The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Jil Zilligen

Jil Zilligen is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Nau, a new apparel company that uses innovative fabrics to blend beauty, sustainability and performance. The company also donates five percent of sales through their Partners for Change program and integrates sustainability into all their practices. We caught up with Jil at Nau's headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

I feel so lucky to be a person whose vocation and avocation are really the same thing. The work I do is part of who I am. And the work I do at Nau is the culmination of so many of my experiences.

I believe that companies are incredibly important tools in social and environmental change. The experiment we call Nau is about building the most sustainable company in every way; in all of our products, in all our practices, in all our partnerships.

Personally, I am not all that interested in simply creating just another brand of clothing. I'm interested in creating a different model for doing business. Now, I certainly think that our products are fantastic. But hopefully what we're offering is much more than a great product; we're asking people to change the nature of business and to consider how our purchases do or do not align with our values.

In college, I focused on environmental science, with an emphasis on ocean resource use and on humans' connections to the earth's life support systems. After college I went into environmental education, and I remember a particular experience that still informs my thinking today. I was a teaching counselor in a residential program for at-risk youth, working with high schoolers doing a fieldwork project on the coast. Most of these students came from urban areas and had never been outside the urban core, much less in a wilderness situation.

When we arrived on the beach after hiking through the dunes, one girl started screaming. Thinking she saw a snake, I ran over to her and said, "What's the matter?" She answered, "The water … it's moving!" and that completely stopped me in my tracks. I thought, "Wow. Yes. The water is moving. I need to rethink this entire project and start with the basics."

That caused me to rewrite the entire curriculum for the course to start with the sun and the moon and the planet. It was one of my first watershed lessons in really understanding: where people are coming from, and how our individual life experiences inform our perspectives, literally, of the whole world and all of life. It taught me in one fell swoop a critical lesson: know your audience.

After working for some time in education, and then a few years in policy, and later in community organizing, I began to understand that I needed to empirically understand business because that is where real change needed to take place. Coincidentally, it was around that time that somebody from Patagonia called and offered me a position in its environmental programs. I knew nothing about making clothes, but I figured I would learn everything I possibly could about apparel, how companies run and how decisions get made, and it would be sort of my working MBA. At the same time, I'd do everything I could to advance an environmental and social responsibility agenda and help the company be as progressive as possible. I thought I would be there maybe four years. Well, I ended up leading the environmental programs at Patagonia for almost ten years, and it was a fantastic experience.

I moved to the Northwest and became the Executive Director of One Percent for the Planet – a program we had started at Patagonia in which one percent of profits were awarded to different conservation groups and which was ready to take on its own identity. While I was doing that work Chris Van Dyke, a former Patagonia colleague and good friend, and I started a consultancy to help companies either start or improve sustainability programs and communicate about them.

It was through the consultancy that Eric Reynolds contacted us with his initial ideas for the company that has become Nau. He had an idea for a direct-only outdoor apparel business that would give five percent of all sales – not profits, but sales – to charitable organizations. And the more Chris and I talked about it, the more we realized we could do everything we were trying to do with our consultancy on a much larger scale, more quickly if we helped make this idea a company. That's when my journey with Nau really began.

Today you see media about "green" everywhere. Green gift guides, green this, green that. And to me this is not as much about a "color" trend as it is about a radical shift in the way we interact with everything we're connected to. My work with Nau lets me explore how to take this even further.

As we were designing the company from the ground up, we consciously sought to create as disruptive a model as possible – disruptive in a positive way. So when we were thinking about how to structure our commitment to donating five percent of sales, for example, which we call Partners for Change, we thought: Is it a foundation? Is it a traditional corporate giving program? I felt very strongly that it needed to be part of the company itself; we didn't want to have a money making entity and then have a do-good entity. It's all part of the same organism.

We also wanted to bring new meaning to the transactional moment itself. As customers make a purchase, they're asked to choose from amongst our partner organizations where they'd like us to send five percent of the sale. They have to think for a moment about what they care about. Then, hopefully by extension, they think about what the role of a corporation is. Why would a company do this? How do I feel about being a customer of a company that does this? Should other companies do these kinds of things? That's the values confrontation that we hope will lead to even greater positive change.

I absolutely believe that partnerships are the only way that we're going to think our way out of our major global challenges. This is why I'm so excited about our Partners for Change program. It's about getting more money into the hands of great organizations like Ecotrust that are doing really good work but it's something larger, too. It also brings a broader audience to the organizations that they may not necessarily reach on their own and it engages the business community in considering a similar value proposition.

We've also tried to create different points of entry – to reach people where they are. So maybe we reach somebody through a beautiful trench coat and end up teaching them something about recycled and recyclable fabrics, and then teach them about community activism, and then personal activism. For somebody else, maybe they're already at that place personally but they've never really thought about buying something other than conventionally grown cotton.

For someone else, maybe they've never thought much about the corporate entity and what a corporate charter is. Maybe they haven't questioned why is it that a corporation receives essentially all the rights of an individual but isn't held accountable for any of the responsibilities. That's why we've structured Nau the way we have. It's why we wrote rules of corporate responsibility into our incorporation documents; it helps us, our investors, our customers and the legal profession think about what it really means to be a corporation.

There is a sense of urgency about the work. Our success matters because a lot of people and companies are watching to see if a company can do well by doing good. We feel the urgency in that and I know our partners feel it. I'm so fortunate to work with a smart, committed group of people at Nau, and one of the things I love most about this field is that there aren't really textbook answers. A lot of days I wish there were, and I guess that's part of the frustration and part of the fun of it.

What could be better than figuring out how we're going to solve these problems our societies have created? I believe we just have to think differently about the problems and recognize, daily, that our sum is greater than our individual parts.

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