An impressive 14% of all waste that goes to the landfill in New Zealand is timber and a large portion of this timber is recyclable or reusable. While our ultimate goal is to reduce waste and educate people on making sustainable choices that are good for our environment, we realised that this probably isn’t something young New Zealanders are interested in engaging with. So we decided to kill two birds with one stone and tackle another issue that is plaguing modern New Zealanders; actually getting out there and making physical connections in an increasingly virtual society. When was the last time you made something with your friends? While some of us may have moved past our making lego in our parent’s lounge phase, we still all want to make cool things with cool people. So we went out and validated. No one was particularly interested in buying pallets. Not a great number of people were interested in buying futures made of pallets. But they thought pallet futures looked pretty cool. So we asked, If we are to provide you with tools, materials, space and skills to make these futures would you be interested? And the answer was ‘YES.’ So as Social Lab, we created Ales and Nails. Ales and Nails was a social workshop that combined two of life’s ultimate luxuries; good old-fashioned DIY and quality craft beer. From this event, we allowed people to come build furniture with a help of our friendly staff and after the production stage, we provided everyone with great craft beer. We provided tools, materials and space for them to get creative and for only $15 per ticket, they walked away with some great memories and a piece of usable sustainable furniture. Carrina Bowe and I teamed up and took this idea to Startup Weekend and built this project up. With this idea and help from the rest of the team that joined us, we started and ran Ales and Nails event. After university, I had to leave as I was given an opportunity to work at a design agency, so Carrina and Megan continued and ran this project all over New Zealand. It was not a profitable event but was very inspiring and was exciting to see this project grow.