by kevin, on December 20th, 2009
This year we significantly increased our participation and coverage of Greenbuild Expo 2009. We would like to thank everyone who visited our blog and read our rants and raves. In all we posted more than thirty-five times with previews, daily coverage, educational session details, a wrap up and best of, on tour visits to interesting sites in Phoenix, and our series of interviews. Those were posted on this site and with our friends at Greenwala.com over the past month. You can find them all (here) on a special page that collects our reporting.
That was more coverage than we originally anticipated, but less than we would like for next year. We’re already planning for how to expand and do more. Our site traffic increased dramatically during the period. We hope we can entice that new audience to return for similar subjects in the future. There were just under 28,000 who attended Greenbuild, and I suspect just as many who didn’t attend but who wanted to feel like they participated. We’re encouraged to think we played some part in that effort.
Over the past five years, Aleida and I have discovered a pretty predictable pattern with the unusual and unique sustainable building materials we’ve discovered – the most interesting products have been developed or created by even more fascinating people, with truly compelling back stories. There have been times we learn this through direct contact with company founders after specifying their products for our design projects. Other times, we’ve heard stories through third parties such as sales reps. With this in mind, we thought Greenbuild would be a great opportunity for us to dig deeper. We were surprised how quickly and easily exhibitors granted us access and time. I’ve exhibited at shows before, so I know how difficult and exhausting they can be. But everyone we interviewed was amazingly generous with their time, and we are tremendously grateful.
Originally I thought those conversations would be a secondary aspect of our overall event coverage. We didn’t even have a title for them. But after the first few, Aleida and I knew we were on to something. Not only did we enjoy conducting the interviews more than anticipated, but so did the interviewees. They appeared to get more out of them than we did. But more importantly, our readers seemed to like them as well. That series of discussions became our Stories of Sustainability and have garnered some of the most favorable comments we’ve received to date.
What seems to be a common theme among them is how these people weren’t attempting to be green, or modify their companies to pursue a growing interest in improving the environmental impact of their products. For many of them, their products are extensions of long held beliefs of how businesses should operate. For others, the creation of a key product came from solving a problem, not from targeting a hot new market segment. What we found is that the best products are being made by authentic people with real character. There are larger corporations currently trying to tap the increasing strength of the sustainable design arena, but they have no personality, and we’re not interested in talking with them. In my opinion, real people with real stories will trump a charmless corporation any day. They are inspirational in a meaningful way that we all connect with. And our clients seem to agree.
We enjoyed the interviews so much we’ve decided the first ten conducted at Greenbuild will be the start of a new regular series called Stories of Sustainability. Since then, we’ve talked with another ten manufacturers and service providers we think you’ll want to know about and read about. It’s going to take a little time to set up some behind the scenes structure to make sure we can produce them with regularity, but we’re excited to be expanding the site to include these stories. I’ll post a list of the next ten shortly. I hope you’ll return for more. And, if you know of any good stories, please let us know. We’re anxious to find every possible new source of inspiration.
Feel free to email us with your ideas. (here)
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