Time WARP back to the beginning

I’m always mulling how to improve the Warp It system to make it a great place to do reuse. And it got me thinking about where it came from and why it's thriving.

I worked in councils and universities as a waste manager when I discovered that the materials and assets that came out of these large organisations got skipped, put in a rubbish heap, or stored in a corner until the point of disposal. The range and sheer volume of things that were being wasted was astonishing. Hundreds of chairs. Hundreds of desks. Hundreds of whiteboards. Hundreds of pedestals. Hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of kit.

I asked around and it emerged that it really wasn’t anybody’s fault. The problem was that everyone's got a job to do and they're really busy. Nobody really takes responsibility for finding new homes for these assets. It's just the churn of stuff in an organisation because people want better stuff, and to do their job better they need better stuff. So while understandable, it often means good stuff get skipped in the end. This was the issue I decided to explore.

I found out that that those responsible for moving the assets were not only really busy but also may not have a place to store unwanted assets. Therefore, they’d leave the stuff outside in the hope that they would be re-homed. More often than not this didn’t happen; and even if an organisation did have storage facilities they’d be massively under-resourced.

So what to do? It got me thinking that there was an opportunity for those wanting to buy new assets to be alerted to opportunities when they were available. What if there was a system that could do this?

The first version of Warp It was actually an email list. When people were buying new stuff, they would put details about their stuff on this email list which allowed the rest of the staff a chance to claim it. And it worked, but it had some problems due to the nature of emails. Because when you send an email out, whether to all staff or even to specific groups, you're still bombarding people with messages, and that doesn't sit very well because the email inbox gets scared.

So it proved that email didn't work – BUT the concept of swapping and reusing assets did!

Next up, I spotted an office block being emptied and hundreds of relatively new office chairs being dumped into a skip. I went over there to find out what's going on. I spot a foreman and after a chat successfully arranged for the chairs to be distributed to a network of charities that I was involved with. This is when I started thinking about how an online platform could actually work.

Using an initial investment of ￡7,000 from Newcastle Science City, I built up the subscription-based networking software so that it connects organisations and allows them to search for and swap surplus equipment.

In the first year, I got about 20 customers. Then the second year I got some more customers, and I thought that's going to be enough evidence to leave my job. So I left my job.

Since then, it’s just continued like that. We're investing in a software regularly making it better and better and better. And we're just bringing in customers in a very sort of natural or organic growth without going too crazy.

Now we service over 50% of universities, around 20% of the NHS and about 30% of councils in England. In Scotland, we service 80% of universities 100% of the NHS and we serve about 60% of councils, so we're doing really well in some areas.

Plans for the future? I want to save my customers ￡5 million and I want to facilitate the donation of ￡1 million worth of assets into the charity sector. And next year I would like an agent in every state in the US, every state in Australia and every country in Europe.

If you’ve got any questions about Warp It, how it works or how we set it up, or if you got some entrepreneurial ideas of your own, get in touch. Maybe we can help. I hope you can use Warp It to make your work life easier.