Brooklyn Industries and Wal-Mart Stores couldn’t be any more different from one another, but both retailers have made the word “sustainability” their mantra.
Brooklyn Industries got its start designing products out of recycled materials. As it grows its retail business, the boutique design firm is attempting to stay green. Wal-Mart, which became the world’s largest retailer by offering “everyday low prices,” is pushing ahead with a global environmental initiative that involves experimental store concepts in its massive portfolio.
How this boutique design company with an edgy fashion line for the hipster set stacks up against the giant of all giant retailers is a study in contrasts. What may surprise is that its sustainability efforts, while vastly different in scale, are not dissimilar in intent.
“Our emphasis has always been on artistic creativity, but much of our design coincides with the environmental movement,” said Lexy Funk, president of Brooklyn Industries. “We see our customers willing to pay a premium for both.”
Brooklyn Industries is a baby in retail terms. The brainchild of Funk and Vahap Avsar, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based business grew out of an initial effort designing and selling messenger bags made out of recycled billboards, less out of a desire to recycle than to incorporate unique materials into their designs.
Now it is one of Inc.’s 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies of 2006 and boasts an annual revenue of $4.7 million and more than 350 percent growth in the past three years.
And the recycling concept has stuck. The retailer’s newest store, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, reflects the company’s current four-R philosophy of recycle, reuse, repair and reduce.
As a several-million-dollar company, compared with the $300-plus billion Wal-Mart, Brooklyn Industries can’t afford the rigors of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. But it does what it can in the construction process, while maintaining the edgy, local focus of the company.
The checkout register in its Chelsea store was made from scraps from the company’s own wood shop by Scrap Pile, another Brooklyn-based design company, while the wall units and merchandising system were built entirely using scraps and leftover wood from renewable forests in Finland. The floors were made from wood by a lumber company being certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council, and are roughly 30 percent more expensive than a traditional flooring system. These are all practices abiding by the central tenets of LEED philosophy, if not comprehensive enough to qualify for certification.
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“We can’t do everything we want, mainly because we can’t afford it,” Funk said. “A lot of the environmental tactics and certification processes are very time and capital intensive, neither of which a small retailer has. But we want to engage where we can.”
Diametrically opposed to Brooklyn Industries on the fashion, retailing, financial, philosophical and cultural spectrum is Wal-Mart Stores. The world’s biggest retailer and the country’s largest corporate electricity user maintains more than 7,000 stores worldwide, just one of which dwarfs the entire portfolio of Brooklyn Industries. None of Wal-Mart’s traditional stores are particularly well known for their architectural detail or support of local artisans and small vendors.
Still, the company that today defines mass consumption and real estate sprawl has launched an offensive for sustainability across all of its business practices, most notably real estate.
At the center of Wal-Mart’s push are two experimental stores, in McKinney, Tex., and Aurora, Col. Both stores utilize solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines to generate electricity and reduce the pressure on the local power grid and have installed compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which require less electricity, in the stores. The company has kept mum on how much it has invested in the real estate, but says the energy saved by the solar, wind and water systems in the McKinney store alone on a normal business day could power nearly 4,000 American homes for 24 hours.
Across its entire real estate portfolio, Wal-Mart plans to invest $500 million a year in energy-saving technologies and cut energy consumption in its worldwide portfolio by 30 percent. The retailer is touting sustainability company-wide and has said it will do everything from slashing gasoline use in its trucking fleet and using more hybrid trucks to pushing its vendors to adopt sustainability practices.
Critics point out that, with its massive portfolio, greening two stores is hardly enough to address the impact Wal-Mart’s real estate has on the environment. Still, it is a 500,000-square-foot step in the right direction. As Brooklyn Industries’ Funk notes, “If we can make our stores more environmentally conscious in some way, even if it’s just one or two stores a year, it’s better than not thinking about it at all.”