Lisa and I were recently traveling the South Island of New Zealand for two glorious weeks. It was absolutely amazing – New Zealand is indeed adventure-land. On several occasions when chatting with folks in NZ we found ourselves telling the tale of what Common Soles is up to. For the most part, everyone responds quite well to our story (or at least we tend to meet very nice people!). They can get into the Common Soles story quite easily, as most everyone appreciates businesses that take on a social bent.

What’s interesting though is where the conversation typically goes after the initial back-and-forth on what Common Soles is and what we are up to.  9 times out of 10 we hear stories of other small social ventures the individual knows of, either through a personal connection, or something they heard about via the media that resonated with them. Folks get incredibly excited to share the stories of these socially responsible organizations. It’s really neat experiencing the energy that is generated during conversations on social ventures. People get really excited about them regardless of their association with the organization, and regardless of whether or not they have even conducted a transaction with that organization!

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The Fair Labor Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending sweatshop conditions. We fully support this cause and organization. Being a supporter is one thing, truly understanding he benchmarks they have outlined that constitute good working conditions is slightly more complex. The FLA has assembled a 28 page document that outlines the benchmarks used to determine if a factory is providing good working conditions for their employees. Here’s a link to that .pdf 

These benchmarks cover all the basic elements such as wages, child labor restrictions, sanitary conditions, etc. What they do not cover are environmental practices in operations. We have discussed our efforts in that area in previous blog posts and will have even more on that topic in the future as it is a concern we also strongly believe in.

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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!

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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

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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…

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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.

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