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 »

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.

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 »

Greater>Than Clothing received several highly original and inspiring “G>T’s” in rapid succession recently (that’s what I call ideas expressed in the form x>y). This blog is still young enough that I get excited about every comment I get, but these were especially fun, as they were posted by a gaggle of enthusiastic (and optimistic!) middle school students. They happen to belong to one of my mother’s classes at Gavilan View Middle School in Salinas, CA. Thanks for being such an enthusiastic Greater>Than booster, mom. The word of the day is “nepotism”, kids.

Their ideas universally display a tremendous positivity; they are child-like in the best possible sense, yet they contain a lot more wisdom than I remember having at that age (actually, I think I might still be trailing in the wisdom department). Reading them made me feel like a jaded old man. Unfettered creativity and joyous collaboration are pillars of my vision for this company, and I’m going to look back at these comments when I need to recapture that initial start-up optimism. Here they are in G>T form:

• Generosity>Competition
• Giving>Taking
• Dignity>Popularity
• Sportsmanship>Winning
• Beauty from the inside > Beauty from the outside
• Celebrating life > Mourning death
• Looking towards the future > Regretting your past

You’ll also find these on the G>T’s page, and you can see their original context in comments in these previous posts (highly recommended).

Thank you Eddie, Tan, Alex, Cecilia, Sherilyn and Ashley!

Great ideas can come from anywhere at any time. My vision is to make Greater>Than Clothing as idea-friendly an organization as possible so that we can take advantage of any and all the great ideas that come our way. Further, I hope to encourage people to send in those ideas by making interacting with Greater>Than as rewarding as possible. I’m all about giving credit where credit is due and I firmly believe that if you create ideas with value you should be able to reap tangible rewards. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. Intrigued?

Of course, it’s hard to create in a vacuum. How is one to know if his idea is a Greater>Than contender? First, I’ll say err on the side of inclusion. Greater>Than is young and still largely undefined. You can influence what it is and what it isn’t by letting me know what you think it should be. Second, I’ll be using this site to define the idea as I currently understand it and as it develops. It is in that spirit that I present an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while, an idea that I think could easily make the jump from concept to Greater>Than product:

Sparrow>Snail

I have no problem admitting that I had a Simon and Garfunkel phase. Those two guys were really on to something for a while there. Plus, Paul went on to release Graceland a decade and a half later, and that album still rules. It is, however, important for me to make it clear that my S&G phase is behind me, and I realize that I’m risking that as I admit that as I started to think about Greater>Than, the juxtaposing lines from their song “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)” inspired me:

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail.
Yes I would.
If I could,
I surely would.
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
Yes I would.
If I only could,
I surely would.

These lyrics carry an air of truth that transcends experience. This is a trivial point at first glance. Of course I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Everyone would; you don’t need to have been hit with a hammer to come to that conclusion. But the song isn’t about choosing up sides, it’s about wishing you were what you aren’t. It’s the snail who’s singing, and we’ve all been there before. Read the rest of this entry »

(Part 1) (Part 2)

As I continued to explore what Greater>Than meant to me, I realized that it could be an encapsulation not only of the product, but of the entire project. The name and symbol began to represent an ethos, a set of principles to anchor the development of the organization.

Greater>Than, to me, is both aspirational and inspirational*. It’s a statement of appreciation, a way to highlight that which is excellent. Therefore, the company must seek excellence in its operations as well as its products. This will require diligent, conscious effort, as every choice will either bring the company closer to this ideal or move it farther from it. Inevitably, mistakes will be made, but hopefully the symbol will act as a compass, a constant reminder of the correct direction. Read the rest of this entry »