Sisters and entrepreneurs Lori Hawkins and Sandra O’Malley have made it their mission to make bagging handy and beneficial for you, your community, and the environment. Their local company, Colibri, manufactures an array of bag products from their small workshop in St. Adolphe. With so many sizes and prints to choose from, they offer a reusable bag for every purpose.
Calling themselves the “sling sisters” in 2008, Hawkins and O’Malley started producing stretchy wraps for mothers to conveniently carry babies, and they started by using their own friends and children as guinea pigs for their designs. By 2010, with the addition of wet bags, the sisters saw the need to expand and change the focus of their business, and Colibri was born.
Why Colibri? The name comes from the scientific term for the genus of hummingbirds often seen throughout North and South America.
In the small workshop located on the top floor of a heritage building near the centre of St. Adolphe, one finds an assortment of snack bags, wet bags, pouches, clutches, totes, and even washcloths—all products available at the Colibri website—but the sky is the limit for what people can actually store in them.
Colibri also offers a fundraising program for schools and daycares, which provides a way for new customers to get their hands on products, while also supporting community organizations.
“We’ve been pushing our fundraising a lot the last three years,” says Hawkins. “The schools get 50 percent back from snack bag sales.”
This is a high percentage when compared with other fundraisers. For schools with litter-free lunch programs, a growing trend, the Colibri fundraisers can be an especially good fit.
Because Colibri stands apart from other snack bag manufacturers by focusing on reusable products, they must take food safety into consideration. Third-party product testing is one of the ways that Colibri sets the bar in the industry.
“We do procedure testing for [all] our snack bags,” says Hawkins. “The fabric is certified and lab-tested for food safety.”
Getting the product on the shelf at the beginning required a lot of footwork, according to Hawkins. “We phoned a lot of businesses… starting out by picking stores we thought would be a good fit.”
Approximately 350 retailers currently carry Colibri on their shelves. And with a sales representative and a distributor based out of Toronto, the Colibri brand has recently branched out into the United States.
If you are considering ditching disposable bags, buying these versatile products from a humming local business might be a good place to start.
