Toronto’s First Eco Manufacturer – A really Love-ly Canadian!

This morning, I attended a Green Enterprise Toronto sponsored event high atop the 35th floor of the Toronto Board of Trade and Investment. As I grabbed a cup of cinnamon spiced tea to take the chill of the 7:30 am start I glanced down to the streets below and beheld a labyrinth in the heart of Toronto. I have never seen it at street level and made a mental note to locate it and walk it one day soon...

The labyrinth serves as a good visual metaphor for where we are historically with respect to green investing, eco-manufacturing and local trade. Are we lost in a maze or are we about to find the centre filled with LOVE and peace? All of these topics and more were touched upon by Bernie Ross, the founder and CEO of F.T. Ross in his talk to an audience of about 25 member’s of Toronto’s Green Business Community.
Bernie was introduced as one of the “faces of Ontario’s New Economy” -and this time we ain’t talking technology... we is talking green. F.T. Ross is a 3rd Generation, family owned, Canadian Natural Cleaning products business started in 1928. It was in the 1960’s that they began to focus on making environmental products. The birth of the brand began when Bernie’s father decided to make cleaning products that would help his wife’s allergies. Nature Clean is a brand build on LOVE! Naturally, this meant eliminating chemicals as much as possible. Not until Bernie took over in 1985 and made improvements to product formulation did sales become significant. First, however he had to do research on various ingredients. He worked on formulations while living in a shared house with fellow college students. Almost daily he would “borrowed” his roommates state of the art blender and make up new mixes and then have, whoever happened to be in the show that morning, “test” them.
http://www.naturecleanliving.com
For the past five years Nature Clean has experienced 20% + growth. This is consistent with the findings of the Deloitte/GMA Survey of Green Shoppers in 09. They cite 28% of green purchases being in the green cleaning/household category.
http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/US_CP_GMADeloitteGreenShopperStudy_2009.pdf

F.T Ross has expanded their product offering to a line of glues and adhesives called Weld bond. They also have an impressive partnership with the Smithsonian for a line of products to care for all the historic wood artefacts and interior décor housed in their museums. Glad to hear that Washington’s museum is being well taken care of! Consumers will be glad to know that a line of Hardwood and Laminate floor Cleaners will be out soon… gotta tell my friends in the flooring industry about this..
What is the key business success lesson that Bernie learnt over these past twenty+ years? Remain in a state of constant innovation. FYI they have 35 new products this year, could be 50 by year end! Wow that’s a lot of blending… One new product is a natural Calcium Lime and Rust Remover! Awesome, now I can finally get rid of that one last toxic product in my home. I just used the last of a bottle a few days ago and felt so BAD. I have this super cool quantum spa device that requires cleaning every 6 months or it goes on the blink. My investment of 5K can now be cleaned with Nature Clean’s CLR! The Q2 God will thank you, Bernie; my energy field will be so much cleaner now thanks to you!
The key problem in the retail market right now is Packaging, says Bernie. The target is to reduce plastic by 80%. The F.T. Ross strategy is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and then Rejoice that consumers can now refill by buying “three in a box”. According to Bernie it has never been a focus on the environment per say, that created their success it was instead, a dedication to health and well being. I gotta agree - being a long time advocate of Health is the Greatest Wealth. LOHAS knows this too! Bernie, are you attending the LOHOS forum in Boulder June 17th to 19th? www.lohas.com Life Styles of HEALTH and Sustainability is where is at, people. These are the folks that masterminded the green revolution for they know, in the course of healing ourselves we heal the planet. We are not separate. The Earth and I are one, we share one mind and it is called the NOOSPHERE.
Bernie says that the “tipping point” for his business came from the release of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Overnight sales went from flat to massive. He closed by saying that as a result of the recession we will buy more hand crafted local products and finally make the connection between local products and jobs. All F.T. Ross products are manufactured locally. “Think Global, live Local”. McLuhan and his cohorts at the University of Toronto coach house will be proud to know that will soon come to pass.

A Different Voice in the Toy Store!

I have been busy doing research and organizing info on new eco manufacturers I am introducing to the Ontario marketplace. I apologize for not keeping you up to date, dear blog reader but I am swimming in a sea of new info on all the various products belonging to the 15 eco manufacturers I represent. Working hard to get it all organized. I started making calls to local Retailers to get feedback for the products I am offering and the state of the green consumer goods market in Ontario.

So far the response overall has been positive, a bit cool though in the eco toy category. The economy is being cited as the number one reason for retailers not wanting to look at my new products. While I know this is the dominate discussion in the media I am always surprised to hear it from green retailers. I expected that they would want to take a look at new product samples regardless. The way I see it, in a recession, retailers are having, to borrow a technology term, lots of “downtime” anyhow. A great time to find new potential suppliers and plan new marketing strategies. Green and alternative has never been in vogue – green business has never been booming. The good news is that green shopping has reached a “tipping point” and is now considered a rapidly growing market. That means that “mainstream” is just around the corner, folks...

My June copy of Harvard Business Review arrived yesterday. I flipped thru it looking for something relevant to my present challenge and found the section called “Different Voice”. This month it is focused on Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse, of Berkeley, California. Her style of cooking became known as California Cuisine. HBR writes “Waters went on to launch a socio-political movement based on her ideas of food and community. These days, her support of organic practices and her close relationship with area farmers and other suppliers has put her in synch with the business world’s focus on sustainability.”

Hear, hear, this sounds great. We are making progress, folks. Finally focus on the second part of the LOHAS equation has arrived I think to myself while reading the article. Then HBR drops the “recession”” mindset bomb stating “Even so, her critics wonder whether her expectations for consumers and for the food industry as a whole are realistic, given the state of the economy.”

Huh? Since when has alternative green organic practices not been met with opposition, resistance, mockery and criticism? Certainly not in “modern” America! It has been 59 years since Micho Kushi the “father” of natural foods and Macrobiotics arrived in America. "Whole foods, such as brown rice, are central to a macrobiotic diet, and many of the first customers and owners of the alternative food stores were students of macrobiotics. In the 20th century, influential teachers emerged, such as the Kushis (who immigrated to the United States from Japan after World War II) distilling wide-ranging ideas on health and interpreting them for modern, urban, and industrialized life."

As I see it struggle is the nature of green alternative practices, what difference does a recession make? Of course Canada took a hit in the US meltdown but today's financial reports say that only one Canadian bank posted a loss in the first quarter of 2009. If you know your LOHAS profile, the demographics of the “evergreen” consumer is such that they have been focused on health and sustainability for a few decades or more. That is what green is all about. They have already visualized the future. It is lean and it is green. You buy only the essentials, buy the best quality you can afford and then maintain it. It makes no difference if it is food or consumer goods, recession or no recession, one lives a lifestyle of health and sustainability regardless. The first part of the lifestyle choice, health products and organic foods currently makes up 33% of the entire green market. Sustainable products and services can be broken down into many different verticals, each with much smaller market shares. Eco-Apparel, for instance, is only 3% of the current green market. I wonder what % is for green educational toys?

On Tuesday evening, Dr. Lovelock delivered to a Toronto audience a synopsis of his latest book. He is the man who is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism.
According to Dr. Lovelock in his latest book "The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can" – any hope of reversing the trend of global warming has long passed and we should now focus on figuring out how some portion of the human race can survive what lies ahead. He figures we have till 2100 which gives us 91 years and makes it even more imperative that we focus on teaching our kids as much as we can about health and survival. Don't panic, go Organic!

IDBIDS are so Cradle to Cradle!

Reviewing the eco design bible, "Cradle ToCradle", I came across a few lines which sum up the importance of ECO Design in creating a new way of thinking about the environment. William McDonough and Micheal Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle write:

"We imagined a world that made children the standard for safety. What about designs that, as Bill put it, "loved all children, of all species...for all time?"

IDBIDS are eco, creative and imaginative. They return us to a spiritual and imaginative way of looking at the world. The planned obsolesence of Mass Manufacturing was a paradigm shift, which was, at first resisted not just because of the technology, but because of the "loss of spiritual and imaginative life".

"Artists and aethetics like John Ruskin and William Morris feared for a civilization whose aesthetic sensibility and physical structures where being reshaped by materialistic designs."

"One might say that the Titanic was not only a product of the Industrial Revolution but remains an apt metaphor for the industrial infrastructure that it created. Like that famous ship, this infastructure is powered by brutish and artifical sources of energy that are environmentally depleting. It pours waste into water and smoke into the sky. It attempts to work by its own rules, which are contrary to those of nature. "

As an Artist I can say that the appeal of IDBIDS to the imagination is HUGE! I read the last two sentences and I see the IDBIDS world. Waste pours into Waverly's water systems and smoke into Scout's bright blue sky. We live in a closed artifical system that works "by its own rules, rules which are contrary to those of Nature". I see LOLA's World.

In the book of IDBIDS: "Iddy Biddy Steps for a Greener World" they declare: "We're here to talk about what lies ahead - not tell some fairy tale from the past"

IBIDS are not human Fairy Tale Characters,...they are the elements which we have ignored for over a hundred years. Now our children can think about them and imagine a better future. The figures have been removed from the fairy tale scene and the ground is revealed. Kids will soon discover that the ground is alive.

In the IDBIDS field book it is written:

iddy biddy step #3
I looked down at the ground today and discovered a whole new environment. "Lots of different plants and animals live on our Earth, so taking care of it is good for all of them too".

Big Love for little IDBIDS!

From the moment I first saw the IDBIDS I recongnized them as classics! It was Love at First Sight!

Why? My Imagination caught fire! Having studied classical Animation for over 20 years I know something about character design. Simple is the best approach for a character, as hand drawn, each must be moved thru space, frame by frame, line by line.

It was the simplicity of the design combined with the depth of the concept which captured my attention.

The IDBIDS are not human characters they are elemental: one a cloud, one a drop of water and one a flower. Allow me to sing praises to each one of my new best friends.

WAVERLY, is my favorite. He is a drop of water. I LOVE Water Energy! Waverly is a single drop of water. What is a single drop of water worth when shipwrecked in ocean of blue? As an Ancient Marinier once said "Water, Water, everywhere and not a drop to drink" How about in a burning hot dessert? Or a country where water does not flow from the tap, an urban dessert, devoid of one of earth's most precious resources. Suddently one drop of pure sweet water is worth a million bucks. I learnt the value of water while trekking thru North Thailand back in 2001, where we "westerners" were told to drink only what we needed to quench the feeling of thirst and no more. My friend just returned from a trip to Africa and she was on about Water right away. The lack of it! She told me how she drank a full bottle on the plane back and it was like Heaven.

I say, Heaven indeed, Water is what we are made of! It is the most abundant element in the human body. The brain is 95% water. Water energy is the key to health and well being on this earthly plane. Years ago, I rep'ed the medical device of an Australian genius, Terry Skrinjar, who invented a personal spa device based on quantum physics and water energy: The Q2 Water Energy System. Terry told us, at a lecture in Phenoix Arizona, that as far as he was concerned the entire periodic table could be reduced to one element and that is H2O. Water. Waverly is brilliant, cool and clean.

SCOUT is a cloud. Where would I be without clouds? Growing up in Alberta, where the great blue wide open sky was so often filled with tall white clouds was a window into another reality. McLuhan said that the great sky over the landscape of Alberta give him a sense of scale. For me it was the clouds in that sky that taught me to dream big and imagine never ending change. Ever changing forms, that is what clouds are. I used to lie in fields of tall grasses and watch the clouds above me meta-morph and shape shift endlessly. To this day I build castles in the air. Each one sits upon a tall white cloud. Scout is soft, sweet and inspirational!

Last but not least is LOLA! Lovely Lola, female energy most powerful. The third musketeer, if you will. Lola is the Flower of Life. She reminds me of the story of Buddha and the flower.

"The Buddha stood beside a lake on Mount Grdhakuta and prepared to give a sermon to his disciples who were gathering there to hear him speak. As the Holy One waited for his students to settle down, he noticed a golden lotus blooming in the muddy water nearby. He pulled the plant out of the water- flower, long stem, and root. Then he held it up high for all his students to see. For a long time he stood there, saying nothing, just holding up the lotus and looking into the blank faces of his audience.

Suddenly his disciple, Mahakashyapa, smiled. He understood!

What did Mahakashyapa understand? Everybody wants to know. For centuries everybody's been asking, "What message did the Buddha give to Mahakashyapa?" Some people say that the root, stem, and flower represented the Three Worlds: underworld, earth, and sky, and that the Buddha was saying that he could hold all existence in the palm of his hand. Maybe.

Some people say he was reversing the Great Mantra, "Mani Padme hum" The Jewel is in the Lotus. When the Buddha held the flower in his hand, the Lotus was in the Jewel."

http://zbohy.zatma.org/Dharma/zbohy/Literature/xybook/flower1.html

I am thrilled to be representing such high products quality both in design and manufacturing! Ontario here we come! www.idbids.com

The Urge to Consumer Terrorizes You

Watching the "Story of Stuff" and all I can think of is a piece of graffiti that I saw on a wall in Vancouver almost two decades ago. I was attending art school and one day say the scrawl that made me do a double take WHAT, I thought, is this all about?

The story of stuff is an excellent overview, which combines animation and a video speaker Annie who gives us a "visual explanation" of what "planned obsolesence has done to our earth and society.(Google "story of stuff, as this link html is not working...) Our DESIGNED obsession with STUFF has turned us into terrorists quite literally and poisioned the breast milk of women world wide.

It is a bitter pill to swallow but at least with the crash of the American Economy based on excessive consumption we can pull back for a minute, re think what we consume and become more conscious about how it gets to us and what we buy it for!

Dawing of a New Day in the mind of an Evergreen

This is my first post so I will introduce myself briefly. I am the Ontario Representative for Eco-Alberta Sales Agency.
I am pleased to be representing a growing number of ECO manufacturers in the Ontario Marketplace.

Born and raised in Alberta- land of beef and oil, who would think that I would end up working for an Alberta company after I defected some twenty years ago by first moving to Vancouver B.C. to study art & macrobiotics and then to Toronto, ON to live the life of culture & technology. After spending ten years in Ontario trying endlessly to do something lean, green and meaningful with respect to sales and marketing this is first BIG Green opportunity that I have encountered and it came right out of the blue skies of Alberta....

Growing up Alberta we used to joke that it "was the land of the blue eyed Sheikhs". There was nothing green about it except, of course the oil and cattle money and the stunning landscape covered with evergreens trees of pine and spruce. Considering that an Alberta winter can be 6-8 months long, in retrospect, those evergreens were a potent symbol of the tenacity and sustainability of green.

Now the long winter of selling and marketing products that I were often hard to justify has come to an end! Finally a "green to the core" sales and marketing consultant like myself has a great wealth of sustainable products to represent. In accordance with the laws of natural time, the American collapse of the lifestyle of over consumption creates a big opportunty for eco manufacturers - "the upside of down". As people slow down and re-think the choices they made that lead them to their own personal financial meltdowns or those of our cousins south of the border we now see the end of a lifestyle of "rich and famous" there will be a void to be filled: one for sustainable products and services. It has been a long time coming but the "tipping point", I believe, will be reached in 2009 and it will usher in an end to planned obsolesence in mass manufacturing which has been around since 1920. After almost one hundred years of "junk" in every way shape and form we can finally look foward to coming in from the cold to a home filled with sustainable products and feeling of goodness!

I would like to thank Rob, founder of Eco Alberta, for this opportunity to represent a growing list of fabulous Eco Manufacturers ranging from Apparel and Fashion, Giftware and Toys, to various Home items. With one foot planted in Alberta and the other in Ontario I stand for the evergreens and I look foward to introducing new eco manufacturers to the Ontario Marketplace!