Healthy Company

We have always offered far more than our impressive suite of household and personal care products to our consumers. We are also a trusted source of information for increasing numbers of people on issues such as healthy lifestyles, green cleaning, sustainability and corporate responsibility. While we provide rich content on our website, our reader-driven forums have stimulated the liveliest exchanges of ideas within our growing online community. Hundreds have posted suggestions on our research and development forum page, for example, to share new product ideas. Our website discussions are resonating with more and more people interested in living sustainably. Our Nation members increased 55% to almost 400,000 participants while our “likes” on Facebook more than quadrupled to 143,000 and our Twitter followers grew 83% to over 23,700 in 2010.

The explosion in social media allows us to dramatically increase our reach and channel our creativity. When we wanted to explain the improvements we made to our diapers, for example, we provided samples to bloggers and also communicated the changes through newsletters to Amazon subscribers, through multiple Facebook postings, on our website, and through newsletters to our community. Constant communication through multiple means is now standard business procedure for us — strengthening our relationship with our consumers and reinforcing our company’s commitment to transparency.

The four examples below illustrate the variety and depth of the educational videos and blog postings related to green cleaning and healthy products on our website.

• One of our educational campaigns focuses on optical brighteners — explaining what they are and why Seventh Generation doesn’t use them. Research Chemist Cara Bondi explains the facts in this video.

• To help reduce the energy associated with home use of our products, we encourage “green laundry” practices here.

• We encouraged women to think about the ingredients in their tampons through this short video.

• The women from WAGES demonstrated their cleaning tips in this series of videos.

• Give us your feedback. We continue our emphasis on engagement here in this 2010 sustainability report by asking you for your feedback. What are we doing right? Where could we improve? What could we explain better? What ideas do you have for us? We would like to hear from you!