A good response rate to a direct mailer or business catalog is 2 or 3 percent, and that bothered Fred Meyers. There was too much waste.
“I was always really bothered by the amount of paper that we were wasting in the direct response business,” he says. “That was our entire business.”
As founder and chairman of The Queensboro Shirt Co., a North Carolina-based, custom-logo apparel company, he combines new communication like e-mail and the Internet to sell their products while cutting down paper consumption by 99 percent and using greener solutions in the textile industry.
“We recycle all of our cardboard and recycle throughout the company,” he says. “We got lights that are designed to go on and off on motion sensors so we conserve energy. These steps can help businesses turn green and also create a more environment-conscious company.”
Smart Business spoke with Meyers on how he turned his company into a more earth-friendly business.
What is the first step to take when you decide to go green?
The first thing to do is to do a process audit and eliminate any waste that is in the system. That could include paper, plastics or production material, any process that is not running efficiently. You have to go through a whole process audit and take all the waste out of your system.
From there, I would look at the supply side — what environmentally friendly options are there for printing inks, for example, or whatever paper left that you are buying — any other supplies that are in the buy process.
And the last thing is to look at how you are organized in the community, running your lights 24-7. Are people in more space than they need to be in and thus using more energy for that? Is your air conditioning running all day and all night when it doesn’t really need to be? Can people be happy and comfortable if it was four degrees warmer in the summer, then you can save on electricity by turning down the air conditioning, and things like that, which is a horrible waste of resources. It’s all about the whole process refinement and process management. It saves a lot of money when you do eliminate waste but it is an expensive process to undergo to uncover where the waste is.
How did going green affect the costs of the business?
It was more costly to go green, but in the long run it is more of an investment, an investment of the future for both the business and for the community in general. As far as products are concerned, they are organic products that we spent a lot of time and resources developing. I feel this is a responsible place to be, a good place. We feel like we need to make sure that the people understand when they come here that we are a responsible community member. That is something that you can’t take too lightly because it’s going to be about the quality of your people, employees and customers. That’s what is going to determine the success of your business.
