Growing my business

When we founded Paper Culture, we set out to build a different stationery company. Of course, when we started, we had a vision of the product that we wanted to produce centered around unique modern design and services that would make our customer's lives easier. However, we also wanted to build a company of which we could be proud.This story is really about how staying true to what you believe in with your business, can not only feel good, but can be great for business as well.

One of our criteria when we started out was that we didn't want to offer an "eco friendly line" of products, we wanted our entire company to be eco friendly.  As a result, all of our cards are printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper that is produced with windpower, FSC certified and elemental chlorine free. But we also know to be a truly eco friendly company, it has to be more than the products we sell, it has to be who we are. When you come to our offices, you'll see CFLs everywhere, 100% recycled paper in our printers (and even our toilet paper which we joke is recycled, NOT reused . . . gross!), 70% of our company takes public transportation or walks to work, and as a company we offset our carbon footprint so we are CarbonFree.

We also wanted to find a way to give back to the communities that we knew would be a huge part of growing our business. Since our first sale, we have donated a portion of all of our proceeds to charities that we feel embody the spirit of Paper Culture through Paper Culture Cares. We focus our support on family, education and the environment.

But all of this is well and good, but really the point of this post is that for us, doing what we believe in, has also been great business. It turns out that our customers really want to buy products from an eco friendly company. They want to support a company that supports worthy causes. None of this was more apparent than our most recent (and ongoing at the time of this post) Valentine's Day promotion. As a company in the San Francisco Bay Area, we live each day with the prospect of a major earthquake. And when we began to understand the scope of the devestation in Haiti, the tragedy hit so close to home. As a team, we voted to donate 100% of all of our Valentine's Day proceeds to Haiti Relief. We didn't issue a press release. We didn't even think of what the business implications were at the time. We simply wanted to help.

We sent an email to our community asking them to help support Haiti Relief. What happened next was the surprise. It took on a life of its own, and more than any other message we've ever sent, people started forwarding it to friend, blogging about it and . . . coming to our site. We had a massive bump in traffic and sales . . . and best of all, it all helped support a great cause.

So the takeaway . . . doing good is good business!

Advice for others

Doing good is good business!