over in Europe. And it actually just came from some of our existing customers who said, hey, it's kind of expensive to ship it over here, and it doesn't fit my environmental goals by shipping something that far. Let's do this. So they've gone to their local government, and looked for incentives for setting up healthy natural materials. They came back and said, let's do it.
Justine Reichman: How large is your team today?
Gregory Wilson: We are 24 people, plus my wife and I. She's our office manager, and so she's in charge of all the money. I'm in charge of making stuff and selling it. And then we have Tommy, (inaudible) and Matt, who are our first three interns that are now our plant manager number one, plant manager number two, and head of engineering because we pulled them from the local university, and they're all owners in the company. And then each facility has a supervisor, and then they each have five operators and three helpers.
Justine Reichman: Amazing. So when you look forward, we're in 2024, so by like 2030, what do you hope to see?
Gregory Wilson: With the bamboo, it ended up being 11,000 people working there. I don't think this one would get that big because this will require automation because it's a higher cost area. I would imagine that if our goal is to build four of these facilities in the United States, we got our second patent approved not only for making flooring, but for making a structural panel that we call OHB, Oriented Hemp Board. We will have four flooring mills in the United States with an OHB mill beside it as your manufacturing cluster. So we'll be able to have $100 million in revenue in the US from those facilities, and then a similar amount of sales from licensed facilities overseas where you get a royalty fee.
Justine Reichman: So if you look at the total population, what percentage do you think by 2030 will be making this choice versus alternate choices?
Gregory Wilson: 3%. We will always be a specialty item. Will never be the cheapest, will never be the most convenient. But it will be what everybody wants.
Justine Reichman: And then if you have 3%, what do you expect in terms of health for that population that is now making this choice to get the hempwood versus those that are not?
Gregory Wilson: Well, there's a clear movement, and what people actually care about more than sustainability is health. That's something that people actually go out of their way to look for when we have our Google search results. And if you get between 70 and 80,000 Google searches a month, and you have over 50% of those come from somebody looking for a healthy foreign, we have like 16 or 17% of those somebody looking for a sustainable foreign. So the health impact is real and is gaining momentum.
“What people care about more than sustainability is health. That's something that people go out of their way to look for.” —Gregory Wilson
The sustainability aspect of what we're doing, I live on an organic farm, and that's what we do. But the reality is that changes whenever the administration changes, whether it's your local or your federal, and that's going to go back and forth because people told me with the bamboo that we were going to be trading carbon credits in 2006 when it was listed on the stock exchange. And that never happened. But that was what one investment bank used as the cherry on top to lower other investors saying, here's the kicker. And whenever you have a change in administration, that changes. And so the sustainability side is great. The healthy side is what people care about. Made in America is also locally made is a very big attribute of it, and then being 20% harder than hickory. So for a hard surface like flooring, that's paramount to your success because it means that it's more durable than your competition.
Justine Reichman: So if our listeners or our founders wanted to get more information from your graduate, what would be the best way to do that?
Gregory Wilson: Check out hempwood.com. Or you can go to our Instagram or Facebook, which are both HempWood as well. But we actually made up the word hempwood and then trademarked it, and got the domains and all of the different social media URLs because it had never been done before. We're the only ones in the world doing what we're doing. So all roads lead to Rome. And if you look up HempWood in Europe, you can see HempWood UK. That's our license there. You can see HempWood Netherlands, that's our license there. We have one that's actually coming online. We have HempWood Belgium, and HempWood in Bulgaria.
Justine Reichman: Maybe Australia one day, and New Zealand.
Gregory Wilson: Absolutely will be Australia. I actually own 20% of a wood recycling plant in Tasmania. My mentor who taught me how to do most of this stuff is the chairman of the board of the Institute of Engineers of Australia, but he solves the big problems when it gets past me. And Jimmy that did the bamboo with me, he's the chief engineer of the bamboo company that we're both at. I sold my shares to start this thing. Yeah, we'll definitely set one up in Tasmania. We've already got it kind of planned out, putting it next to our smart oak facility.
Justine Reichman: That's exciting. So we're going to see you on a global level here. People are going to have more access to you. It might be a little bit cost prohibitive, depending on where people's finances are. But I think on the whole, you're working to work with plants. It's better for people's health, and it's better for the environment. You're not letting all those gasses out too, so it sounds like a triple win.
Gregory Wilson: Absolutely. The Achilles heel of what we're doing is natural materials typically don't cost less. So if you look at the total lifespan of the product, if you're going to have your hemp wood floor for 100 years in your home as compared to a vinyl floor, which gets changed out on average every 10 years, it's not as cheap when you have to multiply it by 10. And so the same method that you have with Tesla that says, hey, it's not only your acquisition cost, but it's your cost of how long that's going to last when a combustion engine actually degrades faster than an electric engine because you're exploding oil inside of their gasoline, as well as the cost of fueling it all the time.
If you look at the total product life cycle, it is less expensive. But the fast fashion world that we live in right now means that people buy fast food, people buy fast fashion. People buy all the junk that you don't really need because it's cheap and convenient, and then it turns you into having issues like I see around here. I live in the most obese state in the United States, also happens to be the Mountain Dew capital, also happens to be the diabetes capital. I love it here because of the nature and everything that you can do outdoors. But where we are, that's not the priority, and so that's something that you always have to take into consideration that your customer base is never going to be the majority because it's easier to do something that's not right.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Greg, thank you so much for chatting with me, sharing all this information. Before I rid you of the floors in my house, I'm gonna have to call you and get an estimate for that.
Gregory Wilson: Absolutely. We have three different grades of flooring. It's between 6 bucks and 10 bucks a square foot. It's not actually expensive. It's the same price as your domestic card would. The higher end your custom stuff we do, or commercial, the lower end is what we call our character grade. Like you see in my house right here. This is our character grade, and that's because it has more of the natural rustic look with the knots, the color variation and all those things, which in my opinion actually looks better. It looks more natural.
Justine Reichman: I think it depends on the house. Some people have a modern house, some people have a traditional house. So I think based on that, it sounds like you have everything from custom options to different kinds of things. So we'll be in touch. Thanks, Greg, so much. We look forward to continuing this conversation and sharing more information and a little bit more statistics, if possible, in our newsletter for our folks, so we'll catch you offline about that. But again, thanks for joining me today.
Gregory Wilson: Well, thank you for having us, and enjoy California.
