This post was originally posted on Eco-Libris blog on June 21.
The added value of going green is constantly growing. According to a survey conducted lately, 46% of consumers say they would shop at a retailer more if it was environmentally friendly. Another study of Mintel shows 62% of customers choose a restaurant based on their commitment to the environment.
A Green Printer interview with Carmen Spagnola, entrepreneur and owner of m.
1. What made you want to start m?
I started m because I was a frustrated consumer. I decided that if I want to have access to smarter, more beautifully designed, more responsible products and amenities for my home and family, I was going
to have to create more demand. Markets are a bit of a chicken-and-egg relationship. Many retailers will tell you that they only provide what their customers want. That is only part of my modus operandi.
I want to showcase the possibility of a better performing future, so much of what I sell and promote is currently considered ahead of the market. But how will the market know what it wants if we don’t inspire it to want more?
Read the rest of this entry »
In Februrary 2009 mokugift started to see traffic coming from Elle magazine France. This piqued our interest and decided to find the article. It turns out that Marion Cotillard mentioned mokugift as one of her favorite sites along with L’alliance pour la planete. We aren’t very familiar with the entertainment world, so we had to look up this name. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that Marion won the best actress Oscar in for her role in 2007’s La Vie En Rose (remake).
The internet makes knowledge accessible, but at the end of the day it is about communications and connecting. Global Green Links came to Mokugift, signed up to our corporate rewards program and became an affiliate in less time that it takes took us to figure out where to go for lunch.
A couple weeks ago I was looking for examples of this principle. I wanted to show how a company’s marketing message should extend beyond greenness to appeal to other core consumer attributes people expect from a good products. I put out a query on HARO and received dozens of interesting products. Of those, five stood out.
The first thing I noticed about Vers iPod Docks is that they are incredibly beautiful. But, they first thing theat Vers wants you to know about their products is that they sound great. They let the fact that they have been touted as the most environmentally friendly iPod dock available speak for itself and focus instead on the benefits that consumer’s want in a an iPod dock: Great sound and good looks. In the words of David Laituri, partner in Sprout Creation makers of Vers products:
“We tend to focus on superior sound quality and design, and environmental thoughtfulness a fast second. Since our sustainable design efforts are a work in progress, we avoid ‘green’ and ‘environmentally friendly’ whenever possible.”
Green Toys are made out of recycled milk containers and are made in the USA (so from a supply chain position they are very environmentally sound.) Green Toys are also packaged in recycled corrugated boxes with no plastics, cellophane or twist-ties, and are 100% recyclable. But most importantly, they positioned as safe (they contain no traceable amounts of Phthalates or BPA and have no external coatings with lead paint) and fun (they are chunky and colorful and beg to be played with). Read the rest of this entry »
June 5th is United Nations World Environment Day. The U.N. Environment Programme has setup a twitter campaign called ‘twitter for trees’. All you have to do is ‘follow’ http://twitter.com/unepandyou and they will plant a tree. The goal is to get 100,000 followers by June 5th. That plants 100,000 trees, so lets get started!
If you’d like to promote the campaign, feel free to tweet:
Please RT: follow @UNEPandYou and a tree gets planted for free. Plant extra trees for $1 via http://www.mokugift.com
Mokugift is an official partner of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Image source: United Nation Environment Programme
Being small and focused helps us stay true to our mission in everything that we do. When a company called kajeet approached us via Miller Strategic Marketing we did our homework and checked out their site, did a search on reviews and looked into the bios of the executive team. We found out that kajeet is a mobile phone service that focuses on the needs of parents with young children. This is consistent with the trend that companies that work with mokugift are focused on creating nurturing experiences or have developed nurturing cultures in their company.
Parenting brings out the pragmatic and resourceful skills in everyone. kajeet approached us with the idea of Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s note: This is guest post from Max Gladwell, founder of #EcoMonday. Rob Reed a web strategist in the green field, is the voice behind Max Gladwell and a blogger buddy of mine for a few years. I value Rob’s take on growth in the green field and his input on social media strategies.
This post is, in Rob’s words, part of a grand social media experiment to publish the first collective, simultaneous guest blog post from Max Gladwell. Our goal is for it be published simultaneously on 100 blogs, thus inspiring 100 simultaneous conversations from various points of view. We have more than 70 confirmed with some of the biggest and coolest in the blogosphere.
Enjoy!
Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.
What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.
For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Friday I read an interesting piece on Mashable Beyond #FollowFriday: 24 Daily Twitter Memes. Memes on Twitter are hashtags to help you keep track of a topic on Twitter – #green and #greentweets are ones I commonly use in my Twitter stream, to label items that might be of interest to the green community.
Now, like popular memes on blogs, a number of Twitter memes have gone weekly. The most well known is #Followfriday. To use it Twitterers simply list some of their favorite folks to follow and add the hastags #followfriday.
My first thought after reading this article was, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if we had a #followfriday like tag for the green community?”
Over the weekend though, while I was playing around with ideas like #sustainable saturday and #greentuesday my blogger buddy and green web strategist, Rob Reed of @maxgladwell fame came up with #EcoMonday, which appeared early Monday morning and spurred hundreds of Twitter fans to recommend their favorite green Twitter streams.
Last night Keilly Witman from EPA’s GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership, the program that attempts to get grocery stores to reduce ozone-killing refrigerant leaks, talked at EcoTuesday in DC. What I thought might not be our most exciting topic turned out to be one of the most interesting I’ve heard in the 8 months of co-hosting these events.
According to a 2008 GreenChill press release:
Compared to the rest of the supermarket industry, GreenChill partners are already emitting fewer ozone-depleting refrigerants and greenhouse gases than their competitors, and saving money at the same time. The partners’ savings in operating costs equal almost $13 million.
If every supermarket in the nation joined GreenChill and reduced their emissions to the current GreenChill average, the industry could prevent the release of 13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and 157 ozone-depleting potential tons annually.
GreenChill has about 30 supermarket partners. Let’s start applying the Big Green Purse principle and ask: Is your market a Greenchill partner or should you shop elsewhere?
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