Timberland
Timberland, the outdoor footwear and clothing company, is a pioneer in the industry's sustainability arena. As Jeff Swartz, the company's highly successful CEO, puts it: "How could we be the voice of the authentic outdoors and the despoiler of the same?" This view has filtered throughout the organisation, leading to innovative changes to the way Timberland does business, and leading the way with increasing pressure on the rest of the industry to follow suit.
In 2006 Timberland unveiled its 'nutritional label' which now adorns each shoebox, with information on the product's environmental and community impacts. The company modelled the idea on food labels, with the aim of informing consumers both about the product they are purchasing and about Timberland's brand values "in a very transparent and direct way". The label specifies where in the world the shoe was manufactured and two measures of environmental impact - the energy used in production and the proportion of renewable energy the company uses - and three of community impact - the number of hours Timberland employees spend in community service, the percentage of its factories "assessed against a code of conduct," and the child labour employed in making the shoe.
In 2007, Timberland added to this with its 'Green Index', a product-specific measure of environmental impact. With a scale from 0 to 10, the index aims to allow comparison between products, taking into account the journey from raw materials to finished goods. The lower the score, the smaller the environmental impact associated with creating that product, with the index based on measures of greenhouse gas emissions, chemicals and solvents used in production and the use of organic, renewable or recycled materials in the product. Currently the Green Index™ rating is carried on select lines of Timberland footwear, with the goal of all shoe lines by 2010.
Timberland's public commitment to environmental responsibilities prompts action across its operations, from using water-based rather than solvent-based glues, to using recycled materials in shoes and clothes, to generating its own electricity - with a windfarm near its Dominican Republic factory and its California distribution hub run on solar energy from one of the largest privately-installed solar arrays in the world. In March 2009 Timberland announced a deal with Green Rubber, a company that can convert used car tyres back into useable rubber. Two new shoes with soles made from the recycled rubber are set to hit the market in the autumn.
The diverse sustainability activities are reaping recognition across their breadth. Timberland's Green IndexTM was the Backpacker Magazines' Editors' 2007 Choice Green Award winner; the Earthkeepers advertising campaign won the first MediaWeek Carbon Neutral Campaign Eco-Award - in recognition of airtime carbon dioxide emissions offset with windpower and billboard adverts recycled into reusable tote bags; and the company gained the top Sustainability Reporting Award in 2008 from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), one of four winners in its annual international competition.
If consumers are to be swayed into making consistent purchasing decisions on the basis of sustainability, Timberland is placing itself well to take advantage of the change, and raising the bar for its competitors in the process. It's a smart tactic - by bringing the issue into the limelight Timberland also, of course, helps to make that swing in consumer priorities more and more likely - and less and less distant.
