Jeffrey Hollender
Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthoracademicjeffreyhollender.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Jeffrey Hollender co-founded and served as CEO of Seventh Generation, a sustainable household and personal care products company acquired by Unilever in 2016. He also co-founded the American Sustainable Business Network and Sustain Natural, and has authored books on corporate responsibility including The Responsibility Revolution.
1shows
3appearances
24statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Jeffrey Hollender said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hollender: Eco-friendly products are just "less bad," not actually good
“To be quite honest, it's often about being less bad rather than good, and I think we've gotten the two things confused. I think that when you're buying a seventh generation diaper, you're causing landfills to fill up, you're causing increased climate change. Y…”
Hollender: My board fired me by phone on a Saturday and locked me out
“Done in a somewhat brutal fashion because not only was I let go, but I was let go over the telephone on a Saturday morning and told that I wasn't even allowed to go back into the office ever again.”
Companies Now Practice 'Green Hushing' Around Sustainability and DEI Initiatives
“There is sort of this new language called green hushing, where people do sustainable things, and they don't talk about them, and part of it is the sort of political environment we live in, and we have many aspects of responsible business, like diversity and in…”
Purpose-Driven Businesses Generate Better Profits and Financial Results
“And there is abundant research, much of which NYU has done itself, that demonstrates that people that run businesses in a responsible, purpose-driven fashion generate better results, more profits, better growth, and as young students, they have to be very fami…”
Founder Obsession With Rapid Hyper-Growth Is Dangerous and Causes Burnout
“The bigger, the faster, the better, and I think that that is a dangerous thing. I think that, that we need to monitor how obsessed we are with how fast we grow, because it's a dangerous thing to be moving so quickly, and it's stressful, and it challenges your …”
Hollender: My board hated that I kept getting arrested with Greenpeace
“I was a board member of Greenpeace for 13 years. I was getting arrested for standing up for things that we believed in, and my board was definitely not comfortable with a CEO who was getting thrown in jail.”
Micro-Influencers Under 10k Followers Remain Open to Unpaid Brand Collaborations
“The people with 10,005 thousand, a hundred followers are much more open to doing something with you, and they won't charge you money.”
Retail Product Packaging Fails to Communicate Complex Health Benefits Effectively
“That's a tough thing to do at retail. It's very hard to put all that information onto a bottle, and consumers don't spend a lot of time reading labels in the store.”
DTC Brands Should Target at Least a 50% Repeat Purchase Rate
“One way to monitor the health of your business is how many people come back for that second purchase. I would hope that it would be over 50% at least to know that you've satisfied them with what they bought.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation gave a weekly prize for the biggest employee mistake
“One of my fondest memories is that in our staff meetings, we would actually give a prize out to the person who made the biggest mistake that week, and they would get a coupon to go out to dinner with their friend or their wife.”
Hollender: Why Seventh Generation killed its catalog to bet on wholesale retail
“We had raised about five million dollars of additional capital, and the board and I came to the conclusion that we had two very different businesses, and they both demanded lots of money, and we decided that we should do something that appeared highly risky an…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation products tested at 90-95% of mainstream effectiveness
“Well, every product we sold, we sent to an independent lab and tested our performance against Lysol, Tide, or Bounty, and we had pretty good test results. We were 90 or 95% as effective. We weren't a hundred percent as effective or more effective, but we felt …”
Hollender: We donated our Albertsons profits to their striking grocery workers
“And we debated, and the whole company sat down in a meeting together, and some brilliant young man whose name I can't remember came up with this idea that we should take all the profits we generated from selling in Albertsons and donated to the Workers Strike …”
Hollender: Seventh Generation achieved 20% employee ownership
“We had built ourselves up to having a company where the ownership of 20% of the company was Resting in the hands of the employees.”
Hollender: Royal Mounties jailed me for starting a company without papers
“In Canada, and I had a pretty high profile because of this successful startup, and one day the Royal Mounties showed up in the office, handcuffed me, and threw me in jail because I was an illegal alien. I was working in Canada without working papers.”
Hollender: Prior business delivered a 10x return to investors
“For every dollar they put into the company, they got 10 dollars back.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation's first $850K came entirely from past investors
“The vast majority of the investors were those investors from the prior business. And they put up 850,000 dollars in 1989.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation Laid Off 50% of Its 120 Employees in 1991
“My recollection is we had about a 120 people, and we had to lay off half of them, almost 60 people, 50%.”
Hollender: Getting into Whole Foods grew our revenue from $12M to $50M
“Yes, it was huge, and it basically unleashed growth that would propel us from, you know, 10, twelve million dollars to five years later, almost fifty million dollars.”
Hollender: Diapers added about a third to Seventh Generation's sales
“I mean, when we got into the diaper business, I was Traveling in Europe, and I saw these brown diapers, I said, wow, unbleached diapers made from, ah, non-chlorine bleached pulp, and I said, I gotta have these, we gotta sell these, and they were a success from…”
Hollender: Firing stemmed from failure to keep board aligned
“I was very headstrong. I was impatient, and I was too focused on doing what I was passionate about doing, and not focused enough on ensuring that I had brought the board along with me.”
Hollender: Skills Exchange of Toronto reached 30,000 registrations in year two
“I think the second year we had 30,000 people register for these courses.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation never put Newman's sabbatical terms in writing
“One of the things we could have done that we didn't do is put things in writing when Alan left. So,
A written document that says Alan's taking six months off, and he will return at the end of six months and fulfill the position he had before.
I mean, that wasn…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation co-founders saw a counselor to reconcile differences
“We went to see a third party to try to reconcile our differences. And we had a series of meetings with a sort of marriage counselor type person to see if we could mend the relationship, which I don't think happened very successfully.”
The other half of the tape: Jeffrey Hollender's own voice is left out of every number here. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Jeffrey Hollender, by other people (2)
Newman: My co-founder fired me by letter while I was on sabbatical
“I didn't know until I sent an email or a letter or however we communicated in those days
Saying, okay, getting ready to come back, why don't we get together and let me talk about some of the ideas that I have put together that I'd love to start implementing, a…”
Newman: Hollender was brilliant in turning Seventh Generation around
“I think what Jeffrey did with the business after I left was in many ways, brilliant, you know, certainly deserves a lot of credit for taking this concept and this fledgling business who was really down on its luck and finding the way”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jeffrey's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business | 3 | 24 | 67% 2/3 | full record on How I Built This → |