There are millions of businesses out there. Many of them are worth learning from and using as reference points. But to a discerning, particular entrepreneur, there may only be a handful that serve as true inspirations and examples for our own work. We’re lucky, then, to have two such examples right here in the state of North Carolina, in East Fork Pottery and New Belgium, both of which were featured today by Mailchimp as part of their year-end annual report (the thing that jogged me to mention them here).
For anyone interested in employee wellbeing, New Belgium has long been known as a gold-standard business — having first gone employee-owned in 2000, and becoming 100% employee-owned in 2012. It has also been known for unconventional financial practices like open book management and aiding employees in financial literacy, for having a milder environmental impact than its peers, and other sorts of things you might expect from a multi-hundred-million dollar business founded by a social worker.
While their sale in 2019 to Japanese-owned conglomerate Kirin Brewing sparked more than a little controversy, not just about the company but about the longevity and standing of the employee-ownership movement at large (though more than 300 employees did reportedly come away with $100,000 or more), New Belgium remains a leader in progressive business practices for us all to learn from. And if you’re asking me, it continues to be one of the most popular beer companies in the United States, not in spite of its approach to business, but because of it.
At East Fork, though not an employee-owned business (nor is Nugget), that spirit of progressive and ethical enterprise is built upon a foundation of radical transparency that makes Everlane (the brand that coined the phrase, to my knowledge) look like McDonald’s. Underneath an exterior presentation as creatively on-point as any other DTC brand out there lies an enormous depth of care and thought, giving customers insight into manufacturing processes, financial expenditures, marketing decisions, staffing decisions, and more. In its marketing, East Fork’s approach to events both within and beyond its control is so consistently tactful, so casual and wise, that it occasionally transcends feeling like a “brand” at all. Glossier, famous in the marketing world for sounding like “your best friend” on Instagram, knows how to be human when everything’s good. East Fork knows how to be human when shit hits the fan.
For those of us in business who find ourselves less than enthused with the status quo, companies like these serve as North Stars — proof that 99% of conventional business wisdom (low costs, high prices, fat margins, massive scale, shareholder primacy, wage-labor expandability, etc.) is not the way it has to be, just because it’s the way it’s been. Proud to have the two of them here in NC (or at least 1.5 of them), and hope they’re here — not just making beer and bowls, but inspiring thoughtful entrepreneurs — for a long time.