POC Member, Coffeenotes, has won the Sustainability Champion Award in the Artisan Founder Creative Business Awards, which recognises outstanding UK artisan businesses.
With a background in paper, printing, and publishing, Sarah Downey, founder of Coffenotes, created the brand as a sister company to Epic Print, which creates paper print and packaging products.
Epic Print had worked with paper maker and innovator, James Cropper for a number of years, but when it pioneered its CupCycling process, transforming used disposable coffee cups into paper, Sarah’s interest was piqued and she began working with James Cropper, through Epic, to utilise this new kind of paper. Seeing its potential, she then founded the Coffeenotes brand to really maximise this innovation, creating premium quality notebooks, with fountainpen-friendly paper, made from your flat white cup that got tossed in the bin.
Founder of the Artisan Founder Business Awards, Lyndsey James, commented: “A common thread this year seems to be provenance of material. Notice how many of the winners are not just sourcing their materials and ingredients with great care, but in some cases repurposing or even growing them.”
Coffenotes creates a selection of notebook formats, from stitched, layflat, and wirebound, each boasting thoughtful material usage. For example, Sarah explained how usually the wires in a spiralbound notebook are plastic or nylon coated, meaning they cannot be recycled and contribute to further plastic waste. Instead, Coffeenotes sources tin-coated or ‘naked’ spirals from Germany, which can be easily removed from the notebook at the end of its life, and scrunched down to be put into kerbside recycling alongside tin cans.
All Coffeenotes paper products are recyclable in usual paper waste streams, and can also be composted, making them easy for consumers to responsibly dispose of them at end of life. Coffeenotes includes all of this information in the back cover of every notebook, to gently educate on and encourage this behaviour with its products.
As well as selling direct to consumer through its website, Coffenotes stocks its notebooks in various specialist stationery shops, lifestyle shops, coffee and tea shops, restaurants, and some museums. “I much prefer to think of Coffeenotes being in smaller, independent shops, where somebody’s going to be prepared to talk about it and engage with customers, than it being lost in a melee of lots of other things and the story behind it not being very visible,” said Sarah.
See the full list of Artisan Founder Business Awards finalists here.
