A year after he launched a biodegradable-bag marketing enterprise, New York-based designer Tony Tracy has been swept up by the green consumer revolution.
This summer, his company, Perf Go Green Holdings Inc., which was founded in November 2007, went public with an initial offering of more than 24 million shares.
On Oct. 6, the company said its 13-gallon kitchen trash bags and 30-gallon lawn and leaf bags were on shelves at more than 6,000 Walgreens stores in the United States. The same day, Perf Go Green announced an agreement with Sprouts Farmers Market to carry the green-tinted bags in its Southwestern U.S. stores.
Perf Go Green bags already had been sold in the Upper Midwest at Roundy's supermarkets and nationally at Albertsons grocers, as well as through drugstore.com, a Bellevue, Wash.-based online retailer.
Tracy is planning big: His next move will be into CVS drugstores and he's negotiating with Wal-Mart for shelf space.
``Walgreens has been reordering already, as are the other places we're in. Our bags are going into Canada. We want to sell our products overseas,'' Tracy said in an Oct. 9 telephone interview.
While he did not give sales figures, Tracy said he is working with his converter, Spectrum Plastics Inc. of Cerritos, Calif., to develop new product lines beyond trash bags.
Spectrum President Benjamin Tran, who is on Perf Go Green's board, said in an Oct. 9 telephone interview that Perf Go Green's next expansion will be into pet waste bags and liners. Tran and Tracy co-designed a trash bag dispensing system that's stored in the bottom of a trash can and dispenses bags one after another.
Perf Go Green bags are made at a factory in Malang, Indonesia, from low density polyethylene plus a proprietary additive that the companies say gives the bags a two-year shelf life and will make them completely break down in a landfill within two years.
In a Sept. 25 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Perf Go Green noted its stock was trading at $1.17 per share. By mid-October, that had fallen to about $1 per share. Tran acknowledged the volatile stock market has tempered executives' initial enthusiasm about the green marketplace.