It was near the end of 2007 that mother of two Susan Mey decided she needed to make changes in her life—and change she did.
She quit her six-figure position as president of Kodak Canada and the following year started up Green Cricket, an online retailer of environmental products for homes and businesses.
“I was traveling constantly, and with two young children at home it just seemed clear to me that I needed to change my lifestyle considerably,” she says.
In her efforts to use environmentally friendly household products and “green” her own lifestyle, Toronto-based Mey undertook much research. She soon discovered that a business opportunity existed in bringing “that kind of knowledge and research” she had conducted to others.
“I thought, if I could bring this all together and provide the research to people who wanted to shop this way, if we could make it affordable and convenient, I think a lot of people would buy into doing better in terms of green shopping.”
Mey found that locating products that are truly green took a lot of effort and that misinformation abounds about what is truly environmentally friendly and what isn’t. “Greenwashing is a real issue,” she says.
With Green Cricket, Mey has focused on making it easy and convenient for people to buy green while providing full disclosure about any product that may be “less green,” such as components in clothing that are made offshore.
“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we only sell made in Canada clothing, but of course the yoga wear, for example, is 70 percent bamboo and 30 percent organic cotton, and we don’t grow bamboo in Canada, so the yarn for those fibres comes from either China or Pakistan.”
