Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carrie Martin-Haley. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Carrie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
In most typical retail stores that carry household and personal care goods, you’ll find lots of packaging, plastics, and often ingredients that research has proved dangerous. That’s where we differ at Summit Sustainable Goods. With our focus on environmentally friendly products and zero waste packaging, we provide the everyday essentials you need without compromising a clean, healthy environment. All the packaging our products come in can be recycled or composted through the proper channels, and some of our products even come package-free. If you visit our mobile refill station at a local market, you’ll be able to choose from refills like shampoo, hand soap, facial cleanser, bath salts, and much more. You have the choice of taking a free and cleaned jar that we provide you, or you can bring your own container and pay by the ounce for your preferred products. This eliminates the need for single-use plastics and allows you to choose the container you prefer for your products.
We also strive to carry only local products with clean, safe ingredients. You won’t find harsh contaminants like phthalates, parabens, or bleaches in our products, and over 80% of the items we carry are handcrafted locally in Colorado, where we are based. This emphasis on local supply chain minimizes the carbon footprint that arises from shipping products, and ensures that products are created ethically and support small businesses.
At Summit Sustainable Goods, we’re proud to provide high-quality household and personal care products while honoring our local communities and planet.
Carrie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Hey, I’m Carrie from Summit Sustainable Goods! My journey to entrepreneurship wasn’t a typical path. After earning a degree in elementary education, I taught in a classroom for 3 years, then decided to make the transition to sustainability. This led me to working for a small local nonprofit for a few years and collaborating with a business partner to start a different sustainability-focused small business in Denver. A year in, we decided to part ways, and I ventured off to found my own business, Summit Sustainable Goods, in 2020!
I have been so grateful for my experiences with my growing small business. At Summit, we’re proud to provide high quality zero waste goods with a focus on local, clean products and an intimidation-free mindset. The majority of our suppliers are based in our home state of Colorado, so we are able to support other small businesses as well. Every six months, we donate a percentage of our profits to a different nonprofit doing amazing work in our communities! So far, we’ve supported Showers For All, a nonprofit serving the unhoused community in the Denver area, We Don’t Waste, a nonprofit dedicated to diverting waste from landfills and feeding families, and Women In Sustainability, a nonprofit focused on caring for those who care for our planet. We are thrilled to have set up pop-ups in several towns throughout Colorado, and continue to expand our reach to serve more of our community. We believe it’s important to meet people where they’re at in their sustainability journey, and work to build a supportive community around using agency as a consumer to be gentle on the earth. And, as we remind everyone – it’s all about the small steps in sustainability! Progress is the goal, never perfection.
We operate online and through a pop-up basis, so you can find us at multiple markets throughout the summer and into the holiday season. We also offer shipping nation-wide and local doorstep delivery. True to my educational roots, we occasionally offer workshops and webinars to educate about zero waste, and post these to our website when they are offered.
Have any questions about zero waste or sustainable living? We’re always happy to chat!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I love to fondly refer to my small business as my “COVID baby”. I launched it in September 2020, when the world still stood still and physical shops were shuttered. Initially, all I had was a website, a couple social media channels, and a vague goal to someday get in front of physical customers.
When the world began opening up again and it became safer to operate a business in person, I had a choice to make. Sure, I was getting sales here and there on my website and it certainly would have made life easier to continue my online-only format, but it just wasn’t fulfilling. So instead, I steeled myself, invested more of my personal savings into my business, and purchased all the equipment I would need for in-person pop-ups. I increased my inventory, signed myself up for a couple weekly farmers markets, and began scanning my networking groups for opportunities to participate in pop-ups at local businesses.
After my first handful of pop-ups in-person, I was hooked. While I still kept my website up-to-date and worked on increasing online traffic, for the first time, I was able to have meaningful face-to-face conversations with my customers. I loved hearing what made people excited about the products I sell, and talking to them about their own sustainable journeys. It became so much more gratifying than simply keeping my online site stocked and posting regularly on social media.
Starting a small business in the midst of COVID pigeon-holed me into starting with one format of entrepreneurship to get the wheels turning. And once restrictions loosened and I was confronted with more options, I had to decide whether to stick to how I had been running my business, or pivot to include a brand new way of interacting with customers and selling my products. It forced me to take new risks that I may not have been prepared for when first setting up my business, and gave me the chance to reflect on what I had learned already and which direction I wanted my business to head. And more than anything, I now know my business is resilient and when it’s time to pivot again, I will be ready.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
When I began Summit Sustainable Goods, I was working as a project manager, and later interim executive director, for a local nonprofit. While the nonprofit helped to pay the bills, my business wasn’t close to breaking even, and having just started, I had no wiggle room to pay myself. After several months of trying to juggle my nonprofit position and working on growing my new business, I made the decision to step away from my job and shift to my business full-time. This involved some candid conversations with my partner, who agreed to take on full financial responsibility for us while I pushed full-steam ahead toward that golden “break-even” point so I could one day begin to pay myself a salary.
But what a difference this decision made! Within just weeks of leaving my job, I jumped into physical pop-ups and markets. This growth allowed me to connect with people in-person rather than relying on online sales, and I found the work so much more satisfying. On top of that, I increased my revenue nearly tenfold between December 2020 and December 2021.
Today, as I am reaching the middle of summer market season in Colorado and have now been working exclusively on my own business for over a year, I am starting the process of looking into my own physical storefront. Thus far, the research is preliminary and I have quite a ways to go before I make the next huge step, but it’s exhilarating to know how far I’ve come already in just a year of working full-time at Summit, and where I will be a year from now!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.summitsustainablegoods.eco
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/summitsustainablegoods
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/summitsustainablegoods