Preview
0:00 - Deirdre Bird: As long as you’re consistently doing something every day to get you closer to the goal of launching that—whether it’s an app or some platform or a service-based business or like myself, a product—as long as you keep taking action every day towards it, eventually you’re going to shake some things loose and you’ll be able to launch something yourself. So, just about consistency. 
Introduction
0:22 - Liam Dacko: Hello and welcome to Stonehill Stories, the official podcast of Stonehill College! I’m your host, Liam Dacko, Class of 2016. Please enjoy my recent conversation with Deirdre Bird, Class of 2014, an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who leads with action as the founder of Dri Umbrellas. She talks about establishing her company, making an impact with her products and more.
Interview
0:48 - Liam Dacko: So, Deirdre, I wanted to first start off by saying thank you so much for joining me today. It’s really nice to meet you. It’s funny, I think when we were both students at Stonehill, our times here overlapped, but we obviously have never met each other til now. But I’ve heard a lot of great things about you, and happy to be spending this time with you for the next hour or so. 
1:09 - Deirdre Bird: Yeah, me as well. Thanks, Liam. It’s very nice to meet you. 
1:12 - Liam Dacko: I always like to kind of start off by asking people, how did their Stonehill journey begin? 
1:17 - Deirdre Bird: So, my cousin enrolled in Stonehill and she was there. So, she’s two years older than me. So, I went on my Stonehill tour just as a standard student and then we got to her dorm room. We got to Boland on the tour and I just kind of like snuck off and went and saw her really quick. And then it turned into more her just giving me a private tour of Stonehill and talking about all the things she loved about the school. And obviously the campus is gorgeous. So, I kind of had my own, like, one-on-one tour and she really sold me on the school. So that’s how I ended up there. 
1:50 - Liam Dacko: That’s great. Can you tell me a bit about your time here on campus? 
1:53 - Deirdre Bird: Yeah, so I was a Sem kid. So right away freshman year I was living in the Sem. I absolutely loved it. Easy to make friends from the jump. And having that cafeteria in the Sem was also awesome. So loved that. Moving forward, we lived in Cotuit. So, the same group of us moved in kind of again as a pack. It was as good of experience as you could possibly have in college.
2:15 - Liam Dacko: And I believe you also met your husband Eric while you were here. Is that correct? 
2:20 - Deirdre Bird: I did. So, Eric was also a Sem kid. So, I met him freshman year and we didn’t start dating until the day before graduation senior year. 
2:30 - Liam Dacko: Oh wow. That’s funny.
2:33 - Deirdre Bird: It was a very slow burn but we both look back on it and are very happy that we had kind of our single years in school where we both went abroad and got to experience that. Both had our different activities that we did and then ultimately started dating right before graduation and led years later to a marriage. So very happy that it worked out as it did.
2:55 - Liam Dacko: You were friends obviously during those intervening years. He didn’t just randomly come up to you at commencement and like, “Hey, you want to go out?”
3:05 - Deirdre Bird: No, no. We were friends for all four years and then slowly began to be interested in each other closer to the end of senior year there. It was a slow burn, but a lot of fun. 
3:16 - Liam Dacko: Hey, makes for a good story. Now, since graduating, you founded Dri Umbrellas, which offers premium eco-friendly umbrellas made from recycled ocean-bound plastic. Give me a sense of how this company came to be. I’d love to hear a bit more about the origins of it.
3:37 - Deirdre Bird: So, I never really thought that I would be an entrepreneur or a business owner. It really wasn’t on my radar, but I watched a pretty shocking documentary on ocean plastic around 2020. It really scared me. There is just this enormous plastic problem. No one at the time certainly was doing anything about it. So, we had 33 billion pounds of plastic infiltrating our oceans every year. And it was just kind of this dirty secret that no one was really aware of in the mainstream media. So, I found out about it through a documentary, a VICE documentary. And a few days later, I was walking to the T. I lived in Boston, so I was walking to the Red Line and I was holding my umbrella. And the umbrella flipped inside out and snapped. So, I was going to throw it in the trash can. And I saw that the tags said, “Made from 100% polyester.”
4:29 - Deirdre Bird: The canopy itself is made fully from polyester. And after I had watched that documentary, it had brought me down a rabbit hole of figuring out what else this plastic can be made into in order to avoid it ending up in the ocean. And one of the things that plastic bottles, so PET water bottles, soda bottles, can be made into is polyester fabric. So, I started kind of putting the pieces together in terms of, can we make these umbrellas better? Can we make them from recycled material? And can we make them from ocean bound plastic to prevent this from infiltrating the water and decimating ecosystems, impacting human health? And it turns out that you can, if you’re persistent enough, you can, in fact, make umbrellas out of ocean bound plastic. So that’s where it came from. 
5:17 - Liam Dacko: As you’ve set your company up, what skills from your Stonehill experience have you have you kind of relied upon? 
5:24 - Deirdre Bird: Yeah, so a lot of the discipline I learned at Stonehill has come very much in handy. I wasn’t a business major, but I was able to pull a lot of the skills that I developed in order to be a good student at Stonehill and put it towards being an efficient business owner. So, a lot of those softer skills. Also, I was a communication minor, so I did an International Communications class that I feel like really helped as they built out a global supply chain. So, there are parts of the Stonehill story that I ended up really bringing into this brand as a business owner. And it was also very helpful, Eric is a graphic designer, communications major, and he has created the packaging and the logo and the labels and helped build out the product design. So, he has really pulled on those skills too. And I’ve taken the softer skills that I learned while at Stonehill. 
6:14 - Liam Dacko: That’s great. And obviously any sort of business venture like this, there’s going to be challenges that you’re going to face. What were the challenges that you faced with this particular venture and how did you sort of tackle them?
6:27 - Deirdre Bird: One of the biggest challenges was that Dri was born during COVID. So, I came up with this idea and then the whole world kind of shut down on me and on everybody, of course. So, it made it very difficult in order to figure out, one, how I was going to get this plastic, two, talking to umbrella manufacturers, talking to manufacturers in general for the first time ever, trying to figure out how to build this supply chain when I had no experience in doing so. So just that in itself and the learning curve overall without a business background definitely made this a very challenging endeavor. In the same sense, it’s made it a very rewarding endeavor, but it has, in terms of communication and knowing which steps to take next, all of that has really been the overarching challenge, but I would say to any aspiring business owners that you do just learn it out of necessity and then, you know, from there. So, you learn as you go, even if you don’t have a background in what you’re going after. 
7:27 - Liam Dacko: You mentioned communicating with manufacturers and dealing with supply chain issues. Can you walk me through what goes into making one of your umbrellas? Like, what is the actual process? 
7:38 - Deirdre Bird: So, our supply chain starts right now on the beaches of Thailand. We go to countries most impacted by plastic pollution, which unfortunately are predominantly small Southeast Asian countries, and that’s really not due to any of their behavior. It’s really due to the fact that U.S. and Canada and Germany and France, these first world countries, we ship all our trash overseas. So, we ship it, we spend billions of dollars shipping the trash to countries that don’t really have the waste management infrastructure to deal with it. So, they don’t have recycling picked up every other Tuesday or trash picked up on Fridays. It ends up littering their environment in poorly managed waste factories or landfills, and then ultimately it leaks into the ocean. A lot of times it ends up in waterways and streams and rivers, which takes it out to the deep ocean where it starts impacting the marine life. And unfortunately, those countries are full of people that rely on fish as their primary source of protein. So not cattle, not chickens, fish. And so, this plastic is going into the ocean, and the fish are eating it. And then a lot of the humans in those countries are eating the fish. So, it’s a really big problem. So, we start on the beaches of Thailand and we pay local workers.
8:56 - Deirdre Bird: So predominantly women who have lower levels of education, might not have as many other financial opportunities, to gather that plastic. They bring it to recycling centers where it’s shaved from the current state plastic and they make it into flakes. It’s like plastic flakes. It kind of looks like confetti. And from there it’s taken to a fabric mill where the plastic flakes are turned into polyester yarn, then sheets of polyester fabric. Then, the umbrella factory hand cuts that fabric and hand sews the fabric onto an umbrella frame. And then it’s sent to my garage in Pittsfield, current state, but eventually to warehouses.
9:34 - Liam Dacko: Well, it sounds like a very involved process, but there’s obviously a ton of benefits to undertaking all these efforts to recycle the materials you’re using. What’s been the response from your customers since your umbrellas first went on sale? 
9:50 - Deirdre Bird: So, everyone has really loved them. At least the feedback that I’ve gotten thus far has been very positive, which is great. I really focused initially on the ocean plastic component of it. And then really prior, as I was building out the manufacturing process, I decided I really wanted to make them very high quality. So, as I learned about climate change, as I learned about sustainable products, I’ve really come to find that no product is really sustainable if you have to throw it away after one or two uses and it ends up in a landfill. So, I really switched gears and made sure that I was also focusing on the quality of the product. So, it has a stainless steel pole instead of aluminum or fiberglass. It has a bamboo handle instead of a plastic handle. I think that, almost even more so than the mission and the ocean plastic, has been what I’ve gotten great feedback on is just the quality of the product. It doesn’t snap, can really withstand really difficult weather. So, the positive feedback has been, you know, the mission’s great and nice to have, but the quality is really what makes it a worthwhile purchase.
10:55 - Liam Dacko: Well, I think people here at Stonehill have also remarked about the quality. Dri actually created a Stonehill umbrella and these specific umbrellas are now used on all our prospective student tours when it’s raining. How did the Stonehill umbrella come to be? 
11:14 - Deirdre Bird: I owe all of that to Nick Chiocco. He has been an amazing advocate at Stonehill for me. So, I reached out to the office. I always had this idea since Dry’s inception that it made sense to get them into Stonehill because when you go on college tours, it’s kind of the worst as an incoming student if it’s raining. Like it’s really hard to get engaged and enjoy a college tour if it’s raining out. So, I always had this idea that if we could get the umbrellas into Stonehill, then tour guides, which I was when I was at Stonehill, I was a student ambassador, would at least have the story to tell. And they could use it from the angle of “We support alumni, we support the environment, we care about sustainability.”
11:58 - Deirdre Bird: There’s all these different angles that they could utilize this product to show parents, to show incoming students that this is going to be a different type of rainy day tour because you have this product, we have the story for you,  and a much better jumping off point than just, you know, I hope you don’t run to your car mid-tour because it’s pouring rain outside. So, I talked to Nick a lot about that and he was just such a good advocate, really pushed it over the line for me so we could have them even as alumni gifts and donor gifts. So, when there are football games and it’s also raining or if people really like them on the tours and their kid decides to go to Stonehill, they have that as a swag option. I saw a lot of different ways that they could use them. Nick saw that vision too and really went to bat for me in terms of getting them in. And then it sounds like the reception has been really great since then.
12:50 - Liam Dacko: And what does it mean to you to see that you’re continuing to make an impact on this campus through a product you created, you know, even 12 years after you graduated? 
13:01 - Deirdre Bird: Wow, it has been quite a while since I graduated. That’s a jarring number. It means a lot because Stonehill gave me a lot. I felt like I was very prepared for the world I was going into. Studying abroad was an incredible experience. Obviously meeting my husband, having such a good base to start from going into the real world was invaluable. So, it feels good to be able to give back to Stonehill in that sense of I can give a little bit towards what they’ve given me. 
13:33 - Liam Dacko: And what advice do you have for members of the Stonehill community who might have an idea for a product or an invention but might not know how to get their idea off the ground?
13:43 - Deirdre Bird: Well, we definitely are fortunate to live in a generation where we have Google and we have AI. I honestly don’t know how entrepreneurs built businesses without having those types of resources. I’m sure it was a lot of library time. So having those resources is invaluable. There’s a lot you can learn just by doing that. But I really think even with no background in business or conservation or the topic that you’re pursuing, as long as you’re consistently doing something every day to get you closer to the goal of launching that—whether it’s an app or some platform or a service-based business or like myself, a product—as long as you keep taking action every day towards it, eventually you’re going to shake some things loose and you’ll be able to launch something yourself. So just about consistency. 
14:30 - Liam Dacko: Great. Really well said. Really great food for thought. Now, Deirdre, I want to pose a question that I like to pose to all my guests. We often share with students and prospective students that Stonehill is a place to find your purpose or calling. Reflecting on your life, your journey at Stonehill, your journey in your career, what would you say your life’s calling has been? 
14:52 - Deirdre Bird: I think one part of Stonehill that I really took advantage of that I loved was the Into the Streets program and the HOPE trips. The only year I didn’t do a HOPE trip was when I was studying abroad. I just loved the atmosphere of those trips. I loved the relationships I developed. I loved the work that I did. So, I think I have always felt really drawn to social impact. I think Stonehill brought that to the next level by all the opportunities that were created for me—volunteering at nursing homes or Big Brother, Big Sister, like all of these different opportunities that they provide students. That really drove home for me that I knew my profession would ultimately be in something philanthropic or rooted in social impact. I don’t know if I would have had that level of confidence without the opportunities that Stonehill gave me to pursue that. So, I would absolutely say that the Into the Streets program, the HOPE program, those are the types of things that really made me feel confident that I knew what I wanted to do in the next stage of my life. 
15:51 - Liam Dacko: Well, I look forward to seeing how you continue to have a positive impact on the world. You’re doing great work through this company, and I’m excited to see how it continues to grow. 
16:02 - Deirdre Bird: Thank you. Me too.
Credits
16:06 - Liam Dacko: Thank you for listening to Stonehill Stories. This podcast is produced by Liam Dacko of Stonehill College’s Office of Communications & Media Relations. Intro theme composed by Associate Professor of Music James Bohn. Outro theme composed by Philip Pereira. Graphic design assistance provided by Colin Spencer. Recorded in the MacPhaidin Library’s Podcast Studio. To discover more about Stonehill College, visit our website at stonehill.edu.