I always wanted to be a socially responsible entrepreneur and giving back to the community was a big part of it. That was the theme that got Dave and I together in this venture. The journey in this direction has opened a whole new perspective for us on conscious capitalism and environmental responsibility. We can’t help but notice and try emulating other businesses and initiatives in this direction. Here are links to some earlier blogs from Dave on some of the businesses we admire
Creating Community Through Food - right on Bi-Rite! We spotted this while in San Francisco. Bi-Rite is an institution in the city and I sure have eaten my fair share of ice-cream from them! While enjoying my latest cone in the corner of the busy shop I flipped through the Bi-Rite brochure. On the back page was one of the best statements of how an organization views it's business ecosystem. Here it is, enjoy!
We’ve sparked a bit of dialogue from our last post on our Top 10 Favorite Social Ventures. Since that time we’ve discovered or have been introduced to several new ventures worth sharing. What gets us so excited about discovering these ventures isn’t just that they necessarily make a cool product or offer a new service. It’s that they do it all within a socially conscious context. That’s what’s so energizing about social ventures. They are businesses that seek profit, but do so by considering and improving on the impact of that profit making process. So here they are, again in no particular order.
ONNO www.onnotextiles.com
T shirts made from sustainable fibers such as Bamboo, Hemp, and Organic Cotton. Boulder, CO
We’re working hard on designing and manufacturing our footwear to be as sustainable as possible. What is sustainable in footwear though?? Sustainable footwear considers: raw materials, product design, manufacturing processes, end-of-useful-life policy, and a whole slew of other components. So many in fact that the only way a company can truly produce a pair of sustainably made footwear is to tackle one element of the process of achieving total sustainability at a time. We at Common Soles are currently focusing our efforts on materials and manufacturing processes right now. That is not to say we aren’t doing all we can elsewhere in the sustainability value chain – this is just our area of focus at the moment.
I wrote a bit about materials on October 22nd of this year. This post is on process. The big one we can influence as a band in the US making footwear overseas is how our factory sources materials. Sourcing is a blend of art and science and is a constant battle of quality versus cost. Being who we are (a social venture) we lean toward quality whenever we have a choice. The difficulty we run into often times is that we are quite small in the world of footwear manufacturing and thus often have little say. Not an excuse though…
Clearly we’re big fans of social ventures, which basically are businesses that practice conscious capitalism. Some individuals define social ventures as either for-profit or not-for-profit. We define social ventures as those which are for-profit and measure success in terms of delivering profits while operating in a manner responsible to both planet and people. So here in no particular order are our top 10 favorites.
Last Friday Rao and I attended a workshop led by Dr. Ralph Z. Sorenson on the topic of Conscious Capitalism. Ralph is an uber accomplished businessman with professorships at Babson, Univ. of Colorado and Harvard Business School under his belt, as well as working for several multinationals, serving as President of Babson College, managing a private investment firm, and a board member on over 30 boards both public and private. One board he currently sits on is that of Whole Foods.
So as you can imagine, Whole foods was a focal point of discussion for the day. Whole Foods is really an amazing organization, I always knew the company stood for good business, and that CEO and Founder John Mackey was a good guy, I just didn’t ever analyze the company the way you can when a discussion is being led by a long time board member of the company!