Behind the Brand®

Creating a Community and Connecting with Impact with Derrick Emsley from tentree.

Derrick Emsley is the co-founder of tentree, a sustainable clothing company with the mission to create a more sustainable future through planting trees. He also founded veritree, a company that helps businesses integrate climate restoration into their operations. In this episode, Jeff Adamson and Derrick talk about what it means to be a mission-driven business. Derrick talks about how sustainability and community should be an important part of a company’s business model, and lends insight into the future of retail.

Listen to the full episode here:

Building a Business One Tree at a Time

Jeff: I want to start with some current events here. You just made the top 40, under 40. What does that mean to you? Does that title hold a lot to you? Or is this something like, "Hey, I'm just heads-down focused on my business and the awards will come and go as they do?"

Derrick: It's obviously a super big honour to be recognized for that. It's one of those things I think with any of those recognitions, you sort of feel a little unworthy of it. It feels like your name is the one that is being publicized when it should be the hundreds of other people that have been a part of the process that should be publicized instead. For me, I'm very grateful and honoured to be receiving it. At the end of the day, it's not about me. It's not about what I did. If anything, I'm the least important person in everything that we're doing. It's our team. It's my co-founders and it's the impact we're trying to create. I think it's just a reflection of that.

Jeff: I want to go back to the beginning of when tentree first started up, because many of the listeners may not be familiar with the story. Tell us a little bit about the motivation behind starting tentree.

Derrick: We think of tentree as a tree planting company that sells apparel, not an apparel business that plants trees. If you go to the beginning, that is core to who we are as a business. When I was in high school, we started a tree planting company in the prairies where we planted 150,000 trees on 640 acres of land. The idea was to sell carbon offsets. It got us connected with this incredible network of global planting organizations that weren't just focused on the environmental side but also focused on the social impact, like job creation and food security.

What we found was that this idea of the carbon-offsetting business model wasn't ultimately viable, largely because the carbon-offsetting world hadn't really developed the way it is now. Also, globally, these organizations couldn't grow and scale their models. For us, the creation of tentree was not about creating an apparel brand. It was about creating a vehicle that allowed us to plant trees and that vehicle was apparel.

We‌ quickly realized [it] was more than that. [It] was the community that was built behind this apparel and that's really core to who we are. Our idea around sustainability was not this old way of looking at it, which was, disempowering, the world's ending, the ice caps melting, the fires are burning. It was more about, how can you as an individual have an impact and how can you use those dollars as a consumer to create a positive impact?

It's not about green guilt or doing less. It's about, looking at how you can have an impact through a single purchase.

Jeff: When you look at that, why is it so much more important to identify as a tree planting company that sells apparel versus an apparel company that happens to plant trees? What is the actual difference in terms of how you operate your business day to day?

Derrick: It guides every decision. It has led us down pathways that we likely would not have gone down had we been an apparel business that was utilizing tree planting as a marketing approach or using tree planting to acquire customers. It goes to that idea of the "start with why", the idea or concept that the companies that will stand the test of time, don't start with a product and work their way towards a purpose. They start with purpose and work their way towards a product.

It's the same idea that Apple isn't an iPhone company. Apple is about inspiring creativity and providing the tools to do it. For us, our “what” is apparel, but it also means that our “what” could be anything. Our “why” is trees. How we accomplish our goals, our community, and really we're looking for different ways every day to give them the opportunity to partake in making an impact.

Becoming a Successful Business

Jeff: I grew up in a small community in Saskatchewan as well. What did you learn that you've taken with you as you've grown as a leader from those early days of planting the trees yourself?

Derrick: I would say the biggest one is probably resilience. I think if you talk to any of the people that have done tree planting and maybe work for you now that are tree planters, everything's easy compared to tree planting. Living in the Bush, slamming a shovel into the ground, planting thousands of trees a day, and living in a camp. What it pushes you to realize is the resilience that you can have as an individual and your ability to push through challenging times or those mental barriers.

I think it's super important when you lean into that from an entrepreneurial standpoint. The media celebrates two points in the entrepreneurial journey. First, the inception, this moment of creation where a lightbulb turns on. Then it celebrates the exit, and there's a survivorship bias that comes with that. What you forget to talk about is this middle period where it's an absolute rollercoaster and the anxiety, stress, [and] resilience that's needed, because when it's going well, you're waiting for things to go bad. And when it's going bad, you're just all hands on deck trying to make it go well. It's really this entrepreneurial journey. It's very reminiscent of the ups and downs and the highs and lows of working in the field, planting trees.

Jeff: I think you're totally right. People will latch on to just the ones that survive, but at the end of the day, for every tentree, there are thousands of companies that don't make it. Why do you think tentree has made it? What has made you guys different aside from the fact that you were incredibly purpose-driven? Are there any other things that you would attribute some of your success to as a business?

Derrick: Every successful business has a healthy portion of luck involved in it. Not just luck of, did enough things go right? But also circumstances. As an individual, my ability to live on noodles and Kraft mac and cheese in my parents' basement for a while, while trying to create this business and knowing that I had something to fall back on, and I could do that confidently.

As a result of our timing, young guys trying to do something good, over their skis at every point of the conversation, not really knowing what we were doing in the apparel space. A lot of people had faith [in us] and supported us through that. I remember the first trade show we showed up at, we had neon American Apparel tank tops with tentree logos on them. And we didn't have a catalogue. We didn't have a price sheet. We didn't have anything.

We showed up at the trade show and it was all outerwear. It was all fall product. And we didn't realize how seasons worked in apparel. We still picked up 15, 20, 25 accounts because people were like, “These guys don't know what the heck they're doing, but we'll give them a shot, they seem nice enough.” I think our circumstances and our timing contributed. The support we had in the support systems around us to really allow us to thrive, definitely [contributed to] it as well.

Jeff: A lot of people would look at what you've done and they would relate to the fact that [you] really care about the environment. They want to make an impact positively on fighting climate change. Not many people would make the leap to start their own tree planting company. Then pivot that to a tree company that sells apparel. Many people would just go and say, “Hey, I'm going to go work for an environmental agency or a large company as an environmental specialist.”

Why did you go the entrepreneurial route versus going and working for a large company that's already doing something like this?

Derrick: First off, the timing of when we started this, we started the business in 2012. The conversation around sustainability and what that meant hadn't really developed into what it is today. For us, there wasn't necessarily the opportunity to step into something that really got us out of bed and excited. The other thing is that we were fortunate that we grew up in an environment where my father had been an entrepreneur. I got to experience some of his highs and lows, learnings and teachings. He always encouraged us to be like, “why don't you try and build something and see if you can turn this into something”. So we tried, and, luckily for us, it wasn't a total failure.

Jeff: Did it always feel like that? There's always that feeling like you haven't quite made it yet. When you think of what you've done so far, do you look at it and say, “Hey, this has been successful,” or do you always feel like you haven't quite made it yet?

Derrick: You've always got the sort of imposter syndrome, of day-to-day, what am I doing? Why am I the one that is getting to play this role? The other thing is, it's the constant moving goalpost. A lot of entrepreneurs are very driven, very goal-oriented people. You have to be always setting your sights on something further down the road because you're in an environment where you have to be pushing towards something.

If you're trying to create a business that is successful today, it probably won't be successful in 5 years or 10 years. You have to be thinking further out. For us, the first thing we were super excited about was [that] we planted a million trees. That for us was this huge milestone. It took us well over a year to get there, and we had a big celebration. Our team was four people at the time, and so we [took] everybody out. Then we decided this was going to be every million trees. Then it got to the point where that was happening every month. We [couldn’t] do this any longer, but it's the same thing with our goal setting. We had a big goal of a million trees and we thought that'd be incredible if we got there. Then we got there way quicker than we thought. We said 10 million and then a hundred. Now [it’s] a billion. For us, the goalposts move every single time.

We're never happy with the last goal. I think it's a challenge that we have, that I asked my team to challenge me on, which is I don't do a good job of pausing and being. Celebrating the hitting of one goal, cause I'm already onto the next.

Finding the Right People for Your Business

Jeff: What's your approach to finding talent? How do you bring in the best of the best?

Derrick: It is a talent war. Just being in Canada in a market that is basically a 30% discount to everybody south of the border and we're operating in Vancouver right now, which is just an incredibly challenging market for a lot of people to even be able to afford a house.

I think there are a few things. One is that we're fortunate that there's a bigger purpose behind what we're building. That's important to our team. If you're on the tentree team, you are there because not only do you want to be a part of building something special, but you also want to be a part of having a really meaningful impact. Us instilling that in every facet of the work that we do is critical to how we hire talent [and] how we retain talent.

Specifically to the question of how do I go out and find talent and how do I try to find good people? It just comes down to culture fit and mission fit. We've found that if somebody believes in what we're doing, they will pour their heart and soul into what we're building. Skills you can learn, but we talked about that resilience, that idea of finding the people that have that drive and [can] be resilient in the face of adversity. Building anything is hard, let alone building something in an environment like what we're dealing with COVID, climate change and everything like that is even harder.

You need people that have that sort of approach. Once you've got those great people, good experience, good talent or skill set [can be learned].

Jeff: Here's a scenario. You've got someone who is a brilliant designer, brilliant marketer, brilliant at operations, and maybe not the best culture fit. On the other side of that, you've got someone who's an amazing culture fit, and maybe they're not brilliant at any of those things, which person do you go with?

Derrick: I want to pretend it's as easy as saying culture fit every time, but I think that's an oversimplification. Naturally, there are business needs and our impact comes from the success of the business. [The] success of the business allows us to create more impact and continue to create that flywheel. We can't outright say the perfect culture fit. Even if their skills suck, they're going to be the person. Maybe a flip to that is we will always have a place for somebody that is an incredible culture fit.

When they're not a perfect culture fit, there's a lot more homework that needs to be done. There's a lot more vetting and there are a lot more questions that need to be answered of why is this where you want to be? Is this the right fit for you? Is this the right fit for us? I think one of the things that we've always believed within tentree is that just as much as we're choosing to employ you, you're choosing to be here. It has to be a mutually beneficial relationship. And we take a lot of time and care to try to understand why somebody wants to be here.

And so I would say that if they're not outright the perfect culture fit, there's a lot more digging that needs to happen.

Jeff: Do you feel like that culture can also be learned on the fly? Or is it something ‌, you're either a fit, or you're not?

Derrick: I think it absolutely can be learned. If there's a true inherent value disconnect, then it's not the right fit. No matter how good their talent [is], it doesn't make sense. I would say that that's a fairly rare circumstance. Nobody's out here just saying [they] hate the environment [and] enjoy burning down trees. If they are, they're not coming to us. It's a relative scale. Oftentimes you'll have somebody that is so passionate about what we're building and maybe their skillset isn't perfect, but then you'll have somebody whose skillset is incredible or perfect. Maybe they're not as passionate about what we're building, but they have to be open to being passionate about it. They have to be ready to enroll in the mission and what we're trying to create.

Jeff: I'm hearing some common words, like mission, purpose and the why. There are a lot more companies that are thinking about the environment now. There are a lot more companies that are making investments. It's interesting because it's a very good thing. But in some ways, do you find that as more and more companies are now making these climate pledges, you guys have been doing this the whole time. Do you find that it's now more diluted and more competitive in terms of, now, everyone's a mission-driven climate company, and tentree is just one of many that are doing it?

Maybe you were early on in it and it's more true. You're more authentic on it. Have you found that it's made it harder to get your purpose out there or has it made it easier? Because now there's more awareness around it?

Derrick: [It’s] a double-edged sword. We don't have a monopoly on caring for the planet, nor should we, because at the end of the day tentree isn’t going to solve the climate crisis. We have‌ a very important part to play in it. I also don't necessarily think that more people stepping in with an authentic approach is a bad thing. Where I think it gets challenging is where companies really are using it strictly as a marketing vehicle, but it's not true to who they are as a business. I think some of the best examples are like, just wait till February, and during the Super Bowl, you're going to see how many companies are going to have paid $5 million for a 30-second ad spot to talk about the $300,000 or a $100,000 dollars that they're giving to a charity. This is the disconnect that creates this level of skepticism for consumers and for people across the globe. Businesses that are strictly trying to value signal and don't [care] are the ones that dilute the overall message.

If we take tree planting as an example, we've planted over 65 million trees since we started the business. Next year, we'll be far beyond a hundred million. For us, what we found was, the challenge wasn't getting trees in the ground. The challenge was making sure that the trees were getting in the ground in an auditable, transparent way that was permanent and created a real, meaningful impact.

What we found was that we started investing time, resources, [and] energy and [we were] travelling to these sites. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year going to these sites. And we built a technology to bring transparency to our tree planting. What we've also seen is hundreds of businesses have stepped into the tree planting conversation and not really invested [anything]. They just want to be able to say, “I have planted this many trees,” or “I've taken this many pounds of trash out of the water”. What we recently did was we took this technology that we built called veritree, and we rolled it out into a separate business altogether. [This ] supports other businesses in, not just investing in tree planting, but doing it in a way that's authentic and transparent and has a real meaningful long-term impact.

Jeff: Other than the Super Bowl, what are some of the ways that consumers can spot a company that is legit versus a company that's just trying to virtue signal?

Derrick: I'm hesitant to call out businesses or suggest that anybody that wants to do something is a bad thing. At the end of the day, the more people are investing, whether it's in tree planting, sustainability efforts, [or] social causes, it's good. Everybody's looking to create something tangible to say, “I did this” and where you can see when it's truly authentic is when they're not just saying “I did this,” but they're looking for the outcome of doing that.

They're not just invested in the initial press release. They're invested in the long-term benefits and outcomes of the work that they're doing. They're not just focused on taking one pound of trash out of the water. They're focused on reclamation of the entire waterway. You're talking about the impact that that's having on an ecosystem. They're not just investing in a pride campaign when it's convenient, they're sort of engaging with the community. We see a lot of this, particularly with indigenous work in Canada, not just trying to use it for a press release, but be engaged and be thoughtful and focus on the long-term.

Jeff: Are there any times in your own journey as a leader where you've been like, this is pretty tough. It's difficult because you 've got to walk the talk all the time. Do you have any stories around where you were like, “We're going to have to maybe compromise on our values.” How did you stay true to it?

Derrick: We have had a lot of those types of challenges. One of the things that I've mentioned before that really led to our success early on was just our lack of understanding of what we were doing in the apparel space. We also ran into a bunch of issues as a result of that. When we were creating products at the beginning, we didn't know a thing about sourcing sustainably. You know, we didn't know what the difference between cotton and organic cotton was. We [had] never heard of recycled polyester. For us we were just making product and our stance was that product led to trees [being] planted.

Three years in, somebody challenged us on it. They said, “Why aren't you guys making your product sustainably?” And we stopped and listened. We said, “What does that mean?” We think “we're planting trees,we're sustainable.” They talked to us a little bit about this and we said, “You know what? You're right.” It doesn't matter, regardless of what the outcome is of planting trees. If the vehicle that gets it there isn't good for the environment, then what are we doing?

And so for us, we, over the span of about 18 months, overhauled our supply chain from 0% preferred materials to virtually, I think it was like 98% sustainable materials. There's things like zippers and trims and stuff like that. There are still a lot of challenges in some of those areas that we're still focused on, but we're already committed to pricing with our end retailers. And we couldn't go back to them and say, you know, this is now $5 more because it's organic cotton.

We just ate the entire margin impact of that. Another example of it was one year, we forecast a lot of our tree planting with all of our global partners at the beginning of the year. We grew by 50, 60, 70% in one year. We're excited about the future. We just think that's going to keep happening. So we forecast it with our partners, we're going to grow by another 60 to 70%. We grew by 20%. We realized some of our infrastructure wasn't scaling the way it needed to. We had delays.

We talked to them and said, “Hey, we're not going to hit our numbers this year. We actually need to plant a million less trees.” They came back to us and said, “Here's the impact it's going to have on communities that we're investing in infrastructure with, we're employing”. What we did was we front-loaded that, and spent the money but when you're building a business, cash flow is critical. We basically had hundreds of thousands of dollars that were just locked up in tree planting that theoretically could have been financing the business. We've had tonnes of different instances where we had to put values versus business on a measuring stick and decide which one we went with.

I would say I'm really proud. I think our team would probably echo this, every time we pick values.

Jeff: I know that you probably would claim that you're not the expert on it, but I think you guys do it extraordinarily well. What advice would you give other leaders who want to stay true to their purpose, but they find themselves in a position where they're like, “We're not going to plant any trees if we're out of business.” What recommendation would you give them in terms of thinking through how to make those trade-offs and how to really look at them and say, “Hey, you know what, we have to just do X or Y.”

Derrick: I think first there needs to be goals in place. There needs to be a measuring stick for those goals. If you don't know what you're trying to accomplish, whether that be related to carbon and emissions and climate, or whether it be related to waste, then you can't confidently [decide if it’s] a good or bad decision. From that standpoint, I think the next piece is you've got to be considerate [that] you should never be perfect. Nobody expects perfection.

If you claim perfection, people expect perfection. I've always believed that as a business, you need to live in the fallibility of, we are doing our best, and this doesn't mean that this is a licence to do bad. You need to recognize that it's a transition and it's a journey. Understanding and living into that fallibility is critical. The final thing I would just say is enrol your supporters, your customers, your community, whatever it might be in the transition, in the journey. If people feel invested in that journey and you're open and transparent about both the wins and the challenges, and you haven't claimed that you're perfect and haven't overstepped from like a communication standpoint, then people tend to be very forgiving and understanding of stumbles along the way.

Jeff: I want to touch on COP26. That's been something that's been producing a lot of headlines [lately]. What are the signals that you're pulling out of some of the noise coming out of COP26? I know that material sourcing has been under the spotlight, incentivizing environmentally preferred materials, recognizing the impact of fashion on the environment. What are some of the things that you've pulled out and what decisions are you making because of it?

Derrick: The high level view is that we're coming up short. If there's one answer that's coming out of COP, it's that the IPC has articulated these different sort of directions. One half degree of warming, two degrees and three degrees of warming right now, the outcome of COP, it's a good step, but it's not where we need to be. There's still a lot of work to do. I've always been a big believer that business will and must play a huge role in the transition it has to be.

I think what drives businesses to make change is consumers. A lot of the environmental conversation has been accelerated because of consumers. It might not be the consumer that gets to make the end decision, but voting with their wallet, choosing to support businesses that are thinking sustainably or acting appropriately. It's what's driving the conversation right now. You know, like youth activism, things like that.

Our belief internally has been that just like with everything to do with climate change, it's all about transitions. There's a transition taking place within business models. If you look at the last call it, you know, a hundred years of capitalism, really, this extractive business model was kit, which is, you know, using resources to create profit, resources are largely infinite in a lot of those conversations. And then the sustainability conversation became the focus, which was really more a recognition that resources aren't infinite and how can we as a business, utilize our resources better in the pursuit of profit.

I think sustainability has transformed into this sort of circularity perspective. Ultimately, the entire sustainability conversation has really been focused around this idea of how can we as a business do less bad? And I think the future of business is, how can we do more good? To us, that's the restorative business model. And I think you saw a huge conversation at COP about nature-based solutions, about the need for restoration and restoring our ecosystems, and the part that that has to play in our decarbonisation strategies.

The future of business has to play a huge part in our decarbonization. We need to understand, reduce, and offset our footprint. Third, like the future of business is in doing less bad, the future of business is doing more good.

Jeff: I couldn't agree more with that. Elon Musk [for example], I think one of the things that he's done fairly well is he's brought awareness to the fact that the electric car doesn't need to be an ugly, slow, only 50 kilometres of range thing. It doesn't need to be something that's only for the rich and wealthy. He's bringing costs down continuously. What he's getting too, is that, “Hey, you don't need to choose an entirely different quality of life in order to drive something that's good for the environment”.

How do you think about driving costs down so that a person who's like, “Hey, I'm going to do right by the environment, but I maybe can't afford to pay that premium.”?

Derrick: Every approach to sustainability has had this at some point, electric cars are ugly-looking hatchbacks that nobody wants to drive. Tesla came out and showed it could be a better product for a better vehicle and it can look great. Same thing with sustainable apparel. Hemp and organic cotton were scratchy and low quality. [It] wasn't durable. We've always believed that people will buy the product once because it plants trees. If it's not a good product, they'll never come back. A brand can only sell the product for so long, the product also has to sell the brand.

Sustainability is ultimately table stakes over the next five years. What happens with that is naturally more demand, which creates more supply. What we're seeing is, particularly in our supply chain, organic cotton prices in the last 12 months went up almost a hundred percent. Suddenly, everybody [has] decided we need organic cotton, and supply chains are challenging. You're going to start to see some of this greater adoption as more and more people come in.

I think you're going to see some challenges at the early stages, but also you're going to see things level out in the years to come. The last point I would say is I'm a big believer in businesses making it frictionless for a customer to choose sustainability. Businesses must make a profit, but there needs to be a greater onus on businesses to make it easy for their customers to help save the planet. Whether that be choosing a system like a battery-powered car. Whether that be choosing a t-shirt that plants 10 trees, or using renewable energy on the grid.

It's an imperative for businesses, if they really want to continue to attract customers and compete, to differentiate themselves by making it easy for their customers to play a part in being sustainable.

Jeff: You can't focus on just their charity or them being perfectly aligned. We're heading into one of the busiest retail seasons of the year. What message would you want to get out to consumers at this time of the year?

Derrick: We’re a product company. I'm not going to sit here and try to pretend that I'm trying to say, don't purchase products. At the end of the day, we recognize what the holiday season can mean to a retail business, to a product-driven business. We've always believed in creating an environment where if you don't need a product, you shouldn't be buying it. But if you're going to buy a product, you might as well buy one that plants trees, or gives back or does something good.

This is always a big time of the year for us. We're super fortunate and grateful that our customers even consider us in that conversation. We're also always conscious of overconsumption. If you're going to buy, vote with your wallet. Think of where you're putting your dollars and hopefully do it responsibly.

Jeff: Whenever I see a tentree piece of apparel out there, in our office, [or] out on the street. I always have a huge sense of pride to see what you guys have built. I think what you're doing is amazing. You're setting the bar for other companies. I think it's something that other people should strive for. I'm really grateful for you being here and sharing all this information and more of the behind the scenes of what you guys are about as a brand. How can people follow you guys? What would you like to get out there?

Derrick: We're really focused on two things right now. We have tentree, which is our apparel business. Like I said, a tree planting company that sells apparel [and] can be found at tentree.com. If what we're talking about on this restorative business model resonates, reach out to us on veritree.com. This is the business that we've rolled out to take what we've learned over the last 10 years of tentree, and try to support other businesses in integrating authentic storytelling and meaningful, transparent auditable impact into their business.

Jeff: Can you just give a little bit more detail on veritree, cause I think there are going to be a lot of companies that are interested in hearing about this.

Derrick: Over 10 years of planting, what we found was it wasn't challenging to just get trees in the ground. That wasn't the most challenging part. The challenging part for us was really how do we ensure that there's no double counting. How do you make sure that it's permanent, there's accountability and transparency and there's auditable impact coming out of it. For us, we're making this claim at tentree that 10 trees were planted. We're not just saying we're donating a portion of proceeds.

We've got a more challenging position to make sure that we're auditing and confirming the claims we're making. For us, veritree was the solution we built for that. veritree is a blockchain based data collection platform that we've rolled out, in about five different countries. By the early part of next year, it'll probably be in about eight to nine different countries supporting global reforestation efforts and making sure that the data that is collected from the ground is delivered directly to sponsors. Tree planting is happening in an auditable way, there's a permanent impact, and we're supporting companies and delivering that storytelling to their end consumer.

So already, we're partnered with an organization to create a tree planting credit card. We're partnered with another organization to support them with rolling out tree planting, to offset the emissions, or remove the carbon from their web hosting platform. We're going to be launching some pretty exciting consumer business partnerships here in the new year and a handful of others.