We Planted 100,000 Trees!
We are very excited to announce that we have planted 100,000 trees!
It seems like just a few years ago that I was trying to bridge a non-profit idea with the speed and scaleability of a for profit business. When I was only 12 years old I wanted to have my own advertising business. After seeing my mother create her own magazine with no help and no investors I knew that I was born to be an entrepreneur. Nearly every job I ever had I moved to the top quickly. Not because I was good at anything. Simply because I knew how to creatively help people by bringing real solutions to real problems. By the time I was 22, I finally started my own business. After being the Associate Publisher for Green Lifestyles Magazine I decided that this was the life for me. Creating solutions for problems that the world was facing right now. Something had to be done and I thought we had some great solutions. With a lot of help from my brother Brian, we created our first business together, Gone Green?, LLC.
We created our mission statement to be "Create social, economic and environmental solutions for all people worldwide". We believed that by breaking our mission into these three departments we could actually make some incredible progress on the planet. We decided to start with Environmental Solutions as this was something we could get going right away. We knew that world hunger and poverty were still very relevant topics and epidemics in the world so we thought long and hard on what is the quickest way to solve world hunger? "Free and abundant food growing everywhere on planet earth" was our conclusion. Then we thought, okay, fruits trees could basically solve that for the most part. But then there was more to solving poverty the quickest. Even if everyone had free and abundant food growing everywhere that may not be able to solve all their problems. They still have actual expenses like, gas, electric, etc. that you actually do need money for. Whether you are selling the food and making money or not, it still needs more. So then we thought, you can make things like baskets, clothes, medicines, etc. with trees other than fruit trees!
We soon realized that by simply planting more fruit trees and other trees that can be cultivated to make crafts and supplies you could have virtually solved world hunger and poverty (at least on a small scale so that nobody is dying without food anymore). Whether we were right or not it was definitely worth trying. So, we began to make an oath to our business that we would "Plant a Tree for Every Product You Buy"®.
With that as our first goal in "Creating social, economic and environmental solutions for all people worldwide" we knew that we had something solid to work towards. After endless hours and endless months and months of nothing working, we finally got our first online store GoneGreenStore.com working. Sooner than we expected, we were planting 3,000 trees every month. Then, soon after that, we hit 100,000 Trees Planted!
That's right! We have planted 100,000 trees to date and you made it happen. We first met Dave Deppner back in 2009 at Green Festival in San Francisco. Trees For The Future was such a cool non-profit with such a simple idea - "Planting Trees, Changing Lives".
Back in 2009 when we were still publishing our magazine, Green Lifestyles on Planet Paradise, we decided that we wanted to plant a tree for every magazine we sold. Unfortunately, shortly after creating this partnership we had to stop printing the magazine. However, this is when we first launched our online store at GreenPlanetParadise.com. We decided to continue our partnership with tftf and to pledge 1 tree planted for every product we sold from that day forward. In the beginning it seemed like we would never get to 1,000,000 trees planted.
Fast forward to February 18th, 2014 at 5:23pm (PST)....
Our 100,000th tree was planted by a wonderful woman from Florida. Without knowing the significance of her shopping that day, she will have changed the world forever. Thanks to her we have gotten one step closer to our goal of planting 1,000,000 trees. Here is a video of the founder of Tree's For The Future, Dave Deppner.
On behalf of Gone Green?, llc and the GoneGreenStore.com we would like to say thank you for helping us "create social, economic and environmental solutions for all people worldwide!"
With love and gratitude,
Brian Wentzel & Will Hamburg
Owners (and Brothers) of Gone Green?, LLC
From Southern Mexico, March 26th, 2014
For more about how many trees we planted, visit: treesforthefuture.org