Ok, so let’s be honest, our site design kicks ass and so do our products, but not everyone judges a book by its cover. This is especially the case when you’re selling eco-friendly, hand-crafted, designer products that are valued a little higher than average. Information is key and based off of our continuous research on what you, our customers, are looking for when you see our stuff, we decided it was time to bring on some new personnel to pick up the slack.

Ally Varady is our new product information and site content writer. She is a junior at Michigan State, majoring in communications, specializing in PR, and minoring in Spanish. Her experience to date includes a recent job at a publicist’s office in NYC working on press-kits, client wardrobes and movie premieres. She’s got a popular blog focused on high-end fashion and occasionally throws in some opinion pieces, usually regarding celebrities or current events.

Some random facts about Ally: She loves puzzles, gives blood every 8 weeks like clockwork and believes strongly in humane animal treatment. She especially loves kittens. LOLZ

Keep an eye out for a ton of new content on our products, blog, and guide to green living section in the coming weeks. Welcome Ally!

- Ryan and Danielle -

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One look at a pair of Olsen Haus shoes, and the word that comes to mind is “fabulous.” However, more meaningful frases to describe these pure vegan shoes are “universal truth, respect for all beings, and social responsibility.”

Elizabeth Haus created this high style line to offer an escape from the environmentally unfriendly repercussions that result from the making of traditional shoes. For more than 20 years, she has been an advocate against “the use of animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment, as well as for the environment and social justice.” For nearly 20 years, she has maintained a vegetarian diet, with the last 2 years being vegan. Her shoe concepts stem from a “passionate pursuit of consciousness, purpose, function, color, art, design, and ethics.” Olsen Haus has redefined the world of high fashion shoes, and this cruelty-free woman is definitely here to stay.

Spring/Summer Lookbook:

Click Here to Visit The Olsen Haus Website

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High-end fashion will no longer be associated with slave labor and animal furs. The Green Movement has swept the fashion industry, proving eco-friendly fashion does not necessarily mean dreadlocks and hemp frocks. Exhibit A: Anne Salvatore Epstein and her environmentally-friendly collection, Beau Soleil.

After replacing her “overly excessive” lifestyle with one that was “simple, modern and organic,” former Marc Jacobs worker Anne Salvatore Epstein decided to launch an eco-friendly fashion collection. She named it Beau Soleil after the her favorite oyster, with the simplistic slogan “Reduce Recycle Renew.” The collection focuses on sustainability, fair trade and labor. She concentrates on the use of organic raw materials with the goal of offering consumers environmentally healthy clothing choices without sacrificing fashion.

Epstein uses fabric made out of bamboo [a sustainable material], vegetable-dyed organic cottons, vintage tencel [made from eucalyptus tress] and  recycled leather trims. The high-style collection combines popular designs with comfortable, sustainable and eco-friendly fabrics..

Some standout products:

Blanket Dress; 70% bamboo 30% organic cotton

Chrome Sweater; 70% bamboo 30% organic cotton

Groove Dress; 100% bamboo

Slinky Dress; 70% bamboo 30% organic cotton

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With interior decorating, gardening, and urban green living all being high on my passions list, I am always looking for cool new ways to combine them. I love having indoor plants during the winter and while researching other ways to incorporate nature into my home I came across some very cool products… or I should say ideas! Some might not be as practical as others, or for outdoors only, but all worth a double take.

Michel Bussien’s Growing Chair

Russian vines grow on willow branches and up the chair legs all within the clear frame. The chair is actually on a rolling planter too!

Nguyen La Chanh’s Moss Bath Rug & Moss Carpet

This is one of my personal favorites! Made of rot-free foam. The moss requires little maintenance, surviving for the most part from daily shower use. Plus can you replace the individual moss pieces if one of them doesn’t make it.

I’m sure you’ve always wanted to have moss as carpet;) This design from the 2009 Milan Furniture Fair is achieved with Terramac, which is a sustainable knitted fabric that is used as a place holder for the plants roots. It also protects the seeds and holds the moss together.  Terramac is a plant based plastic that is biodegradable. I can not wait till this is available to the public! Or maybe someone can give us suggestions for a do it yourself project?

Grass for Your Home or Office Desk

Designed by Uri Romano and Assaf Yogev, this is another simple example of bringing nature into your home. The prototype packaging is made of recycled materials. But this could be another easy DIY project. The grass squares can really go anywhere in your home.

During Easter my Aunt would always plant Wheat Grass in a pot and give them as gifts with little eggs or treats on top. This design is a similar idea for holidays or everyday use.

Peter Cook’s Pooktre Chair

This is living furniture at it’s finest! I know it looks fake; but this is a real tree that has been manipulated over several years to create this unusual design. The designer who grows these trees will typically grow 5 pieces a year including other types of “furniture” such as candelabras, bed-ends, and coffee tables. How cool is that?

Do It Yourself Terra Grass Armchair Kit

Now this is one of the easier projects to start! The kit comes with a cardboard frame and all you do is fill the frame with soil, cover it with grass, and watch it grow. You could also use other types of plants to cover the chair depending on whether it is for decoration or everyday use in the backyard.

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With the website about to launch we thought we’d dedicate this blog post to our reader’s. We’ve posted on subjects ranging from the Vibram 5-Toed Shoes to tips on De-cluttering Your Home and Building an Eco-Fence. But what topics interest you? Is there something you’ve been dying to know more about, but haven’t had the time to research it yourself? Well…. let us do the research. We want our blog to be a platform for starting conversations and interacting with our readers as well as allowing our readers to interact with one another. That being said, below are the top posts from Twitter based off of our audiences interest. These were the articles people found most interesting.

If you’ve been following us on Twitter you’ve probably noticed we use StumbleUpon’s tool, SU.PR, to post articles. The reason being is that it not only shortens the URL but also track clicks. So the articles below are ranked by top clicks through SU.PR. Enjoy!

P.S. Don’t forget the official launch of the e-commerce website is Oct. 1!

With 87 clicks to date: America’s Greenest Cities! Verde Lifestyles Blog Post.

79: Solar Forest Charges Your Car! This is so cool…

78: Are Affordable Green Homes Finally a Reality?

67: Vampire Energy. It’s Sucking Power Out of Your Walls! Ahhh!

64: BIKE-O-RAMA: A Roundup of the Best in New Bikes, Bike Infrastructure, Blogs.. ( Verde Post on Bikes)

If you’d like more info on the subjects above OR you have a topic of interest you’d like to hear more about, feel free to comment and we’ll get something up within the next week.

AND of course, if you haven’t already, RSVP for our launch party here!

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Guest post by Robert Stockham:Global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, sustainability… we all know the buzzwords and if you are reading this post it means you want to live a greener life.  But the question for most people is where do I begin? Saving the planet is not an easy task, but the road begins with small steps.  Therefore, I present to you a list of some small steps that you can take to make your life a little greener in 2010.

Reduce your energy consumption.

It seems pretty simple because it is.  Turn off the lights when you leave the room. Wash your slothes in cold water.  Turn down your thermostat in the winter by a couple of degrees and put on a sweater.  Get a programmable thermostat.  The easiest thing you can do is change out your traditional light bulbs for CFL (Compact Flourescent) bulbs. For every incandescent bulb that you replace, you will save about $30 a year in energy costs. If everyone in a city the size of Chicago replaced just one main light bulb with a CFL bulb, we would save the greenhouse gas emissions of about 200,000 cars on the road. If everyone in the country did it, we would save enough energy to light 2.5 million homes for a year and it equates to the emissions of over 3/4 of a million cars. Replacing just 16 bulbs is like not driving your car for a year. Trade out one in four bulbs in your house and the amount you spend on lighting will be cut in half. Only 10% of electricity used in an incandescent bulb is given off as light, the rest is heat: a big waste on a hot summer night!

Reduce your packaging consumption.

Packaging amounts to a huge portion of a products carbon footprint.  If you think about all the things that you buy, they come in packages.  The more the packaging, the more the waste that mostly goes to landfill.  Ideally, we would all be able to buy in bulk and have relatively little impact.  Unfortunately, most of us do not have that option.  But with some simple planning and thought, all of us can reduce our packaging consumption.  Buy in the biggest package available that works for you.  Avoid small individually packaged items.  Things like snack packs have a ton of packaging.  But buying in a large package and breaking down into small Tupperware that is reusable can have relatively small amounts of packaging.  Buy products that are concentrated.  A concentrated detergent has less packaging than the same washing amount of less concentrated liquid.  Look at your purchases for packaging that has recycled content.

Reuse everything that you can.

Can that jar be used for something else?  They make a fine vase.  Save those margarine containers for use as a food container.  Wash out your ziplock bags and use them again.  Instead of buying individual hand soap containers, buy a bulk package and refill the small one.  Paper sacks with handles are an instant gift bag.  Newspapers make fine gift wrap.  Write on the back of scrap paper, or print on the back side of all the things you print.  Try sewing a small hole in clothing or invest in a good stain fighter to reuse clothes that you thought were not salvagable.  Still can’t save them?  Try cutting them into smaller pieces for dust cloths.  By using everything at least twice, you can cut your consumption of virgin materials significantly.

Recycle.

If you are reducing and reusing, then your need to recycle is dramatically lessened.  Still, recycling can have the biggest impact on the environment in that everyone can do it while having the least impact on their everyday life. If you do not have a curbside recycling program available, make the extra effort to take your old goods to a drop off location.  Recycle all your jars.  Glass is one of the easiest things to recycle and making recycled glass uses 40% less energy than making glass from virgin materials.  Remove your lids and rinse your jars.  When it comes to plastics, all containers have a universal recycling number on the bottom.  While there are not uses for all the numbers so far, emerging technologies are finding ways to make new polymers and diesel fuels from assorted plastics.  In the meantime, Amricans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and most (estimates are about 65-70%) end up in the landfill. Remove your lids when recycling bottles as they are generally a different type of plastic than the bottle and in some cash strapped communities, it is cheaper to toss bottles with a lid still on than to pay someone to sort and remove lids.

Paper accounts for half of the waste we send to landfill.  If Americans reycled half of that, we would save 125 million trees every year. Over 48 % of the Earth’s surface was once covered with forests. Half of those forests are gone and only 1/5 of native forests are left. Making a ton of paper from recycled stock saves 50% of water used and 17 trees. For every 38,000 bills paid online, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved. Stop your junk mail! 17.8 tons of junk mail is delivered every year by the postal service. 44% of that goes unopened and less than 25% is recycled.

Recycle all your metals.  All steel has some recycled content.  It is generally at least 25% recycled content minimum, so the systems are all in place already.  Aluminum is easily recycled, and aluminum cans will make it back to the shelf in as little as 90 days.  But it isn’t just cans; foil counts too-even the foil on the 20 million Hershey’s kisses that are produced every year.

The road to a greener life is a long one.  But the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  What is your next step?

Guest post by Robert Stockham:

Great Lakes Design Collaborative

Great Lakes Green Pages Blog

Twittert @RobertStockham

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Total Read Time: 2.5 Minutes

How do you define a city as eco-friendly? Or even your own lifestyle? It’s interesting to see how our idea of “green” living varies from person to person and has changed over time as well. We are starting to see higher standards for LEED buildings, more companies being called out for “green washing”, and people trying to make sense of organic labels at the grocery store. Kids are learning more and more about recycling and what’s good or bad for the environment. They’re the ones teaching their parents what to do at home! But it’s also interesting to see how cities and larger entities, corporations or our own government, handle today’s environmental problems. Hopefully we will see more and more of these individuals and organizations starting to make significant changes. While you hear of different environmental projects in development around the country, it’s harder to hold a whole city accountable for it’s environmental impact and determine who is really making a difference. That is why I was so excited when I came across an article that not only listed the “America’s 50 Greenest Cities”, but clearly explained how they came to their conclusions and highlighted city projects.

How Cities Were Ranked:

Data was pulled from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected survey data and government statistics for cities with a population of atleast 100,000 and in more than 30 categories, including air quality, electricity use and transportation. The statistics were then divided into four general categories, each scored out of either 5 or 10 possible points. Then the sum of these scores determines a city’s ranking.

What caught my attention was that there were two Michigan cities in the ranking. Livonia at #26 and Ann Arbor at #24. Who would have guessed Livonia? The other cities were of course mainly on the west coast. I was curious about the steps cities took to earn them this type of recognition. It’s not something that is easily accomplished and requires a significant amount of coordination within a city. Think about trying to create a more eco-friendly home, then try to implement that process city wide! Turns out there are a lot of cities who are doing some pretty cool things!

The Categories:

Electricity (E; 10 points): Cities that draw their energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, biomass and hydroelectric power, as well as for offering incentives for residents to invest in their own power sources, such as solar panels.
Transportation (T; 10 points): Greater percentage of commuters take public transportation or carpool. Air quality included in ranking.
Green living (G; 5 points): Number of buildings certified by the U.S. Green Building Council, as well as areas devoted to green space, such as public parks and nature preserves.
Recycling and green perspective (R; 5 points): How comprehensive a city’s recycling program is and how important its citizens consider environmental issues.

Examples:

San Francisco turns wasted roof space into power by adding photovoltaic cells to it’s Moscone Convention Center. It’s a 60,000 sq.ft. expansion of solar panels supplies the convention center and more than 180 homes!

Or how about Santa Rosa that is tapping geysers for watts. Steam from the geysers is tabbed using geothermal technology and it’s actually the world’s largest such geothermal installation.
Then New York City is turning the tides into electricity. The city hopes to generate enough power for 8,000 homes with underwater turbines. A fleet of submerged turbines would be installed near Roosevelt Island, and would will transform the river into a valuable power source.

Chicago actually produces twice the energy with a third the carbon. How is this? Well a typical fuel-burning power plant is wasteful not only because it produces harmful emissions but it also wastes two thirds of the energy it generates. The reason being is that heat, the natural by-product of fuel combustion, dissipates into the atmosphere unused. To produce twice the energy with a third the carbon, the city has invested in cogeneration, the simultaneous production of heat and electricity, which is twice as efficient as conventional fuel-burning power production.

Reference: America’s 50 Greenest Cities

And of course I have to ask if you RSVP for our launch party!

Follow us on Twitter here!

-Danielle-

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Your probably already tired of the new year hype…but wait till you see what we have in store for you!! To start off the new year, we are offering 15% off Verde Lifestyles’ recycled steel tabletop and wall decor pieces!  (See our Verde Deals page for the coupon code.)

These industrial strength tabletop and wall decor pieces were created in part, or entirely of reclaimed steel and celebrate a raw beauty. Due to the sourcing of the materials used in these products, each is a one of a kind.

Below are our favorites from this collection:

Mixed Media Bowl
Reclaimed and recycled metal discs and washers create this unique bowl. Perfect for a dinning room table or as a fruit bowl in the kitchen. But I’m sure there are endless uses for this beautiful bowl. I was even thinking of using it as a planter, a little moss and dirt and voila!

Circles Votive Holder
A candle holder that makes a statement. Try our Cozy Home, Harvest, Pumpkin Spice, or Victorian Christmas soy candles for a longer burning and cleaner scent. Made of recycled materials, this votive holder could also be used as a flower vase.

Mail & Key Rack
Try outside next to the front door or in an entrance way. It will definitely make a great first impression either way. I’ve been eyeing this piece to organize our “stuff” instead of using the coffee table:)

Fireside Sphere Basket
A great piece for holding firewood, magazines, towels and even wine bottles, you name it. I asked Ryan, my partner in crime, for suggestions on other uses for this stunning basket and his reply included toilet paper, blankets and a place to store throw pillows. I give him credit for the blanket and throw pillow suggestion, but I’m not so sure about the toilet paper.

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To all of those people who have been following our posts, tweets, facebook messages and ourapidly approaching event on October 1st, we thought we’d give you a quick sneak peak at some of our products. Keep in mind that we will be showcasing several other items at the event in downtown Royal Oak and everyone will be given coupon codes.  (If you can’t make it, you can sign up for our newsletter once the site launches for coupon codes and updates.)

First up is our Larch organic duvet and pillowcase collection. The rich dark cocoa colors pop out from the white background. This will be available for queen and king-size beds. We’ll also be offering organic pillows and comforters for filling these items.

Lighten up your room with one of our exclamati lamps. These unique lamps are all hand-made using non-toxic and repurposed materials as well as clay. Shown here is the bejeweled lamp. There are many different colors also available in this design as well as several new orb collections.

Everybody loves bamboo! As you certainly know by now, bamboo is the fastest growing lumber in the world and is therefore rapidly replacing many other wood structures as the latest and greatest alternative. Our bamboo rugs are just two of the many bamboo products we anticipate selling within the coming months.

Our soy scented candles have arrived just in time for the fall rush. Each season, Danielle and I will be choosing from our favorite flavors! This fall we’ve decided on Pumpkin Spice, Cozy Home, Harvest, and Victorian Christmas. These items will be available in 10 and 16 ounce sizes.

Finally, because the largest part of our site is devoted to accent pillows, we thought we’d just show off one of them. This eclectic Buddha pillow is part of our EcoArt selection and one of my personal favorites. Other pillows in the Zen collection will be available to choose from as well.

Thank you all for your support so far and we look forward to seeing you at the Tweetup! Make sure to RSVP to the event on facebook.  On a side note…To start more conversations online, what type of content would you like to see on our blog?  Or topics of discussion on our Facebook page?

Here’s the link!

-Ryan-

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I recently stumbled upon this video from New York’s 2007 HauteGREEN Design Exhibition with River Wired which highlights great green designs for the home. Check it out!

Haute Green

It showcases new products such as paperstone, a rug made from felt scraps, and an air-purifying system using plants and solar panels. The premise is small designers that manufacture higher quality products that are meant to last a lifetime. There is also an emphasis on nature based materials that are biodegradable and/or recyclable.

Paperstone:
Paperstone is durable enough for interior countertops, furniture details, signs, cutting boards, and even window sills.
Made from post-consumer waste, recycled paper and petroleum-free phenolic resins.
Organic pigments give this new material superior UV resistance and color stability.

Maltagliati Doubleface Rug by Illu Stration. Hand woven felt scraps.

GreenLight:
The GreenLight is a prescription product developed for the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic.
Prescribed for those interested in changing their relationship to energy systems and improving indoor air-quality.
It addresses issues including VOC, benzene and formaldehyde removal.

How it works: Photovoltaic panels power LED lights which in turn feed the plants. Who would have thought to prescribe plants as a remedy!?

Interested in seeing other products from the 2007 HauteGREEN Expo?

I was unable to find information about the next expo, so if you come across any thing, let us know!

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