Balancing Growth, Innovation, and Sustainability: Insights from Peak Design

Yeah, well, I have some interesting views on sustainability that I think are kind of obvious when you look at where we've gone with it. Now, Peak Design utilizes recycled and recyclable materials whenever we can, which is quite a lot. A huge percentage of our textile goods are even post-consumer recycled. A bigger swath are post-industrial, which is not quite as impressive but still important. We've worked very hard to utilize recycled aluminum. There's always been a big market for recycled aluminum because aluminum is expensive to convert from bauxite into aluminum ore and all that. But I kind of consider many of these things to be sort of table stakes and not the paramount issue. The paramount issue in my opinion has not wavered one iota is the effects — well, it's climate change, it's carbon, it's all of this. You can look around you and if you're savvy enough to appreciate, all the things in the physical world are simply some amount of raw material converted into something useful with quite a lot of energy, different amounts of energy for all these different things. Energy does not really — it can come from a lot of variety. There's a beauty to all the different potential sources of energy. Obviously, for the past 150 years we've been using the hell out of fossil fuels. I'm deeply grateful for the transitions that they've brought upon our world to support over 8 billion human souls. It's absolutely astonishing, and I think that humanity really ought to be a little bit more proud of its accomplishments in this way. But also there is a cost to that, and there needs to remain an urgency around the fact that we need to convert our energy sources to ones that are carbon-free and get on with the very decades-long work of sucking the additional carbon we've got out of the air. Other options like changing the amount of radiant energy that comes into the planet with geoengineering-type things, these are all potential solutions. But we are simply going to encounter a good deal of complicated problems as our world moves forward. And I'm by no means a doomsdayer that thinks all of humanity is going to be wiped out if we don't put down the natural gas power plants at any point. More along the lines of, hey, let's make things a little bit easier for us down the road by shutting down as many coal plants as we can right now, my God, and let's get the electric cars, let's go, let's go, let's go. This is a 30-year effort to make this transition happen. So my view is as a business, you got to look for the ways to actually spend the extra money that it takes to work on getting your energy coming from a clean place. That's kind of number one. Obviously, Peak Design is bet very big on the voluntary carbon offset market. That has been a very turbulent market to be a part of, and it certainly has the expression 'warts and all' applies to the voluntary carbon market. But at the end of the day, it is a commitment to spending a certain amount of the money that you're bringing in and trying to put that back out into the world and foster this transition more quickly.

I think it's a great question, and I'll be the first to tell you that I don't factually know the answer. Anecdotally, I hear all the time from our customers how much they appreciate our environmental stewardship. So when you think about the overall effect of a brand on the world, there's just no way that it doesn't play a part. Whether or not our budget toward many of these things is governed by our joining of 1% for the Planet and then critically our pursuit of the climate label, which forces us to measure our carbon footprint and forces us to develop a carbon transition budget. $15 a ton is what Peak Design must spend in an audited fashion on carbon mitigation. So yeah, that budget of 1% of revenue that goes towards environmental causes, I certainly think that Peak Design is getting more in return in terms of brand stickiness than that 1%. That's the key metric right there. I would anecdotally agree.