A Green Hardware Store on Every Corner? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You May Think

The house in Boulder, Colo., was beautiful. The floors were cork, the carpets were made of recycled plastic bottles — the whole place was being redone on sustainable, environmental principles. “It was mind-expanding,” says Jason Ballard, the co-founder and CEO of eco-friendly home improvement retailer TreeHouse. The house belonged to Ballard’s instructor in a wilderness EMT program. Ballard was staying there shortly after college, and he was inspired by his instructor’s efforts to remodel his home to make it more environmentally friendly. “It was such a lovely vision of what was possible,” he says.
But the more Ballard learned about sustainable home improvement, the more he realized how difficult it was to find attractive, well-designed products. That insight — and that vision of what was possible in the home — led Ballard to create TreeHouse, a company that’s aimed at transforming the home improvement market and, with it, the home itself. Among the wares and services available are recycled glass countertops, electric lawn tools and solar-panel installation. Ballard says customers often call his company “the Whole Foods of home improvement  —  and it’s not too far from the truth.”
Ballard has always had an eco-conscious mindset. His grandfather was an early role model. “He wouldn’t have called himself a conservationist,” Ballard says, “but he gave me both a conservation ethic and a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world.” He studied conservation biology in college, where he started to learn about the enormous impact our homes have on the environment. “All we hear about on TV is gas-guzzling SUVs,” he says, “but the real problem is the buildings we’re living in every day.”
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Private residences are the biggest users of energy, the biggest users of renewable and nonrenewable materials, the biggest producers of landfill waste and the second-biggest users of water. Most exposure to toxins also takes place in the home. “I realized that if I wanted to make an impact with regard to these existentially challenging issues, then the best area for me to focus on was, in fact, the home,” says Ballard, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform. Through GLG, Jason and his team have learned about inventory management, retail strategy, in-store user experience and customer data management to help the company implement best practices across multiple locations.


Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.


After college, Ballard worked in green building for a while, learning all he could about the market. “What I noticed was that everyone had the same set of problems,” he says. It was hard to find sustainable products, and when he did find them, they were expensive, and only available from a few boutique companies. “The obvious blocker to the whole industry moving forward is access to products at a decent rate, and with some level of curation and education around those products,” Ballard says.
TreeHouse is built on a few core ideas. First, Ballard says, most home improvement products are terrible — poor quality, toxic and unsustainable. Second, most home improvement services aren’t very good, either. Anyone who’s ever embarked on such a project knows that they’re often delayed and routinely run over budget. The industry also hasn’t gone digital yet, making it difficult to get information on the status of your project when you want it. “The whole experience around home improvement needs to be reimagined,” Ballard says. “We are now trying to make not just the products great, but the technology great and the service great.”
TreeHouse aims to make sustainable options appeal to more than just die-hard environmentalists. “If we want healthy and sustainable homes to be the norm, they have to be better than conventional homes. And everything around the process has to be better,” Ballard emphasizes. That’s part of why he decided to start a for-profit company to accomplish his environmental goals. “If you’re in a for-profit business, all of your assumptions are tested all the time,” he says. “It forces you to very quickly arrive at what works to affect change.”
Ballard has ambitious goals for TreeHouse. Today, the company has one brick-and-mortar store in Austin, Texas, and is opening two more this year, including one in Dallas. Within the next two years, he plans on opening still more stores, and expanding beyond Texas. Right now, TreeHouse touches only a tiny fraction of the 80 to 100 million homes in the country, Ballard says. He believes 20 stores — a benchmark he hopes to hit in five years — would drive that figure up to 10 percent. The ultimate goal: Launch 300 stores nationwide to reach 80 percent of all the homes in the U.S.
“Our plan is to run hard at those milestones,” Ballard says. “We don’t have a thousand years to figure this out. We are making decisions in the next hundred years as a species that we will have to live with for the next two thousand years.”

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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
Homepage photo by Kirsten Kaiser

From Empty Parking Lots to Bustling Stores: The Ingenious Way That Cleveland’s Improving Its Economy

Until recently, downtown Cleveland had a retail problem. Once anchored by eight department stores, lower Euclid Avenue and its offshoots had fallen from glamorous rival of New York’s Fifth Avenue to a nine square blocks of parking lots and numerous vacant buildings.
Retailers in the city’s historic Warehouse District struggled to keep up with their rent, finding their goods couldn’t fill the vast industrial warehouse spaces like trendy restaurants and popular nightclubs could. It seemed that mom-and-pop stores didn’t have a place downtown, and as a result, Victorian-era buildings were razed for parking lots.
But a creative idea by the folks at the district’s development corporation turned the area’s history as a center for wholesale storage and distribution on its head: They filled a large, ugly parking lot with three salvaged shipping containers. Fronting a busy sidewalk, each box now houses a miniature store, including Banyan Box and The Wandering Wardrobe, two boutique clothing stores, and an outlet selling paraphernalia for hometown football favorite, the Cleveland Browns.
“The way the project’s designed, they simulate a storefront wall, facing the sidewalk,” explains Thomas Starinsky, associate director of the Warehouse District Development Corporation. “They’re pretty simple. Take a shipping container and cut a hole in it.”
Perhaps because of its simplicity, the ingenious idea has worked. It’s diversifying the neighborhood and proving to other businesses that the district is a hip place to set up shop. Even during the winter, holiday shoppers turned out in droves. What was initially thought of as a risky bet has paid its rewards. Starinsky now has a waiting list with more than 40 businesses.
“The economic effects have been overwhelming, more significant than I imagined,” Starinksy says. “Just the fact that we have three new businesses downtown, and we’re actually adding jobs to the community with each 160 square feet.”
Small boxes, it seems, hold big commercial possibilities.

The Program Giving Workers Without College Degrees a Leg Up

For Americans that have completed higher education, figuring out which skills to acquire is less of a concern when it comes to applying for a job. But for workers without a college degree, the roadmap to getting hired is a bit trickier.
That’s a narrative underscoring the growing skills gap across the country, where an estimated 4.8 million jobs were not filled in August while 9.6 million Americans remained unemployed, according to BloombergAs it becomes more apparent that higher education is not the only answer to unemployment — after all, 73 percent of U.S. jobs do not require a college degree — more companies are stepping up to help Americans find the necessary skills for these available jobs.
LearnUp, a skills training platform focused on entry-level positions in retail, goes as far as to pair potential hires with openings at companies including Gap Inc., AT&T, Office Depot and Staples. The two-year-old company provides training programs tailored to each job, helping applicants learn the specific skills needed to land a position.
“The average person has 15 to 16 jobs in their lifetime. You need something that keeps your skills relevant,” says co-founder Alexis Ringwald. “Our vision is to have training available for every job.”
Ringwald, who formerly launched and sold a software startup, frequented unemployment lines before starting LearnUp to get a better sense of the hardships of finding a job. The entrepreneur and co-founder Kenny Ma then launched the platform in 2012 in the San Francisco Bay area and has since expanded job postings across the country.
Since its inception, LearnUp discovered that spending one to two hours of training in one of its modules triples a worker’s chance of landing a position, Fast Company reports.

“Having a series of realistic situations is the most effective way to teach job skills,” Ringwald says.

While not every applicant receives a job offer at the end of the process, the platform does manage to actually bridge the unskilled unemployed with companies seeking out new hires. And for many, that’s time worth spending.

MORE: Teaching Low-Income Youth These Skills May Just Solve the Tech Job Hiring Gap