Ever wondered how a simple idea can turn into a roaring business with sustainability at its core? Strap in for a fascinating chat with Wylie Robinson, the founder behind Rumpl Blankets. A surf and ski trip adventure gave birth to an ingenious product – a sleeping bag blanket, and from there, Rumpl was born. Wylie walks us through the journey of creating a unique, minimalist design that sets Rumpl apart, inspired by sandstone patterns, to the values that fuel his brand, sustainability being paramount.
Delve into the complexities of obtaining a B Corp certification and the importance of supporting other sustainable businesses. Wylie enlightens us about the challenges of the certification process, the influence that brands like Patagonia had on his journey, and how a master’s student played a pivotal role in their certification process. We also talk about the hurdles and rewards of maintaining a carbon-neutral supply chain, the impact of these practices on the business, and how Rumpl successfully communicates their environmental contributions to customers.
As we venture deeper, we explore the intersection of art, environmental activism, and brand identity through Rumpl’s Art for a Cause program. Wylie talks about the criteria of artist selection and their collaboration with nonprofits for environmental causes. We also discuss the importance of setting boundaries around brand activism and maintaining a focus on issues that align with the brand’s values. We wrap up our exchange reflecting on the significance of supporting companies like Rumpl, who put sustainability first in their operations. So, tune in and let us inspire you to use your purchasing power for the greater good.
Other B Corps Mentioned in this Episode include:
Wylie Robinson:
If you care about fostering a sustainably minded business ecosystem, definitely try to prioritize supporting those businesses with your dollars.
Benn Marine:
Welcome to Impact Chats, a responsibly different podcast sharing conversations with industry leaders, leveraging business as a force for good. Welcome to the show, everybody. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Wiley Robinson, the founder of Rumpel Blankets. I don’t know about you, but I love me a cozy blanket. What’s really exciting about Rumpel is they are also a climate neutral certified B Corp and proud member of the 1% for the planet community, with a strong commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship. In my conversation with Wiley today, you’re going to hear us talk about what it means to take a stand as a business, how to set boundaries around the stances that you take and what it means to be a responsible business. So, without much further ado, let’s dive on in. Thank you so much, wiley. So excited to have you here on the show Super jazz for our conversation because I’ve been a big fan of Rumpel for a while. I have both the travel blanket, which is my favorite, because it’s nice to be able to have that on the flight and be able to just throw in a backpack and run. But I’m so curious how did you think to found something like this? I’d be so curious to hear your story with getting started.
Wylie Robinson:
Sure, I’ll tell sort of an abbreviated version of the founder’s story and we can dive into any aspect of that if we want, but try to keep this fairly quick. So in 2012, a really good buddy and I we went on a surf and ski trip down the coast of California. We were both living in San Francisco at the time and we’re both working at design agencies and we had about 10 days off kind of between Christmas and New Year’s from our agencies. So we packed up the van and headed down the coast and surfed all along the way down to about San Diego where his parents lived and we spent some holiday time there, and then the plan was to head back up to the Bay Area and head east on our way up and kind of go through the Sierra skiing on the way back. So the first half of the trip was pretty successful. We traveled down the coast, got some really good waves, and then when we headed east, we actually encountered like the coldest night on record in the Bishop Valley. Before we got to Mammoth we were parked, several miles of dirt road, no sole service, not able to walk anywhere. You know, we had to rely on the car when we woke up the next morning and the car was completely frozen, you know just nothing, when we tried to turn the key. So we basically got to wait around in our sleeping bags until somebody showed up. We actually got really lucky and there was a guy that showed up a few hours later and he was flying his drone to get some drone photography of the mountains with snow on them because this is like a really rare snow event and so he was able to head back and get us some help and get us towed out of there. But while we were waiting around for somebody to show up, we were in our sleeping bags, obviously staying warm, and we got to talking about how we prefer the feeling of our sleeping bags so much more to the blankets on our beds back home. You know, just like technical materials, we liked kind of the lightweight feeling. We liked that you didn’t have to wash your sleeping bags off, and so, in addition to just the hand feel and the tactile sensation, we thought that the materials were just so much more functional than the cotton comforters we had in our beds back home. So that’s when we came up with the idea to create this like sleeping bag blanket is what we call it at the time and we eventually got back to San Francisco, we went to a fabric store and got some, you know, off the shelf ripstop nylon and some synthetic insulation so the first ones of these up ourselves and that was basically the end of the idea. There was no real ambition to you know, commercialize this idea or start a business or anything like that. So gradually both of us would take these things off of our beds and bring them out to, you know, concerts in the park or bring to the beach before surfing in the morning or just like using outside of the house, more than we would have thought. And gradually our friends started to notice this and said hey, you know, this is a really interesting idea. You guys should start a business and that kind of put the light in our heads about maybe we could try this. But we still didn’t really want to dive all in. We didn’t know if this was like any sort of actual consumer insight or any sort of market signal or anything like that, and we decided to do a Kickstarter because that was a pretty low risk way of us testing the idea. We didn’t have to put forward a lot of money and if it didn’t go, well, you know you just bury it and don’t fulfill the Kickstarter and, you know, walk away. But that Kickstarter ended up doing about a quarter million dollars of sales in 30 days and that really told us like this is a commercially viable idea. People are interested in this. You guys have stumbled upon something, and that’s really what created the company Rumpel and what launched our first product, which is the original Puffy Blanket, which is still our number one product today, and that’s how it got going.
Benn Marine:
That’s amazing and I feel like too. From the very beginning, you’ve really built the company around these core values. I’m curious what motivated you to incorporate those into the fabric of the business.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah. So there’s a couple of different, I guess, value sets we could talk about here. There’s kind of a design and an aesthetic value set, just sort of philosophy around those things that I can speak to, and then there’s also just kind of like a responsible business sustainability focus. I imagine you’d want to talk more kind of about the latter, and actually the intent, or rather I should say the way that we produce products now is slightly differently than we did it before. You know, when we first looked at sourcing materials for the product, we looked at both the Virgin and post-consumer cycle content for the base materials and frankly did not find post-consumer versions that had the same strength ratings, that had the same hand feel and definitely not the same cost profile to the materials that we source now, which are all 100% post-consumer recycled. So we actually have migrated our material palette from a mostly Virgin palette to now an entirely post-consumer cycle palette, and the reason for that is really that the demand for these post-consumer recycled materials has gone up considerably over the last 10 years, and so now you can find parity in terms of price and strength and hand feel and all that. So we’ve evolved our material palette with the industry and done so in a way that’s moved our product into a more sustainable place.
Benn Marine:
That makes sense, I mean, and I think so. Yes, love talking about the kind of responsible business practices, but also I think that the design core principles are also important, because I think there’s also this piece of having to balance profit with purpose, like if you’re doing great work but you can’t keep the lights on at the end of the day, well, how much good can you really do, right? I mean, it reminds me a lot of the company MIR. They have an incredible give back program, and so much of what makes them unique and makes them stand out in the marketplace is they’re really clean design. So, yeah, anything you’d love to share about the core principles, as it regards to either the design and also your values as a company, I think folks would love to hear Sure, yeah. So, with regard to design.
Wylie Robinson:
We really just didn’t want to overcomplicate the product. It would be so easy for us to add snaps and clips and all sorts of bells and whistles and things into what is a very simple form factor. It’s a rectangle. We have a little cape clip piece of hardware. We can kind of make it into a cape so you can be hands-free, and then we’ve got loops on the corners so you can stake it down or connect it to other parts of your outdoor kit. But that’s it really. Of course we could add features to the product, but we really prefer sort of a simpler design aesthetic. One of our corporate values make things simple. That goes for our internal processes and goes for our style of communication with consumers and it certainly goes for our product design philosophy. And so keeping things simple, I think, is just a nice clean way to think when you’re designing a new product. We really leave a lot of the functionality and how the product is used to the consumer. We don’t want to be prescriptive about. You need to have a snap here, you need to have a button here. This is a specific way you use it. It’s a rectangular piece of fabric and can be used a bunch of different ways and, frankly, I think extra hardware and trims and things can get in the way of that. So we’ve kept things really simple. One kind of I guess ownable aesthetic touch that Rumpel does have is our stitch pattern, and we have a trademark stitch pattern, so it’s kind of that wavy stitch pattern that you see, and that was really just to kind of differentiate. When we looked around and looked at other blankets and comforters in the market at the time, it was all orthogonal diamond patterns, repeating things. There were some flowing lines, but they kind of stacked on top of each other and just repeated. And when we looked into the supply chain we realized that a lot of these things are actually created using what’s called a Robo-Building machine, which is basically a CNC sewing head that comes down and it moves all over a, you know a layup bed where you lay up the materials and sandwich them together and then the needle comes down and you can sew whatever you want into this thing. And so really the fact that there was only repeating patterns and orthogonal lines was, I think, just a byproduct of not thinking about that opportunity really creatively. So really what you can do with this machine is you could, you could sew cursive. You could sew a smiley face, you could sew whatever you want, any sort of irregular design and we just took that as an opportunity to do something interesting and we came up with this, with this great pattern that’s now become pretty iconic in the category, and that’s that’s kind of how we started from day one. So it wasn’t necessarily I mean, it was a response to what we saw out there, but it was also a leveraging of the capabilities in our in our product creation process.
Benn Marine:
That’s really cool. It’s always reminded me of, like, a topo map. Was that intentional or just kind of?
Wylie Robinson:
It’s actually it’s actually mostly inspired from sandstone patterns. When you see sandstone over time it sort of has that sinuous curving motion and it can be created via water or wind, but it’s just a naturally occurring strata of line work that occurs in sandstone objects and that you know. We found a bunch of images online and kind of look at some interesting ones and developed our own pattern that came out of that aesthetic language.
Benn Marine:
Oh, that’s so cool. It’s really cool. You’re also a certified B Corp N1% for the planet member. I’m curious, starting with the B Corp certification, how did you hear about B Corp cert and why is it something that you all maintain and feel is important? Yeah, I mean, I heard about the B Corp certification and just B Corp in general.
Wylie Robinson:
As a participant in the outdoor industry, you know I followed Patagonia, all the kind of major outdoor brands, and they spearheaded the B Corp certification in the B Lab and so I was aware of it, you know, just as a consumer, for many years. And then you know a good friend of mine runs a business called Indosoul Kyle Parsons is his name and they became B Corp certified, I don’t know, probably eight or 10 years ago when Rumpel was just getting going, and that’s when I, you know, the idea kind of popped in my head like, oh okay, this isn’t necessarily for just big brands like Patagonia, smaller brands can do this too. And I was always aware of how much work it was to do but didn’t really understand how much until we got into the certification process. We got really lucky in that we were approached by a master’s student from Western Colorado University who part of his senior thesis project was he wanted to get an outdoor brand B Corp certified and he chose Rumpel and approached us at an outdoor retailer and I said, yeah, that sounds great. So he really project managed the whole thing.
Benn Marine:
I would say to any business looking to get B Corp certified.
Wylie Robinson:
Definitely make sure that you have somebody allocated to project managing that thing, because it takes a long time and it requires a lot of work.
Benn Marine:
So somebody’s got to kind of own it.
Wylie Robinson:
But you know, now that we’re B Corp certified, it’s still a lot easier to recertify and to track and to understand where we need to improve and how to maintain that certification year over year. The hardest year for sure is that first year when you really need to get all your ducks in a row, and then why we maintain it. You know like it’s. It’s something we’re super proud of. It’s becomes a recruiting tool, becomes a marketing tool and it’s, from my perspective, the right way to conduct business and I’m really proud of it. So I don’t want to let it lapse for a bunch of reasons.
Benn Marine:
Absolutely. That’s awesome. I’m curious Was there anything that you learned through the certification that maybe you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of or that’s really kind of strengthened the business I did?
Wylie Robinson:
learn that we were kind of conducting ourselves, you know, in line with with the B Labs expectations about businesses should be conducted. We just had to document what we were doing. There were a couple of things you know that we were kind of already doing but we needed to put in writing in our, in our corporate bylaws and other things like that. But generally speaking, we really didn’t have to change how we do business a whole lot. So as far as things I learned, I learned that we built the foundation and the base of the business in a way that was aligned with what the B Lab uses best practice. So there wasn’t any like major surprises to me other than the fact we were already doing a lot of what they require. That’s awesome.
Benn Marine:
Yeah, You’re also a 1% for the planet member. I’m curious how does that commitment kind of manifest in Rumpel’s daily ops and could you highlight any partnerships that have been particularly impactful?
Wylie Robinson:
Sure. So I mean 1%, is it’s? You know you commit to contributing 1% of all revenue to environmental causes and nonprofits. And that can be done in a variety of ways. It can be done with just a straight up check where you read a check for 1% of your revenue. You can also slice that number a little bit and you know product donation to allocate part of that commitment. You can do some advertising to comprise some of that commitment. So you can. You can slice it up a little bit, but generally speaking it’s 1% of your revenue that’s going toward supporting environmental causes and nonprofits. The big partnerships that we’ve done we’ve done a bunch, but I’d say the recurring ones that we continue to contribute to each year are conservation alliance, climate neutral, which is kind of part of that, save the waves foundation, protect our winners and high fives foundation. There’s a. There’s a number of other ones that we work with, but those are kind of the big ones that we’ve done for multiple years in a row. We actually started our partnership with 1% through a partnership with Jeremy Koreski, who’s a photographer based out of British Columbia I think he’s like tofino area and we did a, we did an artist program with him. We I’m sure we’ll talk at some point about our program, but he’s this great photographer and we sourced some of his art and and put it on a blanket and told a whole marketing story around him and everything. And when we were asking him about, you know, compensation and how he wanted to be paid for use of his photography, one of the big components of that was he wanted us to join 1% and contribute part of that compensation to raincoast conservation, which I believe was the name, the nonprofit that we worked with on that product. This is back in 2016 or something, so forgive me if I forget that name, but anyway, he he, you know said that that was sort of a requirement for him. He is a 1% member as well and allocates 1% of his revenue through his photography business to environmental causes, and for the first year or two, we were just doing it on that skew and gradually. I think in 2019 is when we committed to being a full 1% for the planet brand across the board, across all skews.
Benn Marine:
That’s really cool. That’s super super cool. And also and you kind of just touched on this but you’re also carbon neutral certified. I’m so curious how, what has that process been like, and has that certification helped you optimize operations in any way?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, so so it’s actually climate neutral, but but same thing. We’re offsetting our carbon with that certification, but we are climate neutral certified, which basically means that we offset 100% of our scope one, two and three carbon each year. And this whole thing came about through a call I got from Peter Deering, the founder and CEO of Peak Design. He and Jonathan Cedar, the CEO of BioLite, are the founders of climate neutral. There may be one or two more in there. Forgive me if I’m missing those names, but I’m pretty close with Jonathan and Peter, and they reached out to a handful of brands early on I think this was 2020, that kind of were part of the freshman cohort of brands that got climate neutral certified. And they reached out to Rumpel and I just had a lot of trust and respect for both those guys and you know they. They told me they had built a way to measure and offset carbon and would Rumpel like to try to do this? And I said yes, you know, frankly, not not knowing a whole lot about what they were proposing, other than I trust them and I knew that they wouldn’t lay down really strict parameters around the business that would make it tough for us to compete or do business or retain earnings or anything, and, as it turns out, offsetting carbon is actually pretty cost effective. At least, it certainly was in 2020 when the program launched. That the cost of offsets is going up as demand is increasing, but it equates to roughly 1% of 1% of your revenue is about how much you need to spend offsetting your carbon, and that’s your scopes one, two and three, and so that’s the full emissions of your total business activities each year. So it’s actually quite cheap to do it. The way that it’s impacted how we think about managing the business is that every time we take an action, we need to pay for the offsets of that action. So if we have to air freight products because we’re late, that’s going to cost us more on the back end than if we have to Oceanship. So you actually kind of double pay for this right Like, air freighting is more expensive on the front end than ocean freight, and then on the back end you also have to pay more for the carbon offset. So there’s a real incentive to optimize your operations as much as possible. Number one, so you don’t incur that upfront cost, but number two, so you don’t get that back end cost on the carbon emissions as well, and so that happens in a variety of different places throughout the business. Definitely, the supply chain is the biggest. I mean, that’s where the majority of your scope three, that’s where all of your scope three emissions come from is the creation and transportation of your product. So really being dialed on planning, you know all your logistics contracts, your container optimization. All that stuff really helps you on the back end if you are going to be signing up for this commitment to offset all of your emissions and I imagine too, as the company has grown, you’ve got more and more people independently making decisions on sourcing or shipping all those things.
Benn Marine:
how have you been able to communicate that value set to make sure that everyone’s thinking in that same way of okay, we want to do this both cost effectively, but also carbon effectively, I guess, if that’s the right term.
Wylie Robinson:
Well, the good news is that they’re directly related. So let’s say you’re using two nodes in your supply chain, right, like a fabric mill, and then a cut-so house. That’s very, very standard for soft goods. It is both advantageous on the front end to have those two nodes close to each other so that the transport time is lower. The cost is lower to get your fabrics to your cut-so house, so you will benefit on the front end with your cost of goods. And then, similarly, you will also benefit on the back end if you have to pay for less carbon due to the transport of those goods. So it doesn’t take a whole lot of convincing or sort of like cultural shift to get people thinking in this way. If they realize that having supply chain nodes that are really disparate or far apart both cost them more on the front end and also on the back end, a good ops person is going to naturally want to reduce that impact, that cost impact. So it hasn’t taken a whole lot of convincing or training or anything like that. Once people realize what we’re signing up for, it’s in their best interest to optimize those things.
Benn Marine:
That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I’m curious speaking of that kind of environmental impact, how do you kind of track and communicate that impact out to, say, your customers?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah. So the first one is on all of our products we have a climate neutral certified badge on our packaging and we talk about this. We’ve got a little text in the packaging that explains what climate neutral certified means. It’s also kind of listed in our website. We also distribute an impact report every year and that’s more tied to our requirements as a B Corp, but in that we certainly talk about our carbon offsetting and describe it in more detail there. Overall, though it’s not like a primary consumer facing message, I would say it’s secondary. Probably. The primary message is these are the features and benefits of the product, these are the aesthetics of the product, this is the price and, by the way, this is a carbon neutral produced product. This business is a B Corp, this business is a 1% for the planet member, so we actually view the product features and benefits as primary and then the sustainability messaging, at least from a marketing lens or communication to consumers, as secondary to that. I actually think that in most consumers’ minds, having a really durable, lasting product is far more sustainable than having one that’s made out of recycled materials or the carbon is offset or whatever. They want to have something that lasts, that ultimately is more sustainable. So we kind of treat our messaging hierarchy as such and talk first and foremost about the product’s durability and its use case and then secondarily about how we try to layer in sustainability philosophies to that.
Benn Marine:
Have you gotten any feedback directly from customers where they’re like, oh wow, like I didn’t. When I learned this piece it really made me. I’m thinking, even just like reflecting on my own experience. I bought a rumple blanket a couple years back for the office because I had to buy a blanket for the office for the dogs. We wouldn’t get fur all over the office couch and I was like, well, if I’m going to be bringing a blanket into the office, I guess it would really be a B Corp blanket. And so I just went into the B Corp directory and searched blanket and you all popped up and it was the first blanket I bought and it was one of your fleece ones. I was like, oh, that’s cool. And then when it came in, on the packaging it explained that and I know I’m not going to get these numbers right, but it was something like you know, this blanket was made out of 24 plastic water bottles or something like that. And I was like, oh, that’s so cool. And then from then on I’ve been like a diehard fan, like I just thought, you know, like I didn’t buy it for that. But then when I saw that I was like, oh, cool. And I’m curious if you’ve heard other folks have similar experiences or if that’s helped with brand loyalty in any way.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, we certainly have. I mean, I think again. I think that the main motivator for someone buying our product is the functional benefit of it. You know the fact that it doesn’t, that it retells pet hair, the fact that it, you know, is stain and odor resistant, the fact that it’s packable and it’s durable and all those things. Those are sort of real primary feature set. And then it’s a really nice added benefit that it’s made with post-consumer recycled material and that the business is a B Corp and we donate a percentage of sales to causes. But you know, there certainly are also instances of consumers finding out about us through those directories, like you did. But I think that you know, if I were to weight how much of an impact that has versus just the pure feature set, it’s probably like 80 or 85% on the product features and the benefits, and then you know 10 to 15 or 20% maybe on the fact that we’re a B Corp and the fact that we’re sort of a ESG minded business. That makes sense.
Benn Marine:
Yeah, I’m curious, can you take us through kind of the life cycle of a rumple blanket, talking a little bit about the sustainability at each kind of phase? Well, first and foremost, rumble was a huge consumer of 30D recycled polyester.
Wylie Robinson:
That is the primary material that we use in most of our products. There’s a couple of products where we don’t use polyester, but in early speaking, most of our stuff is made out of 30D recycled, 100% post-consumer recycled polyester. And so whenever we’re thinking about not just a blanket but like a new product, we actually are thinking more about how we can leverage that material consumption. It’s pretty inefficient to add new materials, new ingredients, into your palette when you’re creating new products, so we always start with that base material. That’s the most consumed material we use. So from that standpoint, we’re already, you know, doing a pretty good job by leveraging material that we know is really optimized, that we know we have bulk efficiency purchasing power in that we have really reputable supply chains in, and so that, right there, I would say, is probably the biggest impact that I think about when I think of new product life cycle. Outside of that, you know, we make sure that all of our sources, all the nodes in our supply chain, meet all of our standards, and there’s a whole variety of standards that B Corp outlines. You know you need to be X amount of miles outside of conflict zones. Your workers need to be paid certain wages, there needs to be certain working conditions that all of these factories adhere to. So by simply being B Corp certified, we have to make sure it’s a non-starter if all those things aren’t met, and so we rely on a lot of third party certifications. We rely on a lot of documentation. It’s impossible for us to fly to every single one of these supply chain nodes and check everyone with our own eyes. We’d love to do that, but logistically it’s very difficult for a small company like us to do that. Additionally, we’d have to be upsetting all the carbon of all these flights and everything. But as a starting point, we make sure that everything is that status quo that we adhere to, and from there we just, you know, we develop products. We try to make them as efficient as possible, both in terms of material usage on the 30 D side, but also in terms of consumption. So the fact that we are a rectangle in most of our products, you know, like a cut to width product, we actually have really, really efficient material consumption. We have very little waste in our products because they mill the fabric to the width we specify and then they just cut it into sheets. So there’s almost no wastage in any of the blankets as they’re created. So it’s really like, from the beginning, just the pillars of how we do things are set in stone, and so it actually ends up being a pretty sustainable product from the ground up, just based on how we’ve conducted things historically.
Benn Marine:
That’s really cool. And I’m curious too, like when you’re looking for maybe a new supplier, do you send out a survey, or what is kind of the most efficient way you’ve found to kind of do that kind of first layer of vetting?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways. We’ve worked with a trading partner for much of our lifespan and they do a really good job. They understand all of our specifications and they nominate supply chains, factories and mills and things that adhere to these standards. Now we are beginning some discussions with some other factories and supply chains that will be able to service some of our future products that fall outside of what we currently make. That we think will be better suited for some of these other groups, and in doing that we just need to make sure that we do the diligence up front to ensure that they adhere to all of these standards. And usually nominations for supply chains come through kind of first or second degree connections. We’ve got a really solid vice president of operations here that knows Asian sourcing and Asian manufacturing extremely well. He’s visited hundreds of factories over there, same with our head of product. He’s spent decades overseas working with suppliers and they just know the landscape really well, so they can kind of zero in pretty quickly on who we want to be talking to and then we just find whoever is able to deliver on pricing capacity, all those other things in addition to the sustainability commitments that we require.
Benn Marine:
That’s cool, so it sounds like maybe one of the big takeaways, too, is building a good team right, building folks with that experience and that bring that to the table.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s beyond all the sustainability goals and everything that’s kind of. The key to running the business is having a good team.
Benn Marine:
Yeah, I’m curious do you have any insights there on recruitment or how you’ve been able to build such a Rockstar team?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, I mean I don’t want to create the perception that Rumpel has created this great team without a bunch of hiccups. I mean we’ve definitely had to reduce headcount, we’ve had to shift roles, we’ve had to swap people out, like it’s definitely not been this linear path to just having this great All-Star team and I’ve made tons of errors hiring for sure. So I definitely don’t want to make sure I disclaim whatever I’m about to say with that, but I would say there’s a couple factors. So, first and foremost, you want to make sure that the personality is a good fit, because your culture, if your culture gets really eroded from some bad apples or people that have some entitlement or something like that, it doesn’t matter how good the other people are on the team. They can be weighed down very easily by people that are negative contributors to the culture. So you really want to make sure that you kind of get a sense for somebody’s work style, for their determination, for how supportive they’re going to be of their other team members. That’s like paramount in number one. Number two I would say you definitely want to look at past experience, how they speak to their role, definitely check references, make sure that everything they’re claiming is legit and outside of that I would say a fairly standard recruiting exercise we go through. The most important by far in my mind is finding the right people to come on the bus that are going to work well with the people that are already on the bus.
Benn Marine:
That makes sense, that makes a ton of sense. Well, and speaking of people and cultivating community, I’m so curious. So, in fostering the kind of community engagement, what strategies do you all employ to elevate that environmental consciousness and access? And I’m especially interested in the Art for a Cause initiative that you’re setting up to launch next year, kind of building on rad, which is also very cool. So I would just be so curious to kind of dig in there and hear more about that.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, so Rumble has done two things for the last several years that I would call kind of like evergreen, always on marketing efforts. The first is what we’ve been talking about for the majority of this conversation, just our environmental and social good commitments and how we talk about those things and how we give money and we’re a B Corp certified business and climate neutral certified business. That’s kind of like one realm of our business’s personality is being a business that conducts itself responsibly and sustainably. There’s another piece that’s kind of ongoing in evergreen, which is our Rumble Artist Division, which is the RAD program. They really have lived independently. We talk about environmental causes and how we want to give back to the environment, and then we also talk about artists and their individual stories and what their art means and all that. We see an opportunity to really connect those things. We’re launching this program called Art for a Cause next year, where Art for a Cause kind of sits on top of everything. With that, we’ve leveraged artists through our RAD program to talk about environmental causes. What we’ll be doing is selecting artists that have a real point of view on sustainability or on conservation and then we’ll work with them on identifying partners, nonprofits, charities, et cetera that we flow a proceed of those sales to. It’s really putting those things together. Historically, the artists haven’t really had much of a say in where our 1% contributions go to and things like that. Building those two things together under one umbrella is the goal of the program. It may not necessarily just be products and art that we bring into Art for a Cause. It could be events, it could be galleries, it could be all these other things that are related to our community that we fostered and also getting them more involved in the contributions that come out of those sales.
Benn Marine:
That’s really cool. I’m curious if there’s an artist listening or somebody who’s like oh, I know a great artist. Can people nominate artists or how do you find or select your artists?
Wylie Robinson:
People can definitely outreach us. We have definitely established some relationships with artists through just cold outreaches. If you have great artists, that there’s a couple of things that we want to check on for an artist. Number one we’d want to have some sort of proof that they commercialize well. They sell their own merch or they’ve done partnerships with other brands that have gone well, or they just get the commercialization game. That’s a big part of it. Number two it’s really beneficial if they themselves are also selling things, because they then have an audience that is accustomed to seeing things sold by them. We always like to cross promote with the artists. It’s kind of weird if there’s an artist that really doesn’t sell things and then all of a sudden they go tell someone to buy rumble products. It seems inauthentic. We want to make sure that those things are adhered to. The third I would say is just authenticity within some sort of outdoor community. That’s really important to us as well. We like finding artists that are climbers or skiers or mountain bikers or surfers or they’re active participants in the community that we care about and the community that we serve. I would say if those three things, if an artist you’re thinking of any listeners checks those three boxes. We’d definitely be interested in hearing from them.
Benn Marine:
That’s cool, that’s good to know. That’s good to know that criteria too, speaking of some of those educational pieces around the environment and those sorts of things how have you set boundaries around brand activism, particularly concerning environmental causes, and why, in your opinion, is it beneficial for brands to engage with some current issues and maybe not others?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, this is definitely a hot topic. I’ll try to answer this from the perspective of rumble and, I guess, my perspective also. Rumble cares about environmental access and conservation. Those are the issues we get loud about, openly to our consumers, what we talk about on social media, what we talk about right now. We have positions and we posture about those things. We generally don’t touch all sorts of other partisan issues. We don’t touch a lot of gun rights, for instance. We don’t touch political issues. We don’t touch a lot of social issues that in the last few years a lot of consumers have asked brands to have a point of view on. We have our points of view internally. We talk about them as a team, as a group. That’s fine. The perspective from the brand is really one of environmental conservation, access. That’s what we focus on. It’s a tough thing to do. Everybody wants brands to comment on all of the social issues and all of the issues that are surrounding their daily feeds and surrounding society. That’s just not an area that we choose to participate in. We choose to really focus our activism, if we want to call it that, on environmental conservation and access. There can be other issues that matter for other brands. If brands want to touch all of those issues and have a point of view, that’s obviously their prerogative they can do that. I just haven’t found it to be a good practice for us to try to touch on all those things. We have lots of different consumers that have all sorts of different political affiliations, that have all sorts of beliefs. The unifying trade amongst all of them is they love the outdoors. They want the outdoors to be accessible. They want the outdoors to be protected. That’s what we care about as well. That’s what we want to talk about outwardly facing to consumers. There’s no right answer to this. That’s the line I’ve drawn with Rumpel. It also provides a lot of clarity for our marketing team. If a social issue happens, there is less questioning. Is Rumpel going to have a position about this? Are they going to say something about this? If it doesn’t fall under that umbrella of environmental conservation and access, then the answer is probably no. That’s just how we’re conducting the business. It can adapt. Of course, we can change that perspective if we wanted a later date. Given the amount of news feed every single day and the amount of things that people comment on, I think it’s been a really nice guard for us to stay focused on. What matters is this brand.
Benn Marine:
I think what’s nice about that too, is you’re able to go deeper on the issues like, obviously, environmental access and conservation that matter to the brand too, I imagine for your team and people at all levels of the company. They can understand. Oh, I’m not even going to bring this up because I know we’re not going to talk about that, but we are going to talk about this.
Wylie Robinson:
Exactly exactly. There is a divisive issue every week, it would seem. It keeps the business focused on what we say matters to us and what we think matters most to our consumers. That’s just how we’ve treated it. Again, that could change. We could definitely adjust our position on that, depending on how important these issues are to our consumers and to the brand, but for right now we’re really sticking with environmental conservation access as the topics that we do elect to weigh in on.
Benn Marine:
That makes a ton of sense. I’m curious what advice would you offer to entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs that want to kind of Eco-Innovate, if you will kind of within their own business model? How should they weigh that kind of profitability against environmental and social objectives?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah. So from my perspective, from a material side of things, you don’t actually have to compromise a lot of profitability to build your products with sustainable materials. And I’m only speaking from the soft goods side of things. Right now I don’t know a lot about hard goods and cost inputs for those. But if you’re talking about making a soft goods like a peril company or an outdoor gear company, there is a plethora of environmentally conscious materials available right now that are at the same price and testing standards as anything virgin. So I don’t think you really have to compromise. If you want to get a bunch of certifications and things like we have, there is going to be some hit to your bottom line. You can probably argue an offset on that hit with regard to the lift it gives you from a marketing and brand affinity perspective. But a lot of the certifications are. You’re writing checks to organizations. 1% for the planet that’s just 1% of our revenue that would likely otherwise fall directly to our bottom line. You could make the argument that fewer people would buy our products if we weren’t 1% and so it wouldn’t be a direct one-to-one to profit. But I think that you sort of have to bifurcate your certifications you get and your material sourcing exercises. And on the material sourcing side, I don’t think you’re going to really inhibit your ability to have a nice margin and build a really profitable business. If you think about sourcing materials sustainably as you scale and as you get bigger, you can layer in these certifications and just do the math and understand. If you want to build those into your cost model, I would argue that it’s a good thing to do just from a moral and ethical standpoint. But again, on the material side of things, you can definitely build products with sustainability at the forefront that have great margins.
Benn Marine:
I imagine too, as time goes on and there’s more and more demand for sustainable products, that there’s probably going to be more and more affordable sourcing available. Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean.
Wylie Robinson:
It’s really simple supply and demand economics right. The more brands that come to these suppliers requesting sustainable materials, the more likely these suppliers are to create those sustainable materials. The more suppliers that create sustainable materials, the more competition there is, the more price conscious they become and you actually start reducing the price of these really great sustainable materials. That allows more brands to come in and get them and allows consumer demand for those sustainable materials to be serviced. So it’s a really perfect flywheel where the more demand from consumers, the more likely suppliers are to produce those products. The more suppliers that produce those products, the further the cost reduces on them and it just feeds itself. So that would definitely be a way that anyone listening to the show here wants to have an impact. It’s like buy products from companies building them sustainably and that will fuel the sustainable economy for soft goods materials. Yeah, it’s the voting with your dollar, exactly.
Benn Marine:
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. I’m curious speaking of that and of people innovating in that space. I’m curious what innovative approaches has Rumpel uncovered in your effort to optimize efficiencies?
Wylie Robinson:
For us it’s largely on freight and sourcing. So we have a really solid operations team here at Rumpel and we put a lot of effort into optimizing our containers so that there’s really limited dead space, if any, in our containers. We do our shipments, we put a lot of effort into planning the business way ahead of where we used to be and so we don’t have to do any air freight. We can slow boat ship everything. We don’t have to pay that excess for air freight and then additionally the carbon offsets to offset that air freight. We’ve done just smaller things on the sales side, where we do a digital wholesale catalog now rather than printed catalogs, and I think the biggest one actually is probably that leveraging of that 30D PCR poly material source. The more products we make with that material, the more advantageous it becomes to us because you get economies of scale and you really start to develop a lot of efficiencies in the supply chain. Those are probably the biggest things that we’ve come up with that really help us stay ahead of that, and it’s largely on the ops and supply chain side of things, I would say.
Benn Marine:
So really planning ahead pays off in dividends, it sounds Planning ahead absolutely. Yeah, that’s awesome. Now here’s one I’m curious I’ve heard of this in a few different instances where there’s a lot of talk in the business community about having to set year over year reduction targets, that you’re always perpetually trying to reduce your carbon emissions and, logically, it would seem that at some point you’re optimized, you would get to a point where you can’t possibly optimize any further. I’m curious how do you think, as a business community, we should be talking about reduction commitments and holding businesses accountable to improving, while also supporting companies like Rumpel who, once you’ve truly optimized, need to be looking into offsetting and those pieces?
Wylie Robinson:
In my opinion, the way to do this is through offsets, not through further mandates. On supply chain optimization To your point, at some point you do get fully optimized. You have a really dialed supply chain, you’re well planned, you’re not shipping half full containers, you’re sourcing materials from sustainable sources, your supply chain is really consolidated. At some point you get to a place where the carbon units emitted per unit of product produced are pretty well optimized and from that standpoint, you can’t really reduce your carbon footprint unless your business shrinks. We all want to grow our businesses. We all want to do all that. So the only way, in my opinion, is to continue offsetting your carbon. And again, as we discussed before, if you require yourself to offset all of your carbon emissions, you will be naturally trying to reduce those emissions anyway. So you’ll be continuing to try to plan your business ahead, you’ll be continuing to try to build really efficient supply chains, you’ll be continuing to try to leverage big material efficiencies that you’re able to uncover, and so I don’t think it’s actually a real path to say you have to reduce emissions year over year.
Benn Marine:
At some point.
Wylie Robinson:
That’s just not possible, and so offsetting, paying for offsets, is the way to do it. Offsets are still relatively cheap. The more demand for offsets, probably the more expensive they will become, because there’s a limited number of avenues that people can go down to buy these offsets, and so you will run into that where the cost of offsets goes up. But I definitely think that to try to reduce emissions past a certain point, once you’re fully optimized, it’s just not possible for a lot of businesses.
Benn Marine:
And I imagine that for some businesses, I think like the rumpels, the mirrors, the Patagonias of the world y’all’s supply chains are pretty optimized, I would think, but then there are some brands that maybe aren’t as dialed in as y’all are, and so maybe they do still have that room to grow. So maybe it’s a progression. Offsets are part of the conversation the whole way through. I don’t know.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, but again, the offset fee is the mechanism that forces you to optimize the supply chain, because as the supply chain gets more optimized, your offset dollars per unit go down, and so I mean, I’m just rounding these numbers, it’s not nearly this high. But let’s say you’re paying $5 for every unit produced to offset the carbon that’s emitted through the creation of that product. The more optimized you get that supply chain, you might bring that number down to $3 or $250 or $2 eventually. But that doesn’t imply that you’re producing less goods. You’re just producing less carbon per unit of output. And that once you get to a point, once you get to a floor there let’s say $2 per unit, is it? You know you’ve got everything happening in the same factory. You literally walk the product across the street into your warehouse, you deliver it by bike to your customers. There’s like a million ways you can optimize like that. But eventually you get to a fully optimized supply chain. And then at that point, where do you go? So the pressure to continue to reduce emissions as a total company. There’s a ceiling on that, and so what you need to do is you need to, you need to incent people through reducing the amount of carbon per unit produced, but again, eventually that hits a ceiling and then you just need to continue doing business as you would and, ideally, after that you’re actually just offsetting all of your emissions per unit cost.
Benn Marine:
That makes a ton of sense. So you’re actually using offsetting as the incentive to reduce. Yes, yeah, it’s a financial incentive that makes a ton of sense.
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, yeah, which is going to go way further than anything. A financial incentive for a small business is the most powerful incentive.
Benn Marine:
Yeah, no for sure. I’m so curious how has your like, when you look back on starting Rumpel and how much Rumpel has grown and been successful up to today, how has that kind of shaped your personal outlook on business, on the environment and kind of how you can use business as a force for good or all of that?
Wylie Robinson:
Yeah, I mean I guess just like taking a step out of the outdoor industry and this sustainability discussion and everything. I wish more people tried starting businesses. It’s obviously been a huge amount of work and there have been moments of stress and anxiety around it and everything, but I really value being able to kind of control my destiny a little bit personally as a business owner, and so there’s really never been a better time to start businesses. There’s all sorts of ways to get funding to start your business, whether it’s crowd funding like we did, or just bootstrapping it and starting it really small and opening up a Etsy shop or a Shopify shop. It’s very, very cheap to do this, and I think that if more people just allocated a year or six months of their life to trying this, it would be a really interesting thing to see how big the startup ecosystem could get. I think that it obviously takes a big leap and a lot of courage to do that, but I would just encourage anybody thinking about it to just try. You’ll learn so much. So that’s kind of like a high level thought that I have about how growing rumple has affected my outlook on this. And then, with regard specifically to sustainability and conducting business responsibly, I go back to the comment I made before, which is like and this is just isolated to soft goods because, again, I don’t know a whole lot about hard goods or electronics or other consumer products you can build really nice products with really nice materials that are 100% sustainable, recycled, whatever the criteria is that you set. There’s just an abundance of materials out there to build your product out of. There’s all sorts of natural-based fibers that are coming out, there’s mushroom stuff, there’s algae. There’s all sorts of amazing material science happening right now that you can leverage in the creation of your new product, and so I would just encourage people doing it to look at those areas first, it’s going to give you a really interesting story that’s going to differentiate you, and it’s available. It’s out there. There’s hundreds of suppliers and sources for these materials, and you just need to go to one of these material fairs and you find 10, 20 of them that you might want to talk to or have prototypes developed by, and it’s very easy to get it going with that as a criteria for your material source.
Benn Marine:
Speaking. I’m just so curious, since you touched on materials and those material fairs for lack of a better term, is there material that you’ve seen that you’re like okay, that’s really cool, or something that’s really blown your mind? I mean, there’s tons.
Wylie Robinson:
So let’s just go on the mushroom and algae comment and I don’t know a lot about this, so I’m going to probably watch some of this. But I’ve seen videos of, rather than using Styrofoam to insulate things that are shipped, they actually grow like a mushroom protective layer around the product inside the shipping box and it grows. Like you know, it’s organic material and it grows in there, so you’re not stuck with a bunch of Styrofoam after you open your product and you need to dispose of the Styrofoam. You can just throw it in the backyard and it decomposes. But there’s all sorts of stuff like that. I mean there’s spider silk fibers that are used in really really strong, really really amazing fabrics. There’s fully upcycled plastic that’s used to make insulations. There’s like algae-based packaging solutions. There’s just so much out there that’s super inspiring. I have no idea how a lot of these suppliers do it, but it’s clearly been demanded by the consumer market and so they’re focusing a lot of energy on developing these materials.
Benn Marine:
That’s so cool. That’s really really cool. I’m curious any final thoughts or words of wisdom you want to leave folks with.
Wylie Robinson:
I mean, we touched on this a little bit, but and this is self-serving, I will admit, but you know we’re in a holiday season right now. People are buying a lot of things. I would say, if you care about fostering a sustainably-minded business ecosystem, brand ecosystem that makes products you love out of sustainable materials and conducts business the right way as a B Corp or otherwise, definitely try to prioritize supporting those businesses with your dollars. To the point we made before about it fueling the whole economy. Your dollars are an expression of demand through the brand to their people producing their products. If the people producing the products are getting more inquiry and more demand for those sustainable products, that they will put more energy into supplying those products. That will then bring the cost down because it creates competition and more brands are going to be able to offer sustainable solutions to their products at a better price for the consumer. So this certainly serves Rumpel. It serves a lot of other brands that conduct business this way, but you do have an impact as a consumer to foster this type of business and this behavior. And now is a good time we’re in holiday and people are buying stuff, and so I would encourage people to buy from brands that show that they’re conducting business this way.
Benn Marine:
Amazing Love that, oh my goodness. Thank you so much. Anything else you wanted to add, or anything that we didn’t touch on that you hope we would, or?
Wylie Robinson:
No, I think that’s it. You know the big thing. I guess the big takeaway other than what I just said about using your dollars to show interest and demand is definitely encourage people to try starting their own businesses. It takes courage, but it’s actually not that hard to do, at least to test something. If it doesn’t work out, you can just pack it up and go back to what you were doing six months before. So definitely take the leap and if you’re going to do it, I’m happy to talk to you about what we did to try to build some sustainability goals into the business from day one, and I think the world would be better if there was more small businesses doing cool stuff.
Benn Marine:
Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. As always, we’ve got quick links to some of the other brands that Wiley mentioned and, of course, directly to Rumble and any other resources that we mentioned in this episode, right in the show notes in your podcast player. Also, if you’re enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate us on Apple podcasts. Your support helps us grow and continue to bring you conversations that matter. We appreciate you. Until next time, be responsibly different. This content is made possible by Dear Go Collective, a media consultancy on a mission to turn consumers into activists, one purchase at a time. To learn more about Dear Go Collective, visit the link in your show notes. This episode was produced by Brittany Angelo and yours truly, ben Marine Music was licensed from B Corp Certified Marmoset Music. To access more resources, visit responsiblydifferentcom.