Keynotes

Ray Anderson, Interface
Ray Anderson may well be the most visionary figure in American business today. As chairman of the textile manufacturer Interface, he has transformed the company he founded 33 years ago into the world's first industrial firm devoted to sustainability. By this, Anderson doesn't mean conservation or being more careful about pollution. He means sustainability in the strictest sense: "Taking nothing from the earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere."

Local visionary leaders will share how they have creatively engaged their companies with Sustainability and Innovation. Bill Scott of Flexcar, Jason Graham-Nye of gDiapers, Ian Yolles from Nau, Brian Rohter of New Seasons Market and Kierstin De West of Conscientious Innovation will discuss the results of their efforts to bring into balance the need for business growth and the need for reducing or eliminating environmental effects in both their business practices as well as products.

 

FlexCar
Bill Scott, General Manager, Portland, OR
Flexcar founded the US car-sharing industry and now operates car-sharing programs for tens of thousand members in nine metropolitan areas, covering 40 cities in eight states and the District of Columbia. By the hour or by the day, members can reserve and drive any of these cars whenever and wherever they need to, without filling out complicated paperwork or paying for insurance, gas or repairs. Their low-emission, fuel-efficient fleet includes sedans, utility vehicles, pickups, minivans, AWDs and sporty cars such as MINI Coopers, Miatas and Scion tCs. About 30% of the fleet is hybrid electric.

Bill joined Flexcar in 2002, after serving as director of the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department for more than a decade. While there, the organization helped attract the industrial investments that have transformed Oregon into a major high technology center, as well as assisted Oregon's rural communities rebuild their economies following large declines in forest products employment. Bill is a graduate of Princeton University and Cornell Law School and is active in many civic organizations in Portland.

gDiapers
Jason Graham-Nye, Co-founder & CEO
For the last 40 years there have been but two choices in diapers. Cloth or disposable. That’s it. Now gDiapers offers a third option. Flushable. gDiapers flushables are designed using the Cradle to Cradle design principles of Bill McDonough. That means everything that goes into one of the diaper flushables is re-absorbed back into the eco-system in a neutral or beneficial way, which means that waste is turned into a resource. gDiapers have no elemental chlorine, no perfumes, no smell, no garbage and no guilt. In fact, flushables are so gentle on the Earth you can even garden compost the wet ones in one compost cycle, approximately 50 to 150 days.

The product was developed and initially sold in Australia. Jason and his wife, Kim, stumbled across the product at a baby expo when they were new parents. They loved the product so much as customers, that they bought the rights to manufacture and market the product worldwide, moved to the US, raised money and launched gDiapers in November 2005. For it’s international launch, they selected Portland as their home base.

Every day in the US, 50 million diapers go into landfill where they stay for up to 500 years. That is 20 billion diapers per year. Given that they are an oil-based product (plastic is derived from oil and all diapers are plastic) and that diapers are the third biggest consumer product in landfills but are used by just 5% of the population. gDiapers has kept 2 million diapers out of landfill to date and feel that that metric is as important as revenue.

New Seasons
Brian Rohter, CEO
As described in the New York Times, New Seasons is differentiated from its competitors by both it the emphasis on local products and its extraordinary commitment to customer service. According to industry analysts, "The New Seasons model is a brilliant concept because it brings back the days of food co-ops, the feeling of being closer to nature, to the food supply, to the neighborhood. What they are saying is, we are your store and we want to build a relationship with you. That lack of relationship has been the downfall of supermarkets. National and semi-national chains are yesterday's news. There is no question people are willing to spend more on local just as they are on organic. New Seasons's decisions about what it will and will not sell are based on a balance of its owners' standards and what its shoppers want. It does not sell cigarettes or farmed salmon, because, Mr. Rohter said, ‘some things are so obviously wrong.’”

New Seasons buys locally so that its customers can buy local, keeping more of the money that Portland spends as a community, right here at home. New Seasons buy from farmers, ranchers, creamery co-ops, fishers and crabbers who are real Oregonians and Washingtonians, local artisan cheese makers, Willamette Valley vintners, Central Oregon brewers, Portland coffee roasters, neighborhood artists who handcraft soaps, candles, pottery and greeting cards.

New Seasons Market donates 10 percent of its after-tax profits to nonprofit organizations in the Portland area with the greatest attention is given to organizations dedicated to feeding the hungry, educating our youth and improving our environment

Brian Rohter is a co-founder and the CEO of New Seasons Market. He has operated retail food markets in Eugene, Oregon and Maui, Hawaii, has owned a farm raising organic produce and natural beef, has been a mechanic, logger and heavy equipment operator. Mr. Rohter's community involvement includes volunteer driving for Meals on Wheels. He has also acted as the co-chair of the Portland/Multnomah Food Policy Council, has served as a board member for Loaves and Fishes and on the advisory committee for the Portland Public Market. He lives in Mount Tabor with his wife, Eileen Brady. They are the parents of four children.

Nau
Ian Yolles, VP of Marketing
Ian Yolles has extensive executive-level leadership experience and has managed brand building and marketing activities in some of the world’s most influential consumer product companies. He has direct experience building and stewarding highly successful and profitable brands that have defined and differentiated themselves based on their strong sense of social and environmental purpose.

In his current role as VP of Marketing for Nau, Ian manages the full spectrum of communications that define the Nau brand. He works to establish awareness of the values of Nau and through these values is building the deep and lasting relationships with customers that will be at the core of Nau’s success. By employing the range of marketing opportunities presented by Nau—storefronts, catalogs, Website, advertising, PR, promotions, CRM strategies, partnerships with beneficiary organizations, and third party reports— Ian will bring the story of Nau’s new way of doing business to customers in a compelling and powerful way.

Ian was the Director of Social Inventions and member of the executive leadership team for The Body Shop, where he was responsible for brand strategy and the development, promotion and application of company values, policies and procedures on environmental protection, social issues, animal protection, and public information. He has also been the Director of Marketing and member of the executive leadership team at Patagonia, where he merged his passion for the outdoors with his interest in environmental and social responsibility in business. In 1997, he became the Director of Brand Marketing at Nike where he provided strategic direction, leadership, inspiration and management in the creation and implementation of integrated marketing strategies. He worked across all marketing functions, and led the integration of marketing concepts across all business units of Nike. As part of his brand building responsibilities, he managed a $25 million quarterly brand development budget.

Panel moderator:

Ci (Conscientious Innovation)
Kierstin De West, Founding Principal/Strategist
Ci is a strategic and creative marketing & innovation consultancy with expertise on the relationship between consumers, brands and sustainability. Ci helps Integrity Brands® grow without losing credibility and mainstream brands and their marketing agencies understand, respond to and capitalize on the shift to sustainability.

Ci brings its expertise to local, national and international clients and brands including GVRD (Greater Vancouver Regional District), Novex Courier, Edible Planet Foods, Happy Planet Foods, VanCity Savings Credit Union, Nike, Publicis, Ethical Funds, SEE (Sweatshop Equity Enterprises), GSD&M, Wal-mart, Canwest, World Changing, Lighthouse-the Sustainable Building Centre and Egg for Portfolio 21.

Kierstin is the key strategic mind at Ci and has been developing brand and creative strategies based on consumer, cultural and marketplace insight for the last 10 years. She is an expert in the relationship between consumers, brands and sustainability. She has worked as a Brand Planner at a number of high profile advertising agencies including DDB, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners and Mad Dogs and Englishmen helping build brands such as Hershey Foods, Unilever and Allied Domecq. Kierstin has worked on the client side of the business at About.com and helped lead the successful repositioning of the company to prepare it for acquisition by Primedia. Her work has taken her to NYC, San Francisco and now Vancouver.

With a keen interest in culture, consumers and their marketplace, Kierstin saw early on in 2000 that all indicators were pointing to a significant cultural shift – where consumers were making lifestyle and purchasing decisions based on a set of predefined values: integrity and social responsibility.

Kierstin is the author of Ci’s SHIFT Report, the first of its kind and most comprehensive study of the shift to sustainability occurring in the marketplace, in particular consumer perceptions, attitudes and behavior around social responsibility and sustainability and the impact this is having on lifestyles choices, brand relationships and purchase decisions.