Meet Becca Berger, the Silicon Valley-based CleanTech inventor, who is literally harnessing the sun’s power to make wood stain!☀️ She says, “The problem with traditional wood stains is that they’re dual carbon offenders, not only does the manufacturing process offlet carbon. but the product application also off-lets smelly volatile organic compounds or VOCs.”
Becca’s background isn’t in Chemistry, she’s an artist. A combination of events inspired this invention. The first was a quote from Tim Cook in the “Elysis” project press release. The second was an artisan friend who had a stroke right in front of her. He knew of several woodworkers who had also suffered from early strokes and heart attacks. The artisan strongly believed these were caused by the daily use of toxic oil-based wood stains.
Concerned for her friend’s safety, and the industry at large, Becca researched volatile VOCs and discovered an even bigger problem. Apparently, the architectural built environment is responsible for the majority of carbon emissions. She spoke with many industry professionals and they asked, “What can be done?” Becca used art to act! She invented a water-based wood stain formula that would “do no harm” to the applicator and used her keen artistic eye to create unique colors. Just one coat of her water-stain initiates a reaction that unlocks nature’s true colors right before your very eyes, and ages wood in minutes, rather than decades. Unlike competitor products, there is no harmful odor, no VOC off-letting, and no need for personal protective equipment. Artisans and woodworkers have described her colors as evoking emotion with warm natural tones. Finishers call WeatherWash “magic in a can!”
She has made it her mission to take on wood stain carbon omitters, and soon paint! The most impressive part of her story is how she is successfully attacking carbon emissions with low-carbon manufacturing operations and zero-carbon wood stain products. Think it’s impossible? Visit your local Walmart coatings department to see just how possible, the impossible is.
Why did you invent a reactive wood stain?
“While I was getting my MBA, I read a press release about Apple, the Elysis project, and Tim Cook that inspired me. He said, ‘Climate change is one of the great challenges of our time, and the time for action is now.’ He challenged other companies to join Apple by ‘innovating.’ #TimCook. My friend’s stroke gave me a very good reason to take on Tim’s challenge and I wanted to be part of the innovation initiative. I believe that true beauty exists in nature and no wood stain is more compelling, no color is more beautiful than the colors of naturally weathered driftwood. I searched for base formulas made from sustainable alternatives, like water. I needed to find a way to re-create that inner beauty, but faster and with no off-letting. So I invented WeatherWash. After creating the product, my biggest challenges were holding the color with a topcoat and retaining one hundred percent of the wood grain,” Becca says as she uses an air compressor to mix raw ingredients in a 330-gallon tote.
Check out the WeatherWash portfolio on Instagram @WeatherWash.
Becca bootstrapped sales until she was ready to launch into retail stores. She and her husband bought a nice motorhome and traveled from state to state and grew as fast as sales would let them. Those efforts paid off big, as Walmart was the first major retailer to place her product on the shelf. At present, she is in two hundred and fifty Walmart stores. You can find her product at HomeDepot.com, Amazon.com, and of course her own website, WeatherwashCoatings.com.
Becca explains her initial success, “Walmart gave us our big break! Our merchant, Jonathan Feinberg, has been instrumental in teaching us about foot traffic, turns, and replenishment! I’m so incredibly grateful that Walmart sees our CleanTech vision and has made space for a zero-carbon wood stain on their shelves! Made in America, sold in America, that’s America’s future!” 🇺🇸
As states have begun to regulate paint and stain emissions, you saw an opportunity to improve upon the inventions of nineteenth-century industrial giants. How is your wood stain innovative?
“My product is not only innovative but so too is the manufacturing process. While I was researching base formulas, I learned that Edison, Tesla, Ford, Dupont, Carnegie, and Sherwin-Williams created our modern world through oil-based industrial manufacturing operations. These operations account for one-fifth of global energy use and are responsible for roughly fifteen billion tons of carbon annual off-letting. Most manufactured products use energy to create heat to produce the world’s materials and chemicals. As the oil supply decrease, prices will continue to rise. Eventually, the oil demand will be higher than the oil supply. When that happens, I expect that low-carbon and carbon-free manufacturing processes, like mine, will disrupt old-school oil-based manufacturers. I built my manufacturing operation on renewable energy and renewable raw materials.” Becca tosses what appears to be herbs into a tote. She pinches a little of this and a little of that and mixes it with a wooden oar.
“Second, my product is innovative because it decarbonizes wood stain. My stain is tannin reactive and water-based instead of oil-based. Once the stain is applied, I start a natural reaction inside the wood, which yields an aged color, like how the sun bleaches driftwood over decades. My secret sauce is that I know how to stop the reaction so that it doesn’t continue to age over time. The whole process takes just twenty minutes, including dry time. Once I stop the reaction, I seal it with a special topcoat I created to hold almost the exact same color as driftwood. Consumers can’t tell the difference between real driftwood and the wood I stain, which is great because my stain gives them an unlimited supply. The entire process from stain to topcoat takes only two hours versus my competitors’ process, which can take fourteen days. Innovation is easy to spot when you’re reducing labor costs and reducing material costs.”
What is your biggest hurdle?
“For the last hundred years, my competitors have held a stranglehold on distribution using assumptions of scarcity, scarce information, scarce choice, and overwhelming marketing power to limit consumer choice. Using the internet I’m working to overcome that barrier by providing a superior product to the customer and hope other big box retailers will give me the same chance that Walmart gave me.”
What are some benefits of using water-based reactive stains rather than oil-based stains?
“My formulas harness naturally grown renewable raw materials and utilize renewable energy sources. Old-school industrial manufacturing operations contribute to the fifty-two billion tons of carbon emissions each year. I used a ratio of total gallons produced / energy use and learned that my manufacturing carbon emission is practically zero — and the product itself has no carbon or VOC emissions. It’s beyond carbon, it’s #netzero!”
Your product is truly magic in a quart, but your operation is next level. You said you use the power of the sun to make the product. Can you tell me how you do that?
“Sure! When I learned that Apple used solar panels to power its manufacturing plant and work facilities, I was curious about what else photovoltaics could do. Turns out it can make wood stain! I realized I could use the sun’s energy to catalyze the wood stain batch rather than electric-powered heat or fossil fuel heat. I was inspired by Apple’s PV solar panels that capture 20% of photovoltaic protons. If the photovoltaic cell can only capture 20% of the sun’s rays, the scientific question I asked was what percentage of the sun’s rays could I capture to cook a wood stain batch? Right now I’m capturing approximately 80% of the sun’s heat and once we install solar panels, my operation will generate power for the grid. #Negawatts! This is the future of net-zero American manufacturing!”
You say your primary focus in your operation is on efficiencies. How do efficiencies play a role in CleanTech?
“Efficiencies are the key to real CleanTech results! The built environment is responsible for 29% of the 52 billion tons of annual carbon emissions. I have five main efficiencies that are reducing carbon, they are raw materials, workspace, energy, labor, and plant power. I have one goal in mind when manufacturing: my energy efficiencies must maximize outputs and minimize inputs. I would say my operation is 78% efficient right now. As we scale to our goal of eight thousand retailers, I expect my efficiencies will be closer to 92%.”
Becca attributes her success to lessons she learned in her MBA operations class. She has capitalized off of continuous flow manufacturing (CFM) and just-in-time delivery (JIT) processes she learned from an IBM case study. What are some constraints you’re experiencing as you scale?
“Warehouse capacity and price parity to start. When we first launched in gallon milk jugs on my apartment deck, space was an obvious issue and costs were high. Now that we’ve grown into 330-gallon totes, our next increase will put us in 15,000-gallon stainless steel vats. The biggest constraint of any CleanTech product is to be on price parity with existing low-cost products. Right now my price on the shelf is $19.97. My competitors are around $15.97. The end consumer is paying a CleanTech premium of $4 when they buy WeatherWash, which is 25% higher than my competitors’ prices. With more orders, my total manufacturing output will increase, and labor efficiencies will improve. I’ll pass those decreases on to the end consumer and get my price in line with my competitors’. I might even land at $14.97 on the shelf, once the COVID supply chains untangle. I’ve learned a few lessons as time has passed. Technology-driven learning, product efficiency, and shared experience will reduce costs per unit as the total volume of production increases. At least that’s what the classic experience curve says. The more you know, the better you can do, and the good news is that the product is profitable. #Profitable!”
To date, the wood stain industry generates approximately $6B a year in US domestic sales. Wood stain is a commodity, so sales have incredible sticking power. What is your growth strategy going forward?
“My strategy is to get WeatherWash on big-box retail shelves as fast as possible. The DIY coatings market is estimated to be $60B. I wanted retailers with the highest foot traffic because that would yield the highest inventory turnover. I’ve set my sights on Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart. These eight thousand retail stores combined have 191.5M US consumers in foot traffic per week, but Walmart gets most of that foot traffic. For now, retailers are the fastest path to the highest growth.
You’ve only been on the shelf for a year. How is WeatherWash growing so fast?
Once homeowners complete their first project, a sort of hunger for the next project ensues. Most start at picture frames and rapidly escalate to kitchen tables, end tables, TV consoles, headboards, decks, beams, floors, and even home exteriors. As the projects increase, customer loyalty grows. The need to beautify and fill empty spaces is limitless because DIY is incredibly affordable and easy to do.
A strong buying segment of DIY clients is 24 to 35-year-old LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability.) LOHAS want wood stains that don’t have strong chemical odors. They want low costs. They want wood stains to be efficient and provide the same quality as oil-based stains but with fewer steps. They want a community to do projects with and share projects. In 2020, LOHAS represented one-third of home purchases. Home Depot is the number one retailer in the home-improvement DIY space, with a towering $151B in revenues in 2021. The majority of their clients are LOHAS consumers who are fixing up homes to sell or repairing homes they’ve just bought. LOHAS are best reached by a marketing strategy known as the “same-store sales” model. The goal of this model is to get customers to visit your store regularly and develop a friendly relationship that in turn will deliver lifetime customer loyalty. I see a lot of LOHAS crossover growth between the world’s two largest retailers, Walmart and Home Depot. #Growth!
As states have begun to regulate paint and stain emissions, you see an opportunity. Can you talk about that?
“Government regulation uses tax incentives and subsidies to shape consumer behavior. It would be nice if state and federal governments would give CleanTech coatings the break they give solar and wind. Could you imagine the impact regulation would make if lawmakers required 25% of paint and stain to be carbon-free, the way they require 25% of grid energy to be renewable? The reduction targets two primary points of emission. Reduced carbon from plant manufacturing and reduced carbon/VOC off-letting from product application. Between high foot traffic and government regulation, I believe the growth will be there.”
You’re ambitious! What is your endgame vision?
“I would like to leverage the passion economy into a DIY video platform where LOHAS could learn and buy quality products they can trust to be carbon free and VOC free. It would be a community of smart creatives. The purpose of the DIY instructional videos would be to connect ‘the how-to video’ to the retail products, creating a seamless loop of inspiration, instruction, and purchasing.”
COVID-19 has pushed consumers online. Do you have an online strategy?
“The internet has made information free, copious, and ubiquitous with cloud computing and global connectivity. What I plan to do online would be even bigger than retail shelves! The Cleveland Research Clinic estimates that finishers will make more than half their purchases online over the next three years. I already have a very strong online presence with Facebook, Instagram, and soon TikTok. Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart are in the top ten most searched websites. What’s missing is a digital community where LOHAS and DIY’ers can experience the human touch. I’d like to build that digital community. Of course, in-store brand awareness will increase online traffic. As sales volumes increase, more and more customers would be attracted. With higher sales volume, I can get faster turns on inventory and more out of my fixed costs. Those efficiencies will continue to lower my price as I feed the flywheel to attract exponential traffic. That is how you grow market share; you build a flywheel and feed it. And the best part? Store shelves would NO longer control inventory capacity. WeatherWash could go GLOBAL! #SCALEORDIE!”
The coatings market is international, how would you grow globally?
“I would focus on the users and build excellent platforms with accessible, higher quality services and products. I would use predictive analytics to continuously slice the data and build a solid foundation. More users will result in more UGC (user-generated content.) The goal would be lifetime loyalty. I would create an algorithm that would unify a DIY digital video library with DIY online clients and organize the how-to videos using peer-to-peer human curation. Burberry has successfully created and implemented this type of algorithm. Angela Ahrendts’s Fast Company interview gave me the idea with a model she created. I think that the same model can be used to democratize the global DIY movement by making wood stains affordable and ubiquitous, both on the shelf and online. I mean, as prices for furniture and fixtures continue to rise, who wouldn’t want a CleanTech do-it-yourself shoppable online option? Plus, if you do-it-yourself, you can disrupt the oil-based coatings and get the high-end Restoration Hardware (RH) furniture look at a price anyone can afford. Ultimately, that’s the endgame—the highest-end look at Walmart prices. No finishing experience required and no harm to the applicators equals customer satisfaction!”
If you had one wish, what would it be?
“I wish that my product would accelerate the switch from oil-based wood stains to water-based stains on the retail shelf and online, as quickly as possible. Could you imagine the lifetime carbon reduction? Wood is a commodity and stains will be used for hundreds of years to come. Minwax operations have been off-letting carbon for over a hundred years and the product off-lets VOCs.
What would you need to scale?
“To take on the whole six billion dollar wood stain category? It wouldn't take much. I would need a larger plant, so that would take funding. I would also need super scalers with proven exponential growth track records to grow us into eight thousand retailers and our online presence. Oh, and a great ad agency. For mentorship, a seasoned CEO who lived through Moore’s law (revenue growth) and Wright’s law (cost reduction) wouldn't hurt, think #TimCook, #BillGates, #JeffBezos. ”
What would you give up?
“Take a look around you. Everything I have here is for sale. Hang on, it looks like my staff is overflowing a tote. I gotta go. Are we done here?”
*****
When I wrap the interview, I’m surprised Becca can even hear me over the noisy air compressors, shouting, and continuous lid hammering. She is laser-focused on “the batch” and somehow manages to answer all my questions even though we are interrupted multiple times by employees.
Here are some of my key takeaways: I personally have a new appreciation and a new perspective for renewables. I believe renewable energy operations will be revolutionary! Why? Because renewable energies are REPLENISHABLE, whereas crude oil is not. If renewable energy products can perform as well as oil-based products and cost just as much, or less, why wouldn’t we switch? CleanTech products may be able to sell at even lower prices once the machinery is paid off because the cost of generating energy is practically nothing.
Becca has arrived at a manufacturing crossroads where renewable raws and alternative energy sources intersect. The result is a breakthrough technology that needs no electricity and no fossil fuels to manufacture. Her process may even be cheaper than oil-based wood stains and this visionary entrepreneur has decarbonized the product and the manufacturing operation. She has lit a path for industrial manufacturers inside and outside the coatings industry. The possibility for a transition from oil-based formulas to carbon-free water-based formulas now exists.
How will the big switch from oil to renewable energy happen?
Inventors and innovators like Becca will harness renewable energy the way she did with the sun’s power to make wood stain. Inventors are inventing products that will have a ripple of change as products are dropped into the market. Light bulbs, alternating current, and gas-powered vehicles were all products that were like a pebble in the pond. Some ripples will be big, like electric wind, solar, and Elon Musk’s electric vehicle. Some inventions will be small, like biofuels and wood stain. Either way, from big to small, the wave of change is coming.
When will it happen?
It’s already happening! In the summer of 2020, Germany successfully powered their power grid with 56% solar power. If you want to see the switch happening within the built environment, specifically wood stain, go to your local Walmart store or go online to Walmart.com, HomeDepot.com, Amazon.com, or Becca’s website, WeatherwashCoatings.com. Just search for WeatherWash and don’t forget to leave a review! 😊
Some serious questions, as the big switch begins are: How will innovators get 52 billion carbon tons to zero in these categories: transportation, agriculture, electric power grids, industry, and the built environment? How much is the big switch going to cost? How many fossil fuel jobs will be lost? How many carbon-zero jobs will be gained?
Many believe 2050 is the cutoff before the 1.6 trillion tons of carbon emission heat the earth up one or two degrees and bring irreversible global damage. Think superstorms, extreme weather, droughts, food shortages, and energy grid collapse. Don’t be afraid of what may come. The big switch shines rays of hope through the darkest carbon cloud, and it’s happening one rippling innovation at a time.
Thank you for reading, and may each and every one of us find the ability within our consuming capacity to make the BIG SWITCH.
