Sometimes the next big thing is not necessarily new.
Just ask the folks at OrganiLock, a Madisonville, Kentucky-based startup, who are preparing for the national distribution of the company's animal-matter-based plant food and soil food.
OrganiLock CEO and co-founder Scott Laskowski said that the synthetic forms of fertilizer that have been developed over the decades primarily feed the plants, but not the soil itself.
“It was very good for a while. We thought we had figured it out, and now hundreds of years later, we figured out you can’t fool Mother Nature … So how do we bring life back to the soil with products we ran out of over a century ago? We have to replace that today to bring soil life back. That’s the challenge,” Laskowski said. “Everybody is trying to figure it out. We believe we’ve done that.”
The startup has been around in various forms since 2007, but did a relaunch of its products in January as it evolves its business around a patent-pending technology of blending what is referred to as “animal mortality” and blending it with biomass, which in turn feeds the soil the microbes it craves.
Or as co-founder and CFO (and Scott’s wife) Brenda Laskowski puts it: “We take the nutrient, and we lock it into the biomass … for that slow release [of microbes].”
When OrganiLock was first started, the Laskowskis and their team used mostly carp, an invasive fish that has overrun the waterways of many inland states. These days, the carcasses of chickens are the main source, given the company’s close proximity to numerous chicken coops.
A family tradition
Scott and Brenda co-founded the company with Scott’s parents. His late father, Don, was one of the co-founders of Wood-Mizer, a sawmill equipment and blade company that started out of Speedway, Indiana.
Wood-Mizer was sold to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) group in 2008, which led to the initial capital for what would eventually become OrganiLock after a series of ventures in the waste stream industry. They went from selling a device called the Bio-Burner, a biomass-powered repurposing and heating system to producing biomass processing equipment — and eventually to soils in 2015.
OrganiLock's product is currently only available on its website and in select stores in the Northeast U.S. That, though, should change as the company is on the verge of signing a couple of large distribution deals that should dramatically increase its reach. It is also finalizing a partnership with Johnny’s Selected Seed, a large e-commerce platform in the home garden space.
Plant food prices range from $32.95 for a 16-ounce bag to $239.50 for five gallons. Soil food starts at $24.95 and goes up to $189.95 for a 38 pound bag of pellets.
The company has raised $750,000 in equity of a $2 million seed round that started last fall. Investors include a $50,000 commitment from Keyhorse Capital. Up until this current round of funding, the founders put somewhere in the vicinity of $7 million to $8 million of their own money into the venture.
Scott Laskowski, who leads a team of around 10 employees, said he sees a big similarity in what OrganiLock is trying to do and what Wood-Mizer did when it was founded in 1982 by an electrical motor salesman and hospital bed designer.
“It was very much to their benefit to not know anything about sawmill, so they didn’t have preconceived ideas of how it’s supposed to be done. They created this new product that was a disruptive technology that took the world by storm. And that’s, I believe, is what’s happening with us.
"We knew nothing about it, so we weren’t following the rules. We’re doing things that people are saying, ‘You can’t do that. That’s not possible.’"
