Green Soul Shoes

GreenSoul Shoes is very pleased to announce that our very own Alastair Ong has been invited by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to be an inaugural class of the NYC Venture Fellow!  We understand that in addition to belonging to an organization where we will be able to meet distinguished companies, venture capitalists, and public figures, we will be able to receive one-on-one mentorship!

Stay tuned - we will definitely update you with our experiences with this fellowship!

Click above image to read the letter from the EDC!

AsAble.com is an amazing website that helps start-ups by interviewing entrepreneurs who have started a company but have not received institutional investments yet.  Alastair was honored when Justin Hong asked to interview him, and you can hear it here: http://bit.ly/AsAble_Interview.  The interview was supposed to last 20 - 25 minutes, but I think they went over 30 minutes - Alastair can never be accused of having a shortage of things to say!

So our team has been visiting different fulfillment centers in the metro NYC area. Thus far we have looked at a number of centers (in fact, just one yesterday!) and have been rating each location on a number of metrics including:

1. Do they resonate with our mission?
2. How responsive is their customer service?
3. Who are some of their other clients?
4. How orderly are their facilities?

Collectively, these elements will help us determine if there is an opportunity to create a really special, long term partnership. Here is a picture we took of Iris yesterday at one of our site visits. =)

So we have the pleasure of working with Winnie Ho, formerly from Citigroup. Winnie heard about us from Lisa Tai, one of Stephen’s friends from his work at another nonprofit, and decided to send us an email.

We asked her what she was interested in working on and her answer?

Designing shoes and running contests!

Within two weeks, Winnie designed and launched a shoe contest to source the best shoe designs using techniques of crowdsourcing and launched the first of many contests to make sure our consumers have as much say as they can in the design of our eco-beneficial footwear.

Check out our judging criteria and let us know if you think something should be changed in the rules! Check out the complete rules here: http://greensoulshoes.strutta.com/ to enter your submission today!

A pool of GreenSoul Shoe buyers, designers and the Board of Directors will judge all entries. The designs will be judged on originality, creativity, attractiveness, artistic merit, inspiration, commercial appeal as they each relate to a Generation Y hipster or LOHAS shoe brand and other factors as determined by the judges.

Design submissions will be evaluated on the following merits:

1. Practicality: 50%
2. Creativity: 20%
3. Effectiveness: 15%
4. Overall appeal: 15%

Details may be found on the contest website: http://greensoulshoes.strutta.com/

We spent the weekend at Brown at the “Sustaining Social Entrepreneurship” conference hosted by noted academic  Shirley Brice Heath.  She is a Professor of English and Dramatic Literature and a linguistic anthropologist whose primary interests are innovation in learning, business, health, race relations and organizational learning.