Old shit on new cans
What does your fertilizer say about you? If you’re like most people, probably not a whole lot. However, that may be about to change.
If you consider yourself as part of the spiring community of urban farmers, chances are you hide your fertilizer somewhere comfortably out of sight from your dinner guests. A sloppy 15 kg. bag of plant food just isn’t very feng shui. But, according to Federico Lodolini, an Italian brand strategist turned part-time manure pusher, the time has come for fertilizer to shine.
Federico came to speak at Likefriends’ bi-weekly OnStage event about his brain child ‘Real Shit’, and the adventures it has brought him and his co-founder on. Together the two have turned something as ordinary as fertilizer into not only a lifestyle product, but a sought-after pop art collectable.
Federico grew up in the countryside of Northern Italy and fondly reminisces about the childhood days he would spend taking care of his own miniature vegetable garden: “My friends played football, I grew vegetables”, he explains. He still does, but, as with increasingly more city dwellers around the world, in a spaced confined by city living, typically balconies or rooftops. However, with a keen eye for market trends, Federico realised there was something missing for him and his community of small scale gardeners.
“While the gardening market is growing along with this new generation of farmers — the urban ones — who seek out products that reflect their emotional and functional needs, the fertilizer category have remained largely unchanged, still focusing purely on tangible benefits”, Federico explains. This, he thought, was an opportunity waiting to be seized.
Shit got real
It dit not take much to convince his friend that this was an idea worth pursuing, and after some intensive months of research and development they were finally ready to smoke test their prototyped can of organic cow and chicken manure, neatly labelled ‘Real Shit — smell the difference’. Media was quick to sniff up the story, and so, the two entrepreneurs were convinced they were on to something.
Next step was figuring out how to get their product to the people. Not wanting to position it as just another fertilizer, regular garden shops did not seem like the right place to start. Instead, concept stores and urban food markets were approached, and in January 2015 shoppers at Italian food market giant Eataly could finally get their hands on some Real Shit (at the time, the only non-food product stocked at Eataly).
As the word spread around Italy and Amsterdam, where Federico is currently based, the founders were soon approached from an unexpected side; the art community. In collaboration with Italian artist Laurina Paperina, the first limited edition manure was released in cans of 500 to raise awareness of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a deal potentially threatening the wellbeing of livestock. Soon after, a window place at designer Ilaria Venturini Fendi’s concept store Refuse followed. Already baffled by the amount of free PR their cans of manure were receiving, nothing had prepared the founders for the kind of hype that followed when a certain Maurizio Cattelan reached out.
Out of nowhere, Federico spotted the enigmatic artist and founder of cult magazine Toilet Paper posing on Instagram with a can of his manure, accompanied with the text ‘send me some’. “I couldn’t believe it”, Federico recalls with a big smile on his face. “Here’s this great artist I’ve been following for years holding a can of our manure me and my friend created”. As no direct point of contact for the revered provocateur was provided, it took Federico hours of calls and online stalking to dig up an address, to which he sent a few cans, and waited.
A few weeks later, contact was established. As an art project on behalf of Toilet Paper magazine, Mr. Cattelan wanted to create a limited edition of 200 cans of Real Shit, send a few around to his closest friends within the art world, and sell the rest online. Naturally, Federico was on board.
The limited edition cans were put for sale online in December 2017. Within a few hours they were all gone. Hypebeast featured an article about it. An opportunistic buyer put a can for sale on eBay for € 1.200. What began as an idea to create organic fertilizer for a community of urban farmers had truly become a piece of pop culture. So where does Real Shit go from here?
“It’s been a lot of fun so far and we obviously really want to see how far we can take this”, Federico says. “We have a very unique product with great potential, but scaling is difficult. We’re slowly entering more and more stores, but we’re just two guys doing this as a side project, so investment is key”.
At a price of € 11,50, a 750g. can of Real Shit is a considerably pricier alternative to regular fertilizer. But then again, it’s produced according to the traditional Italian “manure heaps”, in which piles of manure are left for nine months and turned over exactly seven times to allow for perfect ripening, with no industrial involvement or chemicals allowed. Plus, not only won’t you have to hide it away from dinner guests, it may very well be the main point of conversation.
A big thanks to Federico for sharing his story. Get in touch with him here and visit www.real-shit.com for more.
