i'd been following method and using their products for a couple of years, but somehow it had escaped me that their headquarters were located right in san francisco. like most of the jobs i've gotten, i came across the opportunity serendipitously when a friend of mine participated in a focus group there after being recruited by a friend from graduate school. he knew that i was looking for something that was more aligned with my values and philosophies, and preserving the environment was right up there on the list. I knew that cleaning products contained toxic chemicals that were getting washed down our drains every minute of every day. i knew that new moms washed their kitchen floors with products that contained bleach and other toxins and then let their babies crawl around on them, not being aware of the possible deleterious effects. this was really cool stuff, the idea that you could create cleaning and personal care products that worked as well as the ones that contained the dangerous chemicals but didn't pose harm to people or the environment.
my friend, being the resourceful and thoughtful guy that he is, got the contact information for method's chief marketing officer and did an email introduction between us. about a month later, i had my first informational interview at the company. it took about three additional months to sort out all the details (if you can call making up a job description a detail!), but i started at method as the director of customer advocacy in november '07.
i fell hard and fast for this company. it had been around for about 7 years at that time, and the two young founders were still very much involved, one on the branding and marketing side and the other on the formulation side. and my job - well, i worked hard, but my dirty little secret was that some of the job almost did itself. our customers were so passionate about the products that they engaged in a ton of word-of-mouth marketing on our behalf without us having to do a whole lot to cultivate it. we did everything we could to make them feel special, including mailing out early samples of new products before they were available to the general public. during my tenure there, we doubled the size of the email database as well as the advocacy (our "VIP"s) database. after a few months, i took over the brand communications department, expanding my responsibilities beyond advocacy and customer support into the web site, ecommerce, public relations, and branding and advertising.
unfortunately, however, my new responsibilities came at a price: the company had had its first-ever layoff. the economy was beginning to go south, and method sold premium-priced products in a world of inexpensive mass production, up against behemoths like Procter & Gamble and Clorox. we prided ourselves on the inevitable david & goliath comparisons, but the truth of the matter was that those companies were jumping on the "green" bandwagon too, and they could do it less expensively than we could since their production runs were so much larger.
somewhere in here, the chief marketing officer, who'd been my big champion, left the company. and probably not coincidentally, i made it through one more round of layoffs, but not the third. actually, although it was positioned as a layoff, it's pretty safe to say i got fired. i'd never been fired from a job before, not even come close - well, as far as i knew, anyway. but i guess there was a pattern where there was always one person, at a lot of companies where i worked, who really didn't like me and didn't approve of my work. my peers and the people who worked for me were never among them - again, as far as i knew.
i took it pretty hard. i'd been at yahoo for 4-1/2 years, and i'd wanted method to be my new home for the next 4-1/2, at least, and it had only been 16 months or so. it had taken me a while to break into the company, and there are only so many local businesses who boasted the "socially and environmentally responsible" label. i licked my wounds for a couple weeks and then got busy looking for work, knowing that in the current market (by now, it was almost mid-2009) i'd likely have to compromise my ideals, or at least put them on the back burner in terms of the criteria i used to evaluate new opportunities. i was a single person with a mortgage, and i just needed to be realistic. happily, i found a couple of options relatively quickly, and in early july i started as the director of brand communications for a gaming company called glu mobile.
No comments:
Post a Comment