A number of clients and readers have asked us about ideas for eco-friendly customer gifts and I wanted to write a couple of blogs talking about items that have done well in the past for clients or that are new for this year and doing well so far.

Our first blog was on BAMBOO. Now let us move to ORGANIC COTTON.

1) Organic Cotton Towels - Unbelievably soft and absorbent with natural colors like Stone Green, White and Natural Tan, these towels make great gifts. Embroidered with your company or organization’s logo expect to pay around $24 per unit. Towels work because they will end up in the home of your customer and likely be used for a long, long time. Organic cotton towels and robes also make good employee gifts.

2) Organic Market Bag Set - These heavy duty organic cotton bags look and feel great, so they have a high perceived-value but an honest price at $16 for the set, including placement of your logo.  Employees and customers will use the bags for a long, long time and they use them in public so each time your customer uses the bag in public your company or organization is on display. We also like the large print area on these bags. This is a lot of space to display your message and/or contact information. This market set helps the environment by reducing the need for plastic or paper shopping bags with this beautiful organic cotton set. The set includes a storage tote and 2 full-size grocery totes.

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Green themed programming includes prime time shows such as “The Office” which will air an episode about the company considering recycled paper. And then local NBC stations are incorporating green-themed stories into their newscasts. As a Healthy Living Consultant, I spent this morning at the Farmer’s Market with NBC11 talking about “How to Have a Green Thanksgiving.” The segment will air on NBC11 this Thursday at 6.45pm so stay posted!

I think it’s a great opportunity for Ecopreneurists.  Both in terms of finding interesting eco businesses…as well as a tool for drawing visibility to your own eco business. Last year, the company launched its first Green Week and also a “Get On Board” program to encourage consumers to reduce greenhouse gases and raise awareness. This year’s theme is ‘Green Your Routine,’ the network will feature tips and resources that offer consumers advice on this area: green cleaning companies, sustainable food producers, greening your commute and so on. More information about the programing can be found here.

So Ecopreneurs, it is time to start creating you NBC pitch.  Your company or product might just be their next Green find!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy, talk about his vision for a green economy at The Center For American Progess.

It was an oversubscribed crowd and Jones sat comfortably on an arm chair on a slightly raised platform, giving the impression of a living room chat. He started by talking about how the floor on America has been torn out, but so has the ceiling and now is the time when we are “free to fall or to fly.” He spoke of our unsustainable economic model that is based on consumption not production, run on debt vs. savings and thrift, and environmental destruction vs. preservation. But soon after the gloom, Jones shifted the rhetoric to one of hope. He spoke of building a new economy with clean energy power centers and a clean enemy corps. An economy where all people, including people often left out of economic expansion such as the poor, people of color, etc…, have a place at the table. He spoke of the low hanging fruit in a new green collar economy: retrofitting. He laid out his vision where out of work construction workers — workers he predicted would be idle for 12, 24, 36 months — are put to work retrofitting existing building across America.

And therein lies the ecopreneurial opportunity. In Jones’ vision, people from all economic strata can start a business that provides retrofitting services or produce the products needed to retrofit. And, retrofitting is just the beginning. Jones went on to say that the days of the environment being a “a box you check off” are over and we have entered an era where environmental impacts are a lens through which all economic activity must be viewed. The result is an economy with a host of ecopreneurial opportunities and where our two worst problems, the economy and climate change, are solved by ecoprenuers. In Van Jones’ world, there never been a better time to be an ecopreneur.

Photo courtesy of Van Jones.

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Maybe the title should instead read “How to Fail at ‘Greening’ Your Business”. Often times companies seem to approach “green” or eco-friendly as just another product attribute that can simply be added to packaging or website to reach the “green” consumer segment. In the rush to be eco-friendly, and due to the typical structure of many organizations, the marketing team will take the lead of the greening effort and, in the interest of time & energy, they’ll create a brilliant plan to communicate “green” to a target consumer group, but no internal alignment.

The sustainability and marketing strategies of a typical entrepreneur are often times based on the same model - the shotgun approach. Typically, entrepreneurs start to think about marketing after at least 6 months of hitting the pavement, and then sustainability appears as part of a new “marketing plan” or is seen as some kind of charitable giving / community relations campaign. Sustainable business is neither part of a marketing campaign nor a community relations effort. Neither is it about shifting revenue, but rather how revenue is generated.

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The goal is to achieve the greatest precision with the lowest number of pieces mailed, but there a lot of other benefits. You can save money and enhance customer satisfaction which will in turn improves customer loyalty, purchase behavior and profitability. Here’s 9 ways:

#1: Maintain good list hygiene. Updating your mailing list to remove unwanted, duplicate and undeliverable addresses regularly and thoroughly is a cheap, quick and effective way to reduce waste. There are several ways to verify mailing lists and all outside list mangers are able to perform this function or you can buy your own address verification software. You will mail fewer pieces and, under some circumstances, lower your mailing rates. Consider offering incentives (such as the offer of a discount on their next purchase) for notification of duplicate mailings and incorrect addresses.

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It is becoming more and more obvious that an economic slowdown is coming.

As Ecopreneurists what does that mean to us? I think it means that we need to remember the entrepreneur part of our names as well as the Eco. Tough times are when fortunes are made. They are when more people are open to new ideas, because the old ideas no longer seem to work. Tough times are times to get creative.

Some ideas to make tough times work for you.

Money that is being spent will need to go farther as there may be less of it in your client’s or customer’s budgets. So add value by looking at the full spectrum of what you are selling. Can you offer more and make your client a better deal (i.e. you sell the stove, but what if you can sell the stove, the pots, the pans, and the power for the stove all together). By offering more you can lower your price on the complete bundle but you may make better, larger sales as you are solving more issues for the client).

Who is your competition? Take them to lunch, ask them some questions. Maybe you can serve your clients better if you team together. Or maybe your competition doesn’t have the fight for this coming slowdown and you can expand your business by taking over theirs.

Same idea one step removed. Who are your competitor’s sales leaders, their designers, their useful people? Take them to lunch. Are they scared for their jobs? Show them how they could benefit from being part of a stronger, better focused company. Fear is an amazing motivator, but it also locks people in place. If you can help someone better their position with a better job, now is the time to pitch it.

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This week, I had the opportunity to touch base with an entrepreneur tackling the art market. Tina Santillo, owner of, www.earths-journey.com, talks with me here about her journey as an green entrepreneur.

Did you look into the art market at all before you started?

It’s not so much that I looked into the art market before starting my business, it was more of journey that lead me to here.  I have always been creative, and dreamed of opening up my own little funky craft store downtown somewhere for when I had to retire - just for something to do.  I was going to purchase only pieces I liked, keep my dog in the store with me and smile the day away as people came in and out browsing.

Then one day I was looking for a gift for someone and came across this beautiful piece and fell in love with it.  Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a bowl made from plastic recycled bottle caps, and I was shocked.  It was at that moment that it all came into play.  I needed to find more artists that worked with recycled materials just to see the talent and imagination… and that excitement brought me into the arts circle.  What I found there was a definite passion I was missing in my life - and one that I had been seeking for quite some time.

Tell me about the art market

Did you know that Art has surpassed the stock market in appreciation over the past twenty years. Also, we have an artist on the site that creates Fresco Paintings and that the first pigments used in painting were ground from earth, minerals and organic matter? Pigment is finely-ground colored powder which, when suspended in a medium such as oil, egg or water, forms paint. Most pigments are now made chemically and are more permanent; however he still uses the earth minerals for his pigmentation!

Why do you think there is a market for your site?

I believe in today’s economy, it’s no longer a choice to be eco-friendly, it’s a necessity.  We are all looking for ways to save, reuse, recycle, and do our part on this earth.  We are all in the market for a new concept, a new idea, something ingenious to take our minds off the mundane.  Artist’s like our site because it’s their freedom of expression, and buyers like our site for the variety.  You can buy a cool recycled necklace that used to be a mans tie for $9.00, and you can purchase an Original piece of art from India for $2000.00.  The variety will be endless.

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At the Opportunity Green conference held at UCLA November 8-9, many themes related to the growth and changing direction of the green business movement were discussed by the great variety of green leaders present.

One particularly interesting theme was about the mixed feelings some green entrepreneurs have about going big with their business.

Everybody is eager for success, but green entrepreneurs often fear that scaling up products to reach the masses requires compromises that would negate the benefit of what they are doing and hurt the brand in the long run.

Most green products today are still niche products, perhaps as a result of this fear. At the conference Josh Dorfman, author of “The Lazy Environmentalist”, said that contrary to what many are saying, “Green has not gone mainstream.” Some products are starting to change this, like the Prius and Green Works cleaning products from Clorox, but even these successes represent a small percentage of the overall market. Organic food is big, but it’s still only about 3% of the food we eat.

Do products have to be small to be green? Do they sacrifice something in going big?

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Bad economy got you down? If you’re looking for some inspiration, this trailer for a new documentary might just do the trick. Often down economy’s are the best time to start a new business -especially a green one.

Greenbiz.com gives a few:

According to McKinsey: “most companies in most sectors have profitable opportunities to save money by cutting energy consumption and gas emissions. Our studies indicate that a lot of companies can reduce them by 20 to 50 percent.”

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