Today we’d like to introduce you to Shervin Dehmoubed.
Hi Shervin, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I started my first business when I was 15 selling toys online, and over the next few years I bounced around a handful of different businesses before starting a pickleball brand.
That was really what led me into packaging. We got to the point where we were shipping hundreds of orders a day, and I remember looking at the pile of plastic mailers we were going through and thinking there had to be a better option. I started looking for sustainable alternatives and realized pretty quickly that most of what existed was either way too expensive, didn’t perform well, or wasn’t actually as sustainable as it claimed to be.
I was a freshman at Yale at the time, and during COVID I started working on what eventually became EcoPackables. Our first real product was a compostable shipping mailer, and I basically learned the packaging industry from the ground up while building the company. We won a couple of entrepreneurship and sustainability prizes at Yale early on, and a few years later I was fortunate enough to be named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
But the company today is pretty different from what I originally imagined.
Early on, I thought the answer to sustainable packaging was simply inventing better materials. What I’ve learned is that sustainability only really scales when it also makes economic and operational sense. A brand might love a new sustainable material, but if it costs 50% more or doesn’t run properly on their equipment, it’s probably never going to reach meaningful scale.
That realization changed how we built EcoPackables. Instead of trying to be a niche sustainable packaging company, we’ve been building a full-service packaging company that can compete with traditional suppliers on price, quality, service and scale… while continually pushing customers toward better materials and better end-of-life outcomes.
We started with one compostable mailer. Today we work across flexible packaging, corrugated boxes, labels, mailers and a growing range of recycled, recyclable and bio-based materials, working with brands across the country.
I’m still pretty early in my career, and I definitely feel like we’re early in the EcoPackables story too. Packaging is an enormous, fragmented, pretty old-school industry, which is exactly what makes it exciting to me. There’s a huge opportunity to build a next-generation packaging company that combines better materials, great service and a much more modern way of doing business.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not. A lot of the challenge has come from the fact that we’re constantly working with new materials and trying to push the frontier of what sustainable packaging can do.
It’s relatively easy to make something more sustainable if you’re willing to sacrifice performance or make it significantly more expensive. The hard part is creating packaging that is genuinely better for the environment, performs just as well as the conventional alternative, and is cost-competitive.
That’s something we ruthlessly optimize against. Our goal is ultimately to get to a world where choosing sustainable packaging doesn’t have to cost more. Getting there means constantly testing new materials, working through manufacturing challenges, improving formulations, and figuring out how to bring new solutions to scale without asking customers to compromise.
There have definitely been plenty of things that haven’t worked along the way, but that process of experimentation and iteration has become a big part of how we operate.
As you know, we’re big fans of EcoPackables. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
EcoPackables is a Certified B Corporation and full-service sustainable packaging company. We work with brands on everything from mailers and corrugated boxes to flexible packaging, pouches, labels, retail bags, and custom packaging.
What I’m most proud of is that we’ve gone far beyond simply sourcing sustainable packaging that already exists. We spend a huge amount of time developing our own materials and trying to solve problems where we don’t think the market has a good enough solution yet.
One example is BioLaminate™, our alternative to traditional petroleum-based flexible packaging. We found a way to make polyethylene using renewable sugarcane. The sugarcane is processed into ethanol, which is then used to produce polyethylene that is chemically identical to conventional PE. That means it can offer the performance, shelf life, sealing, and printability brands expect from traditional plastic, while replacing much of the fossil fuel-based feedstock with renewable plant-based material. When designed as a monomaterial structure, it can also be recycled through appropriate thin-film recycling streams.
We’ve taken the same approach in apparel packaging. We developed Ocea™, an FSC-certified paper-based garment film that can replace the clear plastic polybags almost every piece of clothing is shipped in. It is water-resistant and translucent enough to see and scan the product inside, but unlike a conventional polybag that typically requires a specialty thin-film drop-off program, Ocea™ is designed to be recyclable curbside with paper.
We’ve also developed materials using post-consumer recycled plastic and ocean-bound plastic, and we’re constantly testing new films, papers, coatings, and material structures. The goal is always the same: find a way to make packaging meaningfully more sustainable without asking a brand to sacrifice performance, aesthetics, or economics.
I think that is what sets EcoPackables apart. We don’t want sustainability to be a premium product category. We want to help get the packaging industry to a point where the more sustainable option is simply the better option, environmentally, operationally, and economically.
Being a Certified B Corporation is important to us because it reinforces that this isn’t just a marketing position. We put a lot of emphasis on testing, certifications, life cycle analysis, and being transparent about the tradeoffs of different materials. There is no perfect packaging material today, so our job is to keep pushing the frontier and help brands make the best decision available.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
I think the biggest thing I’d leave readers with is that I’m incredibly optimistic about where sustainable packaging is headed.
For a long time, sustainability has been treated as a tradeoff. You could choose the more sustainable option, but you might have to pay more, sacrifice performance, or make your operations more complicated. I don’t think that has to be the case.
Our goal at EcoPackables is to help eliminate that tradeoff. We want to get to a world where sustainable packaging is simply the default because it performs just as well, costs the same or less, and makes sense for the business using it.
We’re still a relatively young company, and I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can build. Packaging is an enormous industry, and there is so much room for better materials, better technology, and better service. I’m incredibly excited to keep pushing that forward with our team and our customers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ecopackables.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ecopackables/?hl=en
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ecopackables/?viewAsMember=true
