Boston University graduates and spouses, Arsh Kakar and Jannat Kakar, founded Tishwish, a packaging company that places great value in the sustainability and customizability of its products, as a response to the pandemic’s impact on the environment.
The company’s main focus is on the unwrapping experience of a product, providing sustainable cushioning such as compostable bubble and normal mailers, packaging tissues, stickers and more.
Arsh worked five years in the packaging, production and manufacturing industry, establishing connections with material scientists and professionals who helped develop Tishwish products.
“We came up with a starch-based biopolymer that comes from corn,” he said. “They [corn] are of no value to the farmers as well.”
According to the website, the average plastic poly mailer takes roughly 500 years to decompose while Tishwish’s plant-based mailer only takes three to six months.
Tishwish also implemented the “Timber Re-Leaf Project”, an initiative to ensure that products only use 100% recycled paper, Arsh said. Additionally, the company works with a third party organization to plant a tree for every order received in an area that needs reforestation.
“There’s no reckless deforestation that happens in the procurement of these trees, so no rare timbers are used,” Arsh said.
In 2020 and 2021, Tishwish planted over 7,000 trees ranging from Africa to New Zealand. The company plans to increase this number drastically in 2022 with a target of 35,000 trees planted. Tishwish also plans to increase the number of trees planted per order for its enterprise scale customers — like Netflix — to 100 to 500 trees per order.
Tishwish is able to leverage initiatives such as the Timber Re-Leaf Project to conduct “cause marketing” that helps make customers say “let’s go with this company,” Jannat said.
Tishwish displays its certifications on all mailers, complying with its philosophy of transparency with its customers. “They’re all printed with our numbers and everything,” Jannat said. They have faced supply chain challenges due to the global shortage of freight vessels, making it difficult to import materials from countries like Vietnam, India and China.
“Our base material is not made in the United States because the same grade of material is not available yet for this particular usage,” Arsh said.
The company is currently exploring potential partners in Canada and Mexico to help keep up with demand, and expects 40% of their products to be made in the US starting February 2022.
