Sustain: Building a Net Positive company from the ground up

Sustainable condoms are the audacious idea of entrepreneur Jeffry Hollender. Hollender came up with the idea of developing a non-toxic, fair trade condom under the brand name Sustain. After all, condoms have tremendous intrinsic social and environmental benefits — they reduce population growth and its associated environmental impact and prevent the spread of disease. But Hollender’s company aspires for much more. He wants Sustain to be a truly net positive business – one that produces more positive than negative impacts. And his vision extends beyond just Sustain. Hollender wants the company to be a “disruptive force in the reproductive healthcare industry, driving it toward greater access, safer products, and increased transparency.”

A Framework to Measure Impact

Given this ambitious mission, how would Sustain frame its corporate purpose to inspire its employees, guide its growth, and communicate externally? How would the business develop near-term targets where both positive and negative impacts are tracked? Hollender turned to Pure Strategies to build the corporate net positive framework to guide the company’s social, environmental, and industry-transforming ambitions.

Pure Strategies first developed a basic framework to organize the vision and the goals and metrics that would follow (see figure below). This framework is based around four pillars that support the company’s core mission of empowering women to fulfill their reproductive health care needs:

1. Restore Nature
2. Deliver Health
3. Transform Industry
4. Promote Justice

Each pillar is constructed with three building blocks:

• A Starting Point, which includes the positive features built into the product right from its launch (e.g. fair trade latex, health care for workers in the condom factory)
• Key initiatives, such as “innovation in materials and packaging” to guide the company forward
• The End State, which articulates the end points Sustain envisions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases are rare; biodiversity and forests are preserved; Fair Trade is the industry norm)

By articulating the ends states and major initiatives for the company, we hoped to provide direction and a solid anchor for setting priorities and developing metrics to measure negative and positive impacts. Sustain has since tweaked the framework and begun to implement it as the business begins to launch in new channels and markets.

Jeffrey Hollender, Founder of Sustain, wrote about our work together to develop this net positive framework and addressed the company’s experiences during one year of implementation in this article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.