EcoSpaces: Innovative Building Solutions

Remodled Living Room

slideshow

4 years old, no longer a baby but

still so young

EcoSpaces just celebrated the completion of four years in business supplying Green

Building Materials to our community, and what an adventure it has been.  We threw a party with beer and wine to

thank our past clients,  woo some

new ones, and celebrate that EcoSpaces is still standing.   We opened our doors in 2007, when

contractors were still pulling down more money than lawyers in this town and

property lots were selling for over a million dollars. 

Yes, Telluride is, and has always

been, a boom/bust town, and now seeing it in retrospect, little did we know, just

a year after we opened our doors we would be heading into the greatest economic

down turn since the great depression in this country.  The bubble didn’t pop right away here, and sustainability

and green building simultaneously gained popularity and press.  So we wondered, even if people were

starting to be strapped for cash, would they still choose a comparable but

SUSTAINABLE product in the end? Other boutique green building showrooms like

ours were falling from grace just at the same time that the big banks started

their infectious toppling motion. 

Our mantra was “Stay above water so we can be in position to dominate

the upswing.” 

I think we have been able to hang

in because 1) we intentionally created a lean business brokering materials and

drop shipping them to the job site instead of warehousing anything. 2) We boot

strapped during the slowest part of the recession and cut back on all staff and

many other expenses for that very slow time.   3) We were very fortuitous to find an angel investor

who believed in the concept of our business and had invested capital into this

start up.    Each year,

our business has grown; people are still building and remodeling, yet fewer

numbers.   Of course we have seen fewer building

permits, more projects halted based on lack of loan funding, and foreclosure

has found too many people in our circles confronted with hard luck.  

We are school teachers turned

entrepreneurs, we learn as we go, and feel that we have earned our honorary MBAs

as we have been forced to study web design, marketing, social networking, cold

calling, communications, psychology, contact management and project management

systems, outside sales and much more. 

It has certainly been an education and there is an abundance to

learn.  We even hired Allison

Wollfe of Vibrant Planet, who coaches on business strategies, marketing plans

and communication techniques for companies focused on social and environmental

innovations.  After a slew of

interviews conducted with architects, designers, developers, contractors, and realtors,

asking them pointed questions about their interest and commitment to the type

of building materials we carry the findings were important for the growth of

the company. 

What we learned was, in this

economy, people are way more money conscious than they are green conscious.  They are first most concerned about

getting an affordable product, next they want it to be aesthetically pleasing,

durable, and finally it is an added bonus that it is green. This was surprising

to us, but also good to learn.  We

therefore decided to market our business as a design showroom providing

innovative and aesthetically original materials that are durable, affordable, as

well as sustainable.  We learned

that the “Conscious Consumer”  (those

already committed to Sustainability) is a very small percentage of people, and

it is the people who are currently building and purchasing building materials

are who we need to market. We have weeded out our product line to be able to

offer comparable like priced products that are also “green” to those that are

conventional.  An example would be

a product like our Beetle Kill Pine siding  (taken from standing dead Pine trees devastated by the bark beetle

epidemic) producing a product that looks like reclaimed barn wood, compared to

a standard virgin pine siding product. 

Yes, some products still are a bit more in upfront cost but will stand

up and last a whole lot longer like our 50-year roofing product than cheaper materials

that may need to be replaced sooner. 

When we started, we said that we

wanted to be in business long enough that these green alternative building

materials were no longer “alternative” but more the norm, and we could see the

overall trend in building shift to a more sustainable one, and thus be forced

out of business as our niche market went fully mainstream.  But, for now, it seems like we still

have work to be done, helping to offer Green Building Materials as a viable

option to people living in homes.