Ralph Bianculli has his work cut out for him as CEO of Paradigm Group, a manufacturer of green products for commercial facilities (think janitorial and breakroom supplies). How can you market your offerings to purchasing professionals when many suppliers won't even carry your products? In this SLM interview, Ralph explains how his manufacturing and distribution company got into the marketing consulting business, and why many supply firms resist stocking greener alternatives.

SLM: How did Paradigm become involved in the green products market?

Ralph: When we began Paradigm Group in 1999, we conducted a lot of research that showed us the sales potential of green products. But we also discovered that end-user interest in environmental preferable products was often derailed by a lack of information on the part of distributers. So, in order to position ourselves in the supply channel as a provider of green products, we realized we needed to provide education as well. The company is divided into four parts: one part is a marketing/consulting company, and three others are situated on the supply-side of equation. We've spent past six years not only developing green products that can be easily integrated into facilities channels but also educating supply channel providers (distributers) on their environmental and financial benefits. Its been something of a challenge, but we believe we can drive the message through the supply chain directly to the end users of those products.

SLM: So rather than meeting supply channel demand for green products, youre creating the products first and then going to your channel providers and educating them on the importance of environmental performance.

Ralph: Weve always reacted to current needs and demands. But we recognized early on that being proactive in the marketplace is a necessity because a lot of channel providers are unaware of the green options out there. A good part of our marketing resources are devoted to collecting information on innovative green products that are now available.

SLM: So more green products would be available to end users if only their suppliers knew that they were on the market?

Ralph: Well, that's where the disconnect is. Channel suppliers today are in no hurry to restock or remanufacture or retool for a marketplace that has to be proactively sold to. So they're very complacent. Its the end users their customers who are going to have to drive the real changes. The bottom line is, if the end user is looking for these green products, the distributers will have to start reacting

And we're seeing a big shift now. Companies have decided they need to clean up their act when it comes to environmental impact. On the facilities side, a lot of green mandates at the senior executive level are being driven down through to janitorial and the breakroom. Facilities products like cleaning agents, paper towels, cups, plates, copy paper make up 25% of the corporate waste stream but its easy to switch to recycled-content paper. This is low-hanging fruit.

SLM: What about cost?

Ralph: In some cases there's an illusion that going green costs more. Again that's misinformation that being disseminated by distributers that don't necessarily want to take in these additional products. When you put all the stats in front of the consumer, there's almost never a financial reason not to switch to a greener alternative.

SLM: I remember when the typical green business story was how to get top-level buy-in for green products, but now it sounds like it's going in the other direction. We're seeing executive-level directives force middle managers to change their business-as-usual purchasing practices.

Ralph: These decisions are definitely being driven from the top down. Traditionally a lot of these facilities product purchasing decisions were made at middle-management level. But today we're seeing CEOs, CFOs telling their middle management, "We want to move toward buying greener products." That's never happened before. It's a change in the way directives are coming.

SLM: If there's such an end-user push toward environmental responsibility, why wouldnt channel providers want to meet that increased demand by stocking more green products?

Ralph: It's not that they don't want to do it; they just want to do it on their terms. Channel providers stock tens of thousands of products. They manage their business by the number of SKUs they have in their system and by the amount of dollar inventories that go in and out of their warehouse centers. If they start adding more SKUs, it becomes a financial burden.

For instance, lets say distributer stocks a virgin-pulp paper towel, and some of his customers start asking for recycled-content paper towel. Now he has to stock two types of towel, because he's still got customers who want the same virgin-pulp product that they're used to. Hes got to take another SKU into his system. Multiply that by tens of thousands of items and you can see why the wait-and-see attitude is, "Ok, when I see a real demand here I'll add that SKU." That's the transition going on in the supply chain right now, but its going to be slow.

SLM: If your regular distributer doesn't currently stock a particular item such as recycled-content paper towels, are you just out of luck?

Ralph: That's where an organization like Paradigm comes into play. We currently sell to over 250 distribution companies, so we have built-in supply channel infrastructure for these products. When those end users want to move into purchasing greener products, we want to not only give them the information but also the opportunity to purchase those products. Well suggest that end users switch to supply channels that carry our own recycled-content products, but well also offer those products to their existing supplier if they want to take those SKUs in. In any case, there's an economic upside for us because we delivering the new wave of green alternatives alongside the standard products customers have been using for many years.

SLM: Do end-users have to come find you? How does it work?

Ralph: We're trying to be more proactive, first to educate prospective customers and then to make it easy for them to purchase our products. Our information and marketing group has spent a lot of time and resources to deliver marketing materials to end-user decisionmakers. We've created a web platform called Green Intelligence to help customers understand some of the simple things they can do in their business environment to reduce their waste stream. So we're educating both the channel suppliers and the end users on what they can do. And it's not just buying recycled products but also seeking out products that create less waste to begin with, like reusable cups, for example. It requires a combination of approaches.

In addition, we're seeing a huge bump in end-user demand for our Emerald brand of B2B brand of green products for commercial facilities. When we started the Emerald category five years ago it represented about 3% of our product mix. Today it represents around 35%. So that shows how quickly it has overtaken traditional non-green SKUs. It's substantial.

SLM: What's next for Paradigm?

Ralph: Our consulting services group is working to get Paradigm's market intelligence into the architectural design of corporate facilities. A lot of green buildings today, tend to focus on lighting, and heating and cooling, etc., but they seem to forget where a lot of the waste stream comes from and it falls into a lot of our product categories. Were looking into offering our services from the drawing-board stage to make new constructions and office renovations more functional and conducive to environmental performance. We think we're going to get a tremendous push in design work. If you have a facility based on the old blueprints, you're not going to get as much benefit. We're going to catch them before they even start building to help them become more productive in this green movement. It's really where it all begins.