We recently connected with Gillie Roberts and have shared our conversation below.

Gillie, appreciate you joining us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

The hurdle to profitability for my business and others like it can be found at the intersection of the cost of sustainable practices and the perceived value of a product. As the term “sustainability” has made its way into the popular lexicon, it has increasingly carried the implication of environmental protections and little else. However, that is only one third of the word’s true meaning. To fully embrace sustainability, you must simultaneously consider environmental well-being, the ability of humans to thrive, and economic prosperity. Any business with sustainability in its mission knows firsthand that literally every input has the potential to increase overhead tremendously when compared to the conventional approach. Paying people well enough to thrive? Expensive these days. Sourcing environmentally-responsible materials and products? Almost always pricey. And then you have to be able to charge enough for your products to cover all of that. The problem is that the vast majority of consumers aren’t of a high enough tax bracket that doubling the price of their daily use items goes unnoticed. The general understanding of what non-luxury home cleaning and body care products “should” cost consumers is based on the mass products of toxic chemicals packaged in plastic and shipped all over the world. Changing ever part of the supply chain changes everything about the final price. Arguably, then, our true hurdle is education. But that takes a lot of time and reach. So we’re back to that word again: expensive.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Gillie Roberts, and I own a low-waste living brand called Ware. I grew up in a pretty hippy-dippy household, and then I went on to get a degree in sustainable development, making it official. I’ve always always been the person my friends turned to in order to be convinced NOT to buy something. My standards for products are notoriously high, which is what made finding enough things to stock a store so challenging, but it’s always why this business came so naturally to me. And it’s those standards that have come to define Ware’s brand. Literally. Our tagline is “Low waste. High Standards.”

Ware is primarily a sustainable lifestyle shop. We have an online store that ships all over the US and Canada as well as a brick-and-mortar store in Asheville, NC. Our dedication to sustainability permeates every facet of the business. From being Living Wage Certified to shipping exclusively with reused packing materials, we’re always considering the impact of our business functions. We source home cleaning and personal care products that are highly functional, responsibly made, minimally packaged, beautiful, made as close to home as possible, and usually produced by small brands with similar values. That’s the short version of what we’re looking for, anyway.

Even though the quality of the products is the core of the business, it’s the people I’m most proud of. I’m proud of the work environment I’ve created and equally proud of how much our customers enjoy shopping for mundane things like laundry detergent in our store. People tell us all the time how welcoming they find Ware to be as a brand. In the realm of sustainable living, that’s a major feat. It can feel incredibly judgmental to be told that nearly every product you interact with on a daily basis is harming the planet and/or people. I’m flattered every time folks tell us that they don’t feel ashamed to approach or ask questions of us. There are plenty of alternatives to that feeling in this industry. It can be understandably overwhelming to start caring about your impact. We love getting to meet people where they’re at in that process.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Though on the older side in the realm of sustainable manufacturing, the book Cradle-to-Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough played a critical role in my understanding of what supply chains COULD look like, if priorities were what they arguably should be. It’s both an explanation and an exploration of what circularity means to the creation of goods. When people in product-based industries ask me for guidance, I always send them there first to better understand what we’re all working toward.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the idea that I am my own ideal customer. If that were the case, my ideal customer wouldn’t need me, since I’m the rare person who happily does the research and tests the duds. Because of this, my target market doesn’t know what I know (yet), and that’s exactly why they turn to Ware. Learning this through customer interactions over the years only further dismantled the idea that the customer is always right. The alternative nature of our products means that they sometimes require a bit of education to fully understand either how to properly use them or what the intended outcome of using them actually is. Customers occasionally miss that information and come to us with complaints of something not working or not being what we said it was. Very rarely are those customers correct. What IS usually true in those circumstances is that we could have done a better job of educating our customers about our product before they purchased it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wareavl.com
• Instagram: @ware.avl
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wareravl
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillie-roberts-448006a8/

Image Credits
Ware