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CAROL CONE:
I’m Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. This week, as leaders from the United States and around the world gather for the UN General Assembly and Climate Week to discuss critical issues facing our environment and society, I wanted to do something a little different. Rather than bring you one new conversation, we’re going back into the Purpose 360 archives to listen across five companies that have become touchstones for what it means to build a business around conviction. Around human justice, environmental justice, fairness to all stakeholders, and staying the course: Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Just Ice Tea, Bombas, Tony’s Chocolonely. Their products could hardly be more different, but their stories share a pattern. Purpose was not a campaign layered into the business. It shaped what they made, how they sourced, who they listened to, how they grew, and what they were willing to protect when the easier choice was to compromise. And none of these stories is a story of perfection.
They include mistakes, layoffs, investor tension, founder transitions, discontinued brands, difficult supply chains, and uncomfortable truths. That’s exactly why they matter, because the real test of purpose is not what a company says when everything is going well. It is what the company does when its values become inconvenient. The recently departed Dolly Parton once said, find out who you are, and then do it on purpose. That idea sits at the heart of this episode. These companies found out who they were and then had to keep choosing it day in and day out. So today we’re asking one question, and then we’re gonna have six lessons to support it. What does it actually take to stay the course? The first lesson: start with the mission, then build the business around it.
This first lesson may sound simple, but it changes everything that the company does. If purpose is going to endure, it has to influence the design of the business from the very beginning. Tony’s Chocolonely may be the purest example in this group of companies. The organization did not begin with a chocolate bar and search for a cause. It began with journalists confronting exploitation in cocoa, and eventually realizing that building a business could become a way to challenge the system itself.
And challenge the system, they did. Let’s hear from Tony’s Chocolonely CEO Douglas Lamont.
DOUGLAS LAMONT:
And then the third episode, the third element of the series they did was to say, well, if none of the big chocolate companies are going to do anything about this, we need to set it up for ourselves. So then, the equivalent of the Apprentice or Shark Tank, they went and said, well, how could we do this? And it was a stump. They weren’t thinking of setting up a business. They literally rang around to find out how they could make a bar, how they could get ethically sourced cocoa.
And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the Johnny Depp one – was being launched in the Netherlands in 2005. They set up a guerrilla stall next to that premiere, told everyone they were going to be there, and of course they had a massive queue. They sold 5,000 bars on day one. Everyone was saying, can we have bars? And they thought, actually, yeah, let’s really put our money where our mouth is and set up a company and do this for real. And that’s where Tony’s was born.
But I think the really important thing is that the impact and the mission came first, before even the business. So the business wasn’t even in the picture at the beginning, and then obviously the business came as a way to serve the mission. And I think that’s a really important fundamental and why we say we’re an impact company that makes chocolate, not a chocolate company that makes impact.
CAROL CONE:
Seth Goldman, co-founder and CEO of Honest Tea, and then co-founder and CEO of Just Ice Tea, or as he likes to say, TeaEO, describes the same idea from another angle. When Honest Tea began, the company did not yet have every impact practice figured out, but the ambition was already embedded in the enterprise, and that ignited the business to move forward.
SETH GOLDMAN:
And so, I was passionate about building a beverage brand, but it was my co-founder who had been my professor, Barry Nalebuff, who came up with the name Honest Tea. And for me that name unlocked this opportunity to go pursue, create a business that had impact embedded into it. And even though this is back in 1998, so we didn’t know exactly how the impact would be embedded, but first it was just a less sweet drink, which was better nutritionally for the consumer. But then we went to make the world’s first organic bottled tea and then the world’s first fair trade bottled tea, and then eventually did those together and that was the path. That’s how I got here.
CAROL CONE:
Key lessons from Doug Lamont and Seth Goldman. Purpose is strongest when impact is part of the value proposition and operating model, not a promise the company hopes to fulfill later. Lesson number two: responsibility is not a destination, it is a practice. Being purpose-built does not mean having all the answers. In fact, one of the most useful lessons from Patagonia is almost the opposite. Responsible companies are willing to discover where they are causing harm, admit it, and change course. Vincent Stanley, Director of Philosophy at Patagonia, told me that the company did not set out with a perfect blueprint. It learned by confronting consequences it had not fully understood.
So let’s hear from Vincent.
VINCENT STANLEY:
We started to give 1% to environmental causes in 1985. And the idea was we were paying an earth tax because we knew that we caused environmental harm in the course of having clothes made in our name, but we didn’t know what it was. So I think that one of the key things that set us on journey we’ve been on since, is the discovery in 1989 that cotton was a harmful fiber. And we opened up a store in Boston, the low VOC paints, the recycled wall board, all that.
And we had to close it down after three days because the employees were calling in sick. And we called in an environmental engineer. He fixed the problem with the ventilation. And said, “What was the agent that was causing people to have stomach aches?” He said, “Oh, that was formaldehyde off gassing from the cotton clothes stored in the basement.” And in terms of stumbling into virtue, that led us to investigate the environmental impacts of the four major fibers we used. And it turned out that cotton was the worst. Half the line came out of an oil well, polyester, nylon, wool has its problems. But at the heart of the problem with cotton is the intensive use of chemicals to grow it.
And it was a very difficult process to take the line completely away from conventional cotton and to go organic in an 18-month period. But we resolved to do that. And it really opened our eyes to the nature of the apparel business. Because when we bought the organic cotton, we had to buy from farmers. And then we broke our connection to the global supply chain. It was a huge educational process for the company that when we finally were able to succeed, it also created a change in the culture of the company because it’s just like if you’re a runner, you want to improve your time. If you’re a surfer, you want to surf a bigger wave.
CAROL CONE:
From lesson number two, we learn that a standard is not that a company has never caused harm. A standard can be whether it is willing to look closely enough to find the harm, tell the truth about it, and redesign the business in response. Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder and CEO of Seventh Generation, makes the same argument even more explicitly. Purpose cannot live in one department or one initiative.
Let’s hear from Jeffrey.
JEFFREY HOLLENDER:
I think the two things they’re getting wrong: one is that they compartmentalize the good work that they do. So they focus on their packaging or they focus on an ingredient or they focus on giving money away to their community. Unfortunately, that’s not what we need. We need a systemic approach to doing what we need to do. We need to look at absolutely everything we do as a company – our entire supply chain, the way we treat our employees. And we have to do that with the same purpose that we bring to making our products better or our packaging better. But it needs to be holistic in its approach. And it needs to be what we call net positive. So instead of being less bad – which unfortunately most sustainable businesses are; they’re doing a couple things good while they’re doing many things that they shouldn’t be doing – you need to be holistic in your approach to thinking about how to be a purpose-based business. That’s critical.
The other thing they’re doing is not taking this notion that we talked about earlier of radical transparency to heart. They’re still not willing to open the kimono and let people know what’s inside. And you can’t build trust. You can’t build the kind of commitment you want from your employees, the kind of loyalty you want from your customers, if you can’t be transparent and tell them the truth. They don’t expect you to be perfect. It’s hard to believe that you’re perfect, but nevertheless, that’s the way most companies still behave today. And it’s a hard thing to change. I remember when we did our first corporate responsibility report at Seventh Generation, I almost gave our lawyer a heart attack when he read it, because of the things that we revealed. And I say that if your lawyer doesn’t almost have a heart attack when he reads it, you’ve done something wrong.
CAROL CONE:
To summarize lesson number two, progress requires the courage to see the whole system, surface uncomfortable information, and keep improving rather than chasing perfection. Now let’s turn to lesson number three: the mission gets real when growth puts it under pressure. Purpose is relatively easy to protect when the company is small. The founders are close to every decision, and everyone around the table shares the same assumptions. Growth changes that dramatically. New capital arrives, new leaders arrive, expectations rise, and the very success of the business can become a threat to the culture that created it. Jeffrey Hollender lived that tension at Seventh Generation. His warning: it’s not anti-growth. It is that growth has to be governed with as much intentionality as impact.
Let’s hear from Jeffrey.
JEFFREY HOLLENDER:
You have to moderate growth because – first of all, growth is addictive. It’s exciting. You’re making more money. It’s sort of like drugs. You can’t get enough of it. But it is dangerous in terms of maintaining your values and your vision because, as you said, we were growing so quickly we kept bringing people into the company who came from very traditional backgrounds in consumer products companies. And at one point, the average employee – half of the company – had only been at the company a year or two and didn’t have that whole experience that most people had had.
And what I discovered after making many mistakes, hiring people that I thought were much smarter than they were and much more committed to our values than they were, was that we were much better off investing in the growth and development of our own staff than going out and trying to find people who we thought knew a lot more than we did. Because that staff that had been with us historically – and our turnover rate was next to zero, people didn’t leave once they came.
Be very, be very careful who you take money from. Do more due diligence on your investors than on your employees. If you’re going to get money from a venture firm, find three CEOs that have taken money from that firm and find out whether things went the way they wanted them to go. How did things go when business wasn’t hitting the goals that it had? And if I had done that kind of due diligence, I would have taken money from some different people than I did. I did not do that due diligence. And it is critical for purpose-based companies to make sure that the money that you take is aligned with your mission and vision. Otherwise, you will have a board that will not support the things that you’re doing and particularly many of the risks that you’re taking to discover new ways to have a positive impact on the planet.
CAROL CONE:
Growth. How does a purpose-driven company find that very special next CEO with the capabilities and skills to double, triple, quadruple impact and growth? Let’s hear from Jason LaRose, CEO of Bombas. He shares with us some insights into his conversation with Bombas co-founder David Heath, why culture was so important.
JASON LAROSE:
Part of the way you know this is a good handoff is when Dave says, “Can you believe it got this big?” and I say, “I can’t believe it’s only this big.” That’s a great marriage. When Dave says, “There’s no more building left,” and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m getting here this early” – that’s a wonderful place to have the handoff from.
The fundamentals of this business are incredible: great product, great mission, and great culture. My job is to take what I know about scaling brands and do it in a way that never messes with the culture, the mission, or the product. This place is an amazing product engine, and we have an amazing giving network of partners and really wonderful employees. My job is to help us triple, quadruple – whatever the number is – the items we can give, but to do it without messing those three things up.
CAROL CONE:
The summary for lesson three: scale should amplify the mission, not outrun it. Capital, talent, and leadership transitions all become purpose decisions. Now let’s turn to lesson number four. When the business breaks, relationships reveal what was really built. Sometimes the test is not growth, it’s loss. When Coca-Cola discontinued Honest Tea, Seth Goldman had every reason to see it as the end of a 20-plus-year chapter. What happened next is one of my favorite examples of purpose creating an asset that never appears on a balance sheet: trust accumulated across a vast stakeholder network.
Let’s hear from Seth, the co-founder and CEO of Honest Tea.
SETH GOLDMAN:
It was. I was really sad as were, by the way, hundreds or even thousands of people who had built the brand and or really enjoyed the brand. And so, it was very needed just to sort of be sad, not do anything, not think, just let us sort of feel sad. But what happened was within a week of that sadness hitting, I started getting messaging, messages from people who wanted, they said, “Well, look, just because Honest Tea is going away doesn’t mean that what you were doing should go away, that the impact should go away.” And for some people, this taste and this taste profile, this product should go away. It really was a part of many people’s lives.
And then the thing that really got me was one of our suppliers, one of our tea suppliers reached out to me. This is somebody who I had worked with his father at sourcing organic tea, and he said, “Of course, we’re saddened by this news economically, it is a real impact, but we’re all equally sad by the consideration that maybe this means organic and fair trade was a failed experiment.”
No, not while I’m still breathing. So, then I said, “We’re going to do this.” We got together, my co-founder, Barry, who had already been still in close touch, my co-founder, Spike, over a weekend, we brainstormed names and we came up with… Barry came back with Just Ice Tea, which has the word justice in it, of course-
That was the second time the clouds parted. The first time with Honest Tea was like, “Okay, that’s it.” But Just Ice Tea, maybe even more so, gives you this license to build a business, a purpose-driven business. And then it really was gratifying about all parts of the supply chain. So, the tea growers, the glass suppliers, the manufacturing facilities, the distributors, the retailers and the consumers all said, “We want this. Let’s go.” And the retailer said, “We’ll get Whole Foods and Sprouts. We’ll give you expedited shelf space as soon as you can deliver it. We’ll put it on the shelf.” The tea supplier says, “We’ll rush you the tea shipments.” The glass manufacturer said, “We’ll get you whatever you need.” The co-packer said, “We’ll cut into our production schedule. Just tell us when you’re ready to go.” And that enabled us to go from basically nothing to being on the market within 90 days. And today, we’ve just marked our three-year anniversary on the market, and we’re now larger than Honest Tea was in its 10th year.
CAROL CONE:
That 90-day relaunch was not simply speed. It was the return on years of doing business in a way that made growers, suppliers, retailers, employees, and consumers want to show up again. Purpose had become relational infrastructure. It had created, dare I say, love for a product and an approach that had to be continued.
And the key lesson here: stakeholder trust compounds. In a crisis, the relationships built through consistent values can become a source of resilience and, surprisingly, speed. Now let’s turn to lesson five: impact has to be good business, and good business has to deliver impact. There’s another misconception these leaders kept dismantling, that purpose and business performance sit on opposite sides of a trade-off. The most durable models make growth useful to the mission. At Bombas, the one-for-one model means more sales can directly expand the company’s ability to serve their giving partners. But David Heath is equally clear that mission is not a substitute for product quality.
Let’s hear from David.
DAVID HEATH:
Bombas is a mission-driven premium basics and footwear brand that donates an item for every item we sell to those experiencing homelessness. The foundation of the business came to be when I saw a quote on Facebook that said socks are the number one most requested clothing item at homeless shelters. I remember stopping in my tracks, thinking I had no clue.
We wanted to solve this problem, but it couldn’t just be a gimmick. We had to have a great product on top of it. It has to be this double bottom line approach – give the consumer something so good, then give them a great reason to buy it, and that creates the flywheel of them coming back or telling their friends.
CAROL CONE:
And after more than a decade of scale, David’s takeaway is strikingly simple.
DAVID HEATH:
It is possible to do it all the right way. We treat our employees well, we treat our customers well, we treat our giving partners well, we treat our partners well. We grow like crazy and we’re extremely profitable. We didn’t have to sacrifice anything. We didn’t have to be bad corporate citizens. We didn’t have to sell an inferior product. We didn’t have to sacrifice our customer service policy or the way we treat employees or giving everybody equity in the business. We did it all, and we still have class-leading growth and class-leading profitability at a massive scale. I hope that shows other people that you don’t have to compromise.
CAROL CONE:
Douglas Lamont makes the parallel case at Tony’s. If the company wants the rest of the chocolate industry to change, it cannot merely prove that a better sourcing model works ethically. It also has to remove the economic excuse not to follow.
DOUGLAS LAMONT:
Yeah, so I think two things. As I said earlier, I see myself as CEO of the mission, not of the Tony’s Chocolonely brand. And that’s really important because it drives the kind of decisions that I make as the leader of the company. But I also have to prove that Tony’s Chocolonely is a profitable company. Because otherwise the other objection is, yes, the supply chain scales, but you don’t make any money. You’ve got lots of revenue, but you don’t make any money because all your supply chain stuff is so expensive. That’s another reason for others not to act. So my job is to remove the barriers.
CAROL CONE:
Summarizing lesson 5: financial strength is not the enemy of impact. In a well-designed purpose model, it is one of the mechanisms that allows impact to grow and others to follow. And it allows for profit that can keep the flywheel spinning for growth and impact and values and purpose at the center. Lesson number six: if the mission matters, protect it beyond the current leader. Staying the course cannot depend forever on the conviction of one founder or one CEO. Leaders leave. Boards change. Ownership changes. If the purpose is meant to outlast the people who created it, eventually values have to become knitted into the infrastructure of the company. For Jeffrey Hollender, after building Seventh Generation for two decades, he was fired by his board. His reflection is a warning every founder and purpose leader should hear.
JEFFREY HOLLENDER:
It was traumatic. It was traumatic. It was almost as bad as my brother passing away, which I also talk about in the book. It was horrible. And I thought it was not even possible that that would ever happen. It was out of my consciousness. I didn’t really pay attention to the fact – then when I no longer owned 51% of the company, I became an employee. Even though I was the founder and the CEO, I was an employee of the board, and they could let me go whenever they wanted. Governance is important. You have to make sure that you don’t just do the right thing, but you set up the governance of the company that makes sure the wrong things can’t be done.
CAROL CONE:
That insight from Jeffrey echoes in two of the strongest governance innovations we’ve discussed on Purpose 360. Patagonia redesigned its ownership so its purpose could be protected in perpetuity. Tony’s built a mission lock with independent Mission Guardians. Different mechanisms, same principle. If the mission is essential, do not leave its future entirely to goodwill.
Let’s hear from Douglas Lamont.
DOUGLAS LAMONT:
The mission lock is something different again. What we said as an impact company – we wanted to make sure that was protected for the long term, because this is about long-term change and a long-term mission. And you know, me coming into Tony’s, I don’t want to work really hard for five years on something I’m passionate about, and then the shareholders change or the board changes and they say, actually, we’re not about this anymore.
How do you give reassurance to employees, to your consumers, that you mean it and you mean it forever? So the mission lock basically – and again, all my shareholders supported this, including my private equity backers – gave a golden share to three Mission Guardians whose only governance responsibility is to look after the mission. And the mission is quite tightly defined against the five sourcing principles.
So it’s not completely open-ended, but it’s saying Tony’s five sourcing principles and the mission to end exploitation are fully served, and you can’t legally change the director’s duties without our permission. So if we wanted to say, no, we don’t need those anymore, they can block them and say, no, legally you can’t change those. So there are escalating powers if management go in the wrong direction and legal powers to make sure that the mission as written doesn’t get changed unless they agree with it. So that’s pretty powerful.
CAROL CONE:
I end our six lessons from these extraordinary companies with an action taken by perhaps the one firm that everyone says is the most extraordinary, and that’s Patagonia. In September 2022, Yvon Chouinard announced the sale of Patagonia into two purpose trusts, saying that Earth is now our only shareholder. And he said in a beautiful message, if we have any hope of a thriving planet, much less a business, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is what we can do. Vincent Stanley talks about that momentous decision made by Yvon Chouinard and his family.
VINCENT STANLEY:
Yvon had been looking for the last 20 years for the ownership of the company be perpetual in some fashion. And everything we looked at was problematic in terms of, whoever was running the company in 20 years or 30 years, what could they do? Could they undermine the current purpose of the company? So the Patagonia Purpose Trust owns I think very little… It basically has a voting stock. It owns some voting stock. It doesn’t own a lot of the company’s stock. The Holdfast Collective is essentially the collective of several different NGOs, 501(c)(3) companies that are tax deductible and 501(c)(4)s that are not because they’re more activists or more political.
And this is also written in perpetuity. So the company can’t be sold. That structure can’t be changed. And what it does is, it enables us to give away to large-scale environmental efforts, what ordinarily would’ve been paid as stockholder dividends. So Patagonia as a company still gives 1% for the planet, and we’re still committed to small grassroots organizations, no bigger than the size of a corner church, just a few volunteers, very effective in saving a patch of land or a stretch of water. But the Holdfast Collective enables us to do the kind of work in the vein of what Kris and Doug Tompkins did of large-scale land purchases in order to preserve ecosystems.
CAROL CONE:
In summary, lesson six: purpose becomes more durable when it is encoded into governance, ownership, and decision rights, not merely entrusted to the next leader. Across these conversations, I hear six powerful lessons. Build the mission into the business. Treat responsibility as continuous learning. Grow with intention. Invest in relationships, make impact economically durable, and protect it beyond any one leader. The larger lesson is simple. Action does not require perfection. It requires honesty about impact, hard choices, learning, and staying power. Purpose becomes credible when it survives pressure and powerful when pressure makes the company more disciplined about what it stands for.
As Vincent Stanley told us, get cracking. Thanks for listening to the special edition of Purpose 360. Until next time, keep asking not only what your company stands for, but what your decisions prove it stands for.
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I’d love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson are our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you are the listener. Please rate and rank us, because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available, so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
