LOS ANGELES—On the heels of their Kickstarter success, millennial entrepreneurs Emma Cohen, 32, and Miles Pepper, 23, appeared on Shark Tank’s season premiere earlier this week. More than 150,000 FinalStraws have been sold through the Kickstarter and their official site www.finalstraw.com.
Co-Founder and President Miles Pepper explains, “When we launched FinalStraw’s Kickstarter, our goal was to sell about five thousand units, and now we’re producing hundreds of thousands. We could have never imagined this success leading to pitching our idea on SharkTank. We’re excited to bring our mission of ridding the planet of single-use plastics to the Sharks, and their global audience.”
The Kickstarter launched at a time when Starbucks, Marriott, and the state of California all banned plastic straws, and multiple news sources reported that Americans dispose of more than 500 million straws each day. The timely success of the Kickstarter campaign was exciting but led to an unexpected hurdle for the FinalStraw team—an epidemic of counterfeit straws hitting the market. The tally is now in the hundreds.
CEO and Co-Founder Emma Cohen says, “At the heart of FinalStraw is our goal of reducing waste by creating the final straw you would ever need in your lifetime.”
FinalStraw is now available for pre-orders. The first shipments of straws will be sent to customers all over the world on November 15.
