“We’re stuck. We shrug away pangs of guilt as we dispose another Amazon box. We leave perfectly good items on the street, hoping someone grabs them before being taken to landfill. Lost, we commiserate with friends about how little there is that we can do. We compost our food scraps, avoid plastic bags and sip through metal straws, hoping to do our drop-in-the-ocean part. Even as the current onslaught of environmental reports continue to shock us into greater consciousness, we’re left standing quiet, watching our planet buckle and sag.”
That was me, about 18 months ago.
I’d just undergone a specific type of climate wokeness - suddenly racked with guilt, I had realized that Sanctuary Computer, our ~27 person product shop, which we have obsessively optimized and tuned for 5+ years to ship beautiful & performant websites and apps at a reasonable price point, had become an very sharp tool for enabling MBA founders (with rich parents and a market gap) to do their part in trashing our dying planet on a massive, global scale.
As an outdoorsman who grew up on 15,000 acres of cattle farm in rural Australia, I was ashamed. The blood of that “climate change” blame that always felt so removed from our little website making business was suddenly on my hands.
And then I got angry. I spent 12 months tweeting about how pathetic and pointless the once exciting DTC and CPG industries had become. Exploiting are.na aesthetics and Instagram’s ad platform to sell ever-more products: some good, but most lackluster - all serving as a thinly veiled get rich scheme.
Everything we build causes damage - but it was Kristian who told me that this framing had become tired to him. He was past the point I was wallowing in - he is working to help his students understand that we, as creatives, have more agency than we realize.
If you’ve seen Adam Curtis’s Century of Self, you’ll know that the invent of public relations (more or less) pulled this country out of recession after WWII. That was done with storytelling. Sure - we’re not on the board of a major oil company, or lobbying in federal government for carbon neutrality by 2030, but we are in rooms with people who are deciding how to bring products to market, week over week.
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If you’re in a room with a founder, and you push for sustainability, you’ll likely be met with at least some resistance. They’re concerned with going to market, staying afloat, and getting customers. What you’re pushing for is a nice to have. What value do they get, on day one, from knowing their algae packaging can be safely washed down a sink? Well, as it turns out, a lot.
The above is a poll I sent from the Climate Leadership Conference in Detroit earlier this year (100+ folks replied). You see, I’ve always had a suspicion that:
If you’re a startup, your demographic are “early adopters”
“early adopters” are proud of giving their pals good recommendations
If their pals see their recommendations as “unsustainable”, they are not good recommendations
By that logic, a product that can’t show a sustainability effort is going to have a hard time attracting customers in 2020. However! What I’ve recently come to learn is that almost all consumers care about sustainability, and a majority of them care very deeply.
Sustainability is (very) good marketing
We can send you a bunch of studies (email us), and graphs, and user surveys to back this up. But it doesn’t matter. When you’re in a room, with a founder, there’s really only one graphic you need, and this is it:
Save this image to your phone. Pull it up in meetings. Show it to your friends. 77% of consumers say that the sustainability of brands matter to them. If you’re sitting in a room, with a founder, and you tell them:
“we should offer Carbon Offsets at the time of checkout because the Yale Program on Climate Change in conjunction with IBM’s Consumer Research group have found that your brand doesn’t matter unless you can show some type of real sustainability effort…”
You’ll have their attention. But how can you lead them?
Seaborne helps brands do sustainability right
We’ve spent the last year studying and researching the various standards and latest thinking in the space, and we’ve come to understand that the biggest hurdles are the beliefs that sustainability is both a) expensive and b) hard. The “bigness” (as David Wallace-Wells writes) is just too big; it’s easy to kick that can down the road.
The optimal time to invest in sustainability is day one. That’s when it’s cheapest to start building this style of thinking into a brand’s DNA. Think about it! When you’re doing thousands of units a day, your supply chain is too big and unwieldy to work with on a short time scale.
Take Treaty for example: a small team, shipping a boutique product from upstate NY. They source hemp from a regenerative farm in Hudson, and they offer a $10 Carbon Credit upsell to their sidecart.
Is there really exactly $10 worth of carbon embodied in their product? Is this a science-backed statement? Is there a 35 page whitepaper? Of course not. But they are doing more than practically any other CBD brand on the market, and that matters.
If you’re the creative that pushes for a sustainability effort, then you’re the reason that company implemented a better version in 2021, and so on.
As that brand continues to uphold the sustainability signal you pushed for from day one, your effect will compound over time, becoming far more important than any design or codebase could ever be.
There’s a lot of important thinking around how to build sustainability into a project, and the reality is that it’s both a) hard work, and b) not as hard or expensive as you may think.
To do it right, you need to do a lot of research. The same type of research we did to push Studio Carbon Negative, or The Light Phone’s sustainability report.
If you’d like to work together, email us!
We exist primarily to help modern internet businesses use science-backed methodologies to measure mitigate and reduce their environmental effect; and then tell the story.
We’re affordable ($90 p/hour), friendly and passionate about our work. Email us at hello@seaborne.nyc to start your climate journey today.