WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

WINTER 2015

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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Winter 2015 29 BAD NEWS AND GOOD INTENTIONS There's a reason that Martin is dubbed "Scienceman" on the Sev- enth Generation website. Today the company has 131 employees and is one of the top-selling national brands of environmentally friendly products. But at its founding in 1988, it was just six ideal- ists doing mail order sales out of a Manhattan offce, trying to save trees and keep chlorine bleach out of baby products. In the early 1990s, they were starting to realize that the composition of paper goods and cleaning products involved a lot more science than they had on board. "We were absolutely hippies," says founder and former CEO Jef- frey Hollender. "We had an offce with no chairs or conference tables—but we did have a nap room. We provided an employee beneft of all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream you could eat." Hollender, who is no longer connected with Seventh Generation, is quick to label himself an atypical leader for a consumer products enter- prise. A college dropout and former chairperson of Greenpeace, "I was always out getting arrested," he says with a laugh. "I had never taken a chemistry course, and took very few science courses." Hol- lander had lots of questions for the consultant he'd engaged to as- sess the catalog products. "I was fascinated by what Martin knew. I was eager to get more of him as soon as I could afford it." In the early 1990s, a friendly community of companies that also included Ben & Jerry's, Stonyfeld yogurt, and The Body Shop, grew up together. "We were all trying to do something similar, but we didn't know exactly what it was—so we were helping each other fg- ure it out," says Hollender. "When Martin joined us, we were selling laundry detergent that cost twice as much as other laundry deter- gents and worked half as well. He was our frst technical person. He was our science expert, and our environmental expert. His role was to rein in the impulses of our marketers to ensure that the science was grounded in fact." Under Wolf's guidance, Seventh Generation ditched products that didn't live up to the label—such as "biodegradable" trash bags

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