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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Yellowknife moving company Best Movers is encouraging Yellowknifers to ditch the cardboard moving boxes and laborious sealing tape, in favour of its new line of reusable boxes for home and office moves.

Cynthia Moyo, right, owner of Best Movers, holds up a 'Best Box' -- the moving company's new, reusable boxes for home and office moves, as her daughters Rudy, 1, and Ashley, 3, climb into a box on Sunday. - Thandiwe Vela/NNSL photo

The plastic green tubs, dubbed 'Best Boxes' by the moving company, are so far, proving to be a promising business move, owner Cynthia Moyo told Yellowknifer, with clients eager to dump the cumbersome cardboard, for their environmentally-friendly option.

"You don't have to waste time taping the boxes and cutting up tape," Moyo said. "So it's way faster, and we're saving the environment."

Tim Doyle, executive director of the Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce, called the introduction of the Best Box, "business innovation at its finest."

"When you think about somebody who's moving -- personally I've done it many times myself -- just moving the boxes around time to time causes damage to them and it weakens them," Doyle said. "And by the time you've applied three rolls of tape to a box to try to keep the contents safe and intact, what ends up happening is you have to take a knife, or pair of scissors, and aggressively cut the box open to get the contents out when you get to the other end.

"So if they've got a new plastic-type box that's durable, can be re-used over and over, it has benefits all around -- both from the environmental side, that you're not filling the landfill with cardboard boxes, and from the other side, that the company is innovating and reducing waste, and finding a new way to help increase profits," Doyle said. "Because that's a hard thing to do these days."

Moyo said clients often had difficulty finding boxes to move their belongings -- scouring the liquor and grocery stores to find boxes, and sometimes having to fork over as much as $6.50 per box to purchase up to 100 boxes per move.

"Then after they're done, they have to hire a truck and pay a hundred bucks to take those boxes to the dump," Moyo said. "With our boxes, we deliver to your doorstep, you use them, you have a two-week rental, then after two weeks we pick them up. So you have the one week to pack, the one week to unpack, and it's pretty much no hassle."

Best Movers got the idea from reusable box delivery company FrogBox, which gained popularity after two appearances on business reality television show Dragons' Den. FrogBox was created "to fill a need for a convenient, cost-effective and environmentally-friendly alternative to using cardboard boxes for moving," according to the company's website.

Best Movers is not a FrogBox franchisee, but ordered their own line of boxes from an international supplier.

The company ordered 500 best boxes, received the shipment in Yellowknife last week, and in the first day, had rented out 100.

All 500 have been rented out for the last week in May, by a contracting company working on a major government move.

Rami Kassem, who hired Best Movers to move his family from Lanky Court to their new Range Lake area home last weekend, rented 25 boxes to facilitate the move.

"First of all, they're good for the environment," Kassem said. "Second, they're good for fragile stuff, easy to carry, and save time."

Moyo said the boxes are so durable, the company is looking at having them "forever."

"We're planning on reusing them and renting them out, at least for a long time," she said. "These are really strong tubs."

Best Movers is also providing other moving supplies to clients, Moyo said, including wrapping paper, and bubble wrap, so they "don't have to run around town before the move hunting for supplies and figuring out what they need," she said. "We're trying to make ourselves the one-stop shop for all moving needs."

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