The medic dispatched to the summit of the mountain at Winter Park, Colorado’s ski resort was asking me some simple questions about my creeping symptoms of altitude sickness when I realized what was about to happen. I stood up, speed walked in one direction, changed directions, speed walked to a trash can and puked about three meals worth of freneticism that felt like my body explaining to me I no longer had control.
The medic made an executive decision, pressing a button and speaking into a radio strapped to her shoulder. “We need oxygen, and I don’t think he should take the gondola down. Let’s drive him down.”
We were 11,700 above sea level. That being said, I wasn’t scaling a mountain and decamping in a makeshift tent. This interaction took place in a restaurant at the summit of a swanky resort. I was there with a group of almost 40, everyone else more or less fine, save a light headache from the altitude. I’m 37 years old and consider myself in decent shape. There wasn’t a lot of room for feeling anything but nausea and a vice grip-like migraine as I was driven down the mountain in the backseat of a glorified four-wheeler holding an oxygen mask to my face, but I managed to set aside some space to feel pure embarrassment.
It might be difficult to internalize as you read this with the normal pep in your step, perhaps significantly closer to sea level, but it’s something of a reminder of the sheer power of nature. After recovering and rejoining the group, I tried to recover from the shame, trying to solve for what I could have done wrong to have led to such a reaction. Eventually, someone whose hobbies are made up of outdoor activities told me, “The explanation is that you were 12,000 feet high.”
It’s really that simple. The conditions of the natural world are what they are. They’re the reason we can breathe, eat, drink… you know, do the things we require to stay alive. You can experiment with bending those conditions, but when they don’t meet you halfway, it’s not personal. And when you find out what it feels like when nature doesn’t give – or worse yet, when it bends and whips back – you understand what not having control feels like.
I should clarify who I left atop that mountain. It was a group of leaders in the branded merchandise industry who had come together to discuss how they could create plans to actively help this industry have a tangible impact in the fight against climate change. Literally the industry’s biggest suppliers and distributors were represented as well as firms of varying sizes with sustainability leaders who knew that their ideas could no longer be siloed for progress to make its next steps. These were people who had been in the trenches fighting to make this industry more sustainable for quite some time. I was supposed to be up there with them, but the work was happening regardless.
One year earlier, when my wife was eight months pregnant with our first child, I realized I couldn’t shake the recent urge to be more heavily involved in sustainability work. I’d like to think I’m capable of caring about more than what directly affects my family, but that incoming feeling of responsibility when you’re about to be a parent is accompanied by a reckoning with your own shortsightedness. You’ve always managed to address what’s in your peripheral view, but you won’t be able to protect your child from what’s outside your grasp. I’ve always said I care about the planet, but I want my son to inherit one that can give as much to him as it did to me and his grandparents, and I want to look him in the eyes and know I did more than say I cared.
I told PPAI I wanted something to change. If sustainability is a pillar of the Association’s goals, I want to be on the front lines. If it isn’t part of my job description, I will make it part of how I describe my job.
I scheduled weekly meetings with Elizabeth Wimbush, CAS, PPAI’s director of sustainability and responsibility. Soon enough, I was PPAI’s liaison to the Sustainability Action Group. I tried to learn as much as I could, drinking from the firehose at times. I tried to help, when I could. It wasn’t entirely clear if this was to PPAI’s benefit or the planet’s benefit or my benefit. I was most productive when I didn’t think about it.
This culminated in a way with that week in Colorado, which began with PPAI’s Responsibility Summit and followed with the Proof Over Promises conference in Winter Park that same week. It was an immersion of people I had interviewed, heard from and learned about over the past year.
Rebels And Realities
A week away from your family. A week away falling behind on your normal job. Attending both these conferences requires a commitment to the cause of sustainability that goes well beyond hoping for the best. Around these rooms were people who united themselves around that commitment. They had shared many other rooms with many other people with very different goals, and this is where they wanted to be. A CEO from Europe walked with me to breakfast. Employees of two different billion-dollar companies chatted over coffee. A founder who had mostly retired but knew their company’s reputation was still tied to them was mostly offering perspective and hoping to learn.
At dinner, an executive of a large company who had seen the firm grow from 10 employees was telling me and another attendee about the transition of ownership to private equity. When asked how the private equity partners likely feel about this person attending these conferences, they replied, “Oh, I’m sure they don’t know I’m here.”
I began to take note that these people, as different as they all were from each other, were all rebels in their own ways. Some say it takes a certain type of fool to think you can make a difference. But it takes principles, courage, backbone and the facts to back yourself up to put business decisions in line with responsible actions.
Don’t Miss A Thing: Subscribe To PPAI Newslink
What they all have on their side is hyper-competence and those cherished facts to back everything up.
- Young buyers are two times more likely to name environmental sustainability as a top priority, and 67% of buyers on deals over $1 million are now millennials or Gen Z.
- The “young buyers” we talked about who care about the environment are no longer the future. They are the present. They don’t just care. They want data.
I won’t use this moment of fact discussion to list some of the most harrowing and, frankly, depressing statistics when it comes to our environment. You can be assured I have them on hand. Instead, what I’ll say is this: PPAI and most of its members are on a mission to make branded merch a household term, as easily as identifiable as digital or print advertising. I have no doubt in the collective leadership’s ability to meet that goal. But there’s a domino effect to everything.
More awareness means a microscope. If you never have to explain your industry to anyone ever again, then you may have to start explaining what happens to all the stuff it creates a little more often. For the past year, I’ve thought about that goal of increased visibility for branded merch and considered it a race. If everyone knows about the industry, then I need everyone in the industry to know their options when it comes to sustainability, and I need more people to be aware of all the good work that people are already doing in this industry when it comes to sustainability. Education so more can participate. Awareness so those who are already doing it can be empowered. That’s how I play my part.
So, how do you play your part?
For many of you, the answer is you start. And you have no idea how much of a difference that can make. Start by examining processes and seeing how sustainable practices fit in. Tara Milburn, CEO of Ethical Swag, tells a story of a woman who always cuts the ham in half before cooking it before a big dinner. Her husband would always ask her why and she would always claim that was the way her mother did it. Finally, he asked why again and so she called up her mother who responded, “Because my oven couldn’t fit the whole ham.”
The lesson is that doing things the way they’ve always done is an arbitrary line of thinking. You can motivate a business to change through sustainable actions and watch them prosper through the efficiency that sparks. Countless businesses have seen that proven true by incorporating solar power.
Visiting PPAI’s Sustainability homepage is also a great starting point. Among many of its resources are case studies (put together by me, by the way) of tools that firms have taken for smart sustainability steps.
You’ll often hear the term “Progress over perfection.” It’s ultimately an attempt at avoiding despair. What I try to do is look back at something accomplished in a certain amount of time and try to imagine where things would stand without that accomplishment. It could always be worse without the work we have put in.
I’ll be honest, as someone whose full-time job is not in sustainability, I question the difference I personally make. I talk to people like Emily Gigot of SanMar; Laura Smith, CAS of Storm Creek; Nick McCulloch of PCNA; Andrew Kelly of Overture; Denise Taschereau of Fairware and so many more in this industry and I generally feel inadequate.
But at a certain point, I accepted what doing my part could look like. Anyone with any passing interest in sustainability in branded merch knows Elizabeth Wimbush and the great work she does. This industry’s strides would not be where they are without her, and it’s a heavy responsibility to carry. I reasoned that any amount I could take off her plate might keep burnout at a healthy distance from her mind or any project I could get across the finish line might inspire her to come up with new projects. That might be a small thing, but you never know how big the repercussions are when it comes to this industry’s potential to make an impact.
If you care about something, you should care about outcomes more than your role in that thing. And if you know somebody worth betting on, you should enable them. Helping Liz every chance I got was how I could tell my son I tried to keep this planet safe for him.
Below are three sustainability projects I have worked on in the past year. This is far from an exhaustive list, but just a few things you could read now to either learn or get inspired:
^The final installment of a six-part series detailing a year-long sustainability study commissioned by PPAI.
^An industry first collaboration between ASI and PPAI, this report was co-written by me and ASI’s Theresa Hegel. Collaboration, from data sharing to brainstorming and resource suggestions, will be the key to further progress in sustainability in this industry.
A note I wrote hangs in our kitchen. It reads:
Our Family Will Try Its Best To:
-Reuse, repair, recycle, share and borrow.
-Waste less food and use leftovers.
-Collect friends and experiences, not data or storage on our phones.
-Demand that businesses respect people and the planet.
