Minding Your Business: Profits That Restore the Planet
by Horst M. Rechelbacher • Wisconsin

In 1978, I had no idea I was creating a company that would pioneer sustainable success and holistic business practices in the cosmetics industry. I didn’t know that I was taking the first step toward what I am now convinced is the business of the future and the future of business.

You could say that Aveda emerged in response to my own urgent needs. In a way, this was my creative solution to a personal crisis. The standard chemicals in the conventional products I had used in my hair salons literally had made me sick. I also realized that if these chemicals made me sick, they couldn’t be good for my customers. So I set out to create a line of natural, sustainable products for nurturing body and spirit. In creating the Aveda line of products, I preserved my own health and well-being, and that of my clients, as well as turned my health crisis into a business opportunity. And, by eliminating from my products toxins and chemicals harmful to the human body and the environment, I helped shift the market and clean up a little piece of the planet. The outcome was a success beyond any I had imagined.
This crisis/opportunity model is fundamental to eco-preneurial business.

An eco-preneur provides creative solutions and services that meet human or planetary needs in an ethical, nonexploitive, nontoxic manner; and by doing so, creates a sustainable, or enduring, and profitable business. Any business based on principles in harmony with natural law, has a practical, ethical and spiritual foundation upon which to succeed.

I’ve since learned that meeting authentic needs in this fashion serves more than the preferences of niche markets and meets more than the socially responsible standards of the conscientious few. Eco-preneurship reveals the business opportunities of today and tomorrow in a completely new light. It uplifts the business of business to a place of honor among human institutions, making it the innovative servant and healer of our wounded planet rather than a predatory system that devours and exploits the earth, its resources, and its inhabitants with reckless abandon for the sake of bottom-line profits. Our world faces a growing crisis, created in large part by such unsustainable business practices. This unique potential for business to thrive through marketing real solutions to fundamental human and planetary problems has yet to be fully recognized and embraced by the creativity of human industry. The conscience of industry still slumbers restlessly in the face of growing problems and imminent catastrophes to which it must not simply awaken but for which it must provide solutions so that it can become truly sustainable and worth sustaining.

Sustainability is not an eco–Band-Aid, a luxury for affluent Westerners, or pie-in-the-sky idealism. It is the necessary lifeblood of a new era of enlightened capitalism on which our collective future may depend. Sustainability is also the defining fabric and intelligent design of nature in all its glorious, self-sustaining, ever-replenishing interdependence. To achieve sustainable success, business must capitalize on the greatest opportunities of our time, which also happen to be the greatest crises of our time. By meeting the greatest needs of the greatest number, and by providing innovative and ethical solutions to the countless crises we now face in every niche of our world system, business will reinvent itself while helping to heal the earth.

But it is not only business that must rise to the occasion by changing and evolving into new forms. Business only does what we allow it to do and support it in doing. There will be no eco-preneurial transformation of the world without the support of an emerging population of eco-consumers. By supporting ethical, environmentally friendly businesses, by purchasing clean, “green,” ethically manufactured products, we, the eco-consumers, will begin to turn the wheel and steer the market in an earth- and consumer-friendly direction. Together, eco-consumers and eco-preneurs have the potential to reinvent the way business is conducted, the way goods are made, sold, purchased and even advertised. As you will see, in the light of this new vision of sustainability, eco-preneurs and eco-consumers have the power to change the very design of how we live.

There is still time for us to rise to the challenge, to respond with humility, courage and ingenuity to the various crises we now face. To do so, we will first need to harness our business instincts and purchasing practices to a higher purpose than bottom-line profits and convenience. We must enter into real stewardship of our planet by creating innovative, truly sustainable alternatives to our current unsustainable business practices and consumer habits.

I believe the future of business belongs to the eco-preneurs who will profit by serving a rising tide of eco-consumers. I believe that those with the vision to invent products and services that repair the damage we have done to the earth, that enrich the health and well-being of the planet and its people, will enjoy a new kind of success that includes and transcends the conventional accumulation of wealth. Even now, a new wave of eco-preneurs and eco-consumers is defining and designing new fashions, services, products and lifestyles that contribute to the healing and restoration of the planet. Together, they are creating an evolution-ary shift in business and human culture.

If we in the corporate world can lift our eyes from the short-term balance sheets and stretch our vision beyond the next quarterly earnings report or shareholder meeting, we will see that our active participation in the creation of a sustainable future is the only thing that makes sense. And it is the only thing that will allow us, as individuals, as companies and as a species, to remain viable into that future.

Horst Rechelbacher is an active environmentalist, artist and innovative business leader. He is the founder of the Aveda Corporation, and the Chairman and CEO of Intelligent Nutrients, a biodynamic and organic-based food and personal care products company. His previous books include Rejuvenation: A Wellness Guide for Men and Women, Aveda Rituals: A Daily Guide to Natural Health and Beauty and Alivelihood: The Art of Sustainable Success.