From Waste to Wear
In this episode we speak with Ian Rosenberger, CEO of First Mile and Day Owl. First Mile works with retailers such as Puma and Ralph Lauren to help them incorporate recycled fabrics into their supply chain while also create prosperity in under-resourced communities. Day Owl creates everyday packs made from first mile material to showcase how companies can incorporate sustainable and equitable practices to create a thriving business for everyone involved.
Learn more via the links below:
https://www.firstmilemade.com/
https://www.dayowl.com/
Imperfect Show Notes
While these notes are not perfect (computer transcription is still a work in progress), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!
My conversation with Ian:
Morgan Bailey 0:02
Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host Morgan Bailey, and I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe.
What do plastic business supply chain Haiti and Puma have in common? Well, this conversation I'm about to show you within Rosenberger, Ian is founder of first mile and day out to impact driven companies. First Mile helps organizations understand how to improve their supply chain specifically around plastic generated fabrics. They help support organizations understand how to work with local communities to build out that supply chain that's having an impact not only on the environment, but also on on the local communities who are collecting plastic, recycling plastic and ultimately creating the fabric. Day owl is an offshoot of that company, to show how these fabrics can be turned into a product, which in this case is de our packs. And then how that business can be run consciously is kind of a way to demonstrate what it looks like to create a sustainable supply chain, turn that into a profit driven business and ultimately, create a product that people love is a really impactful conversation for me to really unpack in thinking and developing first mile and how they work with organizations. And what really became clear to me as through this conversation, that there are a lot of organizations who want to improve things as their supply chain, but simply do not have the knowledge, do not have the expertise and are afraid of taking that risk. And that's where first mal jumps in to help them navigate that pathway. So again, really great conversation. I hope you glean some things from it. So let's dive in. Ian, pleasure to have you on the show, man.
Ian Rosenberger 1:52
Right on. Thanks for Yeah, absolutely. Alright, so I love what you do with with first mile and day owl. But let's cram this in. I mean, how did this all start for you?
Sure. It was everything happened entirely by accident. I wish there was a better explanation than that. But you know, for me, traveling to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, which is a lifetime ago now was where everything began, I was 27 years old, trying to figure out what I wanted out of my life, I was a little unhappy with the direction that I was headed. And I was coming home from a dodgeball match with my friends, we stopped at a bar and on the TV, Anderson Cooper comes on and says, there's been a massive earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti. Like so many people, it was difficult for me to, in my mind know exactly how to point that out on a map. You know, I knew where Haiti was generally, but didn't know anything about Port au Prince or anything like that. And what he said next was the thing that was most alarming that an estimated 300,000 people had died. And that over a million and a half, were left homeless. And those are just enormous numbers. So I did what I now tell everybody not to do. I booked the first trip, I could get to the center of where things were to see if I could figure out how I could be useful. And I recognized now how much privilege that comes with that decision. Which is why I tell people not to do that right away. But I did. I got on a plane to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, I took an eight hour bus ride to Port au Prince, and what I saw there completely changed my life. And then we were off and running.
Morgan Bailey 3:48
Wow. I mean, that sounds like a obviously, I mean, seeing that tragedy, taking that leap. And, and I think it is important to recognize the privilege to be able to jump into a situation, jump out if you need to. So you know, what, what was your experience in Haiti that that led you to, on this journey? Like, what was it there? Tell me a little bit about that.
Ian Rosenberger 4:13
Sure, I went to Penn State University for undergrad and my, one of my my favorite professors. Now one of my dear friends I had mentioned I'd call them and said, Hey, listen, I'm, I'm headed to Haiti tomorrow, and I need a place to stay. Do you know of anybody down there and I he doesn't have any connection. I just figured out call him and see. He teaches one of the most popular classes at Penn State is called Race and Ethnic Relations. It's a massive, massive class 500 to 600 students, and I figured it'd be somebody in his circle that might know somebody, and sure enough, he calls me back in five or 10 minutes and he's like, Listen, I have a student here is trying to get home to Port au Prince. If you can pick her up and stick College and drive at JFK. When you get to Port au Prince, her parents will let you stay at their place. And what I didn't know was that that person, the John Louis family, and Ursula, John Louis, the father of the family would become some of my dearest friends and mentors. And so he's an incredible dude. But he walks around border prints like he with zero fears, zero hesitation, he's a pastor walks into low income neighborhoods and just talks to people. And I just thought that was the way you conducted yourself in these neighborhoods. So having him as a role model in these neighborhoods, really helped me understand how to ask questions, how to treat people with respect. You know, he spoke in Creole not French, which is local, native language. And so though, that I just did what he did. And over time, I started learning and meeting hundreds of people, and learning who they were, and what their stories were. And themes started to emerge. And the work really came from those themes that emerged from those conversations.
Morgan Bailey 6:06
And talk to me, what were the themes that came out of that?
Ian Rosenberger 6:09
You know, what, what's kind of the big thunder strike for me, was the realization that everybody everywhere wants the same things. And I know that sounds maybe overly simplistic, right, of course, everybody wants the same things. But to hear the conversations that I had the chance to have with the friends that I was making in neighborhoods like this relay, which is one of the one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world right now. It was remarkable to me, how how similar the things I was hearing in those in those communities were to what I was hearing among my friends in college or in, you know, my parents are, everybody wants a roof over their head, everybody wants their kids to have a better life than them. Everybody wants a job that makes them feel like they have a little bit of purpose, which, you know, leads to dignity. And when you would ask folks like, Well, what about all the stuff that's coming in from nonprofits, you know, immunizations and food and everything else? And, you know, over and over again, you hear the same thing that, wow, those things are nice. And we'll take them because they're showing up at our doorstep, why would we not take them? It's also a little demeaning. Excuse me. So the base level I'm hearing from everybody that I'm talking to is yes, like, we want to see our neighborhoods improve, we don't have access to the resources to improve them, but we know how to improve them if we had that access in that agency. So what I began to realize was that the end goal of organizations in low income communities should not be the output of the number of immunizations that are delivered, or the amount of food or the number of wells that are dug, but it should be access and agency to resources that the rest of the world has. Or at least, you know, the places that I came from had so remediating that imbalance became my mission. And although that's way up in the clouds, obviously, like, those are all big, big concepts. The way that that started to manifest itself for me was people would just come to me with issues, you know, stuff, mainly medical issues to begin with, it was it was all I have a tumor on my face that, you know, had I been born in the United States I would have died from or I would have been more than that states, I would have been able to solve very quickly for very little money, very little time. I have a something wrong with my urinary tract that, you know, there's I had a five year old kid that's now 18. But you know, that I that I became really tight with his family. And he was born without the ability to pee, right? Like he was just reprocessing urine. And so, you know, these are all things that if you go to a specialist in the States, you could fix right away, but you know, that access in that agency to fix those problems doesn't exist. And you can see really quickly how that idea of like caring for one child or one person in your family that has this thing, it's a barrier can become entirely consuming for a family unit, right? Because of a lopsided amount of your resources when they do come in are going to care for this person. We're in what's crazy about that is that that solution exists, right? It's readily available 400 miles to the north. So that was inherently I feel inherently is unfair. And that became early on. My mission was to was to just solve for those inequity. Solve for that. Add an equity. And then you know, one thing leads to another.
Morgan Bailey 10:06
Yeah. So I mean, so let's bridge that gap a little bit. So I mean, your work with first mile is really focused around supply chain. Yeah. And, you know, how do we remove? How do we make use of plastic that's in result is in the ground? Or in the ocean? Yeah. And help organizations turn that into fabric through sustainable supply chain. Now, how do you so bridge that gap a little bit? So so you're you're in Haiti, a lots going on, people are coming to you with health issues, to saying, hey, you know, what, what's really needed? Is what first mile can offer?
Ian Rosenberger 10:42
Yeah, again, I came to first mile kind of backed into first mile based on what my friends were saying that they needed. So, you know, I was trying to ground agency and and in dignity, right, where did those come from. And what I ultimately realized was that everybody just wanted a nine to five gig, right, they just wanted to be able to get a paycheck and go home at the end of the day, and clock out and then go spend time with their kids and their family. So overwhelmingly, that was what I was hearing from people was, I just want to go to work, right? Like, I just want to, I want to pass the time doing something that actually matters. And so I started looking around for things that might, my my friends might be able to do. And that's when I realized one of the big barriers to the NGO system globally, that is still a massive barrier is that in areas of high unemployment, NGOs, actually sometimes can do more harm than good, because they're not spending resources, creating infrastructure that will ultimately create employed people. They're spending resources, filling the needs the immediate kind of Maslow's needs of those people. And that's not inherently on its surface of bad thing. I do believe it to be at a philosophical level and unethical thing. But that doesn't make the people that work in those areas, unethical people, it just makes the system that we have in place that serves the poor, inherently untenable. So so as I went down the path, I'm trying to figure out how to create employment opportunities for the people that we were starting to serve. And when I say we use me and a couple of friends, you know, to start out, that's the, that's the big barrier or ceiling that I ran up against, it was like, Well, of course, of course, the NGOs do this, like there aren't a lot of jobs to go around. So like, this is what we do, when there aren't a lot of jobs to go around. I always say like, the problem in the NGO system is that most people went to Harvard Kennedy School, not Harvard Business School, right, like, like, I wish there was there was more investment in the poor, around employment. And I think there is some real structural racism behind the decisions that we make in those communities. I think there's a lot of assumptions that are made around what the poor are capable of, and what they're not capable of, because of what they look like. You know, my background is in sociology, so my mind automatically goes to, to those types of inequities. However, it also felt like a really solvable problem, it was like, well, we look at the natural resources that you have on the ground, you figure out how you can get paid for those resources, then you help invest, help the folks around, you invest in those resources to take best advantage of them. And it's just so happened when I looked around at resources. You know, Haiti is really poor of natural resources these days, because so much of the land has been used. But there's no natural resource. It's also renewable in in waste. And in a in a city of about three or 4 million people like Puerto Prince, there's a lot of waste being produced, and not a lot of stuff being done about it. Not a lot of infrastructure to serve that waste. So I saw a waste. I wrote it in my journal on one of my very first trips, if Haiti can turn trash into money equals good. It was that straightforward. And and, you know, so that became the bridge was the base was this realization that okay, there is something in waste that I just didn't know what to begin with?
Morgan Bailey 14:24
Yeah, there's a big theme that you're touching on here. Particularly, I mean, when you think about Yeah, the traditional charity model, nonprofit model, then somebody actually talked about in the last podcast episode was this idea between poverty alleviation, which is the focus of a lot of nonprofits and prosperity and prosperity comes with creating that infrastructure for economic growth, that that can be sort of harness and owned by the local community in a way that that outgrows it The the Oregon entities that helped create it. Right. And and so what I'm hearing is, you know, as you're seeing that as the opportunity, as opposed to some of this may be one off measures that a lot of other organizations. So I mean, I think it's a really important thing. And I mean, I think it comes down to one thing I truly believe in, which is that, you know, businesses have such a great potential to change and especially when you when you balance that with with profit driven enterprise, because again, that can that can sustain much longer than typical typical donor cycle.
Ian Rosenberger 15:36
That's right. It brings. Yeah, business to me is the greatest opportunity to solve our dragon problems. And they bring two things, they bring more capital, and they bring speed,
Morgan Bailey 15:45
and scans, businesses generally what's created some of these challenges too, so?
Ian Rosenberger 15:50
Absolutely. Yeah. I would say perhaps most of the good things in life have come with a double edge to that sword. Yeah.
Morgan Bailey 15:57
So So talk me right. So so the waist, I'm guessing Sam, obviously, some of the ways you identified was plastic. Right? So first mile works, was specifically with plastics, pulling that back into the supply chain. So once you identified plastics as the kind of go to it sounds like there was a little bit of ramp up to figure out well, what do we do with this plastic? Talk to us a little bit about that journey? And how did that turn into a business?
Ian Rosenberger 16:23
Yeah, that's a great question. You're right, it was plastic. In when we started serving people, we realized that even though many plastic materials don't take up a massive part of the waste stream by mass, they take up an enormous part of the waste stream by volume. So what that ends up in is a neighborhood might look like it's full of trash. But when you weigh it all out, just so happens, that the thing that's the biggest eyesore is the plastic trash. And this is a problem of our own doing, you know that. And when I say our I don't mean consumers, I mean, large organizations, Coca Cola and PepsiCo. You know, they pulled the wool over consumers eyes for 30 years about plastic. They invented the term litterbug, you know, they pushed the problem of plastic recycling back onto the consumer, in such a way that makes us feel like the only solution to these problems is for us to figure out how to recycle more and do our part, when in reality, the people who have the biggest amount of control are the people that are actually manufacturing the product, but they're the ones that are actually putting it into the atmosphere. And they're calling on us to figure out ways to to pick it up, which I feel is, again, unethical. And then they're also telling us that the problem is extremely complex to solve. And I think when anybody tells you that a problem is extremely complex to solve, what they're actually doing is stalling. Because most problems are not that complex. Most problems are fairly straightforward to solve, we just lacked the will or the money to solve them, in this case, but I think in this case, really, mainly the will. But, you know, I guess, you look under the ground in places like Puerto prince, and still there's a lot of waste. And so I started looking around for people that might be collecting. And sure enough, like, there's already there was already a vibrant community that were was collecting scrap metal, there was a vibrant community that was collecting all stuff of kind of high value. And there were some people that were collecting plastic. So I went to those people. And I said, Listen, how can we? How can we help? How can we help you augment what you're already doing. And as it turns out, there's like a million things that we can be doing to help augment. It's a cash business. So access to capital was a problem. Lots of like, really crazy problems, things like child labor, you know, if you're a person that's collecting plastic, and there's a bunch of street kids that are working in the neighborhood, you look at them with dollar signs in your eyes, and you say, Oh, I'm gonna put these three kids to work, and I'll give them a buck a day, and they'll be happy, when in reality, like, you know, you're just putting kids on the landfill to work for a pittance. predatory lending is a big issue. So in a cash business, you got people who hold resource, people who don't those power plant balances can be really, really structurally problematic for the community, for lots of reasons. So there's all sorts of things I was seeing that I was like, man, we could really be useful here, right in helping to provide some infrastructure. So you mentioned earlier, you know, businesses, creating models that help the community harness and then hand over. And what we ultimately realized was, if we created this, and then handed it over, that I think this happened with most of these models, that the chances of it taking root are much, much lower. In fact, we had to create a model that was owned by the community from the get go, it had to be owned, and essentially created by the community and all we were there to do was facilitate, facilitate that creation, provide resource provide ideas. I'll give you a really good example. We created a like a small loan facility for collectors in Network One of our first networks 10,000 US dollars, you know, not not big money, couple 100 people involved in that particular network, who were picking up plastic for a living. And we I remember, we actually financed the loan through Kiva. And then we essentially became a small bank, right, we said, we have this money, this facility, anybody can apply for this money who's in this network. But rather than us make the decisions on where the money went, we put a commission together of the kind of collection center owners, which are the aggregators, where plastic comes to you before it makes its way to a recycling facility. And these are many of these folks, you know, some of them had never been on a commission like this before. You know, they're like, in terms of like, academic knowledge of business. This was a foreign concept to many of the people that we were serving. However, these were also some incredible entrepreneurs with more practical experience in business than anybody that I know, in the States. And they learned it, you know, through years of really difficult business situations. So entrepreneurs through and through people who understand supply demand resource, maybe don't always have the, the vocabulary for those concepts, but like, understand them better than anybody that teaches them, right, which is another lesson, I think it's really important to take away from low income communities is that they're, by and large, more talented, more persistent, and more practically knowledgeable than, than any system that we know, anywhere else. They're not worse than systems that we create in the US, they're just under resourced, which is why immigrant communities thrive, right, because when they leave a place that doesn't have resource, and they come to a place that does, they have this incredible storage of knowledge and grit and determination that now is met with this incredible amount of resource, and they take off. So like, it's no secret that these communities are are awesome. It's just that we treat them like they're not. So we provided this loan facility. And the commission would accept the applications of people in the community in there, were talking to 50 $100 at a time, 200, maybe $500 With time, for any range of things, working capital, machinery, whatever. And we put one of our staff members, a Haitian on the team to help facilitate and oversee and he had a vote along with, you know, all these other center owners, and they were so damn hard. They were they were the harder than any bank, I would, you know, in the states would be on any loan application, they were so incredibly responsible with how the money was distributed, they held the standard they helped people to was almost impassable, to the point where, you know, we had to help work the money through. But the payback rate on those dollars was over 90%, we deployed that fund several times back into the community, and it became one of our most successful projects. And, and so our role first miles roll is ultimately to do things like that, to take systems that maybe don't have access to capital access to solutions for these problems, to breathe solutions into those communities. And then to also inherently take care of all the things that families deal with when they come home, from work at the end of the day. So not just the trash issues. But when you come home at the end of the day, and you have a kid that sick, you come home in that day, and you have a roof that's leaking, or you know, any number of things, no matter how hard you work, we call those problems like the poverty hole until you fill in that hole. There's no hope of you pulling yourself out of poverty forever. So you need help getting up to square one. And so we do both of those things, the economic and the social programming required to get a supply chain functioning properly.
Morgan Bailey 23:50
I mean, it sounds like that makes a really big impact and loving loving the Yeah, I guess the very, very tenant of pulling the community and partnering with community in the very getgo. And I think what that means is kind of letting go of some of the assumptions that that you have the answers, which I think is a lot of the issues, a lot of a lot of problems start is that assumption, and really pulling it in said, hey, we'll help provide resources, you know, and we'll solution together. Now, so you're you also support some pretty large brands, and their supply chain and helping them develop fabrics that are coming from this recycling tear. So talk to us a little bit about your brand partnerships. And what does it look like for first mile to help influence some of these larger brands into developing sustainable supply chains?
Ian Rosenberger 24:44
That's a great question. Yeah, early on for me. I looked at big large fortune 500 global 1000 brands as the access to scale. So, you know, Haiti was our first supply chain and we have a bunch of books on the ground there but This is a problem that is writ large across the planet, right. And by many estimates, there are over 50 million people working in waste globally, and these are in landfill and landfill adjacent communities. This is the type of folks that, you know, when you go to a poor community in a place like Puerto prince, and you say, how do you what's going on? Like? How do you deal with the day to day issues and problems of being poor, they'll say, there's always someone poor than you. And they're talking about these communities, right? The folks that that really get left behind, by and large, big brands want nothing to do with those communities. Like they look at a community like that. And they say, that has risk written all over it. If I dive into this community, I'm going to be dealing with major problems in my legal department who are not going to let me do it. And therefore, I have to respectfully decline to be involved with your organization, we hear that a lot. Still, it's still a big deal for brands to like, to branch them want to get involved. Now, our, our hypothesis or our thesis, or, you know, our statement of the fact is that, that the solution to those types of risk risks for large organizations is not to run away from them. But to actually dive into them to demonstrate to a brand instead of Oh, my God, we have child labor in our supply chain to instead go to their shareholders and their customers and say, My God, we have child labor on our supply chain. This represents a massive opportunity for HP to solve for the global problem of child labor in plastic waste supply chains. And be given that HP is a major user of plastic for the things that we make, we feel a responsibility to solving for these problems. So that's what we do, we simply go to an HP and we say, Listen, you want to be a hero, here's how you'd be a hero, right? And we give them the opportunity to come in and stamp hp on it. And we recognize that that's like, essentially using HP as a method of driving resources into these communities. It also distributes the credit to hp in many cases. That's all right with us. And that's why with the communities we serve, you know, the upshot is that when when you do things like that, and then another earthquake comes along, for example, like the one that did last summer, in Port au Prince, or sorry, in southwestern Haiti, because of our long relationship with hp, having helped us solve child labor in water prints, they were the first ones on the phone to say, what do you need? Right? When it comes time for donation to bring in drop in supplies? Like oh, sure, $200,000, absolutely. One phone call, right. So these relationships are developing with large brands to help them understand that they have the opportunity to make a real difference in these communities. But it does take a little bit of a leap, we I used to find was impossible, then when like the HPS of the world came along. And you know, we also serve brands like Puma and Patagonia and Unilever, which is a massive conglomerate. What we found is that more and more, they become really big stories within those brands, because people who work for those employees of those brands, loves to work for a company who actually cares about people. And so all we do is bring a level of, of data accuracy, collection of knowledge, facilitation of solutions. You know, as it turns out, you know, now we work in Haiti, Honduras, Ghana, Taiwan, we've done way studies in over a dozen countries beyond that. And, and what we find is about 90% of the problems I've outlined to you already, they exist in all of those places. So when we go to a brand, we're like, look, here are the things you're gonna find. Here's how you solve for them, we know that this is how you solve them, because we've been solving for them for 10 years. Here's the data that shows us that you can go from this amount of income per person per day to, you know, this amount, you know, plus x plus y. And here's our path to a living wage for everybody in this community. Here's our path to the elimination of child labor. Here's what it's gonna cost you in that level of like, kind of serve it up on a platter. This is kind of our, our special sauce.
Morgan Bailey 29:27
Yeah, that sounds like I mean, it's very interesting value proposition. I mean, because in essence, these brands can outsource the the impact measure of their supply chain to somebody who knows how to do it, because I think that's one of the big barriers for brands is they're like, hey, it's not that we're against doing this. We just have so many other priorities going on and to learn this whole new skill set is something that maybe we all do. Yeah, it's it's extremely daunting. And you know, if, you know, there's there's a lot of politics around it. There's a lot of visibility. There's a potential for looking like greenwashing. So it's kind of, you know, I think brands are hesitant a little bit to understand how to navigate this. And I think they know they need to. And so I think to your to your point, sometimes they probably say, Well, yeah, we'll avoid working with this community, because not only is there do we not know how to do it, but there's also a little bit of risk of visibility, you know, just because you mentioned Yeah, of comes out like child labor like that could turn into a major PR issue. Yeah, even though the situation on the ground might be severely more nuanced than that. So how are you seeing? I'm curious, like with some of the brands that you've worked with, and you've worked with Puma, I think you've worked with Reebok, Ralph Lauren, like you've worked with a lot of brands? And how, like, after they start to see a level of success, are you seeing these brands being more and more open? And perhaps taking more ownership over this?
Ian Rosenberger 30:52
Absolutely. They double down once they start to realize that it pays off? I think that everything you said about the hesitancy is exactly correct. That is absolutely a thing. And the brands have a tough time working through these problems, keeping in mind that they're just now learning how to deal with carbon right there just now taking stock of the amount of carbon that putting into the atmosphere across scope one, scope two and scope three. And, you know, I'm, I'm in grad school right now. And I'm studying carbon, and specifically scope, three carbon emissions. And it's incredible how little brands know about their scope, three carbon emissions, and how that's the biggest part of their carbon footprint in many cases. And so the next two years, three years is going to be all about carbon. And so when we're coming to them and saying, like, Well, what about trash, they said, well give us a couple of years, we got to deal with carbon first. And, and so a lot of our now sale into these brands is well, this is how this affects your carbon footprint, right? Like when you're dealing with these problems is that actually affects your scope, readmissions. So brands do not have not resourced these problems, well enough yet to solve for them, because they many of them still look at it as a liability, not an asset. They don't look at it as an as an investment in their overall profitability. Or instead, they look at it as a thing we have to do, the brands that have started to look at it as an asset or a potential asset, have moved much, much faster towards long term solutions. And I think what will happen like in any business tipping point, the more brands that learn that and the more brands that do it, the faster it will move and the flywheel start to turn. But the thing that I'm really nervous about right now is that we are in a really important decade, that the flywheel is not turning fast enough. So I think its inherent, and this is why, you know, we're really good friends with groups like Greenpeace. And, you know, we think that the role that activism plays in this is extremely important, because active activism has a way of spurring that process on faster. And so I think you've talked to anybody at Greenpeace, you'll hear them talking about how some of them are just bad actors straight up. There are people out there who are have their head in the sand, like you said. And, and there are others who are like, we it's coming, we're getting there. And I think that's where Greenpeace is actually organizations like theirs are doing really great work, because they're they're taking the people were saying it's coming, you know, be patient and saying, Well, we don't have time for patients, we really just don't. So like while I appreciate that things take time, you have a responsibility. Because while it's taking time, you know, in the second you take your foot off the gas, it holds us all back another five years. And we just don't have five years.
Morgan Bailey 33:44
Yeah, I think that's the timeliness thing. We don't I mean, we we don't have any time. Yeah, I think 10 years ago, we didn't have much time. Yeah. So I think the urgency is just becoming ever more and more. And, you know, I think the brands are we're we're paving the way for organizations to do this. We're an unknown terrain. When it comes to all this. We don't really know what the future holds. And business itself has been redefined. As to its role in the world. It used to be purely profit for shareholders. And now we're saying, hey, you know what, that doesn't actually have very good long term returns for anyone. Because as you degrade the planet, as you degrade your communities, as you have bigger, negative social impacts, it actually really harms the economy. And I think we're starting to see that. And so we're really kind of paving the way which is both exciting and a bit daunting, and are one of the things that you've done yourself. In addition to first mile you also have a brand day owl in which you're actually trying to model Well, what does it look like to run a conscious sustainable business that is both impactful but profitable. Tell us a little bit about that brand.
Ian Rosenberger 34:56
Sure, you know, I mentioned earlier why first mile came about it, you know, Before first mount, I started, I started a nonprofit that places the poor into jobs, it's called work. And then when I realized there weren't a lot of jobs to go around, I started a business to create those jobs. First Mile. And ultimately, you know, first mile spent the first five or six years of his existence, helping brands understand how they can improve their levels of sustainability, make their own brand more profitable. And I got really tired of like, I just felt like all day long, we're just crowing about how these are the things that people need to do and why they need to do them faster. And sometimes brands listen to you. And sometimes they don't, it's difficult to be so certain of something to know it in your bones have seen it on the ground and in practice and an academically, but then to not have brands adopted fast enough, is extraordinarily frustrating. And so ultimately, I felt in the spirit of kind of if you can't join them beat them, I decided to create my own direct to consumer brand, and maybe with the hope of learning something along the way as to why brands weren't doing this fast enough. And I learned a ton my team and I and ultimately what we realized it is it is it is incredibly possible to start a brand that is not only sources materials of the most sustainable, most responsible quality. And we use a lot of first materials in our products. But that also you can design and make products that can be used again and again and again, that the concept of circularity, which is rather recent, in this journey of mine, probably call it three or four years, you started hearing the word circularity. And I think that words being used a lot these days with people really not having any idea what it means. And so designing for sustainability designing for resilience. You know, I believe one of our core philosophies is that durability is the first rule of sustainability. So how do you create a product product that kind of plans the obsolescence of planned obsolescence? You know, how do you create something that lasts for 345 acts as long as what's being made currently, and then can be repaired and used again, and again, and again, kind of post purchase circularity and that it opened up a whole new world of opportunity of problems of issues of fun and curiosity. Like there's so many really fascinating problems to solve for in a business like that. And so they all became kind of our laboratory to do that, it just so happened, people really like the product, we make backpacks, everyday carry items made out of first mile materials, for the most part, but also like we take sustainability to the ultimate nth degree. And on top of it, like, you also realize why people choose products like ultimately, you know, if somebody gave me a really good piece of advice a couple years back, and they make jeans denim. And, and the one thing they always told me, they were like, the customers asked has to look good first, right? No matter how sustainable you make pair jeans, no matter how what materials matter how circular, the price, somebody has to look, put them on look in the mirror and be like, You know what, I love the way I look like in these jeans, people are gonna want to hang out with me, I might get a date, right, I might get laid if I'm in this pair of jeans. And like, we have to remember there's, there's some really amazing voices out there. They're talking about this, like Scott Galloway talks about this all the time right now is that, you know, we go we have to go back to our base concepts, like first principles involve, like, you know, finding a mate, like reproducing, demonstrating how much status and power you have in that system. Those are all like human instincts, human impulses, that we have to understand if we're creating products, especially in business. And so you can be as sustainable as you want. But if it doesn't do those things doesn't satisfy those things. You're not gonna be as big as you need to. And ultimately, I created day out to begin to capitalize on the combination of those two things and those kind of base impulses we have as human beings, combined with this, like, total long idea of like complete sustainability. And if we can figure out a way to scale that, to me that represents so a massive step forward for the, for the movement. Oh,
Morgan Bailey 39:07
absolutely. I mean, there's like you said there really resonated with this idea of like, it's not, it's not enough for the product to simply be good for the person good for the world. It needs to serve some more intrinsic properties that people have. And it you know, it reminds me Yeah, I used to spend a lot of time working in East Africa. And this one time I was I was doing an interview with with the Maasai leader. And the guy didn't have a latrine. Or he he had a mud house, the tin roof didn't have electricity. And it was sitting there interviewing and he pauses us and like, it pulls out his cell phone and search is channeling his cell phone. And this was 15 years ago or something like that. So cell phones weren't ubiquitous in Africa at the time. But you know, what that cell phone had And, and I was like, well, he's got a cell phone, but he doesn't have any of those other things that you would say are more basic, like to human survival. But with the cell phone did is it was about its status, status and utility. And it was actually in that moment that I realized business if you like, because nobody was selling latrines or water like that, nobody was saying, hey, look, these, these will make you look sexy, these will improve your status, like they were like, hey, you need these things, you should have them. But it didn't have that same piece that the sort of marketing of a cell phone had that business was bringing to it. So that's why I think that you know, kind of using Daao, like, the power of business. So I create products that are both really in harmony with the world as much as possible. And our value added kind of tap into those innate human desires, I think it's really important. And I think that's where a lot of charities, nonprofits to get it wrong, because they don't play into those other pieces. And I think that's a piece that business has, and that business is used in a really detrimental way to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need. So it isn't a double edged sword. But if we kind of blend the, hey, let's do something good for the world. And let's use human psychology and marketing to be able to kind of wrap that all into one, there's a lot of power, and that
Ian Rosenberger 41:14
an immense amount, it's the most amount of power. And when it comes to, like the the system that we've created, you know, and I've always felt very strongly that I think there's a lot of problems with capitalism, I think the system that we have in place, you know, is inherently based on growth, which is unsustainable for the long term. And I think we're reaching the limits of that, that growth, and I think we're going to start to see it over the coming couple of decades, we already are seeing it in many respects. However, if we, if we are in the process of trying to break that system, we also could really spell certainly certain death for many of the people who depend on it. So we have to figure out how to harness that system and use it to deliver a resource in need and access and equity into the areas that need it. And I think that, you know, I still believe really strongly that the business is the way to do that. And I agree with everything you said, I think that we have a bit of a long road to hoe. But ultimately, you know, the more businesses like mine that succeed, I hope the more that businesses behind it will come. And I think one of my biggest pet peeves in this system is when people think small, you know, it takes small swings. And we work on one specific problem with one specific group of people. And I think that Well, that's it's it, you know, it certainly increases your chances of success. I would like to see some more big swingers when it comes to to these types of issues. And, you know, certainly that increases your rate of failure. I'm a massive baseball fan. So like, you know, I've always liked the home run hitter. You know, I like people who swing away. And does that mean that the batting average goes down? It most certainly does. But man, it's fun to watch. And it's the reason people watch the game. So, ultimately, I think that's, you know, that's the approach that we're trying to take is rather be a big swinger.
Morgan Bailey 43:17
Yeah, well, I appreciate your effort. I appreciate the thought leadership, you're putting in the space. And it sounds like you're having, you know, an impact, you know, greater than just your organization, obviously, as you are working with these much larger brands, and not only helping them improve their supply chains, but helping them in their approach and orientation to how business can be done. And I think it sounds like you are being successful at that
Ian Rosenberger 43:42
one day at a time. And we're wrong way more than we're right. But we're going to keep going.
Morgan Bailey 43:47
Well, hey, what's what's next, you know, as we start to wrap here, what's next for for first mile?
Ian Rosenberger 43:53
That's a great question. You know, we've got some really fun things on the horizon. There's some big, big problems that I think we're working through. One of the things that we've ultimately really felt was a big hole in our model was that we didn't have any ownership of recycling facilities. So keep in mind, we work with waste collectors, we work with center owners or aggregators. And then then we we pass off or help those people pass off that material to a recycling facility that would ultimately process it and turn it into a commodity that can be sold on the open market. We didn't own any of those assets. And the what that did was it gave us a real disadvantage when it came to helping the people that we serve because we had no power over the decision making processes at the recycling facility. And there's lots of things you can do if you have that power. You can serve the people that you work with much more direct ways. Things like making sure they get paid faster or like making sure they have the materials they need to collect more. The data shows us that when you administer the services that we've It administered in the communities that we work in that not only do the quality of life goes up living income, child labor goes down, etc. But the quality and quantity of material that you can actually collect goes up. So we weren't able to take advantage of that in past supply chain. So now, we're actually in the process of building recycling facilities of actually owning and operating the facilities themselves. And we're thinking of doing that, by and large within a nonprofit structure. So of taking a nonprofit system, applying kind of capitalist for profit values to that system, and then letting the beneficiaries of that profit become the people that we serve. And, and, you know, I think, who knows what's going to work but but we're in the middle of building our first facility right now in Accra, in Ghana, in West Africa. And we feel really strongly that that is going to be the next big kind of flag that we've put into the ground is around equity, which is owning one of these facilities, and then letting the people that work within the facility. Be the beneficiaries of it.
Morgan Bailey 46:08
Well excited to hear how that venture goes and the future impact that first Mel's going to make, and really appreciate your time today. If people want to find out for more about first mile or Day Owl how can they do so?
Ian Rosenberger 46:24
Sure. You can. You can go to first mile impact. That's all of our social handles at first mile impact. And then for day out. It's at Hello, day out. So take a look at all those you find. And then I'm at Ian rose and murder everywhere.
Morgan Bailey 46:42
Perfect, and really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing that future impact and future conversations.
Ian Rosenberger 46:49
Thanks so much for having me.
Morgan Bailey 46:51
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