It’s a green party and you’re invited!

SBC Business, Winter 2008

Tonight, the beer comes with a special bonus of virtue. It tastes the same—cold, frothy, delicious—but it arrives in a clear, plastic completely biodegradable cup.

The beer is thanks to the Phoenix Nightclub in Toronto, but the cup comes courtesy of The Weakerthans, who ponied up their own cash to buy the cups served in the bar for this tour. I’m grateful, because nothing bugs me more than pouring a perfectly good, recyclable bottle of beer into a shitty plastic cup, but it’s also the third time this week I’ve been accosted by “GREEN NIGHT!” at a special event. (Granted, one of these “events” was Thursday Night on NBC, but nonetheless…)

Lately, it seems like it’s a green party everywhere you go and action sports is no exception. More and more brands are adding eco-friendly products to their lines and for the most part, style is no longer a necessary sacrifice for having a cleaner conscience.

But while (almost) everyone knows ‘green is good’, how exactly does all this hype translate onto the shop floor? Are customers into it? The staff? Can anyone on the floor successfully explain what sustainable means? And really, what does panda food have to do with saving the world?

Who’s doing it?

Although some action sports brands, such as Arbor, have been doing the eco-thing for a long time now, 2007 was really the year where environmentally conscious products started to make their presence felt in retail in a significant way. Streetwear is where it is most noticeable, but the effort has extended to hard goods as well.

So who’s in the game? In hard goods, Arbor has been pursuing the manufacture of environmentally conscious hard goods for 12 years. Their snowboards and skateboard decks are constructed out of materials such as bamboo and “ecologically cultivated” woods such as paulowina and poplar. The brand is a category leader in combining sustainable materials with high performance; research and development into which, Arbor marketing coordinator Jessica Ng says, “took a very, very long time to perfect.” Other hard goods companies include Fletcher Chouinard Surfboards, Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard and his son’ Fletcher’s company, who wanted to “reduce the use of toxic and nonrenewable materials” that traditionally go into surfboard blanks and Element, which is using hemp in its decks.

Streetwear and outerwear brands with eco-friendly lines seem to be growing by the day: Quiksilver, Volcom, Holden, Planet Earth, IPath, etnies. Most of these products, such as denim and t-shirts, are made out of bamboo, organic cotton and hemp, although some companies are taking things one step further; Planet Earth, for example, is integrating recycled plastic bottles into its ‘green’ denim offering.

Interested in finding out more about these brands, these lines, or other initiatives in action sports? Treehugger.com is the go-to blog for all things environmental, but seems to have a legitimate interest in covering environmentally friendly initiatives in the action sports world. They cover a lot of niche brands such as Comet Skateboards, but devote considerable space to the big guns too. (Needless to say, they love Patagonia, the all-time leader in trying to make as much stuff as possible eco-friendly.)
Are people into it?

Pontificate all you want on the glory of green, but we live in a capitalist society and thus it will be the customer and their wallet that dictate the success of this movement. In talking to staff in action-sports shops from coast to coast, there was a lot of enthusiasm from the buyers, owners and managers for eco-friendly-branded products and all had bought at least some of these lines in the last few seasons.

“I’m definitely buying into the hype,” laughs Stacey Burke, a buyer at The Source in Calgary. “Everyone is stoked on them for sure. And the fabrics are great. Originally, when you’d get that stuff, you’d touch it and it would be pretty stiff. Now the fabrics are so soft and [brands] have really figured out how to make them as soft, or more soft, than the other products out there. So it’s cool that way.”

The organic-cotton denim is selling really well, she says, noting that although you tend to pay a bit more for eco-branded products, Albertans certainly don’t seem to mind the price difference, given the red-hot Calgary economy. Style is still king, she says, but in her experience an equally stylish, green-branded product has a definite edge over something more traditionally made.

“For me as a buyer, if I see it and the pattern is cool, I would buy that over something that didn’t have that same aspect to it. And the more you can tell a customer about a product, the more it is going to sell. You tell someone ‘These jeans are organic and these other jeans are blue’ [laughs], they’ll definitely pick up the organic.”

Dickson Li, manager at The Boardroom in Vancouver, agrees, saying that in his experience, eco-friendliness can make the difference in a customer’s choice when buying a snowboard. “It’s a good selling point. People take it into account. People still buy boards for the graphics, but it’s one of those things where they are like ‘oh, that’s kind of cool’. And it might be a deciding factor in whether they decide to buy the board or not.”

Li is careful, though, to note that while it would be easy to overstate the impact of this new breed of products, it remains pretty far down the list of priorities when people are out shopping for gear and even for streetwear.

“People talk about wanting to be more environmentally friendly, but whether they actually do it is a different matter,” he says. “They buy for the style of something, for the look of it and whether or not it is visually appealing. Whether it’s organic or eco-friendly, that’s probably at the bottom of the list. Customers usually consider style first, then cut, fit, brand, and then, and the end of the list, maybe the environment.”

Sell it like you mean it

Once a retailer has chosen to carry eco-friendly products in their stores, the next step is to move the stuff out the door. It wouldn’t be very sustainable if it just languished on a store shelf, now would it? Most shop staff we spoke with agreed that people are not, at this point, walking into stores and asking point-blank if the store carries environmentally friendly products. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want them—they just might not know that they exist.

The most logical first step in moving ‘green’ product is to make sure your staff know at least a little bit about why that certain product might be a bit more expensive than another similar product made out of traditional materials. If price is not an issue, then it would still be nice if staff can even chat about the benefits should a customer express curiosity. Hangtags can do a lot of the talking (although, as one brand spokesperson recently pointed out, they are wasteful), but enthusiastic staff doesn’t hurt either.

“Making the floor staff aware of the product benefits is a good idea for sure,” says Burke, “but the hang-tags that go along with it have to spell it out and tell the story as well.” The presence of attractive, informative hangtags is part of another sales strategy: brand-oriented in-store promotions. People like branded things and they definitely like free things and it can be as simple as a unique bag.

Last year, Volcom did a special value-added promotion with their V.Co-logical line that involved select stores receiving limited-edition paper bags branded with the V.Co-logical logo on them (a green-ified Volcom Stone). Customers were pretty excited about them, says Diana Kitchener, manager and part-owner of Fathom in Collingwood, ON. “Oh, they love them,” she says. “It’s really well done – we’ve been pretty excited about it.”

Frank Scura, founder and CEO of the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, recommends asking brands (via reps or otherwise) to provide eco-oriented POP displays or even small signs for the doors that say something to the effect of “eco-friendly products sold here”. It’s can be a small gesture, he says, but it might bring in eco-minded customers that might not otherwise have dropped into the store. “Why not reach out, if you’re carrying organic goods?” he asks rhetorically. “Why not get new customers?”

Scura’s main suggestions to stores is to set up a separate little rack, or section, and mark it as carrying sustainable products. It’s a strategy that Zach Tovey of Pro Skates in Halifax was already thinking of pursuing.

“We would definitely like to emphasize [our green lines] more in the future,”

he says. “I think we’re actually going to try and have part of the store committed to that kind of thing, because I think a lot of people come in and everything is mixed up together—I think that if it is designated its own area, then people will find it easier and be way more stoked on it.”
You know your customers best, so how far you take the eco-friendly theme in your shop or agency is up to you and your gut instinct. As Dickson Li noted, the environment is often one of the last considerations on a customer’s list of priorities when purchasing something new. But that also doesn’t mean it isn’t important to them. If you choose to carry some of these eco-friendly products (see sidebar for ideas), educated and enthusiastic shop staff is the first step in making a go of it. Panda food may not exactly save the world, but given how much we depend on the outdoors to do the things we love, it’s a step in the right direction.

-end-

[SIDEBAR/Box]
Eco-what?
A mini-primer on some of the most-common adjectives in eco-speak.

Sustainable: There are a thousand ways to define this term, but in the land of eco-friendly manufacturing and retailing, it usually refers to the use of natural resources that are renewable, such as a plant, rather than non-renewable, like oil.

Organic: We know that you know this, but organic refers to the growth of that renewable natural resource, such as cotton, without the aid of chemicals. Why is organic cotton the go-to fibre for streetwear companies? Cotton is the most widely used natural fibre in textile manufacturing and because it is so popular, it needs to be grown in huge quantities, quickly. In an effort to maximize crop yields, pesticides and herbicides are used to deter bugs and weeds. Cotton is also hard on soil, because it leaches more nutrients from the soil than it returns. Finally, the chemicals used in cotton processing are often harsh. Organic cotton helps lessen the pollution associated with cotton growth, which, according to the peeps at Sustainable Cotton.com, accounts for twenty-five percent of all the pesticides used in the U.S.

Bamboo: The crop of the moment in sustainable manufacturing. Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic and columnist at NOW Magazine, jokes that bamboo “deserves the Nobel for most sustainable resource of the year” because “it can be used like wood but is actually a grass that grows so quickly without chemical pesticides or fertilizers that it can be harvested every year or so…. Its intricate root structure helps prevent erosion when it’s planted on hillsides and riverbanks … plus, bamboo forests are impressive carbon sinks, and the grass is even being looked into for its water-detoxing properties, since it sucks heavy metal pollutants into its shoots. As with anything, though, it’s not a black-and-white affair: Vasil’s bamboo-loving prose is actually part of an argument not to give bamboo too many props until one examines whether toxic chemicals were used in its processing or if a forest in China was mowed down to make way for it.

Hemp: The poster crop for the hippies and dreadlocked skaters, hemp is making a comeback as new manufacturing processes allow it to be crafted into a much softer fibre than its previous incarnations. Like bamboo, hemp is lauded for its quick, pesticide-free growth, its kindness to the soil, and its versatility as a manufacturing material.

Renewable forestry practises: Hard goods often use wood in some fashion, whether it’s for the core of a snowboard or the deck of a skateboard. Sometimes this wood comes from clear-cut forests (bad) or other questionable forestry practises. Some companies are instead focusing on using wood from trees grown in “smart” tree farms and from trees that …

Alternatives to oil: Oil is the principle ingredient for the majority of action-sports products: blanks for surfboards, almost all snowboard and ski gear, and skateboard wheels. Some companies are experimenting with things such as hemp, recycled rubber or sustainable forestry products in an effort to reduce a percentage of this non-renewable resource in their lines.

-end-