A Green Room?
February 14, 2008
Posted by CindyC in : Opinions & Thoughts , trackback
A week after my Green Consumer post, I find in my mailbox, a catalog hawking eco-friendly upholstery and other sustainable design items.
Care to guess which retailer? Give up? That would be POTTERYBARN all decked out in GREEN. On the first page of the catalog, it encourages you to
Reduce your impact on the land by choosing organics. Reuse by taking our travel containers to-go … Recycle by choosing good like Rustic Wood Accents made of reclaimed materials.
This theme (beautifully printed in spring green) goes on for 15 pages, highlighting items made from cork, bamboo and organic cotton. The rest of the 166 page catalog is business as usual.
I think this catalog highlights the dilemma of how to combine mass appeal and the green niche. All the eco-friendly items look great and similar to the conventional offerings. I admit I am biased towards organic cotton or bamboo sheets over hemp. In that sense, Pottery Barn is environmental consciousness with mass appeal. And I’m always the first to applaud any attempt for change. However, I can’t get over the slick marketing gloss that makes it feel disgenuine to me, highlighted by the following:
Several of our bedding collections are now made with 100% organic cotton and more than half of our bedding now contains at least 5% organic cotton. It’s our way of creating consistent demand that will serve to increase the supply of organic cotton -and as there’s more available, we’ll continue to use more.
So if I did my math right, basically 3% of all the cotton used to produce their bedding is organic cotton. I’m trying to give Pottery Barn the benefit of the doubt but it’s kind of hard.
What do you think?
P.S. The catalog number is going straight to my catalog choice account. It must have slipped through my junk mail reduction attempt.
CindyC at Organicpicks
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Comments»
Looks like greenwash, sounds like greenwash, smells like greenwash, and by gosh, it is greenwash. Can’t fault them for trying to sell more stuff. But watch out.
I gave up on Catalog Choice after using it for months with NO RESULTS. It is all smoke mirrors and I wonder now what they are doing with my address and email!!!!!
I am on a mailing list that focuses on making one’s life more “green” and someone was looking around for a “green” couch recommendation. Eventually someone pointed out that a used couch from Salvation Army or Goodwill would be greener than any new “green” couch. I don’t like the companies that are jumping on this green bandwagon in an attempt to expand their customer base.
As for catalog choice…I was a bit annoyed too as I didn’t see a reduction. But some companies have honored Catalog Choice’s requests and some haven’t (you can see which ones haven’t by logging into your catalog choice account). I have contacted the ones that haven’t honored catalog choice and asked them to remove me from the lists.