This business plan is centered around the creation of a digital marketplace that will promote small businesses and sustainable shopping habits throughout the community and beyond. Our business decisions will be guided by our vision which involves encouraging environmentally conscious shopping habits, supporting small artists, and raising money for charity without compromising quality. In addition to our focus on creating a social media-based digital marketplace, we aim to ultimately help local artists grow their businesses and further support the causes they care about.

Valued as a $28 billion industry in 2021, the second-hand clothing industry, or thrifting industry, has been exploding (2020 Fashion Resale Market and Trend Report, 2020). This has been aided by a myriad of technological advancements, social movements, and economic factors. The goal of this thesis is to uncover consumer behaviors leading to this growth across behavioral, emotional, perceptual, and belief factors. Additionally, this thesis aims to provide strategic implications for marketing professionals, create recommendations for brands to successfully enter this industry and target consumers. In this study, a Qualtrics survey was distributed to students at Arizona State University. The results were analyzed through Microsoft Excel. The results showed that in order to be successful in this industry, brands should: emphasize sustainability in marketing, increase brand awareness, highlight feelings of pride in products, uniqueness, and affordability, mitigate feelings of poverty, low quality, and lack of variety, understand the perceptual differences in shopping versus thrifting, and take advantage of branded fashion.

New Leaf was founded with the mission to address the environmental, health, and sustainability consequences of paper production today. We explored the sourcing and foundations of paper needs, supporting our assumption that paper can be created from agricultural waste. We solidified a business plan using agricultural waste after considerable sourcing research and expert and consumer input. We determined that forest foliage, a potential fire hazard, could be sourced from national forests and used to make alternative paper as well as contribute to sustainability efforts.

New Leaf was founded with the mission to address the environmental, health, and sustainability consequences of paper production today. We explored the sourcing and foundations of paper needs, supporting our assumption that paper can be created from agricultural waste. We solidified a business plan using agricultural waste after considerable sourcing research and expert and consumerism input. We determined that using forest foliage that is a potential fire hazard from a national forest could be used as a source to make alternative paper as well as contribute to sustainability efforts.

This paper examines how marketing has been used as a tool to promote awareness among consumers about environmental issues and to encourage them to make sustainable choices. Marketing campaigns have been instrumental in the widespread adoption of sustainable practices such as recycling, second-hand shopping, and reducing personal waste. As consumers become more conscious of their choices, companies use green marketing to capitalize on these social trends. While many companies do have the intent to sell a truly sustainable product to fulfill customer needs, others simply use the label to profit, without putting forth a sustainable product. This practice is referred to as “greenwashing.” The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put forth regulatory guidelines to combat this issue, but does not seem to have the necessary resources to penalize companies who do not follow the regulations. In fact, there are many guidelines that are optional for companies to follow, but not mandatory, making it difficult to spot false claims. We conducted two surveys of over 300 college students to assess their perceptions of sustainability and how it influences their everyday choices. We asked questions about perceived sustainability of various brands, some of which with known sustainability campaigns, and others without. We found that many students hold similar perceptions of sustainability and saw interesting trends in how sustainability affects their day-to-day purchase habits.