Founders Lab: Make & Save Cups

Make & Save Cups is a business concept designed to provide reusable cups to coffee shop visitors with incentives of inexpensive pricing, customization, and sustainability efforts. In our current market, Starbucks and other beverage retailers offer discounts or rewards on purchases if you use reusable cups. However, the cups sold in these cafes are often overpriced, and the selection of different designs is limited. Through community outreach and user surveys, we were able to find out in greater detail why people have hesitations using reusable cups. Our most significant discovery was that people either don't have enough reusable cups or don't like cleaning their reusable cups because they are hard to clean. With these problems in mind, Make & Save Cups was developed to provide our customers with cheaper cups that are still of quality so that they can have more than enough reusable cups for whenever they need them. Our cups are easy to clean and dishwasher safe, allowing customers to wash cups in large batches easily. Another aspect of our business model is that Make & Save Cups will enable customers to design their own reusable cups at a significantly more affordable price point. We sold these cups outside our campus near established, busy cafes with a reusable cup incentive. We have a variety of art supplies, including stickers, paint markers, and more, which are completely included in the price of the cup. Make & Save Cups saves students money while saving the planet and gives them a unique and memorable experience that could potentially incentivize more widespread use of reusable cups. This semester, we accomplished our goals set last semester of fully launching our product, conducting more focus groups to gain data and feedback on our product experience, and keeping our focus on increasing the number of people who use reusable cups.