Plant-based building materials are good for your health and the environment Creating healthy, energy efficient habitats to build a better world. Tommy Gibbons Co-Founder and COO at Hempitecture joins Dan Humiston to talk about their current Crowdfunding Funding Campaign hosted on WeFunder. He details their plans to build a US Hemp Wool manufacturing facility which will substantially reduce their cost and accelerate our nation's transition to natural, plant-based building materials. Produced by PodCONX https://podconx.com/guests/tommy-gibbons https://www.hempitecture.com/ www.wefunder.com/hempitecture
Plant-based building materials are good for your health and the environment
Creating healthy, energy efficient habitats to build a better world. Tommy Gibbons Co-Founder and COO at Hempitecture joins Dan Humiston to talk about their current Crowdfunding Funding Campaign hosted on WeFunder. He details their plans to build a US Hemp Wool manufacturing facility which will substantially reduce their cost and accelerate our nation's transition to natural, plant-based building materials.
https://podconx.com/guests/tommy-gibbons
[00:00:00] Dan Humiston: Today. Cannabis capital. We are continuing our cannabis crowdfunding series with Tommy Gibbons, the co-founder of HEPA texture, Tommy. Welcome to the show.
Tommy Gibbons: Welcome, Dan. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to share the story.
Dan Humiston: Well, I've been really looking forward to having you on because of all the campaigns that we've featured yours by far appeals to the largest audience, whether you're looking to invest in hemp cannabis, or building materials, or even if you concerned about the environment, you're going to want to listen closely to today's show
because it really touches on everything. Tommy, before I pass the ball off to you out, let me try to tee this one up a little bit forour audience. If you've ever been in your attic. Or watched a new home being built. You've probably familiar with that pink stuff and that's insulation and its main job is supposed to keep your house warm.
So Tommy we've been using this pink stuff forever. Wow. Why do we change?
Tommy Gibbons: Well, we change?
because we [00:01:00] finally know what these building products do to our inbox. And where they come from. I think in the fifties and sixties, when we were choosing how to build homes, whether it was dry wall or fiberglass, insulation, or plywood and OSB we use materials that were readily available.
People knew how to work with and were cheap. And now there's like a whole moment of reckoning in the built environment. That's okay. Where does that building product come from? And what is the embodied carbon used to produce it? It's almost like we need the nutrition label for our building products. And so that's a, gives a great opportunity for low carbon building products, mostly anything that's made from industrial hemp to really enter the stage and be a high performing, easy to use alternative to the conventional high embodied carbon building products.
Dan Humiston: Yeah, I love that. It's like, having the food label on the side of your building materials. One thing you didn't say is that a lot of this stuff ends up in landfills or garbage dumps and . It just stays there.
Tommy Gibbons: correct. [00:02:00] Fiberglass is made from sand or recycled glass. And mineral wool is made from basalt fibers and then spray foam, or like a rigid foam styrofoam insulation board. Those are petroleum-based products. So all of these do not have an easy end of life use. Whereas Hempel is coming from a natural fiber and it could be returned to a landfill to easily biodegrade and return to the store.
So when you're looking at the life cycle analysis of these materials from start to finish anything that's using plants like our hemp products usually comes out far ahead than the petroleum-based substitutes.
Dan Humiston: Yeah, it only makes sense. And I would suspect, I don't know this for fact, but I'm just going to guess that. Breathing or living in a home that has some of these synthetic materials is probably not the best thing for your long-term health.
Tommy Gibbons: No, and I think there's more evidence it's coming out to support that as well. We leave the Hempel exposed in our [00:03:00] office. And so we work next to it every day. It's completely non-toxic that fibers aren't abrasive.
You could touch it without an issue. Whereas, , when you look at spray foam, the people installing that are basically wearing full hazmat suits for PPE to protect themselves from the hydrofluorocarbon blowing agent. And yeah. maybe that goes away after two days or maybe that contributes to sick house syndrome, which a lot of these.
Customers that come to us with chemical sensitivities have specifically said, I don't want a material that's prone to offgassing or emitting BOC in my home. What do you have to offer? That's.
a natural substitute. .
Dan Humiston: And enter hemp wool.
Tommy Gibbons: Yeah. So hemp was our trademark name for a fiber batt insulation product. So it fits directly in between the cavities of your framing, just like fiberglass or mineral wood. It comes in our values from. R 13 for a two by four wall to our 28 for a two by eight wall. It's a pressure fit system. So it's very snug, easy to use.
There's no chance for like burrowing or any types of [00:04:00] rodents or pests to get into it. It's mold. So basically everything you'd want an insulation material to be able to do this product does very well. And it's why we've been able to successfully grow sales so much over the past 24 months.
Dan Humiston: It just seems like an automatic, , everyone would be switching to this type of material. Is there a reason why it hasn't transitioned super quickly.
Tommy Gibbons: Yeah. I would say so United States is. the only one, but one of the few developed countries that does not have a hemp installation manufacturing facility. So currently we are using an international manufacturer where the U S distributor, our landed cost of material are pretty significantly higher than your fiberglass alternatives.
It's lower cost than some of the other sustainable natural fiber installations on the market. But once we're able to onshore manufacturing to the United States, we can reduce lead time. Reduce costs, reduce our carbon footprint to fulfill a shipment. We expect to be much more competitive with the existing installation materials on them.
Okay.
Dan Humiston: , it [00:05:00] is one of the challenges that the hap industry has right now. Is there. An established infrastructure in place. And so a lot of the things that seem like that would be an automatic alternative is not because it's more expensive. Now you're in the middle of the crowdfunding campaign hosted on we funder.
Are you going to use some of the money to establish this infrastructure?
Tommy Gibbons: Partially we are debt financing, the equipment to manufacture this installation, but we will views and some of the funds raised through equity to grow. Hire our sales team, as well as some buffer capital for commissioning the facility in ordering inventory and materials up front so that we can just progress right into producing.
As soon as the equipment lands, we've already put down payments on the equipment to start the manufacturing timeline, and it should be here arriving in the United States.Within six months.
Dan Humiston: Nice. Nice. In the near future, we will be producing hemp wool [00:06:00] in the United States in your facility.
Tommy Gibbons: Absolutely.
Dan Humiston: That is so cool. That's so cool. Well, I'm on your, we funder campaign page now. And I see, you guys are just killing it. It's very impressive. How well you've done in such a short period of time. Can you share some of the details of your campaign? Like what's the minimum and also why you selected crowdfunding over venture capital and why we fund or over other stuff?
Tommy Gibbons: Yeah.
Dan, those are really good questions and we are very happy with this choice to do equity crowdfunding. Right now we over 700 investors nearly 1.9 million reserved in our testing, the water stage. And so many great conversations have been generated from this campaign of people reaching out.
Who are in the industry who are in the hemp industry, who are in the finance industry, wanting to see this project happen and wanting to be in our camp. And it was like a complete 180 from conversations with venture capitalists or institutional investors. [00:07:00] That maybe didn't necessarily see this vision or wanted someone else to be the first person to put money in, or really need to do an intense amount of diligence.
While we were trying to run our company and serve our customers. So we didn't really have time to spend an hour and a half explaining the difference between hemp and cannabis to every single VC investor that came into our inbox. And this way, we had reverse inquiry. People reached out to us saying, Hey, are you a publicly traded companyare you going to IPO?
Are you a penny stock that I can somehow invest in? And the answer was always no, we're not open to retail or really any investment at that point. So when it came time to take our first investors, we were like, let's do something that we can bring in our customers, bring in our grassroots movement of people that have supported us to get to this point.
And then they can be our evangelists. They can be our brand ambassadors and we can put the story in one great place and they can have access to it. And the terms are even for everybody. And it just seemed like a much more wholesome and inclusive way to go about raising capital. Then closed door meetings with rich people who were managing [00:08:00] other rich people's money and only they were going to get a chance to invest in HEPA texture.
That's not how we want it.
Dan Humiston: Yeah, I love that. I love that whole aspect of it. Like you said, you have 700 people out there rooting for you to succeedwhat can be better. There are other sites available. Why we funder?Over some of the other sites?
What did you like about working with.
Tommy Gibbons: Yeah, we did diligence on a few different plans. Forms we fund has been around. Basically the longest has the most investment volume. There were other good platforms that were making compelling arguments as well. The, we funder is just equity. Crowd funding is their bread and butter.
Some of these other platforms do like real estate lending and debt lending for startups. We want it to be very clear what we were offering. And they also actually had really good terms, right? So they weren't going to take equity in our company. They were just going to take a small amount of some of the amount raised and would just allow us to customize our page and just run with it.
And that, that seemed a lot better than working with some other platforms that we're probably gonna have different [00:09:00] payment structures and not necessarily as much freedom as we funder was gonna allow us on our case.
Dan Humiston: It's it seems like you're going in the right direction. And we have all the information on the campaign, in the show notes. So if anyone's interested in checking it out or in, it's currently live on Wi-Fi. As you mentioned to me earlier, it's not going to be live for much longer because they're almost capped, which is crazy.
You can get in for as little as a hundred dollars. So your minimum investment, I believe is a hundred dollars. So if you're interested at all, I would say, I recommend go to the site right now and , be part of this movement, Tommy, this is really cool stuff. We'll have to have you back on once you get the facility built and you can tell everybody how things are.
Tommy Gibbons: Yeah, thanks, Dan. We'll certainly be putting updates out there for our investors, letting them follow our progress. Not only do we view this as a great thing for hemp texture, we view this as a great thing for people who want to learn about early stage investing. Invest in companies that they see promising, and then they can follow our path, follow our journey, see what we do that work, see what we do that [00:10:00] maybe doesn't work.
And then ingrain that knowledge, that learned knowledge and then apply it to other investments because that's how we get new products and new companies is be put capital towards them and an energy towards them so that they can make better products into the.
Dan Humiston: Well, it's a great way to do it. And you're . Certainly setting a good example for everyone. So thanks again.
Tommy Gibbons: Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me on.