Lieke van Kerkhoven is a pioneer of the Circular Economy. The Dutchwoman has developed a B2B platform on which companies can exchange unused goods and equipment with each other.
"It was illegal when we started," Lieke van Kerkhoven recently revealed to the BBC News channel, in an interview about her business model. The Dutchwoman has developed a B2B platform via which companies can exchange unused goods and equipment. Her first customers were pharmacists, who sold medicines to each other shortly before the products' expiry date. Although this was against European law, the Dutch health inspectorate allowed it anyway, because it seemed better than throwing the medicines away. It is estimated that medicines worth around 100 million euros are destroyed in the Netherlands every year.
Meanwhile, van Kerkhoven offers marketplaces for the construction industry, the agricultural sector, the care sector and for wind farms on her platform Floow2. Excavators, building materials, forklift trucks, company cars, conference rooms, MRI scanners, canteens or printers thus enter the circular economy and can be shared in a cost- and resource-saving way.
But companies also use van Kerkhoven's solution internally to share materials and goods effectively. For example, branches of the fashion retailer Cos exchange their shop items like furniture via their own Floow2 platform.
And this is how Floow2 works:
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