seventh generation products

Our Liquid Laundry Detergent Ultra Concentrates reduce the use of plastic packaging and save energy.

They’ve been working on it for months, and today our internet team tells me that they’ve finally hit the button and turned on the lights in our first ever online store.

We’ve got a great bunch of exclusive kits that come in their own organic cotton Seventh Generation tote bag and are a fun way to give friends and family the gift of healthy home this holiday season. And there’s a selection of cool organic cotton tee shirts for members of the Seventh Generation nation both young and old. I say wear green, give green, and celebrate the season sanely. Because if you’ve got to shop (and don’t we all this time of year), why not shop for something that gives something back to the people you love and the planet they live on? You know… put some seriously sustainable ho-ho-ho in their newly healthy ho-ho-homes. (Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Shop away!

So it’s not just me. Seems like nearly everywhere I was looking I was seeing Seventh products. At first I thought maybe I just needed a vacation, but no… It turns out that our stuff really is appearing all over as part of that time-honored Hollywood tradition known as product placement. We’re getting so omnipresent you can even play a fun game when the Teevee ceases to adequately entertain: find the Seventh Product on the set. Double points for all non-kitchen appearances…

Elsewhere in Videoville, the Today Show put us front and center stage in a green kitchen segment with author Renee Loux, who nicely sums up all the right whys and wherefores and is apparently a big fan. (As an aside, can I just say that it was just a tad ironic to find my viewing of the video clip being sponsored by Dawn dish liquid!)

Out in Blogdom, sensors indicate that Jeffrey has popped up with a great piece on the Corporate Responsibility Officer blog about the future he sees from here.

And we got a nice shout out from the Tao of Change. Thanks for the kind words!

We got some good ink in yesterday's edition of USA Today. More to the point, we got a nice photo and the issue of unhealthy chemicals in consumer products got some much needed mainstream media coverage, which I think we can all agree is even better.

Following the paper's sound-bite tradition of never printing more in any given article than can be digested between subway stops, the article doesn't t dive into the deep end of the subject by any means, but what really matters is that USA Today gave any ink to this issue at all . They did, and that's a good thing no matter what. Even more impressive, the piece generally falls on the precautionary side of things and rather than give manufacturers a soap box to spin the damning PR their way, it instead chooses to cite independent sources like the Environmental Working Group and Consumers Union. That's a positive development. Let's hope for the sake of public health that it's the beginning and not the end of paper's coverage of the subject.

CNN visited the office a while back and spent an afternoon interviewing Jeffrey and videoing this and that around the office. The result is a snazzy little profile that can be viewed on the CNNMoney site. It’s an interesting glimpse of life in these climes. As somebody who’s been with the company since it was mail order catalog that struggled mightily to reach even bare bones survival sales of $5 million a year and quite often depended on the kindness of strangers to make it to the next quarter, it is completely utterly amazing to me to hear Jeffrey talk about seeing the the $250-500 million mark on the horizon. That’s like half a billion dollars. Holy burstin’ bankroll, Batman! That’s huge chunk of change. And I mean change as in changing minds, changing attitudes, changing ways, and changing the world. Good deal…

A couple of quick media notes to finish out the week…

Seventh Generation gets a nice plug near the end of this look at what it means to walk one’s sustainable talk from GreenBiz.com.

Jeffrey made Grist’s list of 15 Green Business Founders everyone should know about.

And our dish liquid won raves in official mom testing at Parenting magazine.

For our next trick, we will take a single small company and make it appear very nearly almost everywhere at once…

Here we are taking 2nd place in Cook’s Country magazine’s dishwashing liquid tests.

Last week, Jeffrey appeared on WOR radio’s Joan Hamburg Show in New York City. You can hear his segment here (scroll down to August 29, Hour 1).

Jeffrey is also featured on the Fast Company blog in this interview outtake from the magazine’s September cover story on Greenpeace’s Adam Werbach.

And in the strange world of product placement, ours have been getting placed on Hollywood sets left and right. You have to look closely at the background scenery, (kitchen sets are usually the places to scrutinize) and having a DVR for pausing purposes helps, but our stuff has been playing a minor supporting role on The New Adventures of Old Christine not to mention Jeanne Tripplehorn's kitchen on the HBO series Big Love, as well as the countertops of Rachael Ray and Bravo's Top Chef.

In 2001, we had a problem with our baby wipes. Or rather with the manufacturing partner who produced our formula for us. What happened next is a case study in the challenges that socially responsible businesses so often face. Literally. By that I mean that University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business Professor Mike Russo and former grad student Dan Goldstein have actually turned the story into one that just won the 2007 oikos Sustainability Case Writing Competition sponsored by the oikos Foundation at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

The case study, Seventh Generation: Balancing Customer Expectations with Supply Chain Realities, topped 22 other submitted case studies to take top honors. You can http://www.oikos-foundation.unisg.ch/homepage/Inspection_copy_RussoGolds... ">read it here.

While we were all being interviewed for the project and reliving the days back when, we took the opportunity to turn on our video cameras and make our own little mini-movie about the experience for the archives:

Click To Play

It’s an interesting parable about how difficult it can be for a small socially responsible company when the right thing and the profit thing don’t want to get along, which actually describes a fairly typical day around here. What do you do? Here’s what we did when the wipe out loomed, and while I don’t think there’s anybody here who would ever want to go through it again, I’m also sure there’s no one who isn’t thankful for the lessons learned.

When people ask me how I spend my days as a writer who largely works out of his home, my joke has always been that I really just sit around the house all day smoking cigars and watching Oprah in my boxers. So it’s more than a little ironic to have actually just finished watching Oprah (albeit fully dressed and sans cigar) as part of my official duties.

Oprah is alright in my book. She stood up to the Texas beef boys
and told them where they could put their crazy food libel laws. She’s pushed some quality literature to the masses via her book club. And she generally doesn’t shy away from the tough issues nor dumb anything down too much. I think she builds a lot of critical awareness of key issues among ordinary Americans who are often too busy to do it by themselves.

Her Earth Day edition show, which featured our products in several segments and just finished airing here in Vermont performed that service for green living. It was like one of those 50-simple-things-you-can-do books transformed into an hour TV show. Nothing too deep green, but lots of good, useful ideas along with well-stated rationales for making the suggested changes.

I was surprised by how well Oprah packed so much solid, important info into such a short time, Among the Seventh Gen-oriented highlights:

Rumor has it that Oprah will be sniffing our toilet bowl cleaner this afternoon. Wednesday, she taped an Earth Day segment that covers "green cleaning." Guided through the ins and outs of the world of non-toxic housekeeping by Simran Sethi (recently highlighted in Vanity Fair for her work with Treehugger and the Sundance Channel), Oprah saw fit to celebrate Earth Day by teaching her millions of loyal viewers that green cleaning is essential to a healthy home and a safer planet.