Branded Fruit

I reached out to a Fast Company journalist in November who wrote an article about how wasteful the swag industry was and mentioned edible swag as a waste-free alternative.

This led to an article being published about the hot new trend of Branded Fruit (a parent company I made for Custom Avocados).

Within 24 hours I received over 150 inquiries from different companies asking for a quote for bulk orders of branded fruit—oranges, clementines, pomegranates, and even sweet potatoes.

Overnight this became a full-time job. I had to change my manufacturing process, figure out supply chain logistics, and hire employees. Within a week, I was fulfilling orders.

After I launched customavocados.com, my work spread organically on Twitter and various Slack channels leading to my first "bulk" order of 500 avocados with the SalesForce logo.

I created an assembly line with 6 friends to complete the order within a day and found a local avocado farm to supply us with avocados. Previously orders had been between 10-50 avocados, and this bulk order helped me learn about my manufacturing capabilities.

I launched the concept of custom avocados as a business in the San Francisco Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon. The goal was to make something as useless as possible. In that respect, I think I didn't follow the rules of the hackathon, because printing a logo on an avocado is totally useful. It's great swag.

My presentation was received positively (especially the concept of avocado business cards). This was the first time I had web traffic for customavocados.com. For the subsequent year, the idea of Custom Avocados spread on the internet.