The progressive manager at this neighborhood location says his customers are deeply concerned about the environment and are actively looking for products that decrease our impact on precious natural resources and do less harm. Let’s prove him right! We have just a week to show that these tablets are striking a cord customers and that people are willing to switch to a product that will decrease the piles of plastic bottles going into landfills, CO2 emissions, trucks on roads, fossil fuel use, and save companies and consumers time and money.

Go to Intown Ace Hardware on Highland Avenue and do two things! Purchase the product, use it and let us know how you like it. And/or, inquire about the product, take a look, and make comments about it to the store clerk and/or manager. No purchase necessary.

We just one week to show consumer interest, please be a part of this experiment and visit the store as soon as you can!

We are a local, family business with a product that won Environmentally-friendly Product of the Year beating Seventh Generation and Simple Green.

Some impressive data:

• One truckload of our 12-tablet box would mean taking 76 trucks full of liquid cleaner off our roads!
• If retailers replaced just the four category of cleaners with Conserve tablets, the amount of spray bottles that would never be made and go into landfills, would fill Turner Stadium to the brim!
• Also, that would be enough bottles to circle the earth!

Thank you for your support!
Conserve Brand Team

Did you know that Baumgartens offers many new, green product alternatives from many of its brand categories? Our Secure brand offers bamboo and recycled PET lanyards; Organize brand offers paper clips made from recycled plastic; Create brand offers erasers that are lead-and latex-free; and Conserve brand offers battery-free flashlights.

We at Baumgartens are doing our best to provide products that are people-and planet-friendly. Our green products range from using recycled materials to sustainable and annually renewable resources while keeping an eye on what we can do to reduce packaging and our CO2 footprint in our business practices.

Mark the 22nd as an important day to remember and up the ante by putting into practice some of the ways you can personally conserve.

Our fancy new site up. Take a look and play our Scavenger Hunt game to win prizes! Happy Hunting! ]]> http://conservebrand.com/wp/blog/general/new-website-and-scavenger-hunt/feed 0 http://conservebrand.com/wp/blog/cleaners/a-raving-review http://conservebrand.com/wp/blog/cleaners/a-raving-review#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:23:25 +0000 Damon Borozny http://conservebrand.com/wp/blog/?p=19 We just received a great review from the folks over at Forever and Always blog. Great to see people using and loving the cleaners.

Saying you are going green instantly puts you in the spotlight. It seems what people hear, or want to hear is that we are green. This is definitely NOT the same thing. So what I observe is that as soon as we make some progress, it is pointed out where we have not and the spotlight is shone on that aspect, rather than the progress made.

What I have learnt is that the difference between trying to improve performance and becoming going green is this: there is a well understood standard for green, i.e. how nature does it and a very vague but inspiring hope for performance, i.e. faster, more efficiently, cleans without the effort…and we all know it is easier to be held up to the standard of better than an absolute measure. But having the absolute measure provides a very clear compass that will still apply 50, 100, 150 years from now. So while the gap between where we are and where we want to go is great, it is really reassuring to know that the vision is very clear and not about to change anytime soon. That can provide tremendous stability and focus for a company.

Going Green is like trying to turn a giant tanker around! It is very difficult to get the vessel to start and then when it has; it is just as difficult to stop. That is what I like so much about the quest. There have been at least 3-4 attempts in the past 40 years to turn the modern world green and each has petered out. It definitely feels as if this time, we have the momentum to get that tanker turning in a way that will be difficult to stop. I know that for Baumgartens as a company we are getting close to the tipping point. Our top 9 new product sales are all green products and that says something in an industry that has traditionally not really been interested.

And so while progress feels glacially slow and the criticism has no end, we are committed and having fun in the process. At every decision point there is another unknown. A new standard to learn, a new effect that we had not considered, new materials to learn and a new challenge to our claims. How else can we learn to become more green if not through experience and challenge? Bring it on!

I would rather this than a slow death by more of the same!

 Clive Roux, CMO Baumgartens

P&G was a small family owned soap and candle making business in Ohio, just 12 years old! There were no cars, planes, or motorbikes. The steam locomotive was the main means of long distance transportation.

Electricity was fairly new and the electric motor was only 20 years old.

In those days, just having the possibility of using these modern, manmade wonders was enough. In 1850 we began our journey, called the industrial revolution, of making these new inventions and ways to make life easier for man. Over the past 150 years, we have continued to produce more and more and more manmade stuff. To the point where we now find that there is no way to reintegrate this stuff back into the ecological cycle.

In the past few years it has come into much sharper focus for all of us that we have a definite problem and so we are turning our industrial expertise towards the issues of sustainability. It is clear we have too much stuff and have not thought out what we do with it when it is used up. Questions such as why do we do things the way we do, do we really need to do them the way we have always done them and how can we use less, recycle more and reuse are becoming driving forces to help us consume smarter.

In a very small, but significant way, this has been the driving thought behind our new CONSERVE Cleaner range.

The question we asked ourselves was why we need to ship water when it is readily available at almost all of the destinations where our cleaners need to be used in the industrialized world? In fact, we asked, why would we ship it using an inefficient distribution system of trucks when water is already very efficiently distributed via pipes!

Thinking this way lead us to a product solution that saves 87% of the shipping weight! Well that is only a small part of the story. In order to answer how we remove the water from our cleaner product, we had to find a new patented technology that would make this possible. It came in the form of a tablet that carries concentrated liquid. Now instead of just saving 87% of the water per bottle, our product allows us to ship one empty battle and 4 tablets, thus saving shipping 4 bottles of water or 1 gallon per product that we sell.

Imagine if all the cleaners that you bought were shipped this way. We would be saving billions of gallons of water from being shipped for no reason at all! That is the power of re-Imagineering versus just thinking green!

Clive Roux, CMO Baumgartens