How two students build a sustainable cosmetics startup

Leonard Mücke and Liam Metzen from Hamburg sell natural cosmetics made from recycled coffee grounds. It's not easy.

While other students spend their summer vacations partying on Mallorca or spending all day at the swimming lake, Hamburg high school students Liam Metzen and Leonard Mücke were poring over business plans, looking for producers and marketing concepts. Their goal: by the end of the vacations, to start a business selling soap that they recycle coffee grounds to make.

Vacation plans that are unusual for 18-year-old students. While their peers are already failing at derivation rules, Metzen and Mücke talk about economies of scale as if they've been on the startup scene for several years. And yet the two students encountered quite a few hurdles in their startup plans - and almost failed due to paperwork.

It all started with a simple idea, even two months before the summer vacations, during which they worked so intensively on the start-up. At the time, Mücke and Metzen were working in a café in Hamburg. While doing so, they noticed something. "Every evening, just before we finished work, we had to lug a really heavy garbage bag down to the basement," Metzen says. The garbage bag contained coffee grounds left over from making espresso. If these coffee grounds were disposed of in the residual waste, says co-founder Mücke, greenhouse gases would be created during waste incineration. "And even if the coffee grounds end up in organic waste, it's a shame about the resource itself, because some coffee drinkers like to use the coffee grounds to make themselves a scrub," Mücke says. Coffee grounds are good for the skin, he says, and the caffeine has a circulatory effect.

And so the two founders began researching after school: What if you still recycled the coffee grounds? "That's how we came up with the soap idea," says Mücke. Their plan: collect the coffee grounds from the various cafés and take them by cargo bike to a regional soap producer, who then processes the coffee grounds together with coconut oil, olive oil and shea butter to make soap that has an exfoliating effect due to the coffee grounds and is supposed to tighten the skin.

The idea apparently came at the right time: because at Gymnasium Eppendorf, the school of the two founders, it is customary to take part in a start-up competition organized by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the eleventh grade, he says. "It's practically part of the curriculum here, because our school has a business focus," says Mücke. The goal was to found a fictitious company. Together with four classmates, they designed a start-up around the coffee-soap idea - and became state winners in the start-up competition. After winning the prize, they received several inquiries from interested parties - which motivated them to turn the fictitious start-up into a real one, according to the two founders.

It wasn't as easy as it looked on paper. In the end, it took four months longer than just the end of summer vacation, says Leonard Mücke. The two students didn't realize how much bureaucracy such a startup entailed, he says. "We went to the notary to set up a UG and learned there: We need a business account. And it wasn't until we went to the bank that we were told that we had to pay our share capital into this account so that we could form properly." There are no proper guidelines for people who want to start a business while they are at school. Step by step, despite all the hurdles, they built up the company with the name "Coffeecycle," says Liam Metzen. At the end of last year, the time had finally come: They could start selling.

In the meantime, Metzen and Mücke no longer work in the café. "But we still see enough cafés from the inside," says Metzen . The founders regularly pick up the coffee grounds they recycle to produce their soap from several cafés in Hamburg by cargo bike. "Most of the cafés are happy not to have to dispose of the heavy garbage bags of coffee grounds," Metzen says. Some of the cafés would also sell their soap.

Convincing merchants is more difficult, he says. "We mostly went to the stores in person, which builds trust," Mücke says. The goal now, she said, is to find a larger chain of stores to sell her soaps. But because of the rather high price of 8.99 euros per soap due to the small number of items, negotiations often proved difficult.

Becoming even more sustainable is one of the next goals Metzen and Mücke are pursuing with "Coffeecycle." They already pay attention to regional supply chains, and the soap producer is also based in Hamburg. In addition, their soap does not contain any palm oil. However, the two founders regret that some ingredients, such as olive oil, cannot be sourced regionally.

In the long term, however, they are pursuing ambitious goals with Coffeecycle. For example, they would like to produce in higher quantities and use economies of scale to become as cheap as commercial cosmetics suppliers. "We would also like to conquer the German natural cosmetics market," says Mücke. A cooperation with a hotel chain is also conceivable, especially because a lot of coffee is consumed there and coffee grounds are therefore thrown away.

Could this conflict with their own life plans? Privately, the two young founders have a few challenges ahead of them. "We'll be graduating from high school in the summer," says Metzen. After that, they plan to study or train - Metzen and Mücke then want to continue the company on a part-time basis for now. "If we can manage it during school, we can manage it during our studies or training," Mücke is convinced.