The Selling Circular Podcast

Andy Shifrin started building mattresses out of mattresses in Chicago in 1996, with a couple thousand dollars and a borrowed truck. Thirty years later, his company North American Mattress Upcycling (NAMU) pulls trailer loads of old beds off national retailers' docks every day and turns their springs and foam into new mattresses for stores, universities and hotels. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and Sabira Lakhani, Andy is blunt about the hard parts: the "ick factor" that never fully goes away, a supply chain where no two inputs match, and a federal fire rule that landed hardest on the people who followed it. He also explains why the buyers who care most about sustainability aren't who you'd expect. With states debating mattress recycling laws and producer responsibility, it's a rare operator's view of reuse versus recycling.

In 2018, Wayne Visser presented Closing the Loop, billed as the first feature-length documentary on the circular economy. Eight years later, he joins Garr Punnett and co-host Sabira Lakhani to look back at what happened to the businesses he filmed: which ones scaled, which ones didn't, and the pattern that separates them. The conversation moves from the business of making an unfunded film to why the developing world bootstraps circularity, whether "circular" is even the right word, and how whole systems flip faster than anyone expects. Wayne holds two things at once: the trends are worse than ever, and the solutions are scaling faster than ever. And he closes the show in a way we've never closed one before.

Ari Kimmelfeld calls himself a marketplace junkie, and he built a business around everything that stops normal people from buying used. He started by reselling used Pelotons, then turned that into Commonplace, a marketplace for hot tubs, golf carts, appliances, fitness gear and other big, bulky things, with inspection, payment and delivery built in. In this conversation with Garr Punnett, Ari explains why trust, not price, is what keeps big-ticket secondhand from moving, and what it takes to earn it. He also explains why he never led with sustainability, and why AI shopping agents may favor trusted secondhand platforms. It's a practical look at re-commerce for anything too big to fit in an Uber.

Jules Bailey calls his career a "Benjamin Button" trajectory: he started in the Oregon legislature, went on to run the distributor-owned cooperative behind the nation's first bottle bill, and is now in the startup world. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and co-host Sabira Lakhani, Jules explains what happens when a well-meant recycling policy meets real operations. Expect volume nobody planned for, retailers demanding more than you can deliver, and a refillable beer bottle that took dozens of tries to fit existing filling lines. He also makes the case for setting incentives and then getting out of the way, and explains why that's exactly why no state can simply copy Oregon. With seven states running packaging EPR and Oregon's law freshly upheld in federal court, it's a timely look at how these systems actually scale.

Jimmy Funkhouser spent a decade inside Toys R Us before opening FERAL, a Denver outdoor shop that spent its first two and a half years selling new gear like everybody else, until he and a colleague realized brands control price right up until a product enters the aftermarket. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and Sabira Lakhani chat with Jimmy as he walks them through the operating reality of buying used inventory one unit at a time: what it costs in seconds, why a physical storefront beats a shipping label for sourcing, and why he thinks independent shops currently hold an advantage over chain retailers. It's a rare look at re-commerce as a business rather than as a sustainability line item.

Todd Wilson spent ten years trying to convince someone to fund a machine that smacks food out of its packaging. Banks passed. He built it anyway in Michigan, a state with one of the lowest landfill surcharges in the country and no organics mandate to lean on. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and Sabira Lakhani, Todd walks through the economics of pre-consumer food waste: where sealed, unsold product actually comes from, who takes it once it's separated, and why the machine was never the hard part. It's an unusually candid look at the capital, the partnerships, and the smell involved in standing between a grocer and a landfill.

Dr. Phil Brown spent four years at TU Delft researching how companies collaborate to go circular, then joined a company built on the premise that mostly they don't. In this conversation with Garr Punnett and Sabira Lakhani, he traces the line from a master's project recovering plastics out of waste electronics to running sustainable innovation at Circularise and argues that the data layer everyone is now racing to build is step one, not the destination. The conversation covers who actually owns product data, why proof-of-concept paralysis is the real bottleneck, what has to be true for capital markets to fund recovery infrastructure, and which people you need in the room for a circular pilot to survive. It is a candid look at the unsexy plumbing of the circular economy from someone who has studied it academically and had to sell it commercially.

Vojta Vosecký became LinkedIn's most-followed green creator not by sharing better data, but by abandoning it. In this conversation, the environmental engineer and founder of The Circular Economist explains how he learned — the hard way, in front of deflating workshop rooms — that fear and charts lose people, and story wins them. He and Garr dig into how to actually sell the circular economy: the 30-second analogy that won over a global CEO, why "recycling is the worst of your good options," where the real B2B opportunity hides, and why authenticity has become a competitive advantage in the age of AI slop. It's a masterclass in communication for anyone who knows their cause matters but can't get the room to care.

Amy Larkin has spent her career proving that the people who seem least likely to cooperate can solve enormous problems together. A former Greenpeace Solutions Director turned founder of PR3, The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse, she joins Garr Punnett to make the case that recycling was never going to fix our packaging and plastic crisis — and that reuse, done at scale and built on shared standards, is the solution hiding in plain sight. Along the way she shares how a coalition of corporate "enemies" helped phase a potent greenhouse gas into a global treaty, why she calls herself a "radical collaborator," and what it took to launch the world's first standards-backed symbol for reuse. It's a conversation about defying the odds, the business case for reuse, and the human connection that makes systems change actually happen.

Amelia Eleiter co-founded Debrand in 2008, long before "circularity" was a buzzword, and has spent nearly two decades building the reverse-logistics infrastructure that sits in the "messy middle" of textile circularity with the sorting, identification, and traceability work that happens after a garment is returned, damaged, or overproduced. In this conversation Amelia walks Garr & Sabira through how that hidden layer actually functions, why recycling and circularity aren't the same thing, and how regulation and strategic investment are reshaping the economics of reuse. It's an wonderfully candid look at an industry from someone who refuses to oversell it.