Green Collar Entrepreneur - Interview with Green Depot's Sarah Beatty

How does 10 years as an MTV executive in the global marketing and branding department prepare you to open a green building-supply company? Well, it really doesn’t; but that didn’t stop Sarah Beatty from founding Green Depot in 2005. She was motivated to start the business as a consumer who couldn’t find what she was looking for. One week before her first child was due, her family had a mold contamination scare in their home and she began to question home safety as it relates to construction. Beatty began to research green and sustainable building products for her own home and couldn’t find the products she wanted. Her own frustration turned into determination to open her own one-stop-shop for green building supplies.

Beatty wasn’t entirely connectionless in the building-supply industry. Her husband, Mark Buller, and his brother, James Buller, founded and currently own Marjam Supply Company, a traditional building supply company with 15 locations in the Northeast. She and her husband believed so strongly in the Green Depot concept that they financed the start-up themselves. They began by opening a wholesale location contiguous to the existing Marjam location in Brooklyn. They have since expanded to locations in Philadelphia, PA; Greenport, NY; Newark, NJ; and Stoneham, MA.

Thanks to a recent merger with Greenmaker Supply, Green Depot now has a Chicago, IL location, as well. Green Depot plans to open locations in Newark, DE and Albany, NY later this year. They recentlym opened a retail showroom location on the Bowery in Manhattan, and launched private label cleaning products, paint, baby furniture, apparel, and other supplies.

While the construction industry has been hit hard by the current economic conditions, the green industry has continued to grow. While going green is now a mainstream concept, legally the industry is still a bit like the Wild West—there are hundreds of different certification organizations, but no one set of rules and regulations. To simplify the process of sorting truly green products from the products making false green claims, Green Depot developed a proprietary filter to ensure that their products adhere to the highest standards.

Everyone, from local contractors to mayors across the country, is turning to Beatty’s filter to ensure that they are making legitimately green choices. NY REPORT editor-in chief Robert Levin spoke with Beatty about establishing herself as a green building expert, marketing vs. public relations, and why the decline in the financial markets has been good for her business.

Robert Levin: How did you transition from being a network marketing executive to running a building supply company?

Sarah Beatty: From the beginning, I just put one foot in front of the other and tried to surround myself with people who are good at what they do and could bring me some added insight in the green building area. When I started, I decided to go to the building supply product experts and build a model off of that. The next step was to understand more about how this word “green” intersects with building products and how we were going to evaluate what was green and what wasn’t. I think the fact that I wasn’t already indoctrinated with industry assumptions has served me well. I was a fresh slate. It forced me to really ask the very basic questions.

What I found from asking those questions was that there is a lot of greenwashing in the marketplace. Greenwashing is a term used to describe exaggerated, misleading, or inaccurate statements by a company regarding the environmental benefits of a product or service, or the environmental practices of the company. So we’ve developed our own proprietary green filtering system. Because I’m a small business, not a Home Depot or a Wal-Mart, I knew from the very beginning that this company had to be built on quality of service, quality of product, and really delivering the whole vertical solution to a customer. By using this filter, we make sure that every product does what it says it will do.

Since developing this filter, an interesting thing has happened. We’ve had manufacturers come to us after we tell them we can’t carry their products and say they are interested in making their products greener. We’ve ended up getting involved with helping some manufacturers green their products. So the proprietary filter component of my business is so important. It’s forced me to be very disciplined and to be a translator for this concept of green, not only for the consumer, but in regard to arming the building trade with the knowledge and the products that they need to start adjusting how they build our communities.