Tentree, a Vancouver-based apparel company, announced recently that it has achieved its goal of planting 100 million trees in 15 countries across the world including Canada.
Since day one, the company has had a unique business model – for every product it sells, it will plant 10 trees through its partnered organizations. This is where its name comes from.
And for the customers who don’t want that many clothes, they can also choose different packages at various prices for the company to plant trees for them or to offset the carbon they consume.
“We always think of Tentree not as an apparel business that plants trees, but rather a tree planting company that happens to sell apparel,” said Derrick Emsley, co-founder and CEO of Tentree.
“It's taken us about 10 years to plant our 100 million trees … and it's just been really amazing to see the collective growth of that narrative and excitement that happens with people when they see and talk about tree planting.”
Emsley started a tree planting company when he was still in college but later found the business not viable, so he and his business partner came up with the idea of building a consumer-oriented business that would allow them to connect customers with tree planting.
“And for us that product has been apparel,” said Emsley.
Unlike many socially conscious for-profit organizations that give away a percentage of their profits to charities, Tentree’s business model is to build the cost of planting trees into the price point of its products.
The growth of the business suggests that the model has worked: The company has grown by 60 per cent every year since its inception, according to Emsley, and now has a team of 74 and distributes to 1,500 retailers across North America and Europe.
“Customers want to spot brands that represent similar values to what they have, and I think tangibility of environmental impact has never been more important,” he said.
To better track and showcase Tentree’s tree planting progress, the company developed Veritree, a tool to collect data directly from the field, manage that data, verify it against things like geospatial analysis, and inventory every tree so they are not double counted.
It became a separate business last year and now supports more than 100 organizations with their tree planting goals.
Emsley said more companies have joined the initiative and more than 10,000 companies in the world are now committed to tree planting and reforestation.
“It’s a [challenging] time to be in retail.… For us, our focus is on building the brand sustainably for the long run, how can we continue to grow the business and continue to expand distribution of our product, so that we can plant more trees,” he said.
“At the end of the day, the way we talk about growth is not in revenue, it's in our people, it's in trees planted. It took us 10 years to plant our first 100 million trees and our goal is to plant our next 100 million trees in less than half that time, and to get to a billion trees planted here in the next decade.”
