#13 - Ben Young: The Frank Green Founder Making Plastic Pallet Wrap Extinct
episodePreviously titled “Ben Young: The Frank Green Founder Making Plastic Pallet Wrap Extinct” — renamed by the publisher on Sep 17, 2026
Forward Thinking - The Freight, Logistics & Supply Chain Podcast
35 min
2 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's a household name, Frank Green. I think everyone heard of it. I'm pretty sure my wife has got three or four bottles at at home.
We wouldn't have s you know uh sold as many water bottles in Australia as there are Australians, right?
What what were some hard lessons scaling a like a physical product, like and taking that globally?
I think you've got to listen to your customers. Like, you know, to this day we spend fifty thousand hours a year on product development. We are just relentless and obsessed. We don't have the the opportunity to run the hair brain skiing department as I call it to come up with ideas like no rap.
Let's get into it. So Ben, thanks for jumping on. I really appreciate your time and Really good to uh to unpack a few things here. Um, so your business, uh you know, it's a household name, Frank Green. Um, I think everyone everyone's heard of it. I'm pretty sure my wife has got three or four bottles at at home. Um, take us back, you know, I guess it's if I was reading on on your website, it kind of started back in the nineties for you and you had a bit of a vision. But yeah, if you take us back and give it a bit of a high level, um What kind of made you want to build it?
Well, you know, I just uh was someone who was always out in nature as a kid, always out fishing and walking around in the bush and all that kind of thing and so I've just got this innate love for um for nature and everywhere I went I just saw um, you know, single use plastic just in really kind of um uh just disrupting, you know, being able to see the environment and it's kind of pristine. So then, you know, I took that, you know, from a very early age. Um and I did, you know, and then I started my corporate career, which is wonderful. I've got so many uh really fond memories of that and the experience I got. And then, you know, you get you get into your 30s and you start to think to yourself, well, I want to do something better.
So I want to be able to be impactful. and use and hopefully your brains and your experience for good, not for bad is in is in corporate. So then I just you know, I started it. I started doing a holy ph deep research around why people didn't use reusable products and you know, simply put, it was because they looked horrible and didn't perform how you you'd expected. So then I went on a a big um process, you know, you know, pages and pages of research I did on on why people didn't use them and and and so wanted to make sure that every single thing and it was literally a hundred point checklist of all the things that we needed to achieve. And and so we didn't start the business until until that happened.
happened. Um and and people, you know, life's a popularity contest and people want a beautiful looking, reusable product. So it had to It had to deliver on that and um but that's something that I uh that that history says we did deliver on it, otherwise we wouldn't have s you know, uh sold as many water bottles in Australia as there are uh as there are Australians, right? So um yeah. So that's how it all started. It's from it's from passion, but then using my business experience to to make sure that I can solve the business need and in and be two standard deviations, I call it, away from um our competitors. Because it's very noisy out there. And and so, you know, people um have got a lot of competing interests and so you've got to make sure that you can you can capture the imagination with a with a with a well uh designed um product and a really enviable brand.
Yeah. For sure. And did you get much pushback in the early days or people just saying that's, you know, pretty crazy idea, single use, you know, that that won't work? Or what was the general consensus back then when you were launching it?
Uh well, you know, w back when I started th the about one per cent of people used a reusable uh uh coffee cup out of cafe. They they took it in to get refilled. But then, you know, over time and the war and waste from the tr Chaser guys, you know, they they did a good job when they put a whole of single use plastic cups in a tram and travelled around Melbourne and, you know, it was quite impactful at that stage.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:23
2
How did Ben Young’s childhood love of nature inspire the founding of Frank Green?
5:23–12:40
3
What research and design process did Frank Green use to create a reusable water bottle that sold to every Australian?
12:40–21:04
4
Which hard lessons did Ben learn while scaling a physical product globally?
21:04–29:50
5
Why did the 2022 Christmas peak cost Frank Green over a million dollars in refunds?
29:50–35:33