5% of each Composure purchase goes to the MIT Dalai Lama Center For Ethics & Transformative Values.
I’ve found that vision comes from a strong sense of self-awareness, so inner perspective and personal virtues are an important part of Composure’s mission to foster creative independent business.
I can’t at this point think of another group of people who so wholly embody all of these things than those at The MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values: a program about developing virtues and inner perspective, within a school dedicated to tangibly engineering ideas and making them real.
Composure is at a stage where we’re not going to make them rich anytime soon, but it’s important to me to contribute something. The next contribution will be made at the beginning of October 2015, and at that point an update will be made here on Medium.
If you arrived here from the About page at alwayscomposure.com, above are all the straightforward details you probably came to find. A longer explanation follows below — no tangible learnings, so it’s best for those just looking to glean a bit of brand/business strategy insight from how I’m building Composure, or for those simply interested in learning more.
Most of us are familiar with the story of how Tom’s Shoes has inspired an explosion of “social math” (this is the term I’ve most often seen used to describe “one-for-one” and “percentage of sales goes to ___”) programs across companies of all sorts. And coming from a world obsessed with marketing and media trends, I often see the question come up: “is this the future of business?”
It’s a ridiculous question so the answer doesn’t really matter. But I’ll take this opportunity to describe how I think about social math and other initiatives, as a way to expose more of the larger strategy behind the apparel brand I run, Composure.
Let me first make an observation about crowdfunding because it turns out social math and crowdfunding are both tools for exposing something of critical importance to the modern business: vision.
The powerful thing about crowdfunding is simple and often overlooked: crowdfunding as we know it today 1)forces people to 2)clearly articulate a 3)shared vision. It turns out this is no easy task — ‘clear’ and ‘shared’ are the key words here — and there are plenty of crowdfunding campaigns that fail accordingly. Meanwhile there are campaigns that seem absurd and therefore doomed to fail — but because at their core is a shared vision, they do quite well. Consider the NoPhone, a project with a clearly articulated point of view and a vision for a world where real-world connection matters. The fact that the end result is an empty plastic box matters not at all to 900+ backers contributing $18,000+ dollars.
So perhaps a useful answer is: the future of business isn’t “crowdfunding,” the future of business is “having a shared and well-articulated vision that one can rally a community of supporters around.” Because with this answer comes the understanding that the businesses that can do this kind of articulation will find increasing amounts of success in this way (cheers, creative independent businesses, you’re likely to fall in this category), and the businesses that can’t do it will find success harder and harder to obtain (sorry, Fortune 500, you’re more likely to fall in this category).
Articulating a vision
There are lots of ways to articulate a vision, ranging in complexity from a brief About page to a full-blown business & investment plan. Somewhere in the middle is “association”; association initiatives are little more intangible, but they include things like collaborations, contribution programs and “social math.”
At this stage Composure’s development, an About page is little more than just lofty talk (I’ve done hardly anything but sell a few scarves, scarcely enough to prove Composure is about anything in particular), and an investment-level business plan is entirely premature. So associations have an important and functional role. They allow me to point to operations whose About is proven, and to say (hopefully with a little weight): “them! Those people are like us, because we share a vision of what’s important in the world.”
Social math is a way to do this pointing. If we reveal the functional elements of social math, what we get is also simple:
{pointing to people like us, who share our vision}
+ {a commitment to support their cause}
In the case of social math this commitment is financial, but really in any collaboration the commitment itself is the important part. The commitment makes it real.
So as with crowdfunding, we often see the question: “are ‘one-for-one’ / ‘percentage of all sales’ programs the future of business?” Wrong question entirely, while the right answer is: “the future of business is having a collection of people with a shared vision one can make a commitment to.”
People like us (Composure)
Composure aspires to be about the development of creative independent business: creative initiatives that are more than just concepts and hobbies because they exist in the real world, often thanks to the powerful ability of the tools and mechanics of business to make things real. I’ve found that vision comes from a strong sense of self-awareness, so inner perspective and personal virtues are an important part of the Composure ethos.
I can’t at this point think of another group of people who so wholly embody these things than those at The MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values: a program about virtues and inner perspective, within a school dedicated to tangibly engineering ideas and making them real.
I’m entirely confident that this program is the right place to make the kind of commitment I pointed to earlier, and to back that commitment up with financial support. Support which, by the way, ultimately comes from the people who buy into what Composure is about. People like you. Thanks.
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