With lines of hair, skin and body products, Save Your World offers organic, all-natural and fair trade products as well as recycled and biodegradable packaging. Scott Cecil, President and Founder, leads the company, “made up of family and friends who share a passion for preserving the world’s natural resources”. 

 

Cecil, 41, is a Chicago native who founded Save Your World in 2006. As a seasoned corporate veteran, he craved a change of pace and a deeper purpose when he stumbled upon a crossroads in his life. “I had been in the corporate world for most of my life,” Cecil explains, “When the company decided to merge (AT&T), they offered me all the right things, from a career perspective, to stay with them.  At the time, my wife was six months pregnant with our third child. I’d said yes to the company all my life, and at that time, I didn’t want to. There was no better time than the present to start a business. I always knew that I wanted to have an environmental component to whatever business I started. I wanted to have a business that had a clear, concise, easy to understand message for customers. You find companies that offer five or ten percent of profit to worthwhile cause, but for me, that was a little too ambiguous. I wanted our customers to see a tangible result.”                                                                                                   

Aside from seeing the first hand beneficial properties of natural products, Cecil was also driven by an environmental and business vision. “Focusing on natural and organic ingredients made sense,” he explains. “For me, it made sense to do things as well as you possibly can. We just focus on doing every aspect of the business as well as we possibly can, from our product to our packaging.”

As with any sustainable business, they must achieve a delicate balance between sound business decisions and environmental principles.“Being a conservation organization, it’s really hard to do what you really should,” admits Cecil. “You have two competing demands: one is the demand of starting a business and all of the costs involved in that. The other demand is basically our conservation mission and all of the funding we put into that.”

The company has evolved from a tiny, one man outfit into a national brand on retailer shelves. Cecil found building the brands’ name to be the biggest challenge of them all. “The biggest challenge is that people just don’t know who you are; the first year, we were labeling bottles by hand, selling bottles store to store,” Cecil recalls. “We’re starting a brand, from scratch, in probably one of the most mature marketplaces. Its very hard just getting the word out and letting people know about Save Your World.” Through diligence and dedication, the company was able to get a meeting with natural foods giant, Whole Foods.

“We were fortunate, we met up with [Whole Foods] and started working with them in 2007,” he recalls. “We had our products approved as a premium whole body product and we gave them an exclusive label. We are shelved in Whole Foods nationwide. We also hooked upwith the Vitamin Shoppe. They were really great; they brought us on during Earth Day and sold about 10,000 of our wristbands. We build our distribution one location at a time. A lot of independent stores now carry our product, coast to coast.”

Many sustainable businesses, which require a special level of ingredient and quality, find challenges in sourcing and production. But ever optimistic, Cecil doesn’t see it as a challenge; he sees it as a logical practice and procedure. “You just have to follow a specific process. For example, our organic yerba mate, I've been down to Brazil twice to actually visit the location we get if from, to make sure they treat the workers how you’d expect them to, from a fair trade perspective,” he explains. “Same thing with our organic aloe from the Dominican Republic. You put a process into place and in everything you do, you follow that process. Sourcing would be more challenging if we didn’t care about quality ingredients and fair labor practices. We just make it part of the business.”

Traveling to third world countries to evaluate potential partners and sources, Cecil acknowledges that he is a hands-on leader, “I think you have to be hands on with your business. It’s that old adage ‘Trust but verify’,” he shares. “If you want good partners, you have to take the time to visit their locations and understand the way they do business.”

Today, consumers and companies are paying unprecedented attention to environmental issues. About 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have a board committee overseeing environmental issues, compared with fewer than ten percent five years ago, according to, Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres, an environmental advocacy group. With the increase in environmental awareness, so comes attention to green businesses. “I think the attention that green businesses are getting isn’t nearly enough,” he declares. “I think the reason for the attention is basic self-preservation. Global climate change is upon us. You have to do something about it. And I think every business can and should do something about it. But it is challenging, for businesses to do so. It does cost more to do what we’re doing, the way we’re doing it. We’re fortunate that we started our business from scratch with our conservation mission as a component to the business.”

Save Your World is helping to save the rainforest through a unique and innovative leasing program, one of the first of its kind in the world. But how does this ‘One Product = One Acre of Rainforest for One Year’ pledge translate into tangible results? “We were fortunate enough to benefit from the same mechanism that exists for a logging or a mining company. The main difference is, instead of logging or mining the land, we maintain it to its pristine state,” clarifies Cecil. “When you buy a product from Save Your World, a portion of that pays for the acreage fee that we pay the forestry commission of Guyana. There are other costs that we pay too, like royalty fees, which basically equate to the minimum amount that a logging company would pay the government of Guyana for taking timber off the land. But we also support three communities of indigenous people in Guyana. There are a number of different components, but the bottom line is that each product purchased buys an acre of land for one year.”

The ‘supplier’ is a community where approximately seventy people work together to pool their resources, including the money they make from the sale of yerba maté. This community is comparable to a “kibbutz” because its members do not personally earn a wage, but are supported by the community for all of their needs. While the minimum wage in Brazil is approximately $190 per month, this community earns approximately three times that.

Only two years deep in their conservation mission and having achieved so much, there seems to be continued success on the horizon for the company. “Save Your World will always be a company focused on naturals and organics. Save Your World will always be a focused organization from a conservation perspective,” he emphasizes. “We are not interested in having 10 different conservation projects. We currently are working on saving 200,000 acres of rainforest in Guyana. We have to sell at least 200,000 products each year. We have a lot of work to do. We just entered into another agreement in the South Pacific where we’re involved in the world’s largest marine sanctuary. The marine sanctuary is something we are really excited about, and that will be rolled out in 2009.” (This project will focus on protecting the largest uninhabited and unloggedisland in the Pacific, including thousands of acres of pristine rainforest and adjacent coral reefs.)

For the future of the green industry as a whole, Cecil sees the green component as being a common-sense integration into every business strategy. “Every business will be, to some degree, a green business. I don’t think any business will not be, but there will be different degrees,” Cecil forecasts. “We like to think that we’re setting the bar, from the standpoint of transparency, and providing customers with something that has a tangible effect. I cant think of a single company or business that couldn’t t be environmentally focused in one way or another.”

Cecil, who resides in Short Hills, NJ, now has that deeper purpose he was searching for when he escaped the corporate world in 2005. “The reason why I left the corporate world is that we were pregnant with our third child. When you have children, you look at things a little bit differently,” he confides. “What’s very important to me now is just making sure that they live in a better world, and their children live in a better world...you start thinking ‘how can I make the next generation better off than the current generation, or the generation before?’ That’s the genesis for my decision to focus on sustainability. I am hoping that, twenty years from now, my children will be working by my side.”

Photos Courtesy: S. Cecil