After pausing on his other seasonal business of shipping fall leaves from New England to the less autumnally endowed states, entrepreneur Kyle Waring has been busy shipping boxes of snow across the country, just in time for the holidays.
So far, he has sold over 2,500 pounds—more than a metric ton—for this side business, succinctly named “Ship Snow, Yo.”
After the powerful nor’easter blizzard Juno ravaged Boston in 2015, Waring, who is 28 and works for a videogame company, realized there was enough snow to share. According to Waring, the first flakes, sent in water bottles were intended to be joke gifts, “something you’d send to your friend in Florida who can’t keep from bragging about the sunshine.”
Inundated by orders, Waring pivoted from water bottles and was sending real boxes of usable, non-joke snow two weeks later. The first successful shipment arrived in Florida that February.
250+ lbs of snow shipped today! It's a winter wonderland up here… You got ❄️????☃⛄️ pic.twitter.com/SAHOUzdLi0
— Ship Snow, Yo! ❄️ (@shipsnowyo) December 13, 2016
Waring and his wife and business partner Jessica do not use artificial techniques favored by ski mountains ravaged by climate change. Instead, they follow the sky. “We go on the hunt for the perfect snow in the mountains of Northern Vermont—Near Stowe, Warren and Colchester VT,” Waring, who lives in Boston, told Yahoo Finance.
Last year, however, in its third season, Ship Snow, Yo had to harvest snow from Colorado no thanks to climate change. “There wasn’t any snow in the northeast…for the whole season,” says Waring.
To make sure the snow does not arrive at the destination as water, after some testing, Waring ships the snow in a heavy two-inch thick styrofoam cooler and overnights the box via Fedex (FDX) where it can last for 36 hours in 72 degrees.
Being snow, it does still melt, so each box is filled with padding of a few extra pounds of snow to make up for the attrition. An overnight box keeps around 90% of its contents solid, and a two-day keeps around 70%.
Customers can choose from 10-plus pounds for $69, a 10-plus pound snowman for $79, 20-plus pounds (on sale!) for $119, or the 50-plus-pound “blizzard in a box.” Being Fedex, they do ship worldwide, though it costs more. A 20-pound box to China will run around $350.
So who buys this stuff?
“Most of the orders are gifts, from folks in the North looking to share a little piece of winter with their family and friends in the south,” says Waring. “Most of the shipments are going to Florida, California, Arizona, Texas and Hawaii. This year I’ve seen an uptick in corporate orders, which appear to be gifts for their business partners, vendors or colleagues that work in the south.”
Much of it needs to be sent just in time for Christmas, so for Waring it’s crunch time. Over the next two days, Waring has a whopping 1,300 pounds that need to go out the door.
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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