Bag Lady: How I Started a Business for a Greener World and Changed the Way America Shops

A billion plastic bags a day. That’s how many bags Americans were throwing away in 2005 when Lisa D. Foster first switched to reusable bags. The impacts of all those bags on our environment and our taxes kept her up at night. It was wrong. Morally wrong. She believed that if American shoppers knew what she knew, they would switch to reusable bags too. So, she did what any good English teacher would do. She took the facts about bags and turned them into a story. Over the next 12 years, that story transformed Lisa into the Bag Lady, an eco-entrepreneur on a mission to save the world one reusable bag at a time. Because she was driven by purpose, she did a lot of things right. She sold a quarter of a million reusable bags her first year, 2 million her second year, and 8 million her third year. Each reusable bag had the potential to replace a thousand single-use bags, collectively eliminating billions of plastic bags. Lisa also did a lot of things wrong. One out of ten startups fail, and odds are worse for people like her with no business experience or training. In the end, she built a thriving company, disrupted the plastic bag industry and changed the way America shops. It was a wild ride.