EcoSpaces just celebrated the completion of four years in business supplying Green Building Materials to our community, and what an adventure it has been. We threw a party with beer and wine to thank our past clients, woo some new ones, and celebrate that EcoSpaces is still standing. We opened our doors in 2007, when contractors were still pulling down more money than lawyers in this town and property lots were selling for over a million dollars.Yes, Telluride is, and has always been, a boom/bust town, and now seeing it in retrospect, little did we know, just a year after we opened our doors we would be heading into the greatest economic down turn since the great depression in this country. The bubble did not pop right away here, and sustainability and green building simultaneously gained popularity and press. So we wondered, even if people were starting to be strapped for cash, would they still choose a comparable but SUSTAINABLE product in the end? Other boutique green building showrooms like ours were falling from grace just at the same time that the big banks started their infectious toppling motion. Our mantra was “Stay above water so we can be in position to dominate the upswing.”
I think we have been able to hang in because 1) we intentionally created a lean business brokering materials and drop shipping them to the job site instead of warehousing anything. 2) We boot strapped during the slowest part of the recession and cut back on all staff and many other expenses for that very slow time. 3) We were very fortuitous to find an angel investor who believed in the concept of our business and had invested capital into this start up. Each year, our business has grown; people are still building and remodeling, yet fewer numbers. Of course we have seen fewer building permits, more projects halted based on lack of loan funding, and foreclosure has found too many people in our circles confronted with hard luck.
We are school teachers turned entrepreneurs, we learn as we go, and feel that we have earned our honorary MBAs as we have been forced to study web design, marketing, social networking, cold calling, communications, psychology, contact management and project management systems, outside sales and much more. It has certainly been an education and there is an abundance to learn. We even hired Allison Wollfe of Vibrant Planet, who coaches on business strategies, marketing plans and communication techniques for companies focused on social and environmental innovations. After a slew of interviews conducted with architects, designers, developers, contractors, and realtors, asking them pointed questions about their interest and commitment to the type of building materials we carry the findings were important for the growth of the company.
What we learned was, in this economy, people are way more money conscious than they are green conscious. They are first most concerned about getting an affordable product, next they want it to be aesthetically pleasing, durable, and finally it is an added bonus that it is green. This was surprising to us, but also good to learn. We therefore decided to market our business as a design showroom providing innovative and aesthetically original materials that are durable, affordable, as well as sustainable. We learned that the “Conscious Consumer” (those already committed to Sustainability) is a very small percentage of people, and it is the people who are currently building and purchasing building materials are who we need to market. We have weeded out our product line to be able to offer comparable like priced products that are also “green” to those that are conventional. An example would be a product like our Beetle Kill Pine siding (taken from standing dead Pine trees devastated by the bark beetle epidemic) producing a product that looks like reclaimed barn wood, compared to a standard virgin pine siding product. Yes, some products still are a bit more in upfront cost but will stand up and last a whole lot longer like our 50-year roofing product than cheaper materials that may need to be replaced sooner.
When we started, we said that we wanted to be in business long enough that these green alternative building materials were no longer “alternative” but more the norm, and we could see the overall trend in building shift to a more sustainable one, and thus be forced out of business as our niche market went fully mainstream. But, for now, it seems like we still have work to be done, helping to offer Green Building Materials as a viable option to people living in homes.
