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In Conversation With... Flora Blathwayt
A Clean Sweep “Everything has been a bit of a whirlwind since the Channel 4 programme!” exclaimed Flora Blathwayt, founder of Washed Up Cards. Receiving almost 4,000 orders since the documentary aired about her greeting card publishing business would be seen as rather more than ‘a bit’ in most people’s eyes, but then it is ‘bits’ that have turned this plucky eco-entrepreneur into something of an industry media star. PG squeezed in a call with the lovely Flora to find out more about her innovative upcycling business that is delivering the plastic pollution message, one greeting card at a time. Left: Flora Blathwayt on the River Thames ‘beach’.
“I just cannot believe the attention and level of orders Washed Up Cards received after the TV documentary. It is brilliant and terrifying at the same time,” admitted Flora. “I then realised that to make the 3,600 cards just to satisfy those orders would take me months and months, so I roped in friends and family to help. Etsy had to shut down my shop to allow me to catch up a bit. Thankfully I now have several lovely people helping me on the card making and to get the process smoother and an intern is due to start, so we are coming out the other side, but I have lots of other ideas too,” says Flora enthusiastically. All this might never have happened if she had not made her sister (who had been living plastic-free) a wedding card using micro plastic elements that Flora had collected on a River Clean walk in 2019. Then, finding herself furloughed during lockdown Flora started making a few greeting cards, initially for self-therapy. Nothing unusual in that in itself, with card making being one of the most popular hobbies, even before the pandemic struck, but Flora’s cards were ‘rubbish’, quite literally, river rubbish to be precise. 42
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
Left: The wedding card Flora made for her sister which sparked the idea for Washed Up Cards. Below right: On the rear of each card there is a space to write where the piece of plastic that features was found. Below left: Just a small selection of the discarded plastic that Flora has retrieved from the shore of the Thames.
Urged on by neighbours’ positive comments about the cards that Flora had given them (she was new to the area and used the cards to get to know people) as well as necessity (as she was made redundant), she took the plunge and set up Washed Up Cards, launching on Etsy. Attracting ‘five star’ reviews almost immediately, news of Washed Up Cards quickly gathered momentum in the media with BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 5
Live, Metro, Guardian, Huff Post, Main Online, Big Issue and Time Out, as well as a host of local press, all keen to share Flora’s story, which is inspiring on sustainable and entrepreneurial fronts as well as uplifting on a human level. In what must rank as one of the most unusual production and creative processes of any greeting card publisher, a ‘day at the office’ for Flora might start with a bike ride to a stretch of the river near her South London home, where she will don her gloves and scour the river edge up, picking up discarded plastic ‘treasures’ - from brightly colours bottle tops to cable ties, bits of ketchup wrappers to broken buttons - which are then stashed in all their muddy stinkiness into a bag. “You might think it is all manky, but it is like a little bit of treasure,” says Flora, who gets excited when she finds a purple bottle cap that can be turned into a ‘balloon’ on a card, or a piece of blue plastic that is calling out to be repurposed as a whale spout! Back at her home her plastic stash is then given a double wash, making them