40. Katie Tyson Higdon on Shopping Your Values in a Vetted Marketplace

Purpose and Profit with Kathy Varol

Katie Tyson Higdon is a co-founder of Hive Brands, the first online marketplace dedicated to helping people shop their values. Hive Brands sells household goods, groceries, and beauty products that are high quality, good for people, and good for the planet.

Katie is an innovative and strategic marketer with a deep passion for mission-driven brands. She spent 11 years working at start-ups (Casper, Shine), small-to-IPO stage businesses (Freshpet), and agencies (VaynerMedia, Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann).

In this episode we discuss:

• Why Hive Brands created the Hive Five, their internal vetting system, instead of using a third-party certification
• One metric we should all pay more attention to
• 3 lessons for companies just starting their ESG journey

Key Takeaways:

• When it comes to building a personal community, people talk a lot about “finding their people”. This means finding people with aligned values and interests, and ideally, people who care enough to help you become the best version of yourself. What I find interesting about Hive Brands, is that they have become a connection point (or a hive). Their existence and growth demonstrate the magic that happens when you connect people and companies through a shared purpose and aligned values.
• The Hive Brands stakeholder approach struck me as a best-in-class example. The way they interact with their stakeholders appears to have an integrated collaborative advantage, in which they are continuously improving their processes and Hive Five criteria in partnership with the brands they sell, and with the consumers they sell to. Each stakeholder is committed to making the system better.
• The importance of transparency as we try to create better ways of doing things. Perfect isn’t possible, but progress is necessary. Transparency not only builds trust, but it can also accelerate change. For example, by transparently sharing hurdles—like packaging issues—you bring visibility to a problem waiting to be solved. This visibility can act as an invitation to another company that might be able to innovate a better solution for the entire system.

References:

• Connect with Katie on LinkedIn
• Hive Brands
• The Hive Five
• Purpose and Profit episode “Daniel Epstein on Building An “Us” World Through Collaborative Advantage”
• TerraCycle
  • Purpose and Profit episode with TerraCycle’s founder “Tom Szaky on Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling for a Better World”
• Alaffia
• Cloverly

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