Pink: A Business Story

As I prepare to attend the Women's Conference 2010, the color pink comes to mind. Pink has long been associated with girls and women, but I'm not a traditional kind of woman so pink was never my color.

When I first invented the Kleen Slate Paddles, I wanted them to be in bold colors-- red, yellow, blue, and green. Pink was simply too pale for my product and the powerful image I wanted to convey. But then an interesting thing happened. First, my son hooked up with a gal who loves pink. Then, my granddaughter turned out to be a lover of pink. Both of them cajoled me in their own way: "Why isn't there a pink paddle?"

Which gave me pause. Why was I resisting this color when there were clearly those who adored it? My son's girlfriend and my granddaughter represented potential customers, and I wasn't giving them what they wanted.

I started thinking differently about pink. This was the color that represented princesses, royalty in the world if you will. And then I remembered that pink ribbons are the symbol for breast cancer awareness. Suddenly I realized that by making a pink paddle, I could develop my customer base AND support an important cause: Breast Cancer Awareness.


Today, KleenSlate Concepts sells pink paddles, and we donate 5% of the sales of these paddles to the National Breast Cancer Awareness fund. This weekend, I'm going to the Women's Conference, where I will promote my pink paddles in acknowledgment of Breast Cancer Awareness Month: October!

This story about PINK is a business story because it illustrates four essential business principles that I hold dear:

• listen to your customers;
• think outside of the box (especially outside of your personal preferences);
• look for connections between your product and larger more global issues;
• give, donate, contribute.

Next week, I'll tell you what the Women's Conference 2010 power house speakers--Michelle Obama, Maria Shriver, Erin Brocokvich, and others--had to tell us.

Back to School Gifts

One of the greatest pleasures of being in business is giving away KleenSlate products to worthwhile causes. That's why I was thrilled when Julie Kenny included KleenSlate paddles and markers in the Jewels and Pinstripes Back to School Gift Bag.

Jewels and Pinstripes is a gift bag company that is dedicated to raising money for charitable causes. Each year the gift bag project helps a charitable cause. This year, a gift bag will be auctioned to benefit the Care to Learn Fund.

According to the press release:

The gift bag, valued at more than $1,150, includes a wide assortment of fashion-forward children’s products to prepare top celebrity kids for their first day of school with such essentials as lunch boxes, eco-friendly apparel, accessories, kid-friendly stationery, jewelry, learning aids, gift certificates and many other fabulous products.

KleenSlate paddles are one of those fabulous projects!

Not only is my product coupled with "a wide assortment of fashion-forward children's products" (Woohoo!), I am proud to be connected with the Care to Learn Fund which strives to lift children out of poverty.

Kleen Slate in Africa

I am always looking for opportunities to promote good will and give to those less fortunate than I. So when my friend Rosemary introduced me to Max and Kathryn who work with a school in Ethiopia, I offered to give them several cases of KleenSlate paddles and dry erase markers for the school.

They were excited to get the donation but explained that it was not easy to get things like this to the school. Airfreight is expensive and there is always the danger of customs duties, so they best way to get donations of any kind to the school is to take them in their luggage when they visit the school. As it turned out, they sent the paddles and markers with a colleague, so it was several months before they found out if they teachers had put them to good use.

Kathryn wrote the following message when she arrived at the school and also sent the picture accompanying this post:

I went over to Mekele and took our volunteer teacher, Lynn around the school on her first day there. The teachers were not expecting the tour and we went into a few classrooms at random. Imagine my
delight to see the paddles in action in a genuine, unrehearsed lesson!

The students were learning Amharic. This is not an easy language as instead of having an alphabet like ours, they have symbols which represent sound combinations, and they have to learn about 130 in all.
This class was learning the symbols for ha hi he ho hu h etc. The children were holding up the symbols representing these sounds, and then one would hide their symbol and then the other children would have to say which one was missing. Also the teacher was moving the children into different places in the line so that they could spell out some short words!

This was really excellent. The children were enjoying their classes and all participating well and showing learning is fun!

News like this is incredibly satisfying, and of course a picture is worth a 1000 words.