How Responsible Businesses Should Think About Merchandising

Julie Starr • July 16, 2021



Merchandising is a popular tool for many businesses to use, and for quite clear reasons. Not only can it potentially provide an extra revenue stream, but it may help you spread branding with products that speak to the value of your brand. For instance, bringing merchandise to a convention you’re attending can, in effect, help you spread your marketed brand presence around the entire event, especially if you give away certain items for free.

Yet it’s also true that merchandised products should be considered from a sustainability perspective in order to responsibly and ethically design such merchandise. Handcrafted items can be helpful from time to time, especially if you’re a small firm where professional printing or transfer paper can be useful, but how should you think about these problems at scale?

In this post, we hope to explore this topic and see if we can lessen our impact on the production cycle while also chasing possible sustainability efforts . This is a great way to redefine and represent the spirit and values of your brand – everything that merchandise should represent.

Let’s get started:

High-Quality Printing Companies

High-quality printing companies can provide you with a great means of making sure your branded approach works well, and that each piece of merch is undeniably and proudly yours. In some cases, this might include embroidery, such as at the top of baseball caps. The higher quality you can print, the better the merchandise itself will be, and that itself will ensure the item is used for a much longer amount of time.

Never Create Disposable Goods

It’s important to never create disposable goods that can be thrown away easily or thrown into landfills within a matter of days. For instance, instead of having five thousand small pens made for your attendance at a convention, perhaps you could make two hundred tote bags that give the guests a higher-quality item they may even begin to use in their personal life. This has the added benefit of being the container in which other merchandised options given by other brands will be placed, allowing you to supersede the branding therein. It’s not hard to see just how worthwhile that can be, as this speaks to the confidence and sustainable values of your brand. Always source proper sustainable suppliers and practices to support.

Change For Good

It can be healthy to match every sale of a merchandised item with a goodwill gesture. If someone purchases a piece of branded merchandise from your store, for example, you might decide to donate towards planting a tree in a foreign country. This not only encourages sales thanks to the ‘conscious factor’ you provide with every purchase, but it can help limit the impact of creating a humble merch library in the first place. With a cause you stand behind, this could be a fruitful and effective positive step.

With this advice, we hope you, as a responsible business, can make the most of merchandising.

Greener Clicks: How to Reduce Your Environmental Impact with Sustainable Digital Marketing

By Julie Starr • March 31, 2025
In the race to decarbonize our world, one area often overlooked is digital marketing. While it might seem inherently clean compared to print or physical campaigns, our online activities have a real and measurable environmental footprint. From servers powering your website to emails filling up inboxes, every click, stream, and scroll contributes to carbon emissions. At Taiga Company, we believe digital strategies can be powerful and low-impact. Here’s how to get started. Optimize for a Low-Carbon Web Why it matters: Websites and digital ads are hosted on servers that consume electricity, often powered by fossil fuels. Every time a user loads your site or ad, it uses energy. How to reduce your impact: Host green: Choose web hosts that use renewable energy or offset emissions. Clean up your code: Streamlined, efficient code reduces load times and energy use. Compress and reduce images: Smaller files mean faster pages and fewer emissions. Limit heavy media: Videos and animations are carbon-intensive; use them mindfully. A faster, leaner website isn’t just better for the planet—it also boosts SEO and user experience. Email Marketing with Intention Why it matters: Every email sent, received, and stored requires energy. Multiply that by millions of sends, and the impact adds up. How to reduce your impact: Clean your lists: Remove inactive subscribers to avoid waste. Segment wisely: Only send emails to those who will truly benefit. Use plain-text when possible: It’s lower in data and often more accessible. Reduce frequency: Send fewer, higher-quality emails with genuine value. Intentional emailing reduces not only emissions but also improves deliverability and engagement. Sustainable SEO and Content Strategy Why it matters: Search engines crawl, index, and serve up billions of web pages daily. Thoughtless content and bloated sites add to the load. How to reduce your impact: Create evergreen content: Focus on high-quality pages that stay relevant longer. Streamline your site structure: Fewer clicks to find content = less energy use. Use minimal plugins and scripts: Especially ones that load on every page. Green your CMS: Some content management systems are more resource-efficient than others. Sustainable SEO isn’t just eco-friendly—it’s good strategy. Fewer, better pieces often perform better than content mills. Rethink Marketing Automation Why it matters: Automated emails, ads, and data syncing can create a lot of digital clutter. That clutter eats up storage and energy. How to reduce your impact: Audit regularly: Retire old workflows and outdated automations. Optimize syncing: Reduce how often and how much data is transferred. Segment with purpose: Better targeting means fewer wasted sends. Use expiration dates: Don’t let outdated content or assets live forever. Efficient automation can reduce emissions and improve performance. Digital marketing isn’t going away—and it shouldn’t. It offers powerful tools for connection, education, and growth. But like all tools, it can be used more sustainably. At Taiga Company, we’re committed to helping organizations lower their environmental impact without sacrificing reach or results. Sustainable digital marketing is not only possible; it’s essential. Ready to make your marketing aligned with your company's corporate sustainability plan? Let’s start the conversation.

World Water Day 2025: How Beverage Brands Are Leading on Water—and Why Communicating It Matters

By Julie Starr • March 24, 2025
At Taiga Company, we work alongside brands who are not only doing the hard work of sustainability—but are learning how to talk about it in ways that connect with their stakeholders. This World Water Day , we’re reflecting on how leading beverage companies are advancing bold water stewardship goals and communicating those efforts clearly, thoughtfully, and strategically across digital platforms. Water is foundational to the beverage industry. From ingredient sourcing to packaging to community health, it’s a resource that demands attention—not just in terms of conservation, but in terms of how that commitment is shared with consumers, investors, regulators, and partners. Below, we’re highlighting three beverage companies whose recent water stewardship actions—and storytelling—stood out. PepsiCo: From Field to Community, Global Water Replenishment in Action PepsiCo launched 16 new water replenishment projects across nine countries in 2024 alone, restoring more than 1.7 billion liters of water to local ecosystems. These projects are practical and people-centered—ranging from irrigation efficiency in Texas to sustainable farming practices in the Dominican Republic. What stood out: clear project data, human-focused storytelling, and alignment with global frameworks. PepsiCo’s water webpage provides easy access to targets, progress updates, and case studies, helping stakeholders understand both the “why” and the “how.” Suntory Global Spirits: Water at the Heart of the Brand Suntory’s brands—from Maker’s Mark in Kentucky to Yamazaki in Japan—share a common origin: water. The company’s commitment to being net water positive by 2050 isn’t just a corporate goal—it’s integrated into brand storytelling, on-site conservation efforts, and supplier engagement. Their message is rooted in authenticity: water isn’t just an operational input, it’s an essential ingredient in their identity. Learn more on Suntory’s efforts via their LinkedIn post . Asahi Group Holdings: Building Local Water Resilience Together In the Netherlands, Asahi’s Koninklijke Grolsch partnered with stakeholders in the Twente region to develop a local water platform focused on reducing consumption and innovating wastewater reuse. This goes beyond operational efficiency—it’s about building water resilience within a shared ecosystem. Their community-first framing and long-term investment approach were key themes in this post . Why This Matters At Taiga Company, we believe that sustainability actions only go as far as their ability to be understood, felt, and trusted. Communicating water stewardship isn’t just about reporting metrics or sharing photos of wetlands (although both can help). It’s about giving stakeholders the context they need to see a company’s values in motion—clear commitments, thoughtful execution, and measurable impact.  If your team is evolving its water strategy—or simply looking for better ways to communicate what you're already doing—we’d love to be part of that conversation.
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