Consumer-Facing Carbon Accountability
For years carbon footprint reporting has been an esoteric, gate-kept tool, accessible to policy wonks and large businesses with deep sustainability teams. BioLite, along with co-founding partners at Peak Design, strongly felt that perfect could not get in the way of good and that taking responsibility for carbon needed to become a part of the climate conversation for businesses and customers alike.
So, we started a nonprofit.
Climate Neutral (renamed The Change Climate Project as of 2025) is an independent nonprofit dedicated to helping businesses measure, reduce, and offset their full scope carbon emissions. It currently has over 300 members ranging from small startups to businesses like REI, Vuori, and Blueland.
Kickstarting a Consumer Base
The members of Climate Neutral are businesses, but the certification label has no value if customers don’t know or care about it. In parallel with our b2b-facing announcement, we launched a consumer-facing Kickstarter campaign to drive awareness and signal to prospective members that the public is ready and eager for this kind of label.
In collaboration with the talented marketing team at Peak Design, I was responsible for project managing the core campaign content. This meant wireframing, script writing, and ensuring key stakeholder alignment across the two brands and co-founders.
Targeting A Founding Cohort
With limited resources and full time jobs, we had to be extra precise about our go-to-market and membership recruitment efforts. With BioLite and Peak Design both having strong connections to the Outdoor Industry, we decided to make a concentrated effort on building a founding coalition from within this community given the strong legacy of outdoor brands promoting environmental causes.
Through rigorous founder networking, we were able secure 18 pre-launch members and debut our organization at Outdoor Retailer, the marquee tradeshow event for the Outdoor Industry.
In this activation my role was to secure an all-door takeover campaign to create buzz; coordinate panel programming featuring leadership from BioLite, Peak Design, Allbirds, and climber Alex Honnold; support the design & build of Climate Neutral’s first ever physical booth; develop and deliver orientation materials for the 18 founding members on how to collectively activate at the tradeshow for a consistent, amplified message.
Additional post-tradeshow support included wireframing and copy buildout for Climate Neutral’s 1.0 website, securing panel programming at 2019 Climate Week NYC, being on the hiring team for their first full-time marketing role, and working with the BioLite Ops and Design teams to coordinate a production rollout to get the label on all of our products by 2020.