Episode 315: How to Fast-Track Your Sustainable Future With Sterling Wilson, Pop! Promos

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew. A supplier many of you love, PopPromos, removed 36,000 pounds of plastic from their supply chain. They expanded their organic, recycled, and sustainable materials, and they achieved a bronze designation from Ecovadis, the world's largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings. And the POP's promo's transformation towards sustainability and its increased effort towards social impact all began with a small group of volunteers from within the organization. Today I talk with Sterling Wilson, president of POP, about how a small voluntary group made such a huge impact, how they formed the group, what priorities they decided upon, and his tips on how you and your team can do the same. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Hey, throughout the month of May, we're hosting Commonsku University through a specialized series of webinars aimed at helping you and your team master the Commonsku platform by role. So we have a webinar custom built for managers, a webinar focused on sales and how to maximize the platform as a salesperson. We have a production webinar for production folks and even finance. Like with most productivity and tech tools you use today, you're probably only using a fraction of its power. Well, the month of May is for you to master Commonsku. So join Aaron Couturier and all the profs from the Commonsku success team. You can find the link to all of these webinars inside the Commonsku platform on the homepage.

We'll see you there.

Today's episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonsku.com. Now here's my chat with Sterling Wilson. Sterling, welcome to SkuCast.

Thanks, Bobby. Happy to be here.

Congrats on your Ecovadis Bronze, by the way, ESG. This has been something that you and your team have been working toward for a while, and we thought it would be very helpful to unpack what you went through as a brand, because I think this is a very helpful tip for folks that whether they're distributor or supplier. But let's talk a little bit before we get into it about ESG in the promo industry. Our industry has been a little slow to navigate toward ESG standards. And why do you think that is?

I'm not sure we've been slow to navigate towards ESG standards. I think if you look at the companies in our industry by revenue and size, yeah, we're not pacing behind what in other industries. We're a very entrepreneurial business. You got a lot of small firms, both in the supply supplier and the distributor side. The reality is complying with ESG documentation for third-party verification, etc., is really onerous. You often need full-time experts on staff to do it. It's not an easy thing to do. And so I think if you compare on an apples-to-apples basis based on firm size, I'm not sure we're behind. I do think there's some reputational risk to our industry about not getting on board and pushing ESG standards, particularly environmental sustainability standards, forward. But I kind of dispute the whole we're behind thing. I'm not sure it's right.

Okay. It seems as though then it's a resource allocation problem and smaller suppliers might have a harder time allocating those resources to keeping up with that. But yet client demands, regardless of whether you're a very large supplier, whether you're a small supplier, those are still climbing, it feels. How much more of this bigger customers ratcheting up requirements are coming to you than in previous years?

Yeah, it's really interesting. We started to get a ton of questions around sustainable materials, third-party verification of greenhouse gas emissions, and documentation around sustainable materials. Like, it's always been here, but I think it really started to pick up in 2018. But the ratio between people asking about it and buying it was really lopsided. We were getting a ton of inquiries and not a lot of dollars behind it, because the truth is it costs more to do some of this well.

Yeah.

And now over the last maybe 2 or 3 years, I've seen the spend starting to catch up with the— I don't want to use the word hype, but the questions and the required— the documentation requests, etc.

What are you seeing even with smaller companies? Maybe they don't have multi-page RFP requirements, but are you seeing this pressure from even smaller brands?

I mean, everyone— I think one of the challenges in this space is everyone's looking for something slightly different. We talk about corporate social responsibility And we get requests, we want something from a woman-owned brand, from a minority-owned brand, someone who's sourcing from companies owned by disadvantaged groups, companies that are 100% recycled or recyclable materials, companies that track and offset all their greenhouse gas emissions, companies that give back a pair of shoes like TOMS for everyone they sell or plant a tree. And all of those things are different. They all inherently have some social benefit, But what they are really different, and I find what people are looking, what our customers are looking for, very significantly from company to company.

But going back to another point you made though, that interesting that the spend has caught up. So in other words, the spend has actually caught up with the aspiration of what we want to do, and now they're actually putting their money where their mouth is. Some of these companies that are asking for ESG requirements, and I hear this a lot actually, don't really know what they're asking, or they have this multi-page complex documentation. There's a very unspecific ask. It's lots of of boxes to fill out and things like that. Is that— are you seeing that?

A lot of it. A lot of it. It's a mixed bag. I think we have a lot of customers who are extremely well-meaning and say like, this customer has really high standards for corporate social responsibility and wants to be a responsible buyer, or they want a product with a story that they can feel good about.

Yeah.

There is nothing wrong with that at all. I'm also seeing, I see a lot of companies, especially in the last few years, that have built large professional compliance functions, but often outsourcing them to, for example, South America is way ahead of us on this. So Santiago, Chile, Argentina, English speaking, but like people sitting on outsourced people sitting on those teams who have master's degrees in the subject, who are quite knowledgeable, but don't know that much about the actual business going on stateside.

Yeah.

And look, I've been stuck in, and I'm sure a lot of other suppliers and distributors have been stuck in this. I'll get, for example, a project that comes through one of our distributor partners from Nike and they're like, hey, can you meet the requirements in this document? And I look at the document, I'm assuming it's a page, a list of banned substances requirements. It's 100 pages long. And I'm just, and it's full of technical jargon and I'm reading it and I'm like, I just write back. I'm like, do you, can you tell me what's most important in here? And they're like, no, can you just meet the requirements? And I'm like, I have no idea. I don't know what to tell you. So it's hard. It still feels, many companies in this industry, it still feels like a peripheral kind of check the box activity and not something that's central to the brand and the operations of the business.

Yeah. Speaking of central then, one of the unique challenges I think that anyone has trying to make this a priority, whether you're a supplier or distributor, is simply allocating the time and energy to do so. But at POP, you did something pretty unique. You created a CSR committee. And when I say it's unique, unique in that you actually actioned some priorities for your company and came through, and it was a way for you to create a specialization force, if you will. When did that begin?

Yeah, so first I want to touch on the allocation of resources thing, Bobby. You may know this, but we run— Pop Promos runs on EOS, Entrepreneur's Operating System, and it really, it's a management discipline that challenges you to pick what are the 3 to 5 top priorities for your business in the coming year. And to pick them, write them down, share them with your whole company, and overtly focus on them to the exclusion of other things. And I got to tell you, sustainability and corporate social responsibility was always on the list, but it was number 6, number 8, number 7. Never made it onto that list of the most important things because we're a small business, right? We're small, we're entrepreneurial. It's, you know, take care of our customers, maintain our 99% on-time and accurate, like, shipping rate that we have a guarantee on. Make sure we have the industry's best virtuals, launch 40 products this year. It just, it never quite made the cut. And I think what you asked about is the cool thing that happened. I have a background in it. I did a master's focused on sustainable development, studied some of this in school, and especially among our young and more creative staff, there's a big push from people on our team saying, this is something I care about. I want to make recycled products. I want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. I don't like the idea of wasting plastic and being part of the problem. In the world. I want to be part of the solution. And so it was pretty cool. I remember leaving our management offsite where we came up with our 5 priorities for the year and CSR and sustainability wasn't on the list and presenting to our whole team and just asking at the end of the meeting, this issue, sustainability and how to become a better corporate citizen has been an also-ran the last 3 years in a row. And who would be interested in volunteering to try and change that? Here. And the amount of participation not only enhanced, that shot up, but subsequently, like, applications to join the committee blew me away. Wow. Yeah, very cool.

That is very cool. Can you break down, share a glimpse of how the committee functioned and, and like how often they met, what they focused on first as our priority, just so we can get an idea of what they prioritized to begin with?

Yep. I don't know about you, but sometimes if you're in a large organization and you want something to die, you form a committee and let them have meetings about it.

Right.

But this was important to me. And again, we had more applicants than we could take on. We decided we'd start with a small group. I would join.

By the way, did you decide where people would come from? Did you have some strategic allocation for that?

So I decided I would be the chairperson because I got a lot of juice in the company and can get it rolling. I'd be the chairperson. We would pick 4 people irrespective of title and department, but we want diverse voices from who In our application, we said, why— what can you bring to this group, and why do you want to be part of this? And we just assessed based on those applications. It's cool. We had a brand new person out of our marketing department who had a strong interest, who'd done something similar at a prior job. She's now the, the chair of the group, which is awesome. Yeah, we had one of our top salespeople. We had some from our shipping department who said, I am watching us throw away thousands of pounds of plastic like a month. And it disgusts me and I want to change it. It was pretty cool to hear really strong voices and opinions. So I made the decision, just 5 people, we don't want too many, and I'm going to pick the first 4 people to join. I'm going to rotate out from being the chair within 6 months and we're going to put someone else in charge and they're going to run the process going forward. We met once a month, the company buys lunch, and this group sits. The first order of business was to decide what is our mission. Do we have a mission statement? And do we— can we put some clear goals in place that are measurable? And then can we go and work on attaining those goals? So we spent 4 months just working through what's our mission, what are our goals, what do we want to achieve, what do we care about? Because it's so big. It's a huge topic.

I could see why you would have to actually create a finite statement about where you're heading because it's such a massive topic and there's just so much room for inaccuracy and misinformation and passions flaring about this and that if you don't channel that.

Yep, 100%. And it was interesting. Those conversations were wide-ranging. Are we focused on social impact globally? Are we focused in our local community here in Philadelphia? How do we think about the communities where we're manufacturing product versus where we're delivering it to? How do you weight environmental sustainability versus social causes, which are both worthy, but you can't— you have limited resources, you can't do everything. It was fun. It was difficult. Those meetings were some of the hardest ones, but our team came up with a pretty, I think, a really strong statement of what we wanted to do and then good goals behind it too.

I have two questions about that. One is, what were the initial battles won? But let me ask you this first: why was it hard? Just because there was so much to cover, and there was just— or what made it difficult?

I think, I, I think two things made it difficult. One is Everyone watching this interview right now, Bobby, and you and I have slightly— they're Venn diagrams, they overlap but they're not the same— concepts of what corporate social responsibility and sustainability means. Is it environmental? Is it cultural? Is it actual? Like, what is it? And how do you weight those things mentally? And then I think the second challenge is, even if you agree on those things, what is actionable? What can you really do? It's easy, you set huge goals and then you can't make any progress. It's a great formula to just frustrate people and go, no, where. So there was a lot of what are our actual priorities, how do those align with what we can actually move the needle on, and then try cementing it for everyone. It was— yeah, it wasn't super contentious, it just took a long time.

Yeah, yeah. What were the initial battles or sort of things that you won that, that were like some easy wins at first?

Talking about after we set our goals? Yes, yes, yeah. So the goals were pretty, pretty straightforward in the end. We decided We want to use our scale as a manufacturer and logistics company to reduce our environmental impact with a focus on plastic reduction and offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, right? We also wanted to focus on creating a, a culture of sustainability here in our office, reducing paper waste, improving recycling throughputs, changing to running our entire office on renewable power, which we are. And then lastly is give back to our local community. The whole world has people who are struggling and in need, certainly no exception in countries that we manufacture in. But here in Philadelphia, we're the poorest big city in America, and there's schools that the teachers are spending money to buy their kids notebooks and pens, and they're a mile from here. There's playgrounds that are full of trash. And so we decided we'd commit to just the area within half a mile of our office and working to clean that up and improve the lives of people live here while focusing on environmental sustainability in our whole supply chain.

Wow. Yeah, I can see why there's just so much to do. How did the committee change or grow over time as you accomplished a few of these goals? And first off, as you were, the goal set to where you're like, here are the 4 or 5 things we're going to accomplish this year. And did you set a metric for measuring that as you moved along?

Yeah. So we said we're going to eliminate 100% of the single-use plastic from our supply chain with 2021 as the base year by end of 2025.. And we're at— we've achieved about 95% of that already. Wow. So every month we're saving thousands of pounds of plastic, mostly not using single-use poly bags, switching where we do use plastic to using recycled plastic, and looking at everything, even down to like Swift Tacs where we were using them. How can we eliminate that? So that was one piece. The second piece was to grow our sustainable product offering. So made a commitment at least a quarter of the products that we launch every year as we expand will be made of organic, recycled, or otherwise sustainable materials, which has been a lot of fun. And there's been a ton of uptake in the market for which has been a good business decision. We decided to offset all of the carbon emissions for our domestic shipping when distributors ship on our account inside the United States, we're offsetting all of the CO2 released. And I told you about recyclable energy. Those are the big kind of ESG targets that we set as a business. And I'll tell you that the first— within the first year, we had hit 90-plus percent of all those targets. Wow. The last 10% is going to be devilishly hard because try getting rid of this pen is technically part of our like operations and it's plastic. I don't know if I'm going to get to 100. We're going to get to 99. I don't know if I'm going to get to 100, but, but that's been fun. And I think the momentum of the team, which was cool, I said, I want to start this. I want to get it rolling and then I want to step out of the way and that's worked. I haven't been on the committee in over a year and a half at this point and it's rocking and rolling.

Oh, that's amazing. I want to get to social impact in just a minute because you have an amazing story there in Philadelphia, but how did, did Ecovadis come into play around the same time? Was that like a ratification of the values you started? How did that come into play with this?

Yeah, it's interesting. The genesis of this was not our marketing or finance team saying we need to do this so we can tell our customers how great we are. It was truly grassroots from people in our company saying, I want to do this, I think it's important. But one of the things we all agreed on is whatever goals and objectives we set, they would be measurable. We'd issue a quarterly update, at least internally to our team, on how we did, and we would seek some sort of third-party validation for the work that we've done because at the end of the day, it's costing money and time and everything else. And if you're doing something good, you should tell people. Yeah, we set our sights on getting a third-party validation. An accreditation, which ultimately came from Ecovada. We went through that process starting around this time last year, and we got a bronze rating last September. Um, it's not an easy, it's not an easy process.

No, that's what I hear.

Yeah. It's not an easy process, but it was fun. We really enjoyed it.

You had to be so proud. Had to be so proud. How did the, since you rolled off the committee, how does the committee surprise you?

Just Two things: the continued creativity of people coming up with new ways, both on the supply chain side and the environmental sustainability side, and our local community. Yeah, we have a partnership with an organization called Street Tails.

You've never—

you've never been to our office. We have a dog-friendly office. There's puppies running around here today. They're really cute. They can be slightly distracting, but they're really cute. We partner up with a local shelter called Street Tails. We make financial donations to them. We have a line of dog products. We're constantly demoing new products with them and letting them test our new stuff before it comes out.

It's cool.

It's something that everyone loves and respects. They come in here, they meet with us, they came to our Christmas party. It's— there's this creativity and drive from this group of people because they really own it. It's not top-down. Yeah, that continues to impress.

That's cool. That's cool. Tell us about the Thanksgiving dinner that you hosted last fall, and I'm sure you're doing many more things, but that's the one thing that's really fascinating to me. Yeah.

So we've been involved in a growing way with a group called Philabundance. It's one of the largest programs to feed hungry people in our region. So all in the Philadelphia region, we started supporting them with, I think we started offering $25 for every review we got on Sage back in 2014 or something. And we do it every year leading into Thanksgiving and progressively grew the size of the the donations and tying sales competitions, which our team finds incredibly motivating to the point that I think last year and the year before we, we served Thanksgiving dinner to— I want to say it's close to 10,000 people. And look, we're in a big city, 5 million people around here, and there are a lot of people who otherwise would not have a good Thanksgiving dinner with their families. And it's exciting and it's like heartwarming to do. Yeah. And it's been very motivating for our team.

As a leader, as you've actioned this both on the sustainable side and social impact, how has this influenced the rest of the company?

Positively, right? Positively. I don't know how to say it. At the end of the day, look, we're a business. We're subject to all sorts of competitive pressures. Everyone in this industry, I think very few companies have the like booming 2023 that they wanted. I don't know. Everyone's having a different start to this year. We're all subject to profit and loss and all the challenges of running a business. But at the end of the day, if you have something that's greater than that's giving back to other people, makes you feel good. It brings a sense of purpose, even in a small way, to what you're doing every day. And if at the end of the day you leave ripples behind you, either personally or with your business, and they're positive and they help other people, it's a good thing. It makes you happy.

Yeah. We have so many customers that love you and again, the Commscue community. And, and this is a bit of a leading question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Do you find resonance with the Common Skew customers with the sort of passions that you're pursuing at POP? 100%.

Common Skew community, particularly the distributors, they all have a few things in common. It's a diverse group. They all have different businesses. They're interested in technology and leveraging good process to make their lives easier, make their businesses run better. They tend to be progressive, and I don't mean politically, but just mentally. Want to know new things. They want to learn how to improve. They tend to really skew more creative. So we have great fit generally with the Commscue community. We do a tremendous amount of business with a lot of your distributor partners, but I would say we also get a level of almost cheerleading, like people rooting us on. They're like, it feels great. It feels, it's like you're on a field and people are rooting for you. It's a really good feeling. Um, you got a great, you got a great group of distributors.

I feel that too. I feel that too. Um, so talk to us a little bit about, you, you've had a lot of experience in this and level 3 greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions are just one topic that's probably on your radar. As a distributor, what is it I should be aware of now with that conversation that's sort of entering into sort of normal nomenclature for business?

It is devilishly difficult to calculate. I would read anyone's Level 3 GHG emission calculations with a bucket of salt. It's so difficult. It really is. Yeah. This is an area that we have not successfully quantified. We, we did initial calculations. I reviewed them, I had a professional review them, and we made the decision not to submit them with our Ecovadis application. We said we don't have them because they're bunk. It's super difficult to get all of your costs upstream all the way to the facility that's making the fabric. It's so difficult. I think you should be careful with that. I think it's okay to say I don't know. It's okay to tell your customer I don't know. It's okay to take what you do know and feel comfortable and you're on good ground with and explain it clearly. But if I'm honest, it's very difficult. It's something we're going to take another pass at this year, but I honestly, I don't expect to succeed. I think it's extremely challenging to do.

I'm really glad you brought this up because you mentioned it's okay to say, I don't know the answer to this, or I don't know to your customer. Cause I'm often thinking of a distributor as a distributor who has to know multiple, so many different suppliers and products and clients in their industries. And the, I don't know, it was okay to say a whole lot better than slightly greenwashing your way into. A conversation, or it's just much better to admit that because so many people are on this journey.

Everyone in this industry in one way or another is trying to better understand what the real desires are from end users, what the requirements are to satisfy those desires, and if the suppliers that they're working with, 1, 2, 3 layers deep up the supply chain, are really meeting those. It is difficult to do well. And I'll tell you, from our standpoint, we made the decision like we don't overstep, we don't overcommit. We safety test all our products, CPSA, Prop 65. It's all on our website. You can download the original test reports. They're all there. We social audit our factories and you can request copies of those and see them. And we've gone through an Ecovadis audit so that you don't have to look at the literal 800 pages of paper we submitted. You can just look and a third party gives us a stamp and that's that. That's cool. It's tough if you try and go deeper than that. It's very difficult.

Yeah. What's on the horizon for your committee and your company now for sustainability and social impact, either or both?

I think there's a couple of different things. One is we're seeing a few distributors who are really focusing their business models on being the sustainability and CSR experts. And it's the first time I'm seeing companies successfully brand themselves that way and get real traction. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, those companies are just starting to understand. They're looking, and we've been talking quietly about our CSR efforts, but now you have an Ecovada certification. Oh, all your factories are audited. Oh, you have all of your paperwork is tight and like ready. So we're starting to see significant traction with those distributors and most importantly, the end users that are pulling that, that type of product and that type of supplier towards them. So we're on the commercial side working on that. And on the CSR committee side, we're looking at some reforestation projects to back, which I think is really interesting. Yeah. So more to come. It's in early stages and I don't want to blow up anyone's spot, but we're working on that, which is pretty cool. We are, we're starting to look at some, our first retail partnership, a made in the USA retail partnership to eliminate the international shipping side and give people more options. Made in the USA is another. Some people call that corporate social responsibility by local. I don't totally agree with that, but, but we're starting our first partnership there. And then I would say the last piece is just trying to think about how do we tell this story in a way that's helpful to our distributor partners to grow their business. And I do not know the answer. I will take any and all recommendations.

Last question for you, Sterling. You are always tackling some strange not strange, but different topic. And I'm curious what you're reading lately, what book or movie or podcast has got you thinking the most lately.

So there's a series of— I love science fiction, Bobby.

That's right.

Yep. There's a series of books called The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. He's a Chinese author who wrote a trilogy of sci-fi books. They are fantastic in and of themselves, but Netflix just came out with the first of those 3 books as a limited series, like an 8-part, 1-hour-a-piece series called Three Body Problem. And I will say, usually the movies or shows disappoint. It is— it's awesome. So if anyone doesn't have the patience to go read all those books, check it out on Netflix. It's so good. And not to spoil anything, but I will say it makes you think about the world differently. What if we are not the most powerful or dominant force in the world or in the universe, like, how would you look at the world differently? So I highly recommend it. It's great. My wife enjoyed it and she's not a sci-fi fan. I love it.

I'm going to check that out for sure. And what I think that I've always loved about science fiction, it does teach you to think critically. It is one of the most— it is the most fun and enjoyable critical thinking tools. So no surprise that you would gravitate toward that in your leisure time at all, Sterling. And thank you for joining us, my friend. This was great. Thanks. Congratulations to the team and the committee and all the work they've done. I am blown away. What I loved about this is bringing this conversation sort of to the community is because it's something you can action, something you can do. And let's end with that. So if you're talking with a distributor or supplier and they want to do the same thing, do you have some tips on how they should go about it?

Definitely. I'd say my 3 biggest learnings from organizing this committee and all the progress we've made are, number 1, the desire to make a positive change is definitely sitting inside your organization. It's probably not at the very top of your organizational chart. It's probably younger people. Great point. Further down in the org, but they grew up with this stuff. They're native to the language, etc. They're probably conscious purchasers who decide to spend more for brands that align with their values from a sustainability or ESG standpoint. So the talent you need and the drive is inside your organization. It's probably just buried a little deep. Yeah. The second thing is you have to compare yourself to yesterday and not to perfect for anyone, but especially if you're in retail or in our industry. How do I get better than yesterday? And if you just keep improving on that front— we've cut 36,000 pounds of plastic waste a year out of our supply chain. Are we perfect?

No.

I can't even calculate my level 3 greenhouse gas emissions, but I do know that 36,000 pounds of plastic weren't used last year because of choices that a group of volunteers made. And the last thing I would say is if you set out, set goals that you can measure and just report on them. Win, miss, or somewhere in between. Hit them, miss them, something in between, but set goals. Those are big takeaways. And I hope everybody gives it a swing. If you want to contact me and talk about it, we'd love to hear it, but I'm really, it's been a good experience for us. It's been a lot of fun and I'd recommend it to everyone here.

That's awesome. Thank you, Sterling. Thanks for showing up and talking with us about this today. I always enjoy my conversation with you, my friend.

Bobby, likewise, thank you for the time.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SkuCast.

Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comandsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening. Mm-hmm.