August 2007

BUSINESS OF WEARABLES

Sales-Friendly Eco-Wear

Lots of people are ‘going green,’ so here’s what you need to know when your client asks for eco-friendly apparel.

By Nowell C. Wisch, MAS

Over lunch at a trade show, we’re discussing the trend of “going green” in our sales. Someone jokes that selling’s always concerned with green, but in a different context. I bemoan the fact that there are only a small number of ecologically friendly items showing up in my product searches. “How much money are we losing because of the dearth of green products in the marketplace?” I wonder aloud.

"Many Fortune 500 companies are starting to request these green products, and they tend to lead the general promotional marketplace and forecast future demand."

BRIAN, distributor

“You know, eco isn’t always friendly,” says distributor Karen, when I ask about the sales climate for environmentally friendly products. “In fact, in the current climate, one of the biggest fallacies is that everybody wants to go green. It simply isn’t true. A lot of buyers are more concerned with the issue than ever before, but it’s a pretty small part of the market at this point.”

Our “green” discussion started when Steve, another distributor, asked what we knew about a particular product a supplier was showing in its booth. Steve’s client planned to donate a thousand items to an “earth-friendly” charity. “The problem with this entire genre is that green is often a buzzword for a not-so-well-defined concept,” he says.
Where it began “Green” and “earth-friendly” appeared in our lexicon more than 25 years ago. While the green movement’s roots are in the paper business, the trend shows no signs of slowing – and actually is rapidly growing in popularity.

Modern green-ness encompasses an entirely new dimension in product choice. From a sales perspective, the most important thing we need to do with customers is listen to their requests and ask them what types of products they expect.
Eco-consciousness has brought about a change in selling that’s part of a problem Roger, a distributor, deals with every day. “The world’s become more complicated. The whole ecology thing took me by surprise with my biggest customer,” he says. “Her company suddenly developed a corporate conscience seemingly overnight. One day I was selling plastic, and the next day I was looking for items that I’d never heard of that had ‘chasing arrows’ on them. I tried to bone up on the terms fast enough to save the client, but I got replaced by a salesperson who was younger than my children and had grown up learning what eco-friendly meant in school.”

"Knowing the why is really the most important question. Why does the client want to go green? Why do they want green in their message?"

Roger’s hard-learned lesson is a fitting warning to every salesperson about how not going green can impact your relationships with clients. As advertising specialties buyers get younger, they bring an entirely new perspective to their jobs. Being eco-friendly isn’t something they have to learn. From Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth documentary to Greenpeace, today we’re prompted at every turn to consider the impact our actions will have on the environment.

“This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course, but it’s often true that the 50-plus buyers care less about the environmental impact of purchases than the under-30 buyers do,” says Gail, another distributor. “Among our corporate customers, a lot depends on the age of senior and middle management supervisors. The demand for ecologically correct products seems to rise as management gets younger.
This means it’s here to stay, and we’d better learn about it.”

Roger says that his generation used to think that being eco-friendly was buying a car with good gas mileage. “Now our neighborhood recycles plastic, paper, cans and bottles,” he says. “When the city instituted the program, a client recommended me to the buyer, and I helped him with a dozen products that brought the program to the public’s attention. We did lots of paper and plastic items, but very few wearables.”

Where are the wearables? Clothing seems to follow different rules than other products. Lots of people are paying attention to the origin of the fabric, since increased attention is being paid to labor policies and the effects pesticides have on the food chain. Cotton is one of the most heavily sprayed crops, and lots of the runoff pollutes the surrounding communities’ water supplies.

“The problem with wearables is that few items feature any outward notice that the content is green. Most customers want the cache of being green to be visible. In fact, the visibility sometimes is more important than the product,” Karen says. “It’s easier with hard goods because there are symbols that can be applied with the logo. The recycled content symbol can be used with anything that has a substantial amount of material that comes from recycled products.”

Wearables are made from both naturally occurring fibers and human-made material. It isn’t impossible to sell to eco-friendly programs, but it’s more difficult. “The new performance fabrics are made from oil-based threads. I tell my clients who want a green high-tech product that the new fabrics are made from recycled dinosaurs. Sometimes it works, and they change their mind,” distributor Malcolm says. “When they want odor control or moisture wicking, however, a natural cotton or wool fiber doesn’t deliver. They can’t always have exactly what they want but, as the Stones say, ‘… if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.’”
While determining need is the key to all programs, it’s particularly important in eco-friendly ones. Asking questions is a professional salesperson’s basic job skill. Besides asking the usual who, what, where, when and how, good questioning should include the big why. “Knowing the why is really the most important question. Why does the client want to go green? Why do they want green in their message?” Malcolm says.
Questions after “why” should include “what.” “Ask what percentage of recycled content they’ll accept,” distributor Jean says. “What recycled products include enough? Also, is ‘enough’ enough? This is critical to the conversation.”

The green landscape is quickly changing. Brian, a sales representative for Alpha in the Northeast, is showing “the first significant product offering in the market that capitalizes on the trend. Anvil debuted an organic cotton T-shirt in our newest catalog and offers a dozen colors,” he says. “It’s been a very strong product launch, and we’re doing very well with it.”

According to Brian, the green market niche will very likely be quite successful. “Many Fortune 500 companies are starting to request these green products, and they tend to lead the general promotional marketplace and forecast future demand,” he says. “I’d be very surprised if these items don’t appear in more programs forcing more suppliers to offer them.”

Until the time when there’s a green product in every catalog, the demand could help distributors make a little more margin due to the unusual nature of the items. As customers demand the unusual, it gives us a chance to make a little money until price pressure invades the market. Also, when customers request unusual products from distributors, it always leads to…

Happy Selling!