“We always said since the beginning, we’re not a clothing company that plants trees. We’re a tree-planting company that sells clothes,” says Tentree co-founder and chief executive officer Derrick Emsley.Ethan Cairns/The Globe and Mail
Tentree was never meant to be just a clothing company.
Long before the Vancouver-based brand became known for its hats, hoodies and T-shirts, its founders were teenagers planting trees and trying to sell carbon offsets. Apparel came later, not as the main business, but as the vehicle to fund the mission to plant one billion trees by 2030.
“We always said since the beginning, we’re not a clothing company that plants trees. We’re a tree-planting company that sells clothes,” says Tentree chief executive officer Derrick Emsley, who co-founded the brand in 2012 with his brother, Kalen Emsley and friend, David Luba.
For every item sold, the company plants 10 trees – hence the name – saying the approach helps regenerate ecosystems, capture carbon and support jobs in communities worldwide.
Tentree’s purpose shapes nearly every decision it makes, from choosing factory partners and materials to building its B Corp certification and eventually spinning off its own technology platform, Veritree, to verify and track global reforestation efforts.
“It’s not just a, ‘hey, we donate something at the end of the day’,” says Mr. Emsley. “It’s embedded in everything we do and that’s really important.”
The fashion industry is responsible for 2 to 8 per cent of global carbon emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, and uses up to 86 million Olympic sized swimming pools worth of water each year, with fast fashion accelerating production and waste. Tentree, on the other hand, has positioned clothing as part of the solution.
“Apparel felt like the best way to let people make an impact while quietly showing what they cared about. It helped make tree planting feel cool and culturally relevant,” says co-founder Kalen Emsley. “The same way certain trucks instantly say something about the person driving them, we wanted clothing that signaled something too, just for everyday people who care about the environment.”
Purpose as a ‘north star’
In an increasingly crowded apparel market, staying committed to sustainability hasn’t always been the easiest or cheapest path. But experts say that for companies such as Tentree, purpose isn’t a branding exercise; rather, they argue, it’s what enables them to grow at all.
“Businesses that have a purpose as the [company’s] ‘north star’ – which Tentree has – are better able to attract partners than those who don’t have such a credible purpose and a credibility around that,” says Coro Strandberg, president of Strandberg Consulting and co-founder of the Canadian Purpose Economy Project, which promotes the uptake of social purpose action across the economy.
Her research shows that businesses that lean into social purpose use it to build trust, attract customers and strengthen employee loyalty, often leading to stronger retention because consumers increasingly want to buy from brands that reflect their values.
“Businesses that are social purpose and impact driven, they experience double the employee retention, triple the growth and four times [the] likelihood for the consumer to buy from, stay loyal, and recommend to their family and friends,” Ms. Strandberg says.
Sustainability’s imperfect path
For Tentree, staying grounded in its purpose has meant evolving to include a broader range of apparel and to track sustainability through its Veritree platform, from its original tree-planting mandate.
“We’ve gone on our own journey of peeling back the onion on what sustainability looks like,” Mr. Emsley says.
“It’s been beneficial to us that it has been an iterative evolution since Day One. When you look back over the last decade, a lot of what has turned people off sustainability has been this expectation of perfection, this requirement that step one has to be the end state, rather than step one being step one.”
The process has led to some difficult decisions. For example, Tentree ended some supplier and planting partnerships not because of operational failures, but because the relationship no longer supported the company’s larger mission.
Mr. Emsley says problems usually arose when Tentree was too small a part of the partnership to have real influence, when a supplier or planting partner was not aligned with the same long-term values, or when the relationship became driven more by dollars than shared purpose.
“We don’t take those decisions lightly,” he says.
The company also had to confront the reality that sustainability comes with trade-offs, particularly in a price-sensitive retail market. Customers may care about recycled materials and ethical sourcing, but they still expect products to be durable, high-quality and remain affordable.
To manage it all, Tentree closely tracks its product footprint, measuring everything from fabrics and manufacturing to shipping and what happens to the product at the end of its life. The company is even experimenting with an internal carbon tax to help teams weigh operational decisions, such as whether shipping products by air is worth the significantly higher emissions compared with sea freight.
“It’s giving the team the framework and the ability to actually evaluate these decisions with that in the back of their mind,” Mr. Emsley says.
Building ‘good growth’
The discipline has helped Tentree plant more than 100 million trees in regions including Canada, Senegal, Madagascar and Indonesia, while building a customer base that likes the look and feel of the clothes and not just the sustainability messaging. It has helped the company build a customer base that extends far beyond sustainability messaging alone.
Tentree stands out in the business world because it has built what Dr. Oana Branzei, a professor of strategy and sustainability at Western University’s Ivey Business School, calls “good growth,” or expansion driven by environmental impact rather than overconsumption.
“They actually are a very, very rare example that grows exponentially on their primary goal, which is planting trees,” she says.
Its model became even stronger with the launch of Veritree, which helps companies verify that trees are planted, maintained and not double-counted. What began as an internal solution for Tentree has grown into a separate business, also led by Mr. Emsley, used by hundreds of companies looking to track their own reforestation efforts.
For consumers, however, the appeal often starts much more simply: Selling good clothes that align with how they want to live.