Archive for May, 2008
Interview with Alicia Lai, Founder of Bourgeois Boheme
May 31st, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
In this interview, founder Alicia Lai shares knowledge gained from managing Bourgeois Boheme, a compassionate fashion boutique that offers a range of ethical fashion accessories for both men and women.
The London UK-based company has an online store and a showroom in London, and every product offered is free from animal ingredients (suitable for vegans). Bourgeois Boheme has an ethical-business model that aims to educate consumers that their conscious choice of an ethical product does make a difference in how people, animals and the environment are treated in the commercial world.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Ethically-produced products can be price competitive and do not have to carry a price premium
- How Bourgeois Boheme sources ethically-produced products
- The satisfaction of living your values in your work
- Are ethically-product products as stylish as other products in the marketplace? Would Sarah Jessica Parker wear them?
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Dominguez, Green Business Innovators:
Hello, this is Patrick Dominguez with Green Business Innovators, and I am here with Alicia Lai, the co-founder of Bourgeois Boheme. Welcome Alicia.
Alicia Lai, Bourgeois Boheme:
Thank you, Patrick.
Patrick Dominguez: Tell us about Bourgeois Boheme.
Alicia Lai: Okay. Bourgeois Boheme is a mainly online-based business and we provide fashion accessories, fashion with compassion, which is basically cruelty-free fashion that has been produced in an ethical means, as well. We provide a sort of vegan and veggie products that cater to the demands of people that are looking for cruelty-free and environmentally-friendly products. The primary market I suppose is vegan and vegetarians, but we are also trying to target you know ethical and environmental people who are conscious about what they are wearing.
Patrick Dominguez: And what kind of products can people buy from your company?
Alicia Lai: Well, we can buy a vast array of basically footwear, bags, wallets, purses and cosmetics. Basically, sort of all the fashion accessory side of things, and they are all produced with non-animal-based products including glues, etc. And also in more sort of eco-friendly products such as microfibers and hemp and organic cottons and things like that.
Patrick Dominguez: How did you choose the products that you sell?
Alicia Lai: It was really hard, but we started sort of 3 years ago finding products that sort of meet our aims of cruelty-free, no animal products, ethically produced etc. So, we went and visited lots of trade fairs within Europe and in the UK, speaking to wholesalers and starting off with getting products through wholesalers. They would need to meet our criteria. So, we started off on that aspect and as we have sort of grown over the last 3 years we are sort of in a position now that we can start producing our own range, which is quite exciting.
Interview with Mark Pastore, Founder, Incanto Restaurant
May 25th, 2008 by Bill Baren
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- When starting a new business, is passion more important then experience?
- Innovation comes from being conscious about what you do and continually asking the question, “How can I do this better every day”
- “Sustainability is leaving the world better off before you touched it.
- How serving foods that aren’t popular can be the best marketing tool you’ve got… a sustainable business is not based on a marketing ploy, it’s simply a commitment to live your life and run your business sustaineably.
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
Bill Baren:
I’m Bill Baren of Green Business Innovators and I’m here at the back offices of Incanto Restaurant in San Francisco. Incanto is committed to delicious Italian food with sustainable practices. I’m joined by Mark Pastore, the founder and owner of Incanto. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for allowing us to enter your world.
Mark Pastore:
It’s nice to be with you, Bill. Thank you.
Mark Pastore: Sure. I grew up in an Italian-American family and had a life changing experience when I was 21 years old in Italy. I always loved cooking growing up, but when I went to Italy, it made me really think about eating. Europeans eat differently than Americans do. When I came back to the United States, I started a career that lasted about 13 years. But at the back of my mind, I was always interested in food and I would spend all of my spare time reading cookbooks and traveling on food-related vacations. Ultimately, the passion grew strong enough that in 2001, I left my old life and decided to start an Italian restaurant.
Bill Baren: So you’ve made your passion and your love your career these days?
Mark Pastore: Yes, which many people warned me about, but I can’t say that I have any regrets.
Bill Baren: Did you have any formal training or a methodology that you used when you first started?
Mark Pastore: No, I would like to tell people that I’m an untrained professional. I guess, I had started two businesses prior, neither of which had been in the food world. So I had a little bit of background about how to hire people and, hopefully, manage a business. But I was a complete novice to restaurants and to the food world. In fact, I’d never even worked in a restaurant until the day we opened our doors.
Bill Baren: So was that training in the line of fire?
Mark Pastore: It was, I was a deer in the headlights for the first few months, but I’ve been fortunate to be able to work with some exceptionally talented people in this field. I think, why train somebody who’s never been in the business if you can work with really smart people who have more experience than you and you’re going to end up learning.
Bill Baren: So how were you able to come upon these partnerships?
Did You Hit the Snooze-Button Today?
May 21st, 2008 by Bill Baren
In the last 50 years we have increasingly seen major changes in the social, political, economic, scientific and spiritual structures of our society. And in the last 10 years, more people then ever have been empowered to steer the direction of our planet and the people on it.
We are living in a critical time…
Our Ideas ** Our Innovations ** Our Actions
…are going to dictate the course for human kind in the next century and beyond. We can either thrive or perish. We are beginning to wake up to the power we each have to create, to be conscious and to change. Each of us has the power to innovate and push the evolution of human kind forward.
Our planet will be fine. It will adapt. Let’s hope we adapt right with it.
It will take shifts in consciousness and it will take tremendous innovation in order for us to come the next level of our existence.
Crisis is a great catalyst for change. It is vital that we admit that we have a challenge ahead of us and look at this challenge as an opportunity to evolve to create a world of unparalleled abundance for all the people of this planet.
Let’s change our businesses. Let’s change our thinking. Let’s change our planet. Let’s do all that with FEARLESS abandon!
The time is here. The time is NOW. We’re up to the challenge! Come along, join our conversation and INNOVATE.
Interview with Chris Berkner, Founder, One Earth Capital
May 17th, 2008 by Bill Baren
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Find out what the #1 thing “green VC’s” look for in the companies they invest
- How personality can get in the way of your company funding?
- What do Darwin and Edison have to do with your company getting money?
- “To get anything really difficult done usually takes at least five phone calls, most people stop at three.” Find out how this relates to success…
- “No technology is so great that bad management can’t screw it up.”
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
Bill Baren, Green Business Innovators: This is Bill Baren of Green Business Innovators and I am here with Chris Berkner, the Managing Director of One Earth Capital, a venture investment firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. One Earth invests in early stage companies involved in sustainable technologies. They specialize in agriculture, water and energy sectors. They look especially at technologies that are decentralized and mitigate the causes of global warming. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for being here. I’m excited to have you on our show.
Chris Berkner, One Earth Capital: Thanks, Bill.
Bill Baren: So tell me a little bit about how the company got started.
Chris Berkner:
Bill Baren: What made you decide to go into the green space to begin with?
Chris Berkner: I’ve a personal passion for nature and for the well-being of the planet and for the well-being
Interview with Ben Todd, Executive Director, Arcola Theatre
May 10th, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
The Arcola Theatre in London is making bold strides toward being the world’s first carbon neutral theater, through innovations such as energy efficient LED lighting systems - and the world’s first fuel cell powered performance. In addition, Arcola Energy is a pioneering new venture that will bring cutting-edge sustainability practices to other arts organizations. Ben Todd, Executive Director of Arcola Theatre, shares insights that could help any type of organization or business get started in being more sustainable.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The most important first step an organization should take for a successful sustainability project
- Why “artists and scientists are quite often very much the same” when working with them on sustainability projects
- Whether “going green” helps to sell more theater tickets
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Dominguez, Green Business Innovators: Hello, this is Patrick Dominguez here with Ben Todd, the executive director of Arcola Theatre. Welcome, Ben.
Ben Todd, Arcola Theatre: Thank you, Patrick.
Patrick Dominguez: Ben, tell us a little bit about the Arcola Theatre and the type of theater that you do here.
Ben Todd: Arcola Theatre, it is an off West End theater in East London. It started about 8 years ago in the classic tradition of the London fringe. No money, a lot of artistic vision. It was founded by artists, and its strength essentially was that of Mehmet Ergen, artistic director and Leyla Nazli who is now the executive producer, who essentially founded the theater on personal loans, on credit cards and incredible vision and an ability to really inspire people and bring people together to deliver the art that they wanted to deliver. Since then, over the past 8 years it has gone from strength to strength artistically. And increasingly as an organization is this maturity you have to develop in terms of stability, fund-raising and management systems. So particularly, I suppose over the last 3 or 4 years, I have done a lot of work on that with a view to creating an organization initially on which I could almost perch on the back of and do sustainability projects, which is my background. And I know over the last 2 years I realized that it is actually far better to actually directly integrate them - except that I never will finish trying to set up the theater and actually developing the two of them in parallel is far more sensible.
Patrick Dominguez: One thing that I will add to what Ben is saying is that this theater has gotten rave reviews. They consistently get fantastic reviews with the theater productions that they do here.
Ben Todd: Definitely true and actually crucial. If I was to go off and do sustainability projects in a theater that was not considered an artistic leader, it would be seen as almost fringe in the kind of disparaging sense.
Patrick Dominguez: Like a distraction.
Ben Todd: Yeah, or just people who cannot really function in the mainstream, going and playing on the fringe. There is this snobbery. There is this great passion for brilliant things coming from the fringe, but there is always that sense of, it is the people that cannot make it in the mainstream. So, the idea of running a place that has a fringe feel and anything is possible and anybody can do anything, but definitive international caliber work is pretty crucial.
Patrick Dominguez: Could you explain step-by-step the sustainability work that you have done for the theater, and try to frame it in a way that if other theater people were listening right now, what sort of model or formula would they be able to follow?
Ben Todd: The key, I think particularly across all sectors, but particularly in the arts sector is to lead with vision.