Casey Sheahan – TRANSCRIPT
Before I get rolling, I need to ask a couple questions to all of you. I need you to raise your arms up, I need to see some energy from you, and say “yes” if you agree with what I say. So this is an opportunity for you to use a little energy and engage with me for a second.
First of all, would you agree that there’s more business to be done on a healthy living planet versus a dying dead planet? Kind of a no-brainer, right? How about if corporations we’ve been talking about provided unadulterated, complete transparency about everything they make and sell in their supply chain, on the shelves of the grocery stores, everything you find. Do you think you could make more informed, educated, responsible buying decisions every day of the week? OK, two for two.
Do you think that companies would do better if they treated their employees well, they treated their factory workers well, provided gratitude and mindfulness, and all the things we talked about today, compassion, soul, that they had a happier work force, would they do better? OK, my speech is over. We’re going to go over to Hickenlooper’s bar and have a couple of drinks.
Because I’m done, thank you! No, this is what I wanted to talk to you about today. It is this complete transparency in the supply chain that is coming, that has been coming, a lot of speakers are going to talk about it today. It is the next revolution in business. The company that I work for, Patagonia, has been driving this for a number of years and we hope to really lead in this and to share it with other companies.
So, a little bit about the company: Yvon and Malinda Chouinard are the owners of Patagonia, the company is in Ventura, California, and I live in Colorado and commute back and forth. These two people have been great role models in my life, real mentors for me.
And we also make a lot of nice apparel, and we try to do it with the least amount of harm. I got started with Patagonia years ago. I shot photos for their catalogs, and they paid me quite generously and gave me free clothes to ski in. As a matter of fact, they still do. So it’s a nice bonus.
But many of you know about the company. We were the first to give away one percent of our sales to small and grassroots environmental causes. We pioneered a whole supply chain of organic cotton in the mid-’90s, which we gave to other companies and shared with them. We figured out how to make fleece jackets out of recycled pop bottles, which is kind of neat. When I joined the company in 2005, we had an idea that we were going to have all of our clothing, by 2010, completely recycled and recyclable. We didn’t make that goal. We got close; we got about 70% of the way there, and in fact, by fall of ’11, I think we’ll be almost all the way there. But, we set a new goal for ourselves. And this was by 2015 to have all of our apparel completely out of landfills. So if you bought a Patagonia jacket, it would never get thrown away.
What we wanted to do is kind of unorthodox, and it’s not unlike the uncommon culture of Patagonia, is what we want to do first is to buy less stuff from us. OK? Now, there’s a lot of other things we’re going to do, but think about that, because we have to do our job as a company to make really durable, multi-functional apparel that you’re not going to want to throw away. And if you do throw it away, or not throw it away, but give it away, we’ll help you with that. You can obviously give it to Salvation Army; we may find ways to help you sell it on the online community to eBay or somebody like that. We just don’t want it to leave the cycle at all.
Now, if the product is completely shot, a zipper falls out, we’ll repair it. That’s fine. And at the end of its life, if it absolutely won’t work anymore, we have ways of repair nylons, polyesters, cottons, we can recycle all of those items back into new garments.
And finally, because we’ve been talking here tonight about how humans today are far out-stripping the needs of up to seven planets, just this little population of people that’s here now, we want to re-imagine a world that sustains us all.
[Use business to inspire]
So, I want to tell a little story about my boss, Yvon Chouinard, that dirt-bag climber, surfer, fly fisherman.
He got invited to go speak at Walmart, and to help Walmart figure out a way to reduce their manufacturing footprint. I was in one of the earlier meetings with some of the Walmart guys and the Sam’s Club guys, and I just got to thinking, this could be one of the biggest opportunities of our company’s whole future. Because here’s Yvon talking to a company with a scale 1,000 times ours, telling them to get their act together. I remember these stories that were being told at these meetings; we’d heard a story that Walmart’s buyers had asked General Mills to reduce the cardboard packaging around their Hamburger Helper. Hamburger Helper came with new packaging.
They took the air and they took cardboard out of it. Well, guess what? They reduced 795,000 pounds of cardboard out of what they shipped to Walmart that year and they put 500 semi trucks off the road for an entire year. Now this isn’t all altruistic, because they saved a hell of a lot of money in shipping costs too. You think about the movement, the things they’ve done about reducing laundry detergent so it’s double the strength, but I think too about what they could do if they took three milligrams of mercury out of a CFL bulb. It would be the equivalent of recycling 100 million light bulbs.
So this scale is huge. We estimate that they leave 30 million yards of scrap on the cutting room floor in their factories every year. So, can’t we do better than that? Yvon gives a speech, the CEO of Walmart gets up in front of his group and he says, “That guy was awesome! You guys got to get behind this; if you don’t embrace this initiative, many of you sitting in the room today will not be working for Walmart next year.” That was the beginning of Walmart’s greening movement, which you’ve been hearing about in the last five years. This little company, Patagonia, stirring the stick and causing this huge ripple effect that affected this giant, giant company.
Yvon came to me back in California and he said, “You know, I think that was the biggest moment in my career. I may have peaked right then, but that was the biggest moment.” So, another great thing came out of this recently. In March, we announced what’s called The Sustainable Apparel Coalition. This is a group of 35 really big companies that were inspired by this moment with Walmart and what these guys are doing is they are developing an index, a rating system, and it kind of plays back to our prior speaker, talking about ways of getting visibility into everything from manufacturing, shipping, water usage, all the different aspects of what happens when you make a product.
So, the first index will be inward facing, facing into the company. For example, a portion of it is an index that Nike has produced called “Nike Considered,” where designers are actually able to determine the impact of every single fabric or material that they select when they design a shoe or a garment. Now think about it; you’ve got to start there, picking good items. Then there’s another index, which is produced by the Outdoor Industry Association here in Boulder, and it adds to that with all of the shipping ramifications, transportation ramifications of producing items. So when they do this, they’re developing a rating system they’ll use internally.
But my dream is that this rating will soon be in consumers’ hands. So imagine this is a smart phone, I’m going to walk into the store, I’m going to purchase that GMO food, or that healthy food, or that shoe, or that jacket, and I’m going to scan a barcode, and I’m going to see a rating come up on my screen from one to ten as to whether that’s a socially, environmentally responsible product, and it’s going to tell me a lot about what actually went into making that particular product. So we’ve given the consumer this choice in their purchase decision about whether to buy something or not. If they don’t like it from one brand, they can go to another, and maybe get a better rating. So that’s big.
[Cause no unnecessary harm]
How do we tell these stories? Well, everybody has CSR reports, corporate social responsibility reports. They’re boring, they’re paper, they’re charts and graphs. We tried it; it didn’t work. For Patagonia, we try to do things differently anyway. So, we developed an online CSR report called The Footprint Chronicles.
And our environmental gurus, Rick Ridgeway and Jill Dumain, and our head of marketing, Rob BonDurant, decided to take cameras, and microphones, and still cameras into the factories, talk to the workers, interview the factory owners, go see these working conditions these people are in. Some of them, they’re not so great. It’s funny because everybody thinks that all the jackets and things we make at Patagonia are made in our nice, little downstairs sample room. Well in reality, we’re making stuff in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Columbia, and Central America, all over the world, so we wanted our customer to see, to go into those factories, and see where every single item is made, and talk to those workers and find out what it’s like to work there. This has shifted our entire factory base.
They are in this competition to create better working conditions for their people: better food, better dormitories. It’s unbelievable. There’s a factory in Vietnam that’s like the Ramada Inn down here in town. It’s beautiful! So I’m psyched to see this happen with The Footprint Chronicles, but I remember a moment when I was having doubt as a CEO. We were about to launch The Footprint Chronicles; we had five items.
And Hunter Lovins was giving a speech; you’ll see her later on tonight, she’s one of my environmental heroes, was in my office the day before we were going to launch The Footprint Chronicles, and I said, “Hunter, we’re not ready. I’ve got five items, and I’m about to open the kimono wide on Patagonia and tell people exactly what’s going on with every single product I make.” She said, “Well, take a deep breath but go for it. You have to be honest, you have to start somewhere.” And we did! And we got nothing but praise for these Footprint Chronicles.
Now we have, I think, 17 products that are online on the Chronicles. It represents 170 of our 70 styles across all of our categories. We’re getting customer feedback about how we can be a better manufacturer. We’re getting it from all over the world. So this has been fantastic.
Now, we tell the good, and we tell the bad. There’s products in there that are horrible. I have a backpack by my seat over here that’s made with non-recycled nylon; it’s virgin nylon. Environmentally, it sucks. It would rate a zero on a scale of one to ten.
But we’ve brought awareness to this issue. We know we have a problem, and we know we’re going to do something better with our pack line over time. So we’re embarrassed by that, but it gives us that starting point to do something else. There’s one other cool thing that’s happening as a result of this total exposure around the supply chain. We are working with some small ranches down in Argentina.
These ranches are growing merino sheep for high-quality wool. They have figured out a way to use rotational grazing to move the animals around. It’s kind of like the buffalo in the American west 200 years ago where they just rattled over the landscape, 30 miles a day, they chewed up a little grass, but they kind of braided their way through. They didn’t really cause much impact. The gauchos at these ranches are moving these animals very quickly.
Their little hoof marks can actually capture the water that falls out of the sky and maybe allow for some grasses to grow. They drop their droppings and that creates a cycle of greater fertility in the land, better grass, higher protein, healthier animals. These principles came from a man named Allan Savory, who is a Rhodesian biologist, who was actually able to reverse the desert situations going on in Africa. He also saw that when the landscape becomes healthier, you have a lot more biodiversity. So in Argentina’s case, you have the guanaco coming back, the red fox, and, as a supplier, I know where every single fiber of my wool is going to be coming from.
I didn’t have that in the past. A little bit might come from New Zealand, a little bit from Australia. Now I know it’s all going to come from Argentina, and I know the actual sheep that it’s coming from. That is the extreme transparency that I’m talking about that you should demand as a consumer, we all should demand, and it should apply to everything that we eat, that we wear, that we drink, everything that’s on our bodies, everything that’s a part of our planet.
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