It's Not Easy Being Green
Since its inception more than two decades ago, Peace Frogs has made great leaps toward helping the environment.
If in August you made it to the back perimeter of Ecollection, the newest eco show at the MAGIC Marketplace, you surely spotted one of its most eye-catching exhibits: a funky, rainbow-colored, customized ’60s VW van insouciantly parked among the pipe-and-drapes. With its sides and back opened up as display tables, the van disgorged stacks of multi-hued tees, all featuring various graphic incarnations of a sassy frog, with head uplifted and left flipper flashing a determined peace sign.
The company, not surprisingly, is called Peace Frogs. Awash in ’60s sensibility but started in the late ’80s, Peace Frogs is a testament to both the rewards of good-old American entrepreneurship and the difficulties facing modern manufacturers trying to do right by the environment.
Creating an ecologically responsible apparel line wasn’t uppermost in the mind of Catesby B. Jones in 1985 when he and his roommates sat around their University of Virginia dorm room discussing his idea for a start-up business. When Jones decided he wanted to make and sell a line of shorts fashioned out of the flags of different countries, it was just an experiment in American capitalism. “I had the idea,” he says. “I wanted to see it happen.”
But even then, as he scraped together capital for his free-market venture, Jones was thinking globally, as evidenced by his reasoning for the name Peace Frogs. There was the basic idea of peace and harmony, and then there were frogs. “The frog is a significant symbol in a lot of countries. We wanted a symbol that would work internationally,” Jones explains. “It’s much more than that now. We’re like the Ben & Jerry’s of clothing—it’s a philosophy, a positive way of living.”
That vision might be summed up by the company’s initial and literally freewheeling marketing approach. Tired of leaving build-out capital behind in temporary mall storefronts, Jones decided to do up a VW van, tow it into rented open space inside shopping malls and drop down the display table. It was an instant hit. “The van is like a Grateful Dead thing,” Jones explains. “You just cruise in, cruise out. People go nuts.”
The flag shorts are gone (it was too difficult to predict at any one time which countries would be big sellers), but Peace Frogs has gone on. Today, the company offers a smartly marketed selection of frog logo–emblazoned T-shirts for women, men and kids, plus accessories, including pet gear. Much remains, however, from Peace Frogs’ ideological beginnings.
Philanthropy has always been a key component of the business plan. “We basically donate no matter what,” Jones says. “Even if we lose money, we donate.” Chief among the beneficiaries are various programs devoted to frog research, primarily through the Organization of Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. “The frog is an indicator species—a canary in the coal mine,” Jones says.
Jones has been equally generous in extending the Peace Frogs franchise. Wholesale is the company’s backbone, but unorthodox methods have helped build the brand. Those vans? He provides them fully stocked with merchandise to any qualified comer for $15,000 to $20,000. One just secures the rental space at the local mall and pays for shipping. Currently, there are 22 vans extant and 20 retail locations. About $35,000 to $50,000 will license a retail storefront. “They trick out the store; they own it,” Jones says. “I give them any advice they want if they want it. We supply the goods.”
Why is Jones so freehanded with this lucrative enterprise? “We have to spread the frog,” he says simply. Getting the larger global-harmony message out is also part of the business plan.
“We buck a lot of trends; we’re not into negative stuff, bad-attitude tees,” Jones says. “We try to stay apolitical. We’re interested in research, not protest. hellip; You can be environmental but still be fun.”
Jones acknowledges that while the company has been about respect for the Earth for years, claims about being “environmental” and “eco-friendly” are closely scrutinized today.
“Our goals are to be the most environmentally pure as we can be,” Jones says. “I can’t sit here and swear we’ve done everything possible. We’ve done everything within our means to be environmental.”
Only last year did Peace Frogs find enough of a market to reintroduce a line of organic-cotton tees. An earlier attempt to go organic failed. Jones chalked up the failure to “too much pushback from the retailers.” Peace Frogs tries to keep wholesale price points under $10, but organic cotton pushes the price up 20 percent or more. Jones says the struggle to convince retailers to take on higher-priced organic goods is constant, although the market climate is certainly changing. “Our goal is to go all organic,” he says. “The biggest thing is a disconnect between the consumer who wants it and the retailer who isn’t willing to pay extra for it. [The retailer] doesn’t think the consumers are there, but they are.”
Peace Frogs, like many T-shirt companies, relies on its screen-printed graphics—some 60 designs per year—for its identity. Screen-printing has long raised environmental issues because of the nature of the chemicals used in fixing the shirts to the color palettes, applying the artwork, correcting printing mistakes and cleaning the palettes. Spray tack, used to fix shirts to the palettes, can contain ozone-wrecking fluorocarbons, for example, and one option for “spraying out” printing mistakes is an acetone-type substance Jones calls “the worst chemical used in screen-printing.” There is a sometimes-heated debate in the T-shirt world between proponents of water-based dyes and those of plastisol-based inks over which is more environmentally friendly. Jones, who opts for plastisol, believes its clean-up process is “very clean,” but at shows he finds people won’t hesitate to offer their opinions. “When I tell them we use plastisol, half of them say, ’That’s great,’ [and] half say, ’You need to use water base,’” he says. “Most people are more interested in the cotton part. People always want to know if you are using organic cotton. Screen-printing is not a bad process no matter what. The real issue is the cotton.”
Peace Frogs buys only certified organic cotton from a reputable grower in India, but, Jones says, being eco-friendly is also about the “thousands of little things you do: the printing process, your electrical use, recycling.”
“What I tell people about being green is that 90 percent is being frugal and wise with your resources,” he says.
Whatever the environmental issues, Jones remains happily optimistic. “I’m a big believer in business to solve our problems,” he says. “I don’t think business is bad; I believe it can transform the world. It’s the best way to transform the world.”
