VelvetTurf

We Plan to change the turf industry, by creating a eco friendly, low maintenance alternative.

We want to sell a moss turf rolls as an eco friendly alternative to artificial grass to help prevent further ecosystem damage in local areas due to the spike in people purchasing artificial turf. In recent years we have notice a large amount of people purchasing artificial grass and we have seen from many sources have predicted mass insect death and floods in more areas. If we can increase the popularity for eco-friendly turf than artificial turf will become obsolete improving environments around the world. 

We are trying to fight the use of artificial turf as a replacement for natural turfing options. 

If lots of people get artificial turf instead of something natural, local ecosystems will be destroyed in their areas. Many people will be affected because artificial turf is getting more popular. 

There are many factors like age (people are too old to maintain their gardens), maintenance (natural turfs are time-consuming and can be difficult to maintain), the size of the garden (artificial turfs are preferred in smaller gardens when grass is not worth it. 

We would like to try and impact most people in local areas who are looking for a easier to maintain version of grass but do not want to go for artificial options. Moss is an amazing alternative to grass for people with light/medium foot traffic due to moss not being durable with heavy use. We aim to help prevent flooding and ecosystem damage. Many people have suffered due to recent flooding damaging product a factor in flooding is how artificial turf does not allow the soil to absorb the water and rather lets it sit on top.

We did some basic market research by creating a form we gained a lot of useful Data from it. We learned from this that mainly people prefer natural over artificial turf, from the results it was ( an average of 8.47 points for Natural grass, and an average of 3.83 points for artificial grass.) This shows how people do actively dislike artificial alternatives, but when looking 17% stated that they would change from natural to artificial. A lot of the time it was due to old age and price. This also shows how a our company could influence the market greatly

We have created a concept for our product , we have not produced any prototypes yet but we will able to create a similar product relatively quickly. We mainly have to supply the first batch of moss, then from there we can slowly start produce our own moss we would likely use a moss called ('Hypnum inpones') this moss is quite soft and acts like a carpet and can grow it in sheets ,we could produce this relatively easily. The main thing we will need to purchase, is a supply of mineral rich soil to grow the moss onto. 

We have created a form which we sent out which helped show how big the market is for our business , we manged to see that quite a lot of people stated that the main reason 'why they would not purchase an artificial alternative' is because 'Not natural' , 'Drainage' , 'Effects wild life'. But when we asked 'why would you purchase a artificial alternative' people stated 'Low maintenance' ,' no access to sunlight' , 'Price for upkeep'. Again this helps show how there is a large market for our product

We are going to grow moss in sheets to sell.

If we can we would like to start producing next year a prototype of our product, if all goes well we plan to start selling products when we  perfect our product. We might be able to sell to a few consumer due to us likely selling whole lawns rather then small segments. 

We plan to place our product on the market by next year, and have a real company which we can sell additional eco friendly products

We will create logs monthly to track our companies mindset and to try to get an idea of what we want to achieve.

Financial will likely create a barrier due to not being able to rent space to grow our product, and ways to ship our product due to it being large and fragile. But we likely can slowly overcome this soon

We have no other business experience, but we believe this is a great product

We are not currently partnered with any organisation.