Interviews
« Previous EntriesInterview with Jeffrey Swartz, CEO of The Timberland Company
April 16th, 2009 by Amie Vaccaro
Can a Business Do Well By Doing Good?
If you’ve ever contemplated this question, then we’d like to introduce you to the musings and insights of Jeffrey Swartz, CEO of Timberland. Under Jeff’s guidance, Timberland has grown from a $156 million company in 1989 to a $1.4 billion company in 2007.
In this interview, Jeff shares candid thoughts, successes and challenges of infusing a business with values - the values stemming from three generations of family leadership at Timberland. You’ll be inspired to re-think what impact it’s possible to achieve through your business.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Jeff Swartz expounds on “selling values” (Timberland) versus “selling sex” (other clothing retailers)
- Timberland’s Facebook campaign which mobilized thousands to action
- How Timberland creates positive impact in the communities and countries where its products are produced
- Is Timberland is more like Bono or Al Gore in creating messages for consumers?
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators and my guest today is Jeffrey Swartz, CEO of Timberland.
Jeff has been with Timberland now for over 20 years and has served as President and CEO since 1998. Under Jeff’s guidance Timberland has grown from a $156 million company in 1989 to a $1.4 billion company in 2007. It is an honor to have you here with us today Jeff.
JEFFREY SWARTZ: Thank you; it’s a pleasure to be with you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So my first question, I notice Timberland is a great pioneer in doing well by doing good in the business world.
So for example, your employees serve a tremendous amount of public service hours, 40 hours a year, with your Path of Service program and your Servapalooza program. You are committed to going carbon neutral by 2010, you display nutrition information on your shoe boxes, which includes information about the manufacturing plant and your impact on the climate and your community impact. And you are starting a green index for all of your products, just to name a few initiatives.
I’m curious, what is the business strategy behind all of these initiatives? Are they good for business?
JEFFREY SWARTZ: Amie, at the heart of strategy, at least in a company like ours, which is a consumer-facing company with a brand premise that is the locus of all value, right? The locus of value in our company is the brand. It is not on the balance sheet, but it is the basis of relationships with consumers in 85 countries around the world. And so either folks believe in that brand and value it, or our efforts are not going to be rewarded. And so for our consumer-facing company with a brand as its premise, I think that strategy has to be a reflection of deeply felt values and beliefs wrapped up in sustainable emotions.
I am not sure about making the physics equation, but I am just telling you the notion of commerce and justice is not a business strategy that is designed from “here is a problem we have to solve.” It is not that we need a new advertising posture to think about how to do business with millennials. Or how do we make people think that this soap is more attractive because in the moment breast cancers are very topical notion, so how do we link those notions? I am not disparaging those strategies. I am simply telling you that for an enterprise like ours, it is a third generation of the family to be involved in it. It has been from the beginning built out from. This is what we believe. It has been built out from the beginning, for this is what we are passionate about.
Interview with Xavier Helgesen, Co-Founder of Better World Books
February 2nd, 2009 by Amie Vaccaro
Buying Books with Heart and Soul
Next time you’re buying a book online – you may be able to help people around the world learn to read.
Better World Books is an online bookstore that supports nonprofit organizations with literacy programs such as Room To Read and Books For Africa ($3.1 million contributed so far) by donating a percentage of its revenues. In the process, Better World Books has saved 8,170 tons of books (millions of books) from landfills.
Co-Founder Xavier Helgesen explains how a business started by college students has thrived in the online marketplace ($21 million in revenue in 2007) while staying true to its triple bottom line mission of creating positive social and environmental impact in addition to financial value.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why Better World Books targets the mainstream audience, not just the “green” consumer
- How to decide whether your mission-led venture should be a for-profit or nonprofit
- An innovative strategy for offering books on numerous e-commerce web sites at the same time
- How Better World Books overcomes the challenges of a rapidly growing business
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators. My guest today is Xavier Helgesen, co-founder of Better World Books. Glad you could be here, welcome.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Great to be here, Amie.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I was looking through some of your marketing materials, and I see that you describe your business as a self-sustaining, triple bottom line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for its stakeholders. And as far as I am concerned that is kind of the ultimate company, and I would love to hear you kind of explain that and explain your business model in that context.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Well, we are a stakeholder driven company; we are part of B-corporation actually, which is the network of about a 130 companies where management is obliged, not just to the shareholders to maximize profit but to the stakeholders to create social, environmental and economic value. So we focus on our triple bottom lines.
Our social mission, in particular, is to channel the book buying power of all of us out there. People will buy about $20 billion worth of books in the US alone this year. And if we can channel just part of that money to funding literacy programs, we can make a huge dent in the fact that 1 out of 7 people in the world cannot read, 1 out of 7 adults, and not to mention the next generation coming up.
Interview with Ken Kurtzig, Founder and CEO of iReuse
December 27th, 2008 by Judy Lawrence
Imagine you work for a large company and it’s your job to dispose of unwanted equipment or materials - often tons of it. And you want to dispose of the materials in a environmentally friendly way, while saving money and possibly helping a nonprofit organization get needed materials? This is not an easy task. Fortunately, there’s iReuse to the rescue.
In this interview, iReuse founder and CEO Ken Kurtzig reveals how a insightful discovery at a taco stand led to the creation of a thriving business that helps companies reduce their environmental impact, through its sustainbility consulting and waste removal services.
In just over 3 years of operations, iReuse has won numerous awards for its environmental leadership.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- iReuse helped Birkenstock save $170,000 and get positive publicity by donating unwanted shoe material to help horses instead of throwing them away
- How the iReuse “matchmaking system” connects company’s surplus materials to wishlists for non-profits
- How companies can actually save money while diverting waste from landfills
- The success of iReuse’s innovative reuse program created the opportunity to provide additional “green” consulting services to companies
- How transparency and documentation gives iReuse an edge in backing up its environmental claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello, this is Judy Lawrence from Green Business Innovators.com, and I’m very pleased today to be speaking with Ken Kurtzig, the founder and CEO of iReuse based in Sausalito, California, and the website is www.iReuse.com.
iReuse is a leading sustainability consulting firm in the field of corporate reuse and waste reduction providing comprehensive services to help companies go green and save green. iReuse provides services for businesses, individuals and non-profits. This innovative 3 year old consulting firm works with many leading bay area companies like Charles Schwab, Autodesk, Adobe Systems, PG&E, Birkenstock and many others to help manage the internal redistribution, sales, donations, recycling and disposal of their surplus materials thus saving these companies time, money and energy, while at the same time they’re helping the community and the environment.
In a way, iReuse is like a matchmaker between corporations wanting to get rid of surplus goods in a socially conscious way and the non-profits needing to acquire material supplies in a fiscally reasonable way. In fact I understand, in 2007 alone, iReuse redirected over 230 tons of materials from the landfill and much of that went to over 200 non-profits such as The American Cancer Society, Mission YMCA, Trip for Kids and numerous other great non-profits throughout the Bay Area.
So Ken welcome and please feel free to highlight more of your variety of services and recent accomplishments and awards. I know you’ve certainly received awards. So thank you.
KEN KURTZIG: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here and it’s been a fun 4 years, a little over 4 years developing our program and starting to work with some of these large corporations and helping them do the right thing and in many cases saving not only money but also the environment.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how about — well, let me just backup a little bit with how you got started. I kind of love hearing as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.” Tell me more about what inspired you to start the company, when and where your passion for reducing, reusing and recycling was ignited. Was there something even in your childhood experience that related to this passion?
Interview with Elizabeth Royte, Author of Garbage Land and Bottlemania
December 16th, 2008 by Patrick DominguezIn this interview, Elizabeth Royte (a freelance writer reporting on science and the environment) shares highlights from two of her books I really enjoyed - Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. I highly recommend these books to people who enjoy books such as “Fast Food Nation” or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that combine nuanced and thoughtful investigation into our lifestyles with wonderful storytelling.
Elizabeth Royte’s books show that great storytelling can engage people in wanting to know more about industries that you might not think are interesting - like garbage and bottled water, which are fascinating, by the way.
Everyone enjoys a great story. Are you using great storytelling in your business?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The adventures of tracking the truth about our trash - sneaking over fences & paddling away from police
- The “business model” of being an environmental journalist and writer
- How tansparent business practices often lead to healthier business practices for people and planet
- The social, environmental, and political implications of the bottled water that you buy
- The real issue with landfills, and where most waste actually comes from
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Patrick from Green Business Innovators, and today I’m going to be talking with Elizabeth Royte about two terrific books that she’s written. One is about the business of bottled water and the other is about the business about garbage.
One thing I liked about the books is that they use what I would call investigative storytelling. Because they combine deep investigation into the environmental impacts of business and consumer behavior. And they also have captivating personal stories. I’ve seen great reviews of these books in the media, on sites such as the New York Times website, the LA Times, Salon, Treehugger and so forth. Fortunately the news media are giving attention to these books so that more people can get exposed to that fascinating information that these books have. I found both books to be inspirational and really a tremendous personal call to action in terms of my own life. Welcome Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Elizabeth, what was your motive for writing these kinds of books? There’s a lot of things you could be writing about. Why these topics?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: I think I write about the environment because I care deeply about the environment, and I’m interested in all kinds of science topics, learning about how the world works and I used to write a lot about conservation and people doing work with animals and plants and things.
Actually, my first book was about rain forest scientists, but my interests have sort of shifted with the garbage book to the human part of the equation and what people are doing to the environment. And the garbage book followed where garbage went, all kinds of all different types of garbage, after they left us. And research on that book led into the bottled water book because I started to see all these plastic bottles lying around and I saw them as disposable single use packaging and I wondered how we had gotten to this point. I’m now in this niche of writing about what we as consumers are doing to the world around us.
Interview with John and Katy Weiss of Chickity Doo Doo
November 24th, 2008 by Judy Lawrence
Chickity Doo Doo first caught our interest due to its attention-grabbing brand name. But behind the name is a company that has transformed something you might think most people wouldn’t want (chicken doo doo) into a mass market product - an organic fertilizer made from 100% chicken manure, that’s being used as a replacement for synthetic chemical fertilizers in farms and sold in retail stores.
In this interview, John and Katy Weiss reveal the inner workings of their business and share the story of where the product idea came from. Who knew doo doo could be so interesting?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- How a waste material was turned into a useful product
- Creating a branding strategy for products sold at big box stores vs independent retailers
- Why higher oil prices means better business for Chickity Doo Doo
- How education plays a key role in Chickity Doo Doo’s marketing efforts
- How Chickity Doo Doo attains certifications in order to back up its product claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Judy Lawrence from www.GreenBusinessInnovators.com, and I am here speaking with John Weiss and Katy Weiss from Chickity Doo Doo, located near Madison, Wisconsin.
Chickity Doo Doo is an organic fertilizer made from well, chicken doo doo, 100% organic chicken manure. I actually heard about your unique company while I was back in Wisconsin visiting some family and friends, and Katy, your mother-in-law told me about this young start-up company, and I was intrigued by the idea that the novelty of it, the practicality and the recycling aspect of this business. As you begin, I’d love you both to share the story of how Chickity Doo Doo was conceived, your backgrounds. I believe you grew up on a chicken farm, which seems like a natural fit, and then how the company is succeeding in growing. Welcome John and Katy.
JOHN WEISS: Well, thanks very much for having us. I can kind of give you a start, and Katy can jump in too with her thoughts on where we got to this point. My father specifically has been in the poultry industry for about 40 years. His name is Ray. And he and my mom owned a chicken farm together. We technically didn’t live on that farm, it was actually away from where we grew up, but we knew about the farm growing up and the farm they purchased back in 1975. My father and I, in 1999, decided to form a partnership and buy my mom out in order to refinance and do some other things on the farm, and that’s when I got involved. My background is actually in teaching and coaching basketball, and I decided in 1999 that this might be a little nice side investment, and it’s actually been running my life ever since then, thankfully happily.
Interview with James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo
November 8th, 2008 by Janis Mara
Here’s a company that can provide you even more motivation to recycle - the bottles you toss into your recycling bins may end up as the centerpiece of your kitchen! Vetrazzo collects discarded glass from recycled bottles and decommissioned traffic lights and and transforms it into beautiful, eco-friendly surfaces such as countertops and tabletops.
James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo, reveals the details of their products’ sustainable design (85% of the product is from recycled glass) - and how their unique combination of sustainable design and aesthetic design is giving their products an edge in the marketplace.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Drive your marketing efforts by featuring unique sustainable design to stand out from the crowd of look-alike products
- The flip side - the challenges of being amongst the first companies with a unique product feature
- Vetrazzo’s strategies for growing the company’s sales and reach
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TRANSCRIPT
JANIS MARA, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Janis Mara from Green Business Innovators. I’m speaking with James Sheppard, Chief Executive of Vetrazzo, a 3 year-old business that makes countertops with glass, salvaged from sources including traffic lights, curbside recycling containers and the manufacturing plant of Sky Vodka. The 35-employee company is part of a cluster of green businesses in a former Ford assembly plant located just off the freeway in Richmond, California.
Tell me James, how did you get the idea to recycle glass and into countertops?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well Janis, I’d like to take credit for thinking of the idea, but Vetrazzo has actually been on the market since 1996, as the original recycled glass surface. I got the idea to purchase the business and relaunch it on a national level a few years ago, when my business partner showed me her gorgeous Vetrazzo countertops that she’d had since 1999, and I knew the time was right to take this product to the national stage.
Interview with Dan Gill, CEO and Co-Founder of Huddler
October 30th, 2008 by Amie Vaccaro“Giving passionate, knowledgeable people a platform and a voice”
Combine people, products, and passion… mix in user-generated content, product reviews and discussions… and you have an ambitious web site called Huddler, that aims to create a “social commerce” community.
In this interview, “chief Huddler” Dan Gill shares with us how he started the business and his vision for the growth of their Green Home Huddle, which focuses on products and content connected to sustainability. Hear the inside business scoop on lessons they’ve learned along the way, how their business is funded, and how they engage their community.
- Huddler’s unique efforts to build communities to provide a more informed and social shopping experience
- How Huddler develops partnerships to get new green products in consumers’ hands and boost site activity
- How Huddler monetizes traffic to its site
- Lesson learned: The “release early, release often” approach allows users to guide web site development
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie with Green Business Innovators and I am here with Dan Gill, CEO of Huddler.com. Do you want to introduce yourself quickly?
DAN GILL: Hi everyone out there in the green blogosphere world. This is Dan Gill. I’m the co-founder and CEO of a site called Huddler.com. I guess most specifically we’ll be talking about our site, GreenHome.Huddler.com, which you can find a link to directly from Huddler.com and we’ll talk all about it and tell you a little bit about what we’re up to.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Great. So do you want to tell us a little bit about Huddler.com and what you do here?
DAN GILL: Sure, sure. Huddler was actually, the concept that my brother… My oldest brother and I founded Huddler together. And the impetus for Huddler comes from “old school” discussion forums. Some people are really familiar with them, some people are not, but they’re pretty well unchanged from the mid-90s. So if you’ve ever seen the discussion forum at some point where someone can post a question and anyone can come back and respond and a conversation begins in a threaded fashion. There are some wildly popular sites out there that are great resources for people. And they’re always very topical.
The sites that we used the most, they are sites focused on cell phones and mobile technology, and they are sites focused on home theater equipment and really, really deep diving into those topics because they are specific to a given interest. The really knowledgeable, passionate people, they gravitate towards those sites. But from a technology perspective they’re very, very broken from a content creation perspective and from a content distribution perspective. So the original impetus for Huddler was, we wanted to build a platform that really empowers those knowledgeable, passionate people who have all this knowledge and they want to share and they want to interact with other like-minded people, but provide a much better interface, so that we can distribute that content and make it broadly available. Because if you have ever seen a discussion forum before, my mom couldn’t use it if her life depended on it, and that’s not to say there’s not information that would be really valuable to her in there, but the interface is just really hard to use.
Interview with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc.
October 24th, 2008 by Amie Vaccaro
If you’re ever shopping for a new article of clothing at Gap, Banana Republic or Old Navy (all brands owned by parent company Gap Inc.), on the way to the cash register you may be wondering in the back of your mind how much progress the company is making toward reducing the environmental impact of the clothing you just purchased.
With the sheer size of Gap Inc., moving toward sustainability is a huge task, but even small changes can make a large impact. Banana Republic started communicating about its sustainability efforts last spring with the tagline “Greener. One step at a time.” In this interview, Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc., shares her insights into Gap Inc.’s next steps in their journey toward sustainability.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Kindley’s personal path to becoming a sustainability leader inside a large corporation
- How Gap Inc.’s environmental initiatives layers on and connects with its social responsibility practices
- An overview of Gap Inc.’s ECO-strategy
- Insights on how to best communicate environmental initiatives to customers
- One reason why marketing Gap Inc.’s “green initiatives” to customers is difficult - most of Gap Inc.’s sustainability practices are behind the scenes and not glamorous
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I am here today with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc. Kindley, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Sure, Hi good morning. I’m Kindley and I work in Gap Inc. Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs. I’ve been with the company about 11 years, but in this space only for about 18 months. I had the opportunity to work at two of our brands, Banana Republic and Gap for the first 9 years at the company, which gave me a great education on what the brands were up against and what kinds of challenges they face day-to-day especially as we dig deeper with the brands on operational, sustainability, opportunities to redesign product, etc. So it’s been a great thing to bring into this role.
Interview with Jared Blumenfeld, Director, San Francisco Department of the Environment
October 17th, 2008 by Amie Vaccaro
“Mobilizing San Francisco to be a More Sustainable City”
80% of the world’s CO2 comes from cities. So strong action by cities is required to reduce the carbon emissions that they produce.
In this interview, Jaren Blumenfeld, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, explains some of the innovative legislation and actions that San Francisco is initiating as one of the world’s greenest cities.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why the biggest sustainability challenge is sustaining people’s attention
- How the SF Department of the Environment is encouraging more sustainable business
- San Francisco’s cutting edge “Eco Map” project
- How San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom contributes to the green agenda
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amy Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators. I am speaking today with Jared Blumenfeld, who is the Director for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Hi Jared.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Hi.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So my first question today, I’m interested about your background, how you got here, and kind of the snippets of bios I could find about you…Talk about your work in animal welfare campaigns and then moving into this job. It seems like a huge transition. I’m curious how it came about.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, I started doing international environmental law and I went to law school and it was the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. So we, with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, did this big report on the connection between human rights and the environment. If your rain forest is chopped down do you have a legal right against the company who did it, because your livelihood depended on those trees? So that was kind of how I started. Then I worked for Cambridge University doing international environmental law. Then I went to work for NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Council and we did all these campaigns and reports on what countries had done to follow-up on the Rio Earth Summit.
Interview with John Borg, Founder of Eco Imprints
October 7th, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
“Green Your Swag”
As a veteran of many trade shows and conferences, it is appalling to me to see to the huge amount of swag and cheap freebies given away at events that seem destined to be thrown away almost immediately. So it is great to find a company carving out a new approach to more environmentally friendly product promotions in the $18 billion promotional product industry.
Eco Imprints is a San Francisco-based company that sells eco-friendly promotional products (i.e. products you can put your logo on) for you to use at trade shows and as gifts for clients. In this interview, Eco Imprints founder John Borg shares insights about how “eco-friendly swag” is different, and the compelling story of how following his personal values led him to start this business.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- “A landfill is not really where you want to see your logo, that’s for sure!”
- What are the in-demand eco-products for trade shows and corporate gifts
- How to rethink the environmental impact of an $18 billion industry
- Marrying passion and skill sets: the business owner’s Holy Grail
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators, and today we’re interviewing John Borg, who is the founder of Eco Imprints. Welcome, John.
JOHN BORG: Thank you for having me.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay, so let’s start off by, John, why don’t you tell us what Eco Imprints does?
JOHN BORG: Eco Imprints is a corporate merchandising firm, and we try to bring a fresh approach to the promotional products industry, which is an $18 billion industry. In an industry of 20,000 distributors, we’re among the first to focus on more responsible ways of doing business.