Seeing a new business opportunity using recycled PET

Genusee Inc., a startup in Flint, Mich., that recycles plastic water bottles into stylish eyeglasses, has got the kind of angel funding most startups can only fantasize about, cashing checks from investors with a geographic range from Silicon Valley to New York City, from a co-founder of Tesla to a financial adviser to Barack Obama.

Investors say they like that the company is green; that it is a good-news story in a city known for bad, which makes it a perfect fit for those looking for social-impact investing; and that its founder, Ali Rose VanOverbeke, is a savvy CEO who has kept costs under control while bringing her product to a receptive market, with brand-name global retailers stocking her brand.

She said she surpassed her goal for a recently concluded seed round of funding and will soon start raising a Series A round of between $2 million and $5 million. She declined to say how much she raised in that seed round. She finished that seed round with an investment of an undisclosed amount from Invest Detroit in October.

"Ali Rose is an incredibly smart entrepreneur," said Robert Wolf, the founder of family-owned 32Advisors and a co-founder of 100K Ventures, a national group of high-profile investors that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas into for-profit companies. He was an adviser to Obama when he was president and is on the board of directors of the Obama Foundation.

His family office has invested in Genusee and so have some of his partners in 100K Ventures, whose co-founders include Victor Cruz, a former Super Bowl champion who is now an analyst for ESPN; Draymond Green, a Flint native and former Michigan State University basketball player who has won three NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors; Soledad O'Brien, a national TV news anchor and producer; Michael Strahan, a former Super Bowl champion who is a host on Good Morning America; Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code; and Frank Thomas, a Hall of Fame baseball player.

"We look to invest in underserved communities that have very smart entrepreneurs but don't get a lot of attention from venture capitalists," Wolf said. The investment in Genusee, the size of which wasn't disclosed, was made this summer and was the second by 100K Ventures in a company housed in the Ferris Wheel Building. The first was last year in Kalm Clothing, a design and manufacturing company founded by Flint native Kiara Tyler.

"Making glasses from plastic water bottles was just such a smart idea, and she's creating jobs in Flint. It just checked every box for us," Wolf said.

A buzzword in impact and green investing is the circular economy — raw materials turn into products, which turn into waste materials, which are turned into products.

VanOverbeke calls Genusee as the first circular economy eyewear.

She is a 2008 graduate of the Roeper School in Birmingham, Mich., and credits it with shaping her philosophy.

"The Roeper School was founded by two Jews who fled the Nazis. The Roeper philosophy is centered around community. We, not I," said VanOverbeke, who has honored the school by referring to the frames of her glasses on her website as "Roeper frames."

"The school challenged me at a young age to focus on social justice," she said.

After graduation, she headed to New York, where she got her Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion and apparel design in 2014 from the prestigious Parsons School of Design. After graduation, she had a four-month fellowship in design at the Parsons Design Lab, a fellowship sponsored by Ford Motor Co. and Conde Nast.

Before and after graduation, she worked as a freelance stylist, working on photo shoots for a wide range of clients, including Glamour magazine, Revlon and Elle magazine. After her fellowship, she worked as a designer for Lane Bryant and then Joe Fresh, a fashion brand and retail chain.

From June through September 2017, VanOverbeke was in a business accelerator program at XRC Labs in New York, and followed that with 23 weeks in the first cohort of the Elaine Gold Launch Pad, a mentoring program of the Council of Fashion Designers of America for aspiring entrepreneurs, where they are, in the words of the Launch Pad website, "encouraged to embed sustainability, technology, and innovation [and] explore new business models and create value through new ways of designing, making, producing, selling and storytelling."

Which leads us to Genusee. (The name is a play on the name Genessee County, which includes Flint.)

VanOverbeke got the idea for the company over Christmas break of 2016, when she spent two weeks as a volunteer for the Red Cross delivering water bottles to Flint residents. "Seeing this plastic waste stream was shocking to me. My design brain said, 'What can I do with this waste?'"

She wrote a business plan on a Post-It note in January 2017 and formally launched the company in April 2018 after finishing the accelerator programs. A $20,000 grant from Elaine Gold allowed her to do prototyping on glasses before starting the company.

A month before the formal launch, she got her first institutional funding, from ImpactAssets of Bethesda, Md.

After launching, she raised $74,000 in a Kickstarter campaign and moved to Flint full time that May.

VanOverbeke rented space in an optical lab in Flint, then a year ago moved into the Ferris Wheel Building, a business incubator in downtown Flint, where she and her employees occupy the entire sixth floor, the operation growing from 400 square feet to 1,200 in less than a year.

VanOverbeke buys plastic pellets from local recyclers and contracts with a local injection molder to produce the three-piece frames. Each pair of glasses is made from 15 water bottles.

Genusee employees then sand, tumble and buff those pieces in a process that takes six days to get the right look and feel. The pieces are fit together to make complete frames, with the lenses made by another supplier.

Prices start at $99 for nonprescription glasses, readers and single-vision prescription glasses. Progressive lenses are $295. The glasses come in a variety of frame colors and with clear lenses or lenses in various shades and tints.

They can be ordered online at genusee.com and are sold on other websites specializing in eye glasses. While most sales are via the web, she has sold glasses at various pop-ups, and they are available at the recently opened  Comma Bookstore in Flint.

Thanks in part to VanOverbeke's contacts in the fashion industry, Genusee glasses are also sold in retail outlets and online by New York-based Alex Mill; Philadelphia-based Anthropologie; and Shopbop, a subsidiary of Amazon.

VanOverbeke said sales have sharply increased since the pandemic hit in March, whether that's coincidental, people are at home spending more time shopping on the internet, or they've seen pieces on the company in the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Elle and Vogue or caught her on her two appearances with David Muir on ABC World News Tonight.

She has 11 employees, up from just three in March.

She sold her first pair of glasses the month she launched and declined to release updated sales figures.

"I've never seen anyone work so hard, literally," said Heather Kale, the general manager of the Ferris Wheel. "She's always here. What's exciting about Ali is she has this entrepreneurial spirit but she's so focused on the community."

Said VanOverbeke: "It's exciting to be doing this in Flint. Beautiful things are being made here. There [is] so much more than just all the negative things people hear about Flint."