Jeffrey B. Swartz, the chief executive of Timberland, is frustrated.
He has seen makers of athletic shoes and outdoor wear — companies like Nike, Patagonia and certainly his own — act in concert to end child labor practices. And he has seen these companies use more organic cotton and use solar and wind energy.
But he has yet to see an industrywide effort to adopt the greenest methods for making, transporting and selling shoes. Green technologies are readily available, he says, but shoe companies have been excruciatingly slow to adopt them.
The main reason, he says he suspects, is that while most of the industry’s chiefs really do care about environmental issues, they are indulging in parallel play.
In a recent conversation, Mr. Swartz elaborated on why his industry will make environmental progress only if its chiefs agree to an industry standard for greenness and use their combined clout to get their suppliers to meet it.
Following are excerpts:
Q. Shoe companies easily collaborate on human rights issues, so why are they having such a hard time with environmental matters?
A. When you are talking about child labor laws, for example, people from the manufacturing team or from the social enterprise team take charge. And at that level there are wonderful informal networks among the companies.
It’s not Timberland and Patagonia collaborating, its Betsy from Timberland networking with Casey from Patagonia. Its activist to activist, not company to company. The companies are sponsors, but not originators of ideas.
That works for some environmental issues, too, of course. Nike developed a way to gasify waste leather for use as fuel, and someone from their team told someone from our team about it.
We’re putting gasification online at our Dominican Republic plant.
Q. Why wouldn’t that same approach work for adopting other environmentally sound practices?
A. Very few of us do our own manufacturing. Probably 90 percent of the footwear sold in America is made by the same five or six global manufacturers, who are operating out of huge manufacturing complexes that serve many clients.
We all probably use Pou Chen in China, for example. So sure, I can go to the head of Pou Chen and say, “Why don’t you try wind energy? I use it in the Dominican Republic.”
But then another customer says, “No, try solar energy.” We need to go as an industry and say, “We’ll invest with you to explore greener energy.”
And lower-level people cannot make that kind of commitment.
Q. In other words, you should band together to apply pressure on suppliers. But aren’t your customers — the retailers and the consumers — applying that kind of pressure on all of you to provide “green” shoes?
A. Not really. We ask people who just bought a pair of shoes how they made their choice, and the immediate answer is that the price was right, or they liked the look or the color.
Ask people what they know about the human rights or environmental track record of the brand they just bought, and they walk away. People buy on the basis of product attributes, not brand attributes.
Q. But why must they make that choice? Wouldn’t consumers flock to an environmentally friendly shoe that is also fashionable and inexpensive?
A. They wouldn’t avoid it. But as an industry, we position our products as more waterproof, or worn by the hottest celebrities. We haven’t positioned environmental attributes as aspirational, as qualities that will make people who buy our shoes feel good about themselves.
The result is that people may think of green shoes as things that they should buy, but not necessarily as things that they want to buy.
It’s like community service — people have come to think of that as something that judges force celebrity drunk drivers to do, not as something that people joyfully embrace. It’s all couched in terms of guilt and penalties, not in terms of aspirational activities.
Q. But how could even a coordinated collaboration of shoe industry chiefs break through such strong psychological resistance?
A. If the industry breaks through its own resistance, the consumers will follow.
We could start by developing industrywide standards. Timberland has begun putting green index tags on some of our shoes, which show how they rate in terms of their impact on the environment. We hope to eventually have tags on all of them. And we hope other shoe companies will adopt similar tags.
If we all make the tags bold and colorful, shoppers will notice them. And if they are on all the shoe boxes, it will become automatic for shoppers to compare green tags among brands, just like they compare price and color.
And then they’ll notice which boxes aren’t labeled, and they’ll ask the sales associate why not. The sales associate will tell the store’s buyer, who will call the manufacturer and ask for labeling, just like they now call and insist on colors or styles.
When that happens, we’ll all be fighting to have the best tag. No car company wants to be known for the worst gas mileage, and no shoe company will want to be known for the least environmentally friendly shoes.
Q. So why don’t you get the collaborative ball rolling, and convene a meeting of your chief executive counterparts?
A. Good question. Our competitors are so much bigger than we are, and that makes me reluctant to place the call. But maybe I really should do less lamenting that C.E.O.’s aren’t getting together, and pick up a phone. Maybe that’s the answer: I should lament less and dial more.
Source: New York Times, 9/29/07
