“Painless” rental model
When you come to Tainan’s Zhengxing Street commercial district or the area around National Cheng Kung University, you see many shops with a cute cup-shaped sign hung on their doors or set out on their counters. By scanning the adjacent QR code and becoming a Line friend of Good to Go, you can use their container rental services. All you have to do is show the rental screen at the shop and they will put your drink into a Good to Go cup. When you are finished with your drink, return the cup to any participating business, and the Good to Go team will collect the used cups and take them to be machine washed and sterilized.
For consumers this doesn’t call for much of a lifestyle change, since you still don’t have to bring your own travel mug and don’t have to wash anything, so people can behave in an environmentally friendly way with little effort. However, it took the Good to Go team two years of trial operations to create the process for this seemingly simple service.
Founders Sung Yi-chen and Li Yi-he were classmates in the Industrial Design Department at National Cheng Kung University. They jointly founded the Last Longer Project in 2015, with the idea that they “wanted to find a second life for all kinds of usable resources; things should not be made just be to be thrown away.”
In 2017 they launched Good to Go’s “Zhengxing Cup Project,” experimenting with various operating models for Good to Go in the Zhengxing Street commercial district. To win the confidence of consumers, Good to Go started off by using transparent glass tumblers. They assumed that as long as clean glass containers were placed in shops they would be used, but when they did on-site visits they found that there were problems with available shop space and staff training.
Good to Go spent a year designing their own tumblers, taking into consideration various factors including heat resistance, transportation, and washing, as well as recycling of broken tumblers. In the end they opted to use polypropylene, which has a smooth, non-stick surface, as the material, and they designed the cups to be stackable. After tumblers are returned from the cleaning plant, they are inspected one by one, then their QR codes are scanned, and sets of ten cups are placed in long waterproof bags designed by Good to Go. The cups are stacked bottom up, making them easy to use. For consumers, the cups add a designer feel to their drinks, and they can be used with the tumbler totes and reusable straws that are available in stores. Moreover, each time a consumer returns a rented cup they earn points, which they can exchange for drinks discount coupons.
“Homeapp123” encourages people to make their home appliances available for rental online, both to promote the circularity of resources and also to bring in a little extra income on the side.