These Earplugs Are Saving Your Ears and the Planet

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast.

I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, I'm really excited to have Lauren Menard. She's the CEO and co-founder of Gob, where they make bio-based earplugs out of mycelium. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Absolutely. Well, before we dive into today, let's go back. Everybody loves a good origin story. What got you to decide to go after making earplugs out of mycelium?

Oh man, origin story goes almost back to my childhood, but I did grow up in the Adirondack Mountains, and so I didn't spend as much time in front of a TV as most folks. I probably spent maybe, I'd say, 75% of my time outside just, you know, playing with sticks and rocks and making things out of bark of trees. So it really did start from a really young age where I started designing things out of stuff that was found on my parents' land. But my whole career has essentially been this journey of sustainable design. I started in fashion, and then I moved towards footwear where I worked for companies like Specialized Bikes, a little for Nike, and furniture. So kind of worked in the world of physical design with the added layer of always working on material innovation my entire career. About 4 years ago, I started an agency with my co-founder. The agency is called Prowl. And it still exists today. It's an industrial design and strategy agency that the whole ethos is begin with the end. And what Prowell does and what I did when I was there is help companies like giant, you know, Fortune 500 companies mostly. So like Target, Herman Miller, Steelcase, really big companies, BMW, build regenerative products mass manufacturing. And running that agency, it was kind of just a matter of time until I came up with a product idea. I just kind of knew in my gut that it was going to happen eventually. And so where Gob began was the idea of Gob was just my use of earplugs. My mom lost her hearing somewhat recently, and she found out that it could have been prevented with Just really protecting herself from a younger age, and my fiancé started a hardcore band during the pandemic. So I just really went through earplugs like it was nobody's business. And just so happened that one day I was using earplugs at a spin class that was unbelievably loud in New York City. It was I was on a business trip. They were blasting Vanessa Carlton of all things. Like you wouldn't think that would be a spin class. Song, you know, the Making My Way Downtown song. I just had an aha moment right then where I looked at them and I was like, oh, I've never thought about how bad these are. Well, given what I do for a living, how have I not thought about this? And so just sort of spiraled into looking into the industry, recognizing that there wasn't a better alternative really that was completely free of petroleum. Even the wax ones mostly have Some petroleum in them, some petroleum wax, and discovered, all right, this is a huge opportunity, a weird corner of the product world. I should probably try and fix this problem. And so that's how it came about. It's kind of, it sounds, you might think like, oh, mycelium-based earplugs. That's really random until you hear my career trajectory. Then you're like, oh, that also makes sense.

I love it. I just, one of those things, you, you don't always know where things are headed, right? And you're, as you're building through your career and your experiences, and then you get there and you're like, oh, look at this. I, it all, it all adds up to something pretty obvious. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so the whole like mycelium world, polystyrene, all that very much. Like there's so many, so many interesting uses for it.

Yeah.

And so it's always, it's caught my eye as a material for a long time because I, I was, oh, I forget how long ago, maybe 10 years ago, more. They were like, oh, packaging, we can make packaging. And so I've always seen it as a structural material. And now yours, a whole new application. I feel like it's, we're still figuring out what we can do with mycelium. How did you arrive? There's, you know, other materials that could be soft, right? Then cotton, people have used cotton as earplugs. How did you come to mycelium as the material and, and be able to use it?

Yeah, so again, things are seeded and planted many years before they actually turn into something. So the second of 3 colleges that I went to was RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I was in the same program as the folks who started started Ecovative, who is now our material supplier. They, 15 or so years ago, I think they've been in business since 2010 when I met them, and they were making mycelium packaging. That was their first invention, you know, wood chips mixed with mycelium to, as an alternative to Styrofoam. I kept in contact with them and kept in touch and mostly just kept an eye on what they were working on throughout the years. Because I kept thinking maybe I could use this in furniture, maybe I could use this in footwear. So I was really keeping tabs on what they were doing. And when we opened up the floodgates and looked at all of the potential materials that could be used for earplugs, we were not finding anything that met our criteria. So that was available for scale. So being— Prowell as an agency has access to a giant material library and experts, and we really found nothing that was not still in the lab phase that was truly home compostable, which was our— if we couldn't do that, then we didn't see it worth doing at all. Because if they're, quote, biodegradable, they're still going to cause an issue, right? They may not break down for months or years, and like, what good is that? So I do remember being at a conference maybe 7 years ago. It was the Biofabricate Conference. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's incredible. I was at the Biofabricate Conference and Ecovative had a prototype of this foam that they had on display, and I'd been waiting for it to become available. So right when I had the idea for Gob, I was like, sent them an email, hey guys, It would be amazing if we could turn this into earplugs. And I heard nothing for a year. February last year, so exactly a year ago, I received an email from their team. Hey Lauren, you've been bugging us for a long time. We're happy to say that the material is finally available. We'll send you samples and try it. Mind you, we had been in R&D for 6 months trying to create an earplug out of a compostable material. We only found silicone alternatives. So we were looking at reusable earplugs, which wasn't ideal. We wanted to fix the foam problem because it's single use and they're dirty and awful.

Well, there's so many single use. It's like trying to get rid of plastic forks. People just use it way too many of it to get rid of it. Got to figure out a better material.

And there's a reason you see them all over the ground when you walk around. If you walk past a construction site or in a city, I see earplugs on the ground everywhere.

Even, or big concerts. I've been to some big concerts and you just look and it's, you start to see, you start to see what's left.

It's like a forest of, you know, water bottles and just earplugs. And so, and like drug paraphernalia everywhere, but depending on where you are. But, um, essentially we kind of, we were like, oh, well, we'll keep going on the reusable thing and like see if this foam works. And we received this sheet of mycelium. We drilled cylinders out of it and shoved them in our ears and we're like, oh, this is the softest thing I've ever felt in my life. And then we sent them to Penn State University to get tested and they perform unbelievably well. So it was just a matter of shooting at every single option on the table. And then mycelium kind of came to the rescue. Thanks to Ecovative for scaling their foam business because no one else has figured it out. So we got pretty lucky with timing, I will have to say. But mycelium naturally— our material, which is right here, these little cylinders, this is nothing but mycelium roots. They've found a way to grow it into these giant sheets. So it's truly 100% plant-based.

Yeah.

And it naturally dampens sound. We don't add anything to it. We just literally process the material after it's grown, and then that's our product.

So they literally just grow it and it's the right density and everything, and you just cut— you're basically— they grow it in sheets and cut it into a shape for you and it's done.

They grow it into these massive 25-meter-long sheets and they grow once a week. It's so quick. It grows to its full thickness. Some people ask about scale. I'm like, oh, that's no problem at all.

You know, they just keep growing.

And we get 300 plugs out of a square foot. So it's—

Oh, wow.

Insanely scalable. But how we process them, it's our proprietary automated process. But I will tell you, mycelium humbles you. It does not cut like foam. It's fire retardant and heat retardant. It dulls blades. It does everything that, like, you don't want it to do. So it took a while to figure it out, but we finally did.

Well, then that means, so if it's all those materials, so you have a lot, you don't have any shelf life storage issues when you're talking about that material because it's, it's fine then. And it— how long do you have a shelf life, I guess? Because it does Biodegrade, right?

So the material itself is considered inert, which just means dead, because it's kiln-dried. So it won't, it won't grow, it won't grow bacteria. It just, it really, the shelf life is extraordinarily long to the point where we don't know what the shelf life is yet. But it's in the matter of, it's years. It's years. If you Put these next to microbes that want to eat them, they will break down. But if you're not throwing these into soil, they won't break down in your packaging or anything like that. And I think that's the— that's something that needs to be communicated more with compostable products is don't worry, it won't, it won't like fall apart on you while you're using it, right? Until you introduce it to microbes.

Yeah, we have that. We have clients that we work with that we're developing products and, and every time we bring up, oh, it's biodegradable material, they're like, okay, well, just like air? Like what if I hold it in my hand? How quickly does this disappear?

What is that?

What does that look like? I feel like if on the, if the company side is having that question, the consumers are definitely going, okay, well, how long till this falls apart? Can I—

Totally.

Use it today? Like, Shipping it to me already used up half its life. Like, what does that mean? So it's, I'm glad you mentioned that because it is, you have to have the right conditions still. It doesn't magically become dust in your—

Exactly. It does not do that. No, that'd be a fun magic trick, but that does not happen. Maybe.

Yeah. Magic trick. Magicians will be interested in that material, but not—

Yeah, exactly.

And so performance-wise and everything. I know there's different grades of hearing protection that are out there. Where does this fall in? How can, you know, construction sites, music, there's so many uses and decibel levels. Where I guess would you say it could be used in?

Yeah. So our 2 strongest use cases are live events and sleep. Our earplugs are the most comfortable to sleep with. They don't push out of your ears the way that memory foam does. They just settle in, and we've had a lot of people test them for sleeping. And one of the most common pieces of feedback we get is, "I forgot they were in there when I woke up, and I started my morning routine and wondered why I couldn't hear anything." So that's how comfortable they are—is people forget. Yes, for live events, regular foam earplugs that are made of polyurethane or PVC—they were designed to cancel out. Everything. But what they do is they hit, they knock down the highest frequencies more than anything, the way that, that's the nature of the material. So that's why when you're at a live event, you usually can't hear the vocalist the same, but you can hear the drum, you can hear the bass, right? Our product, again, the mycelium naturally does this. We didn't have to do anything to it to make it do this. It knocks down everything almost equally. So you can still hear pretty well, but it's all just brought down a little bit.

Just muted, but your, your EQ curve is not messed up. The music is going to be the music still instead of this weird partially deaf but still hears. It's all messed up.

Yeah, exactly. The dB rating, a lot of when you get your earplugs tested at the one facility, the only facility that tests them, Believe it or not, in the US, there's only one. They literally shove an earplug in someone's ear, they play a sound, and they ask them if they heard it or not. It's unbelievably simple.

I was thinking that there'd be like some dummy head, we put those in and then sensors and measuring like decibel decrease between— but no.

Totally. That's exactly what I thought too. And then they're like, nope, 20 people. Whoever's in the office. So it's just random people and then they just run the test and then you get a number. And so our numbers, you essentially get the mean and the average of like all of those people and you get one number. However, the way we look at it is more of a spectrum. So our dB levels are between 12 and 20, and that is perfect for live events and sleep. And just general, like, let's turn the volume down. If you get the professional earplugs for, or like more complex filtered ones, those range from about 9 to 24. So you can see that we're like exactly in that range, which is great.

So is that like, do construction sites fall under that higher level or are they, I guess maybe it depends on what kind of work you're doing too.

It does depend. And we've gotten a lot of interest from areas like that, but we would want to produce a much denser version of our product to go that route for a number of reasons.

Yeah.

Mostly just because folks who are working with heavy machinery all day long, they really should be using like absolute sound-canceling, you know, over-ear protection. Like if you're in the pit at Formula 1 working on those vehicles, You should have like foam earplugs and over-ears, right? You should not allow anything to penetrate because it's very likely that you'll experience damage no matter what if you don't. So we don't go that route yet, but we will probably create another denser version for those purposes. But it's still right now our sweet spot is sleep and live events.

Got it. Well, that's cool that you have the, you know, at least potential ability to get into that heavier, because I'm thinking, you know, construction sites and how much garbage and stuff gets produced. And right, there's those areas and Formula 1. There's so many things that people do that are loud, loud environments that could utilize something that's more sustainable, really. I mean, I would imagine that if you can get into that, maybe you get LEED-certified projects to have to use these on them.

Totally.

Not produce a bunch of petroleum garbage.

Yes, that is on our roadmap. But technically, workplaces can choose to use our product for their workers. It's dependent on their HR, essentially, to choose something with a lower dB rating or higher. There are some businesses that aren't as crazy loud that we'll be using ours. But when it comes to, again, the long durations of just abusing your eardrums, we recommend over-ears for that.

Well, that makes sense.

If you're more of like carpentry or something where your occasional loud noises will happen, or you run a saw for like 10 seconds at a time, it's just these, these bursts that you need to Well, it's like at a concert, right? There's times when no tech— you don't need any ear protection because it's really quiet, but then you have these really loud portions that will jump out.

Exactly. Yeah.

Hey, it's your host Ian. I'm really glad you're enjoying this episode. I absolutely love highlighting amazing brands and founders for the awesome things they are doing. I've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs and businesses like yours turn their boldest ideas into powerful, purpose-driven brands. So if you're serious about building a brand people love, like our guests and clients do, and one that you're proud to stand behind, I invite you to dive a bit deeper with our book Conscious Design. Inside, you'll discover the exact framework and steps we use to help entrepreneurs like you turn purpose into a powerful, impact-driven brand— brand that stands out, attracts loyal customers, and drives sustainable growth with social and environmental responsibility woven into its Grab your copy today. You can find it on our website, consciousdesignhouse.com, or just find the link below in the show notes. Enjoy the rest of the episode and don't forget to like, subscribe, and share.

And so talking about the compostability, right? So these are backyard home compost, throw them in the ground, they disappear. How long does it take? Have you guys tested that?

Yeah, so we've just done some of the compostable testing on our own, and we have also our material manufacturer, they've done a lot of testing themselves. If you take our earplugs and you throw them in your home compost, they will be completely gone in a matter of weeks, as long as they have the right environment, right? Microbes, food, stuff eating it. And so, pretty incredible. What we say is it's as compostable as, say, a banana peel because it really is just, it's this porous plant-based thing. It is USDA certified, 100% bio-based. So, there's no BS. We're not hiding anything in there.

There's nothing left.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with, you might be, but maybe your audience isn't familiar with mycoremediation. It's a process of like mushroom farms. Mushrooms grow from mycelium, right? It's the root structure. And how they're harvested is there's usually some sort of food for the mycelium, which tends to be wood chips or something like that. There's mycelium spores, and those grow flowers, which are mushrooms. And so mushroom farms have this chunk of mycelium. That has a couple, you know, several, forgetting the word right now, but essentially they let the mushrooms grow into full flowers, full mushrooms. They're harvested several times. And then after that, it's harder to get a flush. That's what it's called. Certain number of flushes. And then the mycelium is considered not dead, but it won't be as productive. That mycelium is sent to farms. To add nutrients back into the soil remediation. And so it acts as fertilizer, actually. So our product technically acts as a lightweight fertilizer. So most healthier products are like, oh, they won't harm the soil. Ours will actually feed the soil, which is another reason why I had to go full-time into this business. Because when I realized that we had a truly regenerative product on our hands, that could replace plastic version, I was like, it's go time.

Yeah, I feel like it's starting to happen more, but it is rare to have something where you go, oh, it actually beats the material that's already out there. And like you said, there's so many products that are like, well, it doesn't cause any harm. It's just neutral. And I feel like more and more people are kind of expecting neutral. You should at least be neutral. So whenever something like this, we're like, oh, regenerative. That being able to check those boxes is, is still a little rare. Yeah. It's very rare. But it's amazing that you guys have found, it's amazing to me that it's a material that just does exactly what you need. That like has this perfect function fit. And, and there's no user, like as a user, you don't have to relearn how to, it's not like, oh, you now have to do these 10 steps in order to Put the earplugs in properly and have it work. It's the same habit you've had for however long. You just swap out the product. Because I think that's one of the big things that kills products is if you have to relearn. Totally. Then it becomes like, well, how much education do you have to do? But this is really just buy it, use it, repeat.

Right. I will say though that you actually skip a step. In using our product, you don't do the whole like pinch and roll thing and then shove it in because it really just forms to your ear. So you can slightly roll it in your fingers and turn it into more of a conical shape, but then you really just shove it in.

You don't have to crash it into this tiny thing so you hope it sticks.

No, no, actually you just want to like— I'll do it right now. You really just do this, you position it, and then you push it in. And then that's it. So it's very—

Okay, even less steps, even better.

Exactly. Fewer steps and just getting people to like not crush them is the only learning curve really. But once people know, it's like, I think some people just try to shove regular earplugs in their ears anyway. You know, you can't blame them.

Yeah, it's squishy. It's supposed to work, right?

Exactly. Just shove it in.

Yeah. Amazing. Well, I guess kind of looking to the future a little bit, you've talked about you're looking at a denser version to be able to do higher decibels. Is there anything else that you're looking at product-wise that you've— I mean, you're a designer, you think about these things. Is there anything you can share product-wise that you guys are looking at being able to have as follow-ups?

I mean, we could build a big business just with earplugs alone. The data point that I usually start conversations with is The world produces 40 billion foam earplugs a year. That is 5 times the number of plastic straws or something like that, because I believe it's closer to 6.

Oh, wow. That's a lot more.

That's a lot more. So if you think about the scale at which we— what we need to work on replacing, we could by itself with earplugs build a big business. But the way that I would like to build this company and build this brand and the way that our whole team is working on this is this bigger picture of protective wellness. And so if you could think about owning a category, for us, it would look like personal protection, but reinventing that through regenerative materials. So I will just throw a few things out there such as you could imagine flushable condoms. You could imagine different types of hearing protection. You could imagine eyewear, you know, SPF, protecting yourself from the elements and from the day-to-day, but through materials, packaging, and ingredients that actually give back. And the reason why I think this is worth doing, you know, in my career, I've, And there's so many material companies out there. I could have started a material company, but what I'm finding is a lot of, we'll call them alternative material companies. So mycelium leather, kombucha leather, seaweed packaging, you know, like all of those. I think those are the, that's going to be the standard eventually once people are forced to use them. But right now they're kind of left in this luxury space. And that's something that's always bothered me, but I understand why it needs to happen. For example, let's take MycoWorks, for example, mycelium leather company. Ecovative also has their own mycelium leather called Forager. They work with folks like Stella McCartney, you know, like big, really big, well-known luxury brands, because the thought there is The material right now is not fully at scale, like conventional leather, for example. And so they do really low quantity, really high price point, really high margin products with this new material. And then it's a big marketing story, and then it's never fully scaled. And I call those peacock products. There is so much functional use for these materials outside of luxury handbags, right? I really do believe, like, there are so many cool options out there. I just believe in looking at new and innovative materials more from this accessible functional lens. And this is something that I didn't mention earlier. I'm also a professor of biomaterials at California College of the Arts, just down the street from me. And my students every year invent a new material and design something functional out of it to solve a problem. And so I see my students doing it all the time at this very like conceptual level, and I'm just sick of designing really beautiful high-end things that no one will ever touch. And so essentially I'm just taking more of the capitalist approach. This is a really long-winded answer to your question, but taking the capitalist approach of like, Let's help these material companies scale by making functional, scalable, accessible products out of them, selling them at a reasonable margin, and then building a business out of it. So that's kind of like, that's where we're coming from. And when you like really zoom out at GOB at large.

Yeah, I love that approach because it's, I've had quite a few material companies on the podcast, right? And it's, you know, a few Fits perfectly. Cool material, sustainable. And what I've noticed is that there are so many really cool materials out there, right, that are sustainable or biodegradable or even, you know, regenerative level. A lot of times they go off of the standard material company approach, which is, I'm just going to sit here and make materials. I don't make products. I don't talk to consumers. I don't— there's no direct connection between customer actually ends up touching it and them. They sit as that supplier and they wait for BMW or Nike, Adidas, these other companies go, well, I guess we're going to do something sustainable, so we'll try your material. And that, you know, it's good PR, right? It does get some good PR, but it never— it's a really long route. And so you, and there's been a couple others that I've had on that are doing this more, is a cool material. Now let's actually tell people about it. Let's make it consumer and create this tie-in. Because there's just industry-wise, the average person, I'm not, I talk to material people all the time and materials, but if you're the average consumer who doesn't live in this world, you never talk to a material scientist. Like, all you know is maybe you know one and they don't really— like, nobody talks to them about their work because everybody doesn't want to talk science. It's not their space. So you don't have that direct connection of, I don't know, here's a product, it's biodegradable, you throw it in your backyard, this is how it works. It's easy to don't have that connection in that material, and it's hard to It really makes it hard for big, even big brands who have the marketing budget to sell a new material if it's only, if they're only selling it to the high-end customers. You know, that's too small of a population to make a dent in the average population's understanding of materials.

Right. And honestly, I think people are, and The Business of Fashion did an article on this last year. That's much better than what I'm about to say. But if you want to dig deeper, you can look up the article. I think the average consumer is really fatigued by just hearing brands talk about sustainability in a way where it's like, you've caused this problem, right? Like, you've caused this problem, now do something about it, right? Consumers don't want to hear that anymore. Like, when people like shaming Shein and all that, like, Do I want to shame Shein? Yes, I do. Do I want them to not exist? Right, I don't. It's not helpful to sell product with that way of thinking. And so what I'm seeing now is companies like ours shifting the narrative to more of, we're healthier for you, because wellness is everything right now. People want to talk about what's going to help them live longer.

Right.

So if you're building a product that Exactly. If you, you can tweak anything that is quote unquote sustainable will probably also help with not giving you cancer, I would hope. Right. And so if you have those elements working for you and you build a brand that people can connect to with more than just this is better for the planet, it's important, right? That's why our marketing looks very loud and it's like real people. Usually not models, sometimes models, but like, it's like real people wearing our product in real world experiences because that is something people can connect with and it doesn't fatigue them to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? So sustainability is so important, but it can't be the only story. It has to be one of a many layered bean dip story.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. How do you When you're marketing, how do you prioritize? I know some PR companies that work only in sustainable, they'll work with sustainable brands only. And I have seen over the last 5, 10 years, this shift of, you know, you could sell something, it was like, oh, it's a sustainable mug. And as long as it was sustainable, that would be like the feature to buy it. And now it's like what you're saying. Yeah, it's, it should be there, but it's like on this bullet point list of other things that should be there and it's not. Really dry. You can't just make a brand grow exponentially right now just being sustainable. You have to. So yeah, I'm curious, how are you guys seeing that in marketing and how do you prioritize that in terms of like, what's your messaging? How do you show that without being like, it's the only thing?

Yeah. Oh, so many ways to describe this, but we know we're hard launching our company. next month. So I can't pretend to be an expert in this because I'm, I can only say what we're trying to do now, but I have helped clients of mine with this sort of messaging. So I do have an idea of like what works and what doesn't. But I'd say first and foremost, we remove all scientific jargon. So we talk very bluntly about sustainability in our marketing because we have to accept the fact that Maybe 90%, maybe more of people don't know what mycelium is. And as someone who works in, lives and breathes the world of, you know, new and innovative materials and biology, that was a shock to me when I would start talking to potential consumers and they're like, I don't know what mycelium is. They would gimme this dead look and I'm like, oh, oh, my bad. Okay, let me start from the beginning. You know, and so we just, in our blog and in our marketing, like one of our biggest blog posts is What the F is Mycelium, right? Like that's our material. Well, what is it? It takes a while to explain. Yeah, sure. It's mushroom roots, but it's also in this uncanny valley between plants and animal. It's this really wild, it's the largest living organism on the planet, you know, and you start to dig into it a bit.

Yeah.

And we say, you know, our product is made from mother-effing nature, right? 'Cause we want someone who is at a NASCAR race to want to use these just as much as we want someone at a sustainability conference to use these. And so we just do it by removing the jargon. 'Cause if we say it's a compostable biopolymer that was biofabricated in a lab that's vertically integrated, people are gonna be like, what are you talking about?

Right.

That might be the way I talk to certain groups of people at different conferences, but for a consumer base, it's like, this is nature, nature doing its thing. And we almost poke fun at it in a way where it's like, add humor and speak in very common language, because I think that's how you connect to the masses and not get stuck in this like little niche.

Right. You just kind of, you want somebody from NASCAR to super crunchy sustainability all the way, everybody in between to be comfortable. Right. Again, and I guess that's really kind of where working with a unique material, it's getting people comfortable with, hey, this, this is new, but it's not scary. It's not— there's nothing weird is going to happen. It's just a normal experience. This is what it is. Here you go.

Yeah. And not leading with shame like, oh, do you use regular foam earplugs? Well, you're bad, you know, because shame is not motivating.

Well, you don't want to just attack people right off the gate and tell them they're, they're bad for using foam earplugs.

We've seen brands do that in other spaces, you know, especially in like wellness and supplements. That is the Wild West right now. If you look at skincare and you look at food and supplements right now, the jargon that's being thrown around In those spaces is unbelievable.

I feel like they're very harsh.

Yeah. And like people talking about like glycerides and like all of like tretinoin and all these words that are highly scientific in skincare, like people describing it as if they know what it actually does is blowing my mind. So maybe I'm wrong about not using jargon, but that's just what we're trying.

Yeah, I think it's one of those things that if you meet people where you are, like, I feel like that's a tried and true, meet people where they are rather than, because the overwhelming with like, oh, I'm smarter than you because I'm using big words, it'll work for a little bit and then people will get really annoyed because they find out they don't know what it actually is because they didn't actually, like, takes more time to research it. And then figure it out. Or just, you know, people get fed up with a bully. Like, that's totally— ultimately it doesn't end well for everyone.

So yeah, exactly. I love that you're doing this.

I love that you've figured out how to use mycelium for something other than packaging. As one of those people that knows what it is, been waiting for someone to figure out what else can you do with it. Packaging couldn't be the limit. So I'm glad you guys have been able to do that and And use it. For people that are watching this, where can they find you? Best way to reach out to you? And of course, anything else you want to add in that I haven't asked, but you have been itching to say?

Yeah, well, so you can find our website, our Instagram, and our TikTok are all gob.earth, G-O-B.earth. And right now we have a preorder campaign running on the website. But we're actually going to start shipping orders. And sorry if this dates the episode, but it is now 2025.

Yes.

And we will start shipping orders in about 2 to 3 weeks. So the end of February 2025. And if you live in New York City, on March 14th, 15th, and 16th, we will have a full pop-up at Shopify's Flagship store in SoHo. Keep an eye out for that. And if you live in the New York area, you can come by and experience the whole thing. We'll have like a whole lab set up. We'll have a DJ and a photo booth, and it'll be a good time.

Amazing.

Oh, that's exciting. That's awesome that you're doing that.

Thanks. Yeah, we're so excited and feel really humbled to be even welcomed into that space.

Yeah, that'll be Hopefully a lot of good traffic for you guys. Get people's attention. And the DJ and earplugs go well together. It'll be perfect. Perfect trial run for everyone. Exactly.

We're calling it like a full sound experience, you know, so there'll be like speakers and be a whole thing. You'll see. Amazing.

I'm super excited for you. Yeah. Thanks for being on the show. This has been, I love what you're doing. Amazing to see what you're accomplishing. I'm excited to see your other products. As you can actually show and share those and hopefully your launch, hopefully the launch goes really well. Excited to see that.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a good convo and I love talking shop with anyone who loves to talk about the subject because I could go off for hours about materials. So maybe that'll be another time.

Yeah, I'm sure. Let's do that. That would be great. I feel like we can definitely talk even just mycelium forever.

There's so, exactly, so much about it. So yeah, perfect. Thanks for having me.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast.

If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.