Creating Generous Companies

As a lead up to Sustainable Brands conference SB’18 , students, alumni, and faculty of our MA in Sustainable Design program interviewed selected speakers — leaders in corporate sustainability initiatives.  In this blog we share our interview with Nicole Hagerman Miller, Managing Director of B3.8.   Nicole, what did you talk about at SB’18? I’I

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What’s the DIF?

Do you know about the DIF (Disruption Innovation Festival)? This annual online festival of ideas asks: what is we could redesign everything? Free online sessions run from November 6-24, 2017. Tune into the DIF Live Launch What are the stories that we tell ourselves about the economy? That’s the question that Mark Stevenson, Ann Pettifor,

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How a T-Shirt is Paving the Way

This is a true story. A really cool, hard-won, real-life story of sustainable product design within the fashion industry (which is practically an oxymoron) and we wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss it. “This is a story about an extraordinary effort to transform an ordinary piece of clothing. In June, C&A, the international

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Student Spotlight: REMIX Nike Making App

Last month Nike, the company I work for made several exciting announcements around initiatives and awareness of the materials footprint in the apparel industry and its relationship to climate change. We publicly released a summary report commissioned through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that looks into the embedded and often unrecognized energy usage, environmental and

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Who Made My Clothes?

On Friday, April 24th, from 6:15-9:30pm, local small businesses, activists, and students will come together in the Twin Cities to participate in Fashion Revolution Day on the anniversary of Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza Collapse. This will be Minnesota’s first Fashion Revolution Day event, to be held at the Minnesota Textile Center in Minneapolis. Learn more: www.fashrevmpls.eventbrite.com

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Making the Business Case for Sustainability

Wendy Jedlička (CPP, MIM) is a front-line sustainable packaging designer. We recently caught up with her to discuss her fully online course devoted to the subject, Making the Business Case for Sustainability. SDO: What is your class about and who is it for? Wendy: The class is about diving into the innovation advantages business schools

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Raising the Bar to Restorative

Net zero. Carbon neutral. Zero impact. Sustainable. These buzzwords and concepts have come to represent the highest levels of innovation within our built and designed environments. Or have they? It turns out that they have not, that a new wave of development is pioneering beyond them into the restorative, net positive space. Restorative development leapfrogs

Sustainability in Design and Marketing Boot Camp

The desire to tackle all efforts from a sustainability perspective has been growing for some time. From protests causing major manufacturers like Mattel and Lego to rethink their purchases from old growth forests, to the rise of Fair Trade and Certified Organic goods, to the severe punishments doled out to wrongdoers in China over issues

Ethics-Based Marketing

Like causing ripples in a pond, a great marketing effort (or even just a good one), will take-on a positive life and energy of its own. An ill-conceived effort though will sink like a rock, causing barely a splash. What is ethics-based marketing? Ethics-based Marketing put simply  — is telling an honest story. It’s also

Working with the New FTC Green Guides

At the beginning of October 2012, an article by GreenBiz’s Joel Makower was posted on livingprinciples.org about the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) long awaited release of the revised Environmental Marketing Claims Guidelines* – noting you can’t call something “green” or “eco-friendly” unless you can prove it really is “green” or “eco-friendly.” And while the

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