Episode 188: Simplifying Sustainability with Joshua Wolfe

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It can be really easy to be made to feel like you're wading into it one step at a time isn't enough, right? It can very quickly feel like doing enough, but the fact that if everyone in this community wades in one step at a time, we're a lot of steps farther than we were if only the people who are doing it perfectly are wading into it.

That's the voice of our friend Josh Wolfe. Josh co-owns Sky Punch Creative, a promotional products distributorship which is about to undergo a rebrand, rename, and relaunch. But he started his career as a photographer and focused on telling the story of climate change, co-authoring the book on the subject, Climate Change: Picturing the Science. Over the years, he's done stints in academia, activism, and industry, which through a roundabout and completely circuitous path led to the promotional products business. Like everyone else, he's trying to figure out how to make better, more useful, and more sustainable products, and when lucky, succeeds. Those are his words. Josh is this hidden gem in our industry, incredibly versed in the subject of sustainability. He's a free thinker who, contrary to his seemingly curmudgeonly persona, is incredibly positive because he looks at sustainability through such a generous, genuine, and practical lens. Which is why I wanted to talk with Josh. I wanted to hear from an expert within our industry why this subject of sustainability is so colossal and how we can simplify for ourselves, our teams, and our clients so that we could make the biggest possible impact. We chat about how to engage with clients in practical ways. We talk about the client's infinite pool of worry, a great concept in working with clients. And we talk about additionality plus individual impact versus corporate impact. How we as an industry can make massive changes one step at a time, the fallacy that sustainable products are more expensive. Plus, Josh shares an ambitious idea that suggests how we as an industry can impact the consumer market versus always merely lagging when it comes to sustainable product development and so much more. And of course, I wanted to have Josh on this QCast before our product summit next week, which is solely focused on sustainability. The event is held on Tuesday, June 22nd. From 2 to 5:30 PM ET. The goal of Product Summit is to elevate how we think about sustainability in our industry, how we sell sustainability, plus we're combining real-world learning with on-trend product ideas that are solely focused on sustainable solutions. It's led by leaders in the field such as Brandon Konovitz, Sarah Miltenberger, and Anna Lepri with Twelve NYC, Denise Tashro with Fair Wear, Kathy Chang with Redwood Classics Peril, John Borg with Eco Imprints, Michelle Sheldon with Eco Promotional Products, Tracy Tarquinio with HIT, Emily Gigo with SanMar, and breakouts led by 24 supplier leaders. I know we say this all the time, but it is the one event that you should bring your entire team to because it's this highly concentrated experience solely focused on conscientious selling. And you'll get training not just in how to think, how to communicate with clients, but also some fantastic product ideas as well. Register at commonscue.com/productsummit. This episode is brought to you by CommonsCue, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonscue.com.

Josh, All right, I called you for help. I'm wading in, stepping foot in this big oceanic topic of sustainability, right? I get about knee-deep and I notice it's starting to get murkier the more I look into it. Climate positivity, circularity, net zero, carbon offsets, blockchain, ethical sourcing, bio-based materials. I noticed as the water is getting darker and murkier, I'm starting to backpedal. I'm starting to back out. Why is this so confusing? And can we demystify this?

It's confusing for a lot of reasons, but I think there are two parts. One is it's confusing because very quickly you go from a general concept that we can all agree on to actual materials that have local and global concerns. And the actual idea of sustainability is one that I think every society, every religion can agree on. The basic concept is You know, how do you leave the world, their life, better for the next generation than we ourselves have it? And on some basic level, to make a better future for our kids, some resources have to be available. If we use everything up, there's nothing left for them. And what are we passing to them? And that can either be local— your river that's running by your house, if that's polluted, that's, you know, a sustainability issue. They won't be able to fish there. Globally, if climate changes in, or continues to change in a dramatic way, that affects the world they live in. If you built a house 500 meters from the shore and sea levels change, that house isn't 500 meters from the shore anymore when they grow up. And so you're looking at this idea of how do we present ourselves as good stewards of the world for the next generation. And so that's the general concept. But then you get into the confusing part. And I think, I'm not sure I made it any better for you when we talked last, is how do you turn that into actionable items either within your life or within something like the promo community, which is an interesting element of, you know, the sustainability conversation. And so it's sort of a tricky, thing to answer. And I think the last thing I'll say, which we talk about, is a lot of it comes down to what you care about and what you think you're trying to pass down to your kids. Are you passing down that river? Are you passing down farmland? Are you passing down a climate system? What are those next things, and what do we have to preserve for that to pass down coherently? And sometimes they're in conflict. I mean, organic cotton is great, but it requires more resources.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to get— I want to get to that in a second. And I was sort of— obviously I was being facetious in my intro question, but I, I think I represent the person that might be listening that is very conscientious and concerned. And so, in a little background, Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors, always has been, and he has been such a champion for ecological causes through the years, long before it became sort of fashionable to do so. But he really has influenced me through the years. But I think I consider myself what my— a lot of folks might be listening in that I'm deeply concerned, conscientious in my personal life, concerned about leading clients now in my professional life as either supplier or distributor. And am I wrong about my first assumption? Because I really just want to start doing really good work, conscientious work. Great promo has always been about sustainability, is it not? I mean, we want to create sustainable advertising. That our clients buy that perpetuate the brand that lives forever. I know I'm oversimplifying it, but am I wrong about that?

No, it's true. An item that gets reused is more sustainable than an item that gets thrown away. It's this basic concept of waste not. If you make a t-shirt, I think it was Danny Rosen famously said, the t-shirt that becomes the one worn when the guy is mowing the lawn., right? That t-shirt is not ending up in the waste stream. If you make the t-shirt out of the most sustainable materials on the planet and it gets thrown out the next day, it still required a lot of resources to make that t-shirt. So it's about finding a balance, and better products do have more lasting power. And, you know, you also get into the other side of that, which is there is always going to be a waste factor in the promo industry. Anytime we're giving out a kit or we're giving out an item, not everyone is going to take to it. And so figuring out how to balance the impact of what we're creating with the fact that inherently there will be some that drops off.

Right. Can you share the New York Times tote bag story as an example of what we're talking about? Because I think it's a story both you and I love.

Oh, the New Yorker tote bag. My cynicism about tote bags.

Yeah, let's get into that because I'm really—

let's hear about that. Okay, so I have cynicism about tote bags. I'm not the only one who has cynicism about tote bags and the inherent sustainability of a tote bag. Buying and giving out a tote bag is in itself not a sustainable act. Buying a tote bag in and of itself that's out of organic materials is not a sustainable act unless it is used. And there were a number of studies, one by the Danish government, another by a group in the UK, that found if a tote bag isn't used a certain number of times, it's not any better than giving out a plastic bag. And each type of material has a greater amount of time that it's used. So a polypropylene tote bag— and you'll have to look up the Danish study to get the exact number of times— but it was about 2 dozen times it needed to get used to have a better environmental impact than the plastic bag at the store. And that seems doable, right? I use a tote bag more than 2 dozen times. An organic cotton tote bag requires many, many more uses, partly because cotton itself is not a particularly efficient crop. You know, only about 30% of the cotton that's picked is usable, and organic cotton is even lower percentage of usable crop. So it takes a lot of water, a lot of resources to create an organic cotton tote bag. So a lot, you know, the vast majority that I get might be wonderful tote bags and I might use in my life, but they're not inherently good from a climate perspective. Now, if you're concerned about organics and pesticides, that's a different conversation, and they— there is a sustainability argument from that perspective. But my background's climate. But the New Yorker tote bag is a purse, is a statement, is it—

is it—

is it carry, right? People use it differently than they use a tote bag. So like, yes, that tote bag might not be sustainable compared to a plastic bag you get from the store, but you're using it as a statement. You're using it instead of a leather bag or instead of a bag made out of other materials. So from that perspective, it might actually be sustainable or more sustainable because it's replacing something that would otherwise be far more resource intensive. Um, and people are keeping that, right? They're getting that for a reason, which is somewhat different than— my wife works at a big law firm, and I can't tell you how many big law firm organic cotton tote bags I have that are wonderful for like trips to the pool, but you know, we don't use them that much.

Yeah. How does additionality come to play in this, and what the hell does that even mean?

That's one of my favorite terms. So it comes out of the— additionality comes from the world of carbon offsets, and it relates to what we're talking about with tote bags because the question is Are you doing something that you would do otherwise, or are you doing it for environmental gain? What are we giving people credit for in our community? So, for example, I know one of the print plants I work with a lot gets a pretty good price on their recycled cardboard. You know, they have a great machine for it. They're going to recycle that cardboard because they have a system in place for it. I know other factories that have a great system to sell their scraps, right? Those scraps have value. Do we give them credit for that?

What do you mean by credit? Do we give them credit for that?

Do we say that they're a sustainable institution because they're doing sustainability practices inherently, wasting nothing on your factory floor? I see. It might also be cost-effective. So if you're doing it for a cost perspective, do you get credit? And in the world of carbon offsets, you can sell credits based on the additional money you put into doing something that you wouldn't have done otherwise. So Another way of looking at it with the tote bags is, so I get these tote bags from my wife's work and we use them to go to the pool. I would have bought a bag to go to the pool anyways. I probably would have gone and bought it at Target or, you know, online or something. If you give me a bag from this law firm and it's significantly better than the thing I would have bought myself anyways, then there's a value, right? You've now reduced my consumption because you've given me something it's better than what I would have done otherwise. And so it's this concept of, are you looking at it from the perspective of, you know, and we've talked about a conscious consumer, right? We're consuming things, right? We just consume things. We do, like, you know, so we're going to consume things anyways. Can we do it in a better way? And is it worth giving credit for saying we can consume this in a way that has benefits, knowing that we're going to do it anyways rather than not do it at all.

Yeah. When you have a client come to you who is not an obvious eco-client and they begin to talk about sustainability to you, how do you break that colossal subject down into something more meaningful?

It's a— well, so it's a tricky question. And what I talk about a lot with our clients is there's this ideal idea in social science called the finite pool of work, that we as humans can only worry about so many things at one time before we shut down.

Like, some of us have a bigger pool than others, but yeah, yeah, okay, but we still have— all have a finite pool.

True. Yeah. And they, like, they did— there's a group that did a study during COVID where they found people stopped talking about climate change during COVID you know. They stopped talking about terrorism during COVID right? They only talked about COVID-related concerns. Right. And so when we're dealing with clients that aren't necessarily focused on sustainability, and even ones that are focused on sustainability, a lot of what we're dealing with is their finite pool of work. I can go to them and say, look, I want you to think about sustainability and I want you to think about it in a detailed, complex way. Right. Or I can go to them and say, look, you're worried about sustainability. It's on your list of things. I'm not going to talk to you about it a lot, but I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I'm going to help be the guide so this doesn't get into your finite pool of worry. We can have metrics and goals and, and reports on, on how this works. But for most of our clients, I think it's true for 90% of the clients, if that item doesn't arrive by Friday at the location, they're going to get fired. If that item is perfectly sourced You know, they might get a little bit of credit, but they're going to get fired if it doesn't arrive. And so figuring out how to weave that narrative of we're going to do the hard work because our industry is doing the hard work, and we're not going to consume your finite pool of worry, is a lot of how we talk to our clients about it. But a lot of our clients, you know, it's sort of twofold. A lot of our clients are in the business of talking to other people about it. So we're also trying to design the products so that when they're talking to other people, we're not overwhelming them either. So it's—

yeah, yeah, yeah. Since you have a client that is far more educated about this subject than probably the average client, one of the things that you ask that I think— which I think is a phenomenal question for whether your client is deeply concerned about this or enmeshed in this, or whether they're just barely in this topic at all, and whether it's important to them, is what do you care about? Can you unpack that a little bit? And what do you mean by that? And do you— and do you work with clients from that perspective? Do you have that conversation? What is it that you care about, or is it something you already know?

So in our case, we typically know— we work with a very narrow set of clients in very specialized types of energy, environment, and water outreach. So our clients tend to— we spend a lot of time getting to know them before we're even talking to them. And we've talked to 100 other people like them, like in the same, in the same job as them. But I think the question that you ask is a good one because we, we deal with this with our clients, especially in the water space, because water issues are different everywhere. And I'll give you, you know, just an example of where you live and where I live and why figuring out what they care about matters. You know, you're in Oklahoma. I draw the fracturing is just a different thing for you than it is for me. Right? It's a quality issue. Yeah.

You're literally waking up at night with earthquakes.

Yeah.

So you're right. It's a pressing, prominent issue here.

Right. It is an immediate environmental concern. I live in the Northeast, where heating oil is a real environmental concern. And lower natural gas prices are leading to more heating oil to natural gas conversions. So what's an environmental problem where you are is dealing with an environmental problem where I am. And so you get into this question of what matters locally. And now obviously natural gas has a lot of issues and a huge oversimplification, because once you get into climate, there are lots of reasons to move away from that as well. But what you're getting at with a client is what environmental issues do they care about, and how do you educate them about how promo fits into that or not. Because if they care about climate change, then they might purchase a different item than if they care about water resource issues. You know, uh, Levi's is deeply invested in water issues, and thinking about how their products fit into that will probably go much farther with the Levi's than, you know, a company that's really— their goals are climate-centric.. And so it's, you know, it can be tricky. And then, you know, I think the third part, which is a real concern for the, for our community, is these are advertising mediums. So we're one, talking about how do we make sustainable products for them, but also how are our products advertising their sustainability. So, you know, if we're creating a product that screams sustainability and, you know, there's certain products that unfortunately all get designed in the same design language that we've decided is sustainable. You know, there's a, there's a certain like eco-friendly tan tote bag that screams environmentally friendly, whether that's fair or not. Like, you can have more fun with the environmental, you know, uh, design palette. But, you know, if we're using that palette to support what they're doing, and then they're also if you care about water, out lobbying against better regulations for water systems, are we helping them promote a false narrative? So you can get into kind of interesting conversations of where our role in promoting kind of corporate action is.

I want to get back to something about our role, too, in providing educational merchandise, because that's really a big part of what you do. But let's stop for a minute and just talk about narrative sustainability. What are the dangers in this? This narrative sustainability is a phrase that I first heard you talk about. What's the difference between selling to an ego versus selling— and I mean ego in a positive way too— versus the environmental benefit? One of the phrases was something like you said, just because the narrative makes you feel good doesn't mean it solves the problem.

Can you speak to that? Yeah, so, and there are two parts to this. Like, I'm not— I don't want to cast blame here because I think anybody who's undertaking an attempt to be more sustainable is trying to do the right thing in an industry really hard to do it in. But I think there's a danger when we rely on the stories of sustainability versus the metrics of sustainability, right? Can we quantify that that was successful? And if we can't, can we design it in such a way that we're comfortable saying that we're pretty sure if we could quantify it, it would be successful. And the reason I say that we can't is in some ways it's really, really difficult. And I'd say there are maybe only 5 or 10 promo companies that have the resources that if they really wanted to quantify their sustainability, they could. Because we can quantify the product easily up until the point we hand it off to a client. But that's not really the full life cycle of our product. Once we've handed a tote bag to a client, you or I or most other people in promo can't tell you how many of those tote bags got used, how many times they got used, were they actually a net positive. And the only way to do that would be a massive study of usage that followed those tote bags, you know, or a representative sample of them for some period of time and saw the actual usage rate. So it's hard to quantify the end use of our products, which makes this difficult. And I thought about this a bit because we do a lot in the energy education space or energy efficiency, and a lot of our clients have regulatory requirements to reduce energy usage. So when we make a kit, they, they've actually modeled out what they think the likely percentage of people who use our kits is, and then our clients get credit based on how many they've given out, sometimes as low as 25%, sometimes as much as 50% of the potential energy savings those kits, because they say not everyone's going to use them. And they're right, not everyone uses everything they get. So I think it's— it can be kind of difficult to figure out what the real sustainability is. And so then we fall back on telling a story, right? This person did a good thing. This person, you know, this place, their, their heart's in the right place, and that's important. But it's also dangerous with, you know, again, using tote bags or water bottles as an example. Those are both important things, but just because someone's selling them does not inherently make it sustainable. Drilling down to that next level can be important, and it's difficult because we're such a fractured community. You have all these distributors, all these suppliers, they're buying them from factories. The supply chain is very dispersed. And there are distributors who are trying to drill down through all of it and figure out how all the pieces go together. But in the absence of that, we're likely to tell the narrative. And I think the other danger of that is you get into this question of, And this is debated a lot in the climate community. What matters more, individual action or collective action?

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

Right. You know, so if I go and make my life a greener, you know, more conscientious life, that is good, right? There it is, a net positive for the world. There's nothing wrong with it. If we want to combat climate change, it's only going to happen on a global scale. And, you know, one of the big debates in the climate community is how much do we need to push back against the narrative of individual action, that, you know, recycling is an individual act, but the production of the materials that are recycled are done on a global scale, right? And are we better off using our time and resources to push back at the source at this global scale problem And as a community, we sell items of individual action. And so there is a question of where could we be part of the greenwashing of, you know, the movement, so to speak.

By the way, to clarify something too, there's a distinction in the community, and I'm saying the community in the sustainability community, between individual action, the lack of change that can actually occur versus legislation. Which is where the big heart of changes would occur.

Yeah, or big corporate changes.

I mean, yeah, could you say that we affect collective action by selling to a larger—

I could say we have the potential to. We have— I mean, if you think of us as— I don't know if we're— how many billion we are this year. This year is, you know, this year and last year, like, okay, $21 billion from 2 years ago, right? Right. Right, you can do a lot with $21 billion in spending, right? And that's what I say, because we're so fractured, like, if we look at the stuff we sell and we look at it from the perspective of what could be made better with $21 billion in purchasing power, there's a lot of change we as a community could affect, but it requires rethinking the way we interact with our buyers. And rethinking the way we interact with our distributors and almost creating partnerships. Like, I sent you an email the other day, because I became fascinated with SanMar's ReTea, right? They have this recycled cotton t-shirt. And we're both bibliophiles, we both have piles of books in our background. Cotton has a wonderful recycling history. If you go back to like the 1600s, 1700s, You'd buy your fancy clothes, and you'd wear them out. And they'd become kind of junky, so you'd wear them inside. And then they became your pajamas, and eventually they became your rags. And then someone would come around and buy your rags and turn them into cotton paper. And if you find older books, like, on cotton paper, like, cotton holds up well. They look nicer than if you bought a, like, 50-year-old book on wood pulp paper. Like, it still shines through, like, 200 years later. Which is phenomenal. But cotton t-shirt— recycled cotton apparel and bags, they're still kind of rough, right? We haven't really figured out the technology yet. And part of it is no one's really invested in it. And so what if as a community we said, look, we're going to sell 10 million a year of these, you know, because we have plenty of clients that are using t-shirts that we know are only going to be used twice, and it's okay if they're a little rougher. But we're going to commit— if they commit to improving the technology, we're going to commit to purchasing it We have the purchasing power to push whole parts of the market forward. And I'm a small distributor, I don't have the purchasing power to push any new technology creation. But if you look at one of the top 10 distributors and their client base, they really could move markets. It'd be interesting to have a sustainability program at one of those that says, look, corporate purchasing could be more than just what we buy and what it's made out of, it could be the place that we make things that then filter over to the consumer market.

Talk to me a little bit about performative sustainability.

What do you mean by that, and do you have a practical example of that? So I'm obviously a cynical human being.

But I want to actually— I want to interject, yes, but you're also incredibly optimistic too, which maybe you hate.

But go ahead. You know, we sort of talked about this a bit before. You can do sustainability because you care about it, and you do sustainability because you want credit for it. And there's nothing wrong with wanting credit for sustainability. You know, the, the old story of Priuses are always had an ugly design because people didn't want to buy a hybrid car. They wanted to buy the hybrid car that you knew was a hybrid car, right? People want Right, right, right. Eco-friendly stuff all looks a certain way. And I think the danger on the corporate side, you know, for an individual, like, look, you deserve credit if you're doing this stuff. It's hard. Yeah, right. Yeah. And most people don't really appreciate that you've done it. On a corporate level, it's more of an ethical gray area for me when a corporation's engaging in performative sustainability because You know, oftentimes they're saying, look, we'll make our promo more sustainable, we'll make these other things more sustainable, but we're not going to make our core business more sustainable. Right. That's where their real impact is. And to give the flip side of that, there's this great story of Walmart from probably 20 years ago when compact fluorescent bulbs— you know, the bulbs that, like, the spiral sort of bulbs They were really expensive when I started working on energy programs. We're talking $6, $7 a bulb, and incandescent bulbs were 50 cents, but a CFL lasted like 20 years and used a fraction of the energy. They were just better. And now they've been replaced by LEDs that are even better. And when Walmart decided that they were going to become environmentally friendly, they went to pretty much everyone under the sun and said, "How do we become environmentally friendly?" And everyone said, Oh, make your stores more efficient, put solar panels on the roof. And they did. They're maybe the top 5 solar producers in the country right now. But some professor at Brown with the Environmental Defense Fund said, you could drive down the cost of compact fluorescent bulbs single-handedly. And they did. They sold 100 million of them. And now the bulbs are like $1.25. They used their market power to fundamentally change the market for everyone. And so if we're saying, you know, if they just want to put solar on all their roofs, it would be impactful but somewhat performative. They can do it, here we have it, come for our roof.

Yeah, great point, great story.

Yeah, so it's a tricky balance though too, because, you know, as much as I critique performative sustainability, it also has an impact, right? You know, Tesla is a great example. Like, the early Teslas were really expensive. They were not cheap cars. You bought them because you wanted to show off you had a Tesla. But when Tesla was working on those early cars, there was this belief in the battery market that— and the electric vehicle market— that electric vehicles would only work when next-gen batteries came online. Tesla's basic business model was, we're not going to wait. We're going to stick laptop batteries in a car and we're going to charge a huge amount of money for it. And people who had the resources, you know, and wanted to show off that they had the resources and were eco-friendly went and bought Teslas. And if they didn't do that, everyone would still be waiting today for next-gen batteries. Yeah. But now like Ford is announcing an electric pickup. So like performance sustainability does have a value. Yeah. And it's like that, that's, you know, as I said, like there's so many gray areas in this. And the question is, where can you have an impact in your own business, in your own life, in your own, you know, spending, and how can you make that positive knowing that there are going to be pitfalls? It's not always going to work out. It's not always going to be the right decision. One of the cardboard pens now, do you remember this? Yeah, like, you know, they twist it in half like the first time, and every, like, you know, 10 years ago everybody was making them. It's like, we're no longer using plastic in pens. I'm like, they last like 10 minutes. Like, you know, I'm not for trying. They really did try. I'm sure someone had a brilliant idea there.

Well, I think there's, there's something useful for us as advertisers in performative sustainability, and I mean this in the positive side. I remember we were donating to a cause as a distributor. We were donating to a cause. It was really, really important to us, and the director asked me why we weren't advertising on our website or anywhere else that we were contributing to this incredible nonprofit. And I said, well, it's just something we do because we want to. It's not something we I really want to talk about. He said, Bobby, I'll never forget it. He said, if you don't advertise the fact that you do that, we can't attract other donors like you who will then grow our donations. And so I, I realized my, my lack of advertising or performative donations in that sense, or talking about it, really had an impact on the negative side. You sent me a link to a really interesting concept, the Higg Index Sustainability Profile.

Can you comment on that? Yeah, I think it's the Sustainable Fashion Coalition, and they're coming out— like last week they came out with a scorecard. And I don't know how widely this will be used, and they're, they're not the first to try this, but the idea is that each garment will have a score on different topics of sustainability, and they separate them out, which is kind of cool because it gets at this idea of what do you care about. And not everything you buy is going to be perfect, you know. And I think that's true of everything we do in promo. And maybe this gets— it sort of wraps up the previous ideas a bit. Nothing we buy is perfect. And as advertisers, it's kind of in our nature to say that it is, right? Right. We've solved your problem. That's what we're talking about, right? You have a problem, we're solving it. We have the perfect eco-friendly solution. And it's not. None of this is perfect from a sustainability perspective. It might be perfect for the business, But, you know, and so acknowledging that it is imperfect, but it's trying, and here's where it's trying, and here's where it succeeded, and here's where it needs to improve. I think A, calls attention to what it succeeded with and calls attention to where it's failing so they can focus on improving on that. But also, you know, it gives people more— I think having more of a gray area articulated gives people more confidence. So, you know, I think all of us have wrestled with Prop 65. You know, all of us have muttered to no end about the product that has like 0.02% of something in the tiniest part of it getting the exact same label as like a Monsanto fertilizer. You know, if you're a California consumer, You're sitting here going, okay, it will all kill me. And it's possible, it might all kill you. But if you say all of this is equally sustainable, then people become numb to it. If you say all this is equally dangerous, on the other side, people become numb to it. So I like this idea that the fashion community is getting it. And again, who knows how well it'll be adopted. The fashion, the apparel community is notoriously bad at reporting metrics involving sustainability. But, you know, if they really do get this idea of what do we care about, where are we succeeding, and where are we failing at the biggest brands, it'll start to filter down. And I think it's the same thing with, you know, what we do. We have $20 billion. If we can solve problems, it'll filter out to the rest of the community. So, you know, I think it's really cool.

You have a fascinating business. You are sort of in the business of educating folks through promotional products. If I'm— I don't want to oversimplify this, but can you share a little bit about a few stories about how you build promotional products that impact, that, you know, demonstrate well a sustainable promotion?

Yeah. So we didn't— I mean, I guess I didn't realize I was a promotional products dealer until someone told me. Um, which, you know, I think is true of a lot of us, right? You know, a lot of us in the community through kind of related industries. Um, my business falls into a category with maybe 10 other companies that have done this model where we really create educational and outreach materials that can be branded. And so everything from coloring books and tip books to actual books and promo products, right? Because they're traditional promotional products, right? Coloring books are part of the promo industry. We just make our own because we're often selling in far more specialized niches than the promotional products industry itself can support. And so when we look at a product, we're saying, how can we use that to educate people on something? You know, can it fit into their life in a way that might change the way they think about something. And that gets at the idea of the finite pool of worry, right? If people can only worry about so many things, and I'm a great example, right? I've spent 20 years working on climate change. And all I thought about this weekend was the fact that we switched health insurance and I couldn't figure out how to get my kids out-of-network doctor reimbursed on my health insurance, right? My pool of worry was overwhelmed by like health insurance. And I care about this stuff, and I focus about it, I think about it way too much, and I still haven't figured out the health insurance thing. Um, that might be my whole week. But if we can create, you know, what we really think about is how do you use promo materials to create items that will then work themselves into people's lives, and then we can get that message across to them the same, you know, over time. And so if it's a coloring book Despite having all these books behind me, I've read, you know, every Mo Willems book 20 times in the last, you know, 10 years to my little kids. You know, I read maybe one of those a month if I'm lucky. Because, you know, and I can repeat back the Mo Willems books and Goodnight Moon and the rest of them by heart, because that's just, you know, where my attention is. And I think promo has this potential to really do interesting education and outreach or to be part of that. Because, you know, for the outreach workers, you know, if they're talking to you in your day-to-day life, you might not remember what they said. And same thing as a, you know, a corporation giving a promo item. The outreach worker goes, you know, gives them that promo item, it works their way into their life. It might be that reminder, and it reminds them of one thing they need to do. And you can kind of affect change in people's life by using promotional products. And so that's really why we ended up calling ourselves a promo company, even though we didn't realize we were.

You had said something really intriguing to me that you said, with our projects, the suppliers are not the end of the conversation, but the beginning of the conversation. I think there's a really interesting insight into developing custom projects.

What did you mean by that? Yeah, so I mean, look, if I'm going to sell 200 units of something, there's not a lot of conversation that happens, right? You send in a PO with the artwork and that's it. But we're selling often the same product, sometimes with more customization, sometimes with less, to 40 or to 200 clients a year. And so what we really do is we look through what a supplier can do, what products they carry, in stock versus, you know, how much flexibility they have and say, what can we really do with their capacity? And there's some suppliers that are really wonderful production houses. And if you sit down and say, look, I, I can order 5,000 or 10,000 units up front just to test out this idea because I'm going to sell generic versions to my clients too, then a lot of them have a lot of interesting potential with the stuff they're importing that they might not have thought of. And there's some suppliers, you know, I'll call it wonderful, you know, they think about that a lot. And there are others that are a little shocked by us when we show up, but, you know, are willing to work with us anyways. And to your point, like, a lot of custom products fit into that. We just— I think we approach it slightly differently in that we go in at the start and say, you know, we're not here to buy off the shelf. If we can avoid it. You know, sometimes we do, but, you know, we're here to figure out what we can do with what you can do.

Well, I love how that builds and creates a unique experience all around. It builds and creates unique promotions. It builds and creates a unique brand and a unique distributor because you're creating things and doing things that others aren't off the shelf. And it maximizes a supplier's capabilities, which are far more and above than what we typically realize. We usually start with product first as opposed to capabilities first.

And I mean, look, it's a challenge though, right? Because I can't go in and say, I want to do something completely unique and original and I need it by next Thursday. I have to go in and say, I want to do something completely unique and original and I have a 4-month lead time and we'll figure it out. And the first set of artwork I'm going to send you, you're going to hate. And so it's a more iterative process. And a lot of suppliers are really open to that because you call up their pre-press department, you're like, I have a cool idea, and they're like, wait, you're not screaming about getting this tomorrow? I'm like, no, no, when you have free time, I know you'll have downtime. Like, I have a cool idea, I've got a big enough PO in hand that like your bosses won't get mad at you, let's do something really cool.

And I love that.

I mean, I love it when a pre-press person lights up because a lot of them are pretty sick. I mean, you have to be. It's a pretty brutal job running through that paperwork with, you know, the error rates you're allowed to have. And so coming in and saying, we're gonna have fun, that's cool.

That's cool, yeah. A few final questions. What can I as a distributor do better from a sourcing perspective?

That is a good question without necessarily a good answer.

Well, it's too broad. I know that's what, it's a good question, but it's a broad question, right?

Well, I, I mean, I think the best thing you can do as a distributor is, one, spend the time to really understand sustainability and where your clients fit into the sustainability picture, right? Because a lot of what we're doing is matching clients to product, and we're trying to get them to buy into what might be a more expensive item. And what I mean by client product is, say for example, an item's being marketed as recyclable and you think this item is actually going to be recycled. Just because it's marketed as recyclable doesn't mean it's recyclable in the place your client is, right? Their jurisdiction might not recycle that product. That product is no longer recycled. So figuring out what the, the full cycle of your products are with those key clients is a real part of it. And then I think the second one is really thinking through when putting together presentations and putting together pitches, which, you know, I think is what you've encouraged all along is the better products are the ones that people keep. And the one sort of fallacy I think that exists in this industry, and it exists in the sustainability industry as well, is that for that to occur, the products need to be more expensive. Um, and that, you know, it doesn't mean— like, the tote bag I use the most is not the, like, $40 Gemline tote bag that my wife got from the law firm. I mean, I use that to go to the pool 3 times, 4 times a year. Yeah, the product that I use the most is, from a sustainability perspective, is actually not a sustainable product. I, I use— there's a 3-step can lid that Evans makes, right? I have no clue what kind of plastic they make it out of, but you know, my dog does not eat a full can of dog food every day. And so otherwise, I would cover that with aluminum foil. Aluminum foil is a hugely, you know, resource-intensive product. I don't throw out aluminum foil anymore because I have this 3-step can, right? It preserves the food, and I don't have to think about it. You know, I spent $1.05 on it. I don't know, you know, you can, you can get products— you can think through the end uses of products, even if it's a low-cost product. So that the product gets kept.

Yeah, I love something you just said there too, getting into the fallacy that eco has to be expensive. That's something that this industry has perpetuated for a long time. Maybe that was the case when organics or things like that first came on the scene. Um, but I, I thank you for mentioning it because you're someone who, uh, and other distributors like you would be able to answer this as a fallacy. More than me, but it just seems like that's a knee-jerk reaction that we have, as opposed to really digging in what the client cares about.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I think it depends, right? And there's a value to both sides. So let's take the SIG water bottle, right? Super expensive, or Yeti, right? A Yeti water bottle or Yeti mug thing. That is, everybody aspires to that. Sometimes you'll get the cheap knockoff, right? But that'll still get you— the lower cost knockoff will still get used, might be just as good in some cases, and you can get that sustainability goal of less waste in, in the product ecosystem. But people buying that higher-end product is what drives people to, to make the less expensive version. So you need both parts. You need the people who are buying the high-end product to then drive innovation at the lower cost. So I think both exist well, but I do think, wait, to your point, and just because there's the higher end, there's the best, right? This product was made in the perfect conditions but costs like $100 a unit doesn't mean that the thing that's going for $1 a unit can't also have value, and that we shouldn't, we shouldn't let that really expensive perfect item box out the lower cost item that's going to go to more people, right? So a more marginal benefit on a lower cost item might have a larger overall benefit because more people are getting it. Yeah, you know, just, you know, the high end, it's difficult.

A couple of things I learned talking with you, and particularly, uh, from the selling perspective. I started with this difficulty of taking this big topic of sustainability and knowing that I have to spend, like you did, the past 20 years of my life investing in it before I can understand it, or I can start with what my client cares about. That's one thing that I learned from you that's a shortcut to actually helping me learn more about sustainability almost OTJ, right? It's on the job as I'm working with clients, understand what they care about, and something we've advocated for a long time anyways is research and know your client. And then number 2, the end use case. That's where GoodPromote always started. That's where GoodPromote lives is a really strong end use case. Knowing those two things, I think I can walk into this world a little better. I'm not quite overwhelmed by the murkiness.

I support that. Then I think the other part is knowing your client, but then I really do think there is a value in figuring out for each of us what matters to us. What's the reason that we're doing this? What's the reason we're going on a sustainability— I hate the word sustainability journey, but Why are we engaging in this topic? And it's different for everyone, even if there are universal themes of, you know, we care about our community, our kids. Like, there's stories of the Trump family did about everything they could to torch environmental issues, but Trump Jr. was a hunter and, you know, fought for this one wildlife preserve because he cared about that slice of wilderness. You don't have to be an environmentalist to care about sustainability. It's figuring out what you want to protect for your kids, and then how do you do that? And I think, you know, it's a complicated thing, but you can wade into it one step at a time. And that doesn't necessarily— like, sure, we're saying the high cost of it, it can be really easy to be made to feel like you're wading into it one step at a time isn't enough, right? It can very quickly feel like you're not doing enough. But the fact that if everyone in this community wades in one step at a time, we're a lot of steps farther than we were if only the people who are doing it perfectly are wading into it. Yeah, right. So like, it matters for everybody to take that step, and hopefully that will lead to the next step, and 5 years from now we're having a different conversation.

Yeah, I didn't tell you I was going to talk about this, but the book that you co-authored with some of your colleagues— tell me the name of that again.

It's Climate Change: Picturing the Science.

Okay, and you took the photographs for this, right?

I took about half of them. I collaborated with a few other friends and colleagues.

Okay, okay. You have some new things going on that we won't talk about now, but some really interesting— always interesting to talk to you, Josh. Are there any other additional resources or places you'd recommend for me to continue my education?

That's a good question. So, I mean, the places I would start are— there are a lot of groups, and each industry has one, that are tackling sustainability as an industry. And there's— they're looking at things like materials. Um, so like the Sustainable Fashion Group that I sent you the link to is a good start.

I'll put that in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of academic resources. There are a lot of academics that are looking at materials. And I'd say almost any material that we make a promo material in, there is a research paper about how it's made, how it's used, how it can be made better. And just getting a sense of what the things we sell are made of. I mean, we do that anyways, right? Because 15 years ago, I don't know if you remember the scare about lead paint and tote bags. Like, you know, they're just like, we did it for quality assurance. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say. Like, if you look at everything we did on quality assurance, that's a step towards thinking about environmental friendliness as well, right? We've already started to think about our supply chain in a more robust way as an industry. How do we then take that a step further and say, can we have greater impact with that supply chain? And, you know, the research is out there. It's really interesting. And this is definitely one of those places where, like, the internet rabbit hole is Wonderful. And there's some groups that have done great publishing. Columbia University, which I work with on and off, has a State of the Planet blog that has some bloggers writing interesting stuff. Yale also has a climate communications group that's doing interesting stuff. I don't want to just make it Ivy League schools in the Northeast, so I'll also throw out there UC Boulder. The head of their environmental sciences department is friends with multiple promo distributors. I won't call out which other ones he's friends with, but he does something like they have, uh, it's called Inside the Greenhouse. They're doing some interesting stuff. Cool. Okay. A lot of overlap between promo distributors and elite-level climate scientists that people don't think about. That's interesting. I won't call it out in public, but it's, uh, it is a small world.

Yeah. Well, Josh, I, uh, on behalf of the community, I want to say thanks. You're always sharing some fascinating insights through the community feed on Common Ski you, and I always, always, always enjoy talking to you.

This has been fun, and thank you for reaching out because, you know, it's— I don't get to have these conversations otherwise. Yeah, I appreciate that you and Mark have indulged me every time I have one of these things that I don't say on PromoWorld and write like 10 paragraphs on the comments keyboard.

Oh yeah, we nerd out on that all the time. You should see the emails flying back and forth between us. All right, Josh, thanks. I'm going to go let you put out some fires. And man, thanks for sharing your insight and your time with us. I'll put links to everything we talked about in the show notes.

Yeah, no worries.

Thanks.

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