Zicklin Students Build a Green Future from Upcycled Plastic Bricks

Zicklin School of Business students David Jimenez (BBA, ’25) and Shenjie Qiu (MBA, ’23) are two co-founders of Quiick Briick, a Bronx-based startup that transforms recycled plastic into 

environmentally friendly building materials. The company’s six co-founders are all CUNY students who met through programs and workshops at the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship.   

David Jimenez (BBA, ’25)

David, a marketing major who is Quiick Briick’s chief sales officer, met Jessica Brewington, a Lehman College student and the company’s CEO and mastermind, at a Field Center “PitchPREP” workshop.  

“When Jessica told me about her idea of making inexpensive building materials out of recycled plastic, I knew I wanted to get involved,” says David, who was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the U.S. as a child with his family. “I’d always wanted to do something related to business and

Shenjie Qiu (MBA, ’23)

the environment.”  

Shenjie, a Chinese native who has a PhD in polymer chemistry from the CUNY Graduate Center, is Quiick Briick’s chief engineer. “Thanks to the CUNY Startups program here, I was able to meet like-minded friends from other CUNY campuses who share a common goal of saving the Earth from plastic waste,” he says. “Quiick Briick has become like a loving family to me.”

Quiick Briick inventor Jessica Brewington holds a prototype

This summer, the startup is hard at work developing a prototype of its “brick” — a durable, fire-retardant block made of recycled plastic with grooves enabling it to interlock with other blocks for ease of assembly. And thanks to a collaboration with a private university in upstate New York, a dollhouse made of miniature Quiick Briicks is being built, to offer potential investors a model of how the product will look.  

Quiick Briick prototypes

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