Interviews
« Previous EntriesInterview 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
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
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.
Interview with Jonathan Storper, Partner, Hanson Bridgett
September 15th, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
Hanson Bridgett is a San Francisco-based law firm that has taken an innovative approach not only in being a greener business - but also raising its profile as a sustainable business leader in the community.
Jonathan Storper, partner and chair of the sustainable business practice at Hanson Bridgett, explains both the business and personal benefits of becoming a more sustainable law firm - and the how they’ve overcome the challenges that come up on the journey to sustainability.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why sometimes the greatest challenge to being more sustainable is employee resistance - and what to do about it
- What is a “B Corporation” and why Hanson Bridgett became one
- Why using china instead of biogradable plates became a big challenge
- Jonathan explains how competition is good for (green) business!
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello this is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators and I am here speaking with Jonathan Storper, who is a partner at Hanson Bridgett, and a chair of the sustainable business practice at Hanson Bridgett.
Interview with Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle
September 1st, 2008 by Amie Vaccaro
There is more than one road to success. Here is one formula: Dropping out of Princeton + Growing Pot = Potentially the world’s greenest consumer products company. Here’s another formula: Imagination + Things People Don’t Want = $3.5 million company. Yes, we’re talking about Tom Szaky and TerraCycle, a company that develops products made of and packaged from waste and sold at large retail chains.
Since 2001, TerraCycle products have received a Zerofootprint Seal of Approval, and the company has been inundated with a host of other awards. Its products include plant fertilizer, cleaning products, school supplies and bags - all made using trash.
CEO and founder Tom Szaky discusses how it all began, what has been most challenging, what he loves about his job, his views on greenwashing and more.
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How did you come up with this idea for TerraCycle while at Princeton?
TOM SZAKY: My friends and I were trying to grow better pot and it turned out worm poop did the trick. It was also inspiring in that it was using garbage.
Everyone “Diggs” 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG.org)
August 26th, 2008 by Patrick DominguezBig news just announced from 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG.org)
With 1 Block Off The Grid (aka 1BOG.org) San Francisco residents can save up to 48% off the cost of a solar system for their home (total cost for low energy users would be about $3,200 for a system). The deadline for taking advantage of 1BOG’s offer is September 15, 2008 so check out 1BOG’s web site soon for more details.
I just heard this news from Sylvia Ventura, co-founder of 1BOG, and I’m mentioning this to my blog readers because this seems like a particularly unique opportunity for my fellow San Franciscans to receive low-cost solar power - and I’m a supporter of affordable renewable energy.
San Franciscans can currently benefit from the largest government-sponsored rebates that have ever been available, but some of them will soon no longer be unavailable. Between 1BOG’s discounts and the rebates, this is likely the lowest price opportunity for solar available in San Francisco this year. In addition to securing volume pricing, the team at 1BOG helps guide and educate its members through the process, making getting solar power less intimidating than going it alone.
The background on 1BOG
1BOG’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of renewable solar energy in residential homes. Their primary tool for doing this is to make solar power more accessible financially by negotiating deep discounts in the price of solar systems. 1BOG’s unique business model involves bringing together a large group of homeowners in a given city, and then using group purchasing power to negotiate volume pricing so that everyone in the group benefits.
According to Sylvia, 1BOG aims to take the equivalent of a city block off the San Francisco grid by the end of the year. This isn’t an actual city block - it’s more like a “virtual block”, the aggregate of all the participating solar homes in San Francisco. Afterwards, their goal is to reduce San Francisco’s electricity demand by many blocks, and then to repeat this in cities across the country.
Taking a block off the grid, or roughly 50 homes, in San Francisco would be a real achievement, given current numbers. According to 1BOG’s site “The city has set a goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010; to date less than 700 residences have solar on their roofs.” This low level of adoption is largely due to cost, but also due to inadequate information (e.g. about government incentives and tax benefits).
You can see a visual image of the demand for 1BOG in San Francisco:
A Bad Time to Take a Vacation
Another story from Sylvia - her family was taking her kids on a 10-day summer vacation in Tahoe last week that they had planned 6 months in advance, including family visiting from out of town. This soon turned into an entrepreneurial working vacation when unexpected promotional pandemonium broke loose…
When 1BOG put an announcement on the news wire on August 19 (during their family vacation) that they had selected Real Goods Solar as their solar power installation partner, a CleanTechnica blog post about the news suddenly became a popular story on Digg. By the next day, there was 100 Diggs, and the story hit the front page on Digg, and became the top story with over 600 Diggs in just a couple of hours!
Within hours, 1BOG.org was flooded with thousands of visitors, and this led to 80 new registrants, bringing their total number of members to 340.
Why did this get so popular on Digg out-of-the-blue? Sylvia isn’t sure, but she suspects that Digg is very much community-oriented, and that 1BOG has an inspiring community-oriented concept.
Where to Next? Going National
Though 1 Block Off the Grid is focused on completing their first round of community solar installations in San Francisco, the word has gotten out nationally. According to Sylvia Ventura, they are now considering the next cities they want to serve. My guess is they will go to the cities with the largest number of registrants at 1BOG’s site, so that should be motivation for people outside of San Francisco.
1BOG has signed up 40 people in Washington DC, 15 in Las Vegas, 6 in Portland, and a number of people in other Bay Area cities such as San Jose and Sacramento.
Interview with Mo Chicarro and Anthony Oram, Founders of Male Organics
August 16th, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
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“The Cleanest Men in London”
Male Organics is a UK-based internet store that’s a one-stop shop for organic and natural grooming products for men aspiring to be chemical-free and earth-friendly.
The two founders of Male Organics share why they seized upon the idea of starting a store for men - and surprising things they’ve learned along the way.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why Male Organics was told off for being sexist….
- …and a surprising fact: 50% of the customers at Male Organics are women!
- What from the marketing toolbox is working? Offering discounts is working to attract people to their site
- Find out the #1 bestselling natural grooming product purchased for men
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: This is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators.com and I am here speaking with two gentlemen from Male Organics. Why don’t you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what your company does and its history.
MO CHICARRO: Sure, I’m Mo Chicarro.
ANTHONY ORAM: And I’m Anthony Oram.
MO CHICARRO: We started out Male Organics almost a year ago and the idea was we were looking ourselves for products on the internet - to wash with or brush your teeth with, a toothpaste, shower gel, stuff like that and previously you would only find them on websites that were mainly female orientated and a very small men’s section. So, we spent about a year researching a wide variety of products and then put them all in one place which is now Male Organics. Guys can go there and the whole website is laid out for men’s idea of shopping.
Interview with Chris Bristow and Harvey Jones, Founders of Smartly Green
August 8th, 2008 by Patrick Dominguez
Smartlygreen.com is an innovative shopping portal/loyalty program/social network that allows people to offset their carbon footprint for free while they shop online at 400+ top retail stores. The site serves customers in the US (with stores in the US including the Gap, Apple, Orbitz, Macys, etc), the UK, and Australia. The two founders of Smartly Green, based in the UK, share the story behind the founding of the site and their vision for its growth.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The Smartly Green story of two “normal guys” (actually with extensive business experience) making a choice to give back through their business
- How they were able to enroll so many top retail brands in their program
- The thinking behind Smartly Green’s international expansion
- Does Smartly Green encourage people to do more shopping? The founders address this question
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Hello, this is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators and I am here with the two founders of Smartly Green. Why don’t you introduce yourselves and tell us what Smartly Green does.
HARVEY JONES: My name is Harvey Jones.
CHRIS BRISTOW: And my name is Chris Bristow.
HARVEY JONES: First of all, Chris and I thought we needed to do something which was environmentally sustainable and living in that way. Because we had spent the last 25 years working for large corporates in different parts of the world and it was now time to put something back in. We came up with the idea from looking at a series of studies that had been in the UK that indicated that in between 70 and 75% of the population actually did have an environmental conscience, but were doing nothing about it. They were doing nothing about it because (a), they found the information confusing or worse, they were actually finding the information coming downstream contradictory. That was a major issue. That resulted in them doing absolutely nothing. We came up with the idea saying, okay let’s do something for that part of society. Let’s make it easy for them and let’s start them on the journey to a more sustainable lifestyle. And let’s make it in such a way that they don’t even have to think about it. They don’t have to change their lifestyles to begin with and they certainly don’t have to spend any more money.
We came up with a retail portal called Smartly Green and people are encouraged to do their normal shopping through us, not to spend any more money and certainly not to do anymore shopping.