Since I’m planning on rebranding my blog, I decided not to print up business cards for SxSW. Yesterday there was a drawing for a book from the Go Virtual session and all you had to do was drop in a business card. I sighed after reading the sign, then put my brain to work.
I have a coffee cup cardboard sleeve I’ve been carrying with me all week. Yes, I’m using a paper cup, reluctantly, but I thought at least I can reuse the cardboard sleeve. Light bulb!! I’ll write my info on the cardboard sleeve. I make my regular cards out of recycled stuff anyway, so this is not far from what I would have anyway. I wrote my info, I dropped it in the bag and I listened to a great session.
After the session, they did the drawing for the books. The girl doing the drawing had no idea that was in there, but as she was choosing a card, she said, “I’m going to grab this one that feels different.” I won my choice of the two books AND I got my paper sleeve back. My little Ecogrip has quite a journey going here. I think I might need to give it an itizen tag.
Sometimes easy solutions can be found for life’s little problems, all it takes is a willingness to do something. Not bringing cards probably wasn’t my brightest plan, but they have plenty of recycling materials here and I’ve made several cards on the fly. Less than one minute of thinking about a solution yielded many great things. I got a new book, people got to see how repurposing works, my cardboard sleeve is getting a long life, less paper was used, something created as disposable has been used over 5 times now and I have a great story.
If you run into a small issue today, throw one minute at creating a simple solution. :)