7 posts tagged “csr”

[Cross-posted from Lucire] By Lucire’s editor-at-large and Planet Green host Summer Rayne Oakes, Style, Naturally is an eco-conscious guide to fashion and beauty, with responsible brands and tips for living sustainably. It’s the most comprehensive and accessible book on the topic—we had a sneak preview a few months ago. Out now; for more information, surf to Summer Rayne’s site at www.summerrayneoakes.com. Retail in the US is US$24·95—you can buy now via Amazon.com for a lower price of $18·96.

For a moment I thought this was a real billboard saying someone was missing (see the bad typography), since it was the only one I saw. Turns out now it’s for a TV show.

   OK, this was clever (and we do have a lot of clever ads) and I am very glad TVNZ is at least promoting one of its own shows strongly—but is it also irresponsible? By the way, I do not recall what the show is named.

What do you tell a Lucire team member who claims to be addicted to chocolate? You tell her that almost all the chocolate sold in New Zealand has some slave labour component to it and let her conscience stop her from consuming, otherwise she effectively supports slavery. Amazing what you learn when you are on the Brands with a Conscience 2008 committee.

I was honoured to be interviewed by Uduak Oduok, lawyer, fashion model and journalist, for Ladybrille. Lucire readers may remember Uduak as the writer of a piece in an earlier issue on a fashion show in Nigeria, and I was honoured to be her subject this time.
   Years ago, I was inspired by Simon Anholt’s Brand New Justice, a book that emphasized that brands, not monetary hand-outs, help poorer nations out of their predicaments and allow them to raise their incomes. Simon’s viewpoints have held firm and many from his research found their way into the Medinge Group’s first co-authored book, Beyond Branding.
   By this time, I was heavily in to branding and CSR, and I attempted to set up a forum that would connect first-world advisers with entrepreneurs in less wealthy nations. Sadly, we never got proper first-world support—not enough people willing to give their time—and I admit it was one of the things we didn’t look after properly while we had some difficult staffers at Lucire creating internal problems.
   It was very much the third world’s loss as we had a few entrepreneurs sign up. But I have always taken the opportunities to extend some of those early-2000s ideas and appearing on the Ladybrille blog–zine was an ideal way to help specifically African businesspeople involved in this rather crazy fashion world. I hope I have contributed to helping them with my interview answers.
   Most importantly, the Ladybrille site attempts to do what I could not do with my forum: provide intelligence for entrepreneurs so they can raise their businesses and communities toward greater incomes, addressing this planet’s rich–poor gap. It is a noble goal that Uduak has set herself—and she has the courage and passion to succeed.
   The interview was done piecemeal since I could not spare a solid time period to answer Uduak’s questions, so please excuse any changes in expression or style. The URL is ladybrille.blogspot.com/2007/09/lucire-magazines-jack-yan-offers-tips.html.

Anita Roddick was an inspirational lady. Here are some quotations from her last interview in The Daily Telegraph.

On the US wealth divide
It’s a society that is absolutely separate, it’s a gated community living next door to a society that is impoverished, a gated community living next to ghetto—you see that all the time and it will happen here—the two poles of our society.
   Everything is here for the wealthy. You can hide your money away in tax havens, you can find ways of making more money.

The global credit crunch in the US
It's like that fresh flesh: I want it now, you know I can’t work for it, I can’t be an apprentice, I can’t look up to it. And people are living longer. The elderly don’t want kids in their home. Everybody’s staying at home and there’s not a work ethic that I’m seeing. There’s got to be more creative ways of finding jobs and getting skilled or finding jobs that are worthwhile and you don't have to be skilled for.

B-school
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it’s crap. Because business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system—but the most exciting things are what’s being done untraditionally.

L’Oréal and the Body Shop
I’m thrilled with it, absolutely bloody thrilled with it. I think they’re going to do amazing things. I think they’ll be able to—with the research companies that they’ve bought—not the product companies—of completely eliminating animal testing in the future. It will not be part of the industry. Because they're doing cell culture testing—they’re making their own cells and their own skin. Every ingredient, every food product will be tested.
   For me it’s been a wonderful gift because a company that is a strong understanding brand bought it. The alternative was that a group of financiers would come in and asset strip it—they wouldn't give a toss for anything.

Outsourcing
We’re not a manufacturing country anymore. But I think you get people to understand the story behind what they buy—to make that one jump and say what's the real cost of something, if everybody got another 25pc for the garment they made then you wouldn’t get this big social dilemma.
   I remember going to a sweatshop area in Nicaragua, and it was quite a modern factory but there was no place to eat or have half an hour off. And the women were walking some 3 miles to work every day. And I walked back with them, and they were living in cardboard huts. One woman said to me, whatever you do tell them all that we want to do is move from slavery to poverty. They were forced to take contraceptive pills, they were thrown out if they had a grey hair and this is nothing compared to what goes on in Bangladesh.

The futility of “marketing”
We never had a marketing department for 20 odd years. Every year we were getting awards for our marketing, and we didn’t know what it was. The minute we brought in marketing as a traditional thinking—cover your trucks with messages, environment human rights etc, went out the door.
   We had an enormous amount of humour. I remember on Mother’s Day we had a message saying ‘God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers’. We were doing really quirky things that got people engaged.

   There’s more on Dame Anita Roddick, DBE today in Lucire, along with a related op-ed from yours truly about her leadership.

I don’t know if my YouTube embedding worked at my main blog (I can’t remember how to do it), and it’s probably easier to share this video on Vox. It features Lucire’s US editor Summer Rayne Oakes modelling and discussing corporate social responsibility. (Originally on Summer Rayne’s official blog.)