Greater>Than Clothing

This is the first in a series of posts on the broad topic of “sustainability”.

From the beginning, I have thought of Greater>Than as a kind of laboratory. I’m interested in different ideas about how to structure a business, but I have never been in a position to implement them myself. Further, it seems unlikely that I will ever have license to be truly radical within the context of my day job.

As in most larger companies, greater responsibility seems to coincide with increasing conservatism. I’m not sure which side is causal, but they are definitely directly correlated. So, Greater>Than is a chance for us to try things out, and while it isn’t exactly risk-free since we have invested some significant effort into the project, it isn’t the basis of our livelihoods (at least not yet).

photo credit: shearforce

One of the most buzzed-about concepts in business today is sustainability. When oil companies are making commercials touting their environmental sensitivity, I think we can safely say the concept has reached a critical mass. Consumers are leading the charge. As the general public becomes more convinced of threats such as global warning, they start looking for ways to mitigate their contribution to the problem. More and more, consumers will choose “greener” products if given an opportunity.

Many companies have responded by flooding the marketplace with products that claim to be less harmful to produce, use or dispose of than their predecessors. While greater attention on the issue is a positive development on the whole, there are to my mind at least two major flaws with these early efforts to consume more sustainably.

First, given the American tendency to use “what we buy” as a proxy for “how we live” and even “who we are”, we may have found ourselves a path to getting the small things “right” at the expense of the larger picture. There is a peculiar symbiosis between American consumers and the products that we buy that allows us to construct our public and private personas in part through the products we choose. The ramifications of this relationship are far-reaching, but it’s most germane to this topic in that it explains why adjusting our consumer choices is the most efficient way to start to feel like we’re making a difference. Buy some recycled paper towels, some natural detergent, maybe even a Prius, and you become a full-fledged eco-warrior.

You might even begin to look down on people who haven’t made the same efforts that you have (here, as in many, many other areas, South Park provides the sharpest satire, showing us that despite reducing smog the Prius leads to dangerous levels of smug). My point here is not simply to point out that some people are a bit hypocritical in their greenness (I’m not free from guilt here myself), but to suggest that real change may require asking tougher questions of ourselves than whether we are willing to switch to CF bulbs. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that a few years from now we’ll look back on our attempts to buy our way out of this mess and realize how stunningly hubristic it all was. We might even find that “sustainable consumption” is an oxymoron. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there. Let me be the second to welcome you to the new, improved Greater>Than Clothing blog, complete with actual blog posts! As Ryan mentioned previously, we are both going to be posting more frequently from now on. For me, this is partially going to be an exercise in stopping myself from over-thinking things, which does not exactly come naturally to me.

My strategy will be simple, however: I’m going to do stuff so that I have stuff to write about. The daily struggle to move this little enterprise forward an inch at a time should provide plenty of blog fodder, and I think we are finally in a place where we can really concentrate on the business. I’m pretty pumped.

So, in that vein, I have an announcement: we are temporarily suspending e-mail newsletter sign-up. I know it’s disappointing, but calm down; it’s going to be OK. At some point in the future, e-mail newsletter sign-up will be back. Every reputable e-commerce company has an e-mail marketing program, so it’s something we’ll have to do sooner or later.

For now, though, it’s coming down for two main reasons. First, honestly, I kind of jumped the gun when I put the sign-up widget on the site, seeing as how we don’t yet have any products to market. I read about this great free e-mail marketing service and I signed right up. We did not, in fact, find an occasion to send a single newsletter. Lesson learned: add features to the site only if they are likely to provide a near-ish term benefit.

Second, it has basically been all downhill for that service provider I was so excited about, Zookoda. First, they were purchased by an at-best-controversial company, IZEA (Michael Arrington is not a fan). After this TechCrunch post putting them on deadpool watch, I figured it was time to pull the plug. Lesson learned: even startups with well-reviewed, working products can turn on a dime. It’s good to have a backup plan. We got away with this one mostly due to the fact that we don’t yet rely on an e-mail program.

Which brings me to the e-mail sign-up post-mortem. I have to say, for something that I just slapped up on the site, we didn’t do too badly. Of the five people who signed up, four of them weren’t me, and one of them was someone I don’t personally know. I salute you all, but especially the unnammed t-shirt enthusiast with a hawaii.edu e-mail address. If you send me an e-mail, I’ll put you on a super-secret discount list that I just made up right now.

Some of our loyal readers have complimented our new header images. Thanks for the kind words. I’m happy with the way they look, too. The previous header came with the blog theme (which is called Freshy), and I’m glad to have put more of a personal stamp on it.

You may also have noticed that the header isn’t always the same when you visit. I got the randomization script from Photo Matt, which is the blog written by Matthew Mullenweg, who is the founding developer of Wordpress, which is the self-publishing software running this site and many thousands of others. You may have to hold shift when you hit refresh in Firefox to get a new picture to show up (Firefox caches pages). If you’re not using Firefox, you should be!

I took each of the pictures currently featured*, some of them on a recent trip to Chicago. Here’s another:

In the open spirit of this project, I’d love to put some pics from the community up there. So send in your 780 x 95px jpegs!

While I’m in the middle of this navel gazing meta-post, I’d like to give a shout-out to the creator of the forums plugin that allowed me to launch the forum feature on this site in a single day, Andy Staines. I had a slight problem with the installation, which I posted to his forum, and he figured it out for me personally. He provided amazing support for his (free!) software. Andy, you rock.

*Update: Ryan has added some of his pictures to the mix, from his trip to Hawaii. The gorgeous sunset and the sea urchin shot are his. We want you to get credit for your images if you send them in, so be sure to mark them as yours in some way before sending.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of community forums on Greater>Than Clothing!

This is another incremental step toward our goal of creating a seamless, one-stop site where members of our community can talk to us and to each other. I invite you to check them out and let us know what you think. I’m particularly interested in any comments you might have about the forum’s structure. Are there sections you’d like us to add?

Let’s see some chatter out there!

I’ve been spending a lot of space in this blog talking about theory, and while that is certainly part of the plan, another key goal is to chronicle how we get this company truly up and running. So, it’s time to check in from an operations/development perspective.

A while back, Ryan and I sat down and worked out a draft budget for phase one of the project. Essentially we were trying to figure out how much cash we would need to design, print and sell our first 300 shirts*. The good news was that we both felt the assumptions were reasonable, and having a budget made the whole enterprise seem more substantial. At our day jobs, the motivation comes from outside, but with Greater>Than we have to find ways to keep ourselves motivated. Simply having a plan goes a long way, even (maybe especially) when it illuminates the obstacles in our path. In this case, that’s exactly what it did, as we simply didn’t have the money our budget called for. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many fun things about starting your own company is that you get to make up a title for yourself. Publicly traded companies officially have to have CEOs, etc., but private companies like Greater>Than have no such constraint. The founders of Cranium Inc., for example - Richard Tait and Whit Alexander - call themselves the Grand Poo-bah and Chief Noodler, respectively.

I’ve been searching for something a little more descriptive of what I want my role in the company to be. Ideally, it should be fairly general, as I plan to have a presence in many of our operations, even long term. But, although I am and will continue to be an owner/leader, I never want to position myself as a “boss”. I’m not “bossy”.

So here’s my draft title: Chief Creativity Enabler

I like it because it clearly shows that our priority as a company is to give people an outlet to do the sort of work that they want to do. We are a platform for creative work, and my job as a leader is to make sure that the platform is as functional as possible. Of course, not all of my work is going to contribute directly to enabling the creativity of other people. I’m thinking here about development or sales activities, the more “businessy” stuff I have to do to make the company successful. I think the title covers this side of my role as well, reminding everyone (including especially myself) that building the business is necessary because it will allow us to enable more creativity, and not the other way around.

What do you think? Over-explained and hopelessly cheesy? Heavy handed compared to your more succinct idea? The perfect title for such a visionary genius? Let me know (or let me have it) in the comments.

Update: After some great discussion in the comments (thanks Sarah!), I’ve decided to revise my title. I think the revision still encompass the points above, but it adds an extra dimension. Here it is: Chief Creativity Catalyst. A catalyst assists in a chemical reaction by speeding it up or making it happen more efficiently, but the reaction can happen without it. I think that’s an apt metaphor, since one of our base assumptions is that there is a lot of latent creativity out there. We want to help people discover or re-awaken their creative sides, but the call to create is innate.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

–R. Buckminster Fuller

I came across this quote in a great article in GOOD Magazine* (which, incidentally, was founded and is published by a friend of mine from college). I thought this was relevant for Greater>Than because the article makes the point that Fuller was, above all, a designer. I love this quote because it reminds us that the “form follows function” idea doesn’t mean that we should settle for ugly, “functional” objects.

As Donald Norman argued in Emotional Design, attractive things actually work better. That book is very highly recommended, and I found that particular point both surprising and convincing. It’s not much of a slight to Norman to note that Fuller beat him to the punch by about 75 years, as most people are much farther behind.

For those of you not familiar with Fuller, here is a quick list of some of his notable achievements:

• The Geodesic dome
• The Dymaxion Car
• The concept of “Spaceship Earth“
• The Fuller Projection, a “one island in one ocean” map, which happens to be my favorite projection (I even have the poster):

Imagine living your life as an open-ended exploration for the betterment of mankind, with beauty as your compass.

*Look in the sidebar on the right for links to the rest of the Buckminster Fuller feature. The rest of the magazine is worth checking out as well. Its purpose is to chronicle and support the movement toward smart, sustainable business and life, a movement to which Greater>Than is similarly committed.

I’m an Atlantic reader and an unabashed word-nerd, so naturally one of my favorite features is the Word Fugitives column by Barbara Wallraff, (who wrote a book of the same name). Readers write in with requests for words to express particular situations or feelings, and other readers try to coin terms to fit the bill. Wallraff sifts through the results then writes her column, highlighting representative and outstanding examples. It’s fun collective nerdery and there are usually one or two gems.

In the most recent issue, answers to the following prompt are given:

“that happy feeling of kinship one feels for the driver of a car of the same make and model as one’s own”

My favorite answers included carma, carcissism, carmraderie and autobond. I told you I was a word-nerd.

Two Greater>Than-related things caught my attention while I was reading this month’s column:

I realized that Word Fugitives is just like Greater>Than

In fact, it’s an almost perfect illustration of the “curated crowdsourcing” model we use. The editor sets the rules of the game, a community member provides a prompt to focus the creativity of the group, solutions are submitted, the editor sifts through the submissions, then publishes the results back to the group. So simple!

Over time, the community becomes self-defining; the tone and quality of the output determined, is maintained and evolves over time through the collective efforts of the community. Think of an Ouija board. Nobody is “controlling” it, but everyone has a hand in determining direction. To put it another way, it is controlled by everyone and no one (no “one”).

One submission in particular blew me away Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to welcoming Ryan to the Greater>Than team, I wanted to follow up on the change in strategy he described in his intro post. My original plan was for Greater>Than to play a design consulting/curation role, working with designers to help them achieve their visions and selecting the most promising designs for production. We would then contract with another company to get our shirts made.

This had proven a bit frustrating, especially since the company I had chosen to work with was in another state, and we were conducting all of our business through e-mail. Plus, we don’t want to compromise at all on quality, and I felt like there was an element of risk involved there, since the quality of the print itself (a crucial component in overall quality) would be out of our hands.

While I was trying to force my way through the frustration, Ryan saw this problem as an opportunity, deftly demonstrating one of the key operating principles that I had set out for the company (but had failed to live up to myself): use problems to identify opportunities. This principle of ‘probletunity*’ is a reminder to bring creativity to bear on issues that hold us back, so that they can be not only overcome but transcended. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have seen, Greater>Than is growing. I wanted to check in and say how tremendously excited I am to have Ryan on board. He’s a born problem solver, the kind of guy that every growing business wants to find. As he explained, he is going to concentrate mostly on production and operations, but he also has a designer’s eye and experience with vector software (like Illustrator), which I plan to take full advantage of.

I’m also very pleased at how organic this development has been. I’ve had the privilege of working with Ryan at the day job. Our friendship led to discussions about my nascent business, and I was glad to find that Ryan thought the idea had potential. I’ve received a lot of advice and encouragement from people whom I respect (Sarah and Halli in particular), but it’s hard to describe how great it feels to be able to offload specific tasks to someone in whom I have such confidence. (I’m always looking for more collaborators. If you want to get involved, drop me a line.)

His interests and expertise are nicely complementary to mine as well. As readers of this blog may have noticed, I have a tendency to get a little carried away with theory. I like to think about principles, strategy and philosophy; the “whats” and “whys” if you will. That’s just how my mind works. Ryan is much more tactical. He likes to think about “how”. He has a natural talent for logistics, and his involvement in the project is already helping me reign myself in a bit and concentrate on getting things done. I’m looking forward to seeing how our partnership develops.

I’m on the verge of gushing here, so I’ll end it there. Welcome aboard, Ryan!