Ep 017 – Bringing Simplicity + Style to Your Trash Bins with Finer Liner

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Stephanie Todd of Finer Liner!

Stephanie is a former PR executive, a wife, mother of two kids, a game show winner and now the founder of Finer Liner. After years working in the PR and product development world with brands like Crate & Barrel and Ralph Lauren, Stephanie discovered a common household problem that nobody seemed to be addressing. Using those tacky grocery store bags to line your small trash bins, which never work well and always leave you with icky items stuck to the bottom of the bin.

So Stephanie decide to create a solution and launched the Finer Liner dispenser kit, which is a sleek refillable source of trash bin liners that attaches to the bottom of your trash bin. Think of it like a beautiful tissue box, but for trash bags. You just pull up the first liner, wait til it’s full of trash, then rip it off a the bottom and pull up a fresh one right from the dispenser. It’s genius and beautifully designed.

Episode Highlights:

How Stephanie can up with the idea to create a new product for trash bins (as someone who NEVER thought they’d be in the trash industry):

“It was in 2021. My son was a baby at the time and my husband and I were at a family friend's house. We were in the bathroom changing my son. I think it was like the bathroom floor or something because we didn't have anywhere to change him. And we had a dirty diaper in our hand and we noticed that we didn't have anywhere to put the dirty diaper. And so I said, ’Okay, well why don't we just throw it in the trash bin here?’ Well, there was no liner in the trash bin. We didn't wanna just leave a dirty number two diaper in the trash bin.

So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be so amazing if there was already a liner there that we could just pull up, throw that away, put the dirty diaper in, throw it away, and then pull up another one? Kind of like how you do with baby wipes? So I thought about it and thought about it and I kind of sat on the idea for a while.

And then in 2022, I ended up going on the game show The Price is Right. I ended up winning the game show. I won a bunch of prizes, sold everything. And just decided that I was gonna take my aha moment and really go for it! And two years later, here I am.

On going through multiple prototypes to create the final product:

“So initially when we were talking about it, my product designer kind of presented me with a few different options for prototypes and different directions we could go in. I'd say there were probably four or five different iterations of the actual prototype, the dispenser. I think we hit a problem with the liners not fitting in the dispenser or they would get stuck when you pulled it up from the dispensers. So we would go back and forth and have to figure out, ‘Okay, are we gonna put 10 liners in each roll? Are we gonna put 20 liners in each roll?’ So there was definitely some issues we ran into, but in the end it was so worth it!”

Stephanie’s hope for the future of the trash industry:

“Aa lot of consumers that I've talked to are really big on recycling and keeping things very environmentally friendly. And so I kept that in the back of my mind when I created the product. The actual dispenser is made from PET plastic, so it's recyclable. And all of our liners are biodegradable and that, at least the people I talk to in my age range, that was important to them.

And I really see the industry going in that direction and I hope it continues to. I mean, we gotta keep this earth clean. So yeah, that's something I really have on the forefront and I hope to continue to keep my products environmentally friendly.”

Follow Finer Liner on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠

Shop their trash bin liners at ⁠www.shopfinerliner.com