By Jacob Dubé
Ryerson’s Fashion Zone has developed a solution for the university’s two-ply problem in response to The Eyeopener’s investigation last week.
Members of the Fashion Zone collaborated with Arvind Karir, co-founder of wearable tech company RunFree. Karir said Ryerson chair of the school of fashion Robert Ott asked them to come up with a solution to the school’s two-tiered toilet paper last Wednesday.
“He said, ‘can you solve this issue, and how can you do that?’” Karir said.
In only three days, they developed the idea for Uberwipes. Though only at its prototype stage, Uberwipes is a machine that will take Ryerson’s one-ply paper and graft it together with stitches to make multiple-ply paper.
But on account of the short notice of the venture, 5th year Ryerson fashion design student and Fashion Zone managing director Olga Okhrimenko had to stitch the paper together herself.
“We realized it’s an issue,” Okhrimenko said.
On Tuesday, Okhrimenko and Karir were in front of the Student Learning Centre giving samples of their grafted toilet paper to students and getting feedback on their idea.
“We are trying to find out the market need, and see if it’s a big enough problem that people would be interested in buying. If it is such a thing then we might think of making it a business because we don’t know yet,” said Karir. He said they are also looking into making the packages scented.
Karir said they haven’t decided on how students would get the paper, but options include a cash payment, sending a tweet or watching a video.
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