Strange Shelf Fellows

Seventh Generation's Jeffrey Hollender initially opposed being sold at Wal-Mart. Now he welcomes the opportunity.

Image: Courtesy of Seventh Generation

For Wal-Mart, seeking to partner with leading nontoxic-household-products maker Seventh Generation was a no-brainer. With green products gaining market share thanks to competitive pricing and growing environmental awareness, the retail giant wanted a piece of the lucrative action, especially since the green sector is now boasting nearly $560 million in sales last year.

“As part of Wal-Mart's broad sustainability goal to sell products that sustain people and the environment, we are always looking to expand our number of sustainable offerings," Al Dominguez, Wal-Mart's vice president of chemical and paper goods, said in a statement.

But Seventh Generation’s “chief creative protagonist” Jeffrey Hollender used to say that “hell would freeze over” before he would sell his goods at Wal-Mart, reports the Wall Street Journal.

So what led Hollender to change his mind? "At this point, we now believe that we can have a bigger impact by partnering with Wal-Mart than by shunning it," Hollender wrote in his blog when the companies tested response to the partnership at several locations.

And a marketing shift that started this January with Seventh Generation’s first-ever national ad campaign, Protecting Planet Home, helped make the transition smoother. Back then, Hollender and new CEO Chuck Maniscalco talked with Portfolio.com about making the switch from grassroots to mainstream. The two executives found that while, in general, demand for environmentally conscious products was on the rise, a big chunk of shoppers didn’t know the company existed.

“We’ve found that we only had awareness that was between 10 and 20 percent of the population, so almost 9 out of 10 people didn’t know we existed. And yet close to half of the population had a high interest in the kinds of products [we make] and the kind of company we are,” Maniscalco said at the time.

No stranger to mass retailers, Seventh Generation has been widely available at Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, and on Fresh Direct. Adding Wal-Mart to the mix gives the household-product purveyor visibility in nearly 1,500 retail locations as well as on the retailer’s website.

For its part, Wal-Mart is calling the partnership a way “to give customers the tools and information they need to lead a healthier and more environmentally friendly lifestyle.”

That sounds great to Hollender, who’s made it his mission to be an educator on the topic since giving up CEO duties to Maniscalco.

“I have a lot to say, so I do like the opportunity and the discipline of formulating my thinking.” Hollender said about keeping up with his blogging duties for the company’s site. Besides writing books (his latest, The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win, came out on March 15, 2010), the blogging really is part of our goal to be a thought leader and to set an example and to sometimes be critical.”

What analysts will be looking for is initial response to the seemingly strange coupling and whether the hardcore environmentalists will have a problem with Seventh Generation on the shelves of such a massive-scale retailer that still has a ways to go to reduce its carbon footprint.