Before anything else, let go of your easily-prickable Pinoy pride for 15 minutes and read (or re-read) Nick Joaquin’s A Heritage of Smallness.

In this influential essay, the one-time National Artist for Literature holds up a mirror to the Filipino Soul and eschews our love affair with all things small :

“Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma, noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.”

He further builds his case, noting the Philippine aversion of going for big, bold risks.

Whereas other countries have the grandeur of millenia-old pyramids, colloseums, or castles, our landscape reveals … invisible traces of the nipa hut, obliterated in months and years, not centuries.

This seeming absence of ambition in our DNA is a reinforcement of Joaquin’s three theories :

“First: that the Filipino works best on small scale–tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials–clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the threat of competition.”

While there’s most certainly truth in this – denial would only be delusional and unproductive – it’s time to reframe Joaquin’s thoughts and put them in a new historical perspective; Most especially since this so-called heritage of smallness is a jiu-jitsu move whose time, I believe, has finally come.

The transformation spurred by the Industrial Revolution saw unprecedented growth and scale driven by cookie-cutter replication;  This great leap forward was facilitated by large-scale organizations and systems : huge industrial factories and their assembly lines, massive one-size-fits-all educational systems, sprawling country-wide infrastructure – all supported by financial institutions that both oiled and churned the giant wheels of commerce.

Just consider the following examples :

The tri-media attack of Television, Radio, and Print became national – even global – platforms, easily influencing and swaying popular opinion at a massive scale.

Big Business got bigger, while the small guys got smaller. The latter would eventually became roadkill for the ever-burgeoning class of multinational corporations : Wal-Mart dries up the Neighborhood Mom & Pops, Starbucks engulfs the local coffee shops, Barnes and Noble kills the community-based bookstores.

The so-called First World Countries’ GDP’s would balloon and dwarf those in the Third World at mind-boggling ratios. These countries even formed an Industrialized Nations’ Club called the G8 – with their collective financial institutions pretty-much dictating the pace of the World Economy.

But something peculiar happened at the turn of the century.

The large institutions started teetering, and are now on their way into becoming dinosaur-obsolete – their 20th century innards simply being torn apart by 21st Century Realities.

The seemingly impenetrable consolidation of media became oh-so-vulnerable. Professionally produced shows on Television compete with amateurish two-minute antics on YouTube; Internet radio is replacing the radio station as we know it; And every week we extol eulogies on yet another magazine and/or newspaper’s death, as they become replaced by blogs, websites, and online forums.

Even Big Businesses are in quite a disarray. Wal-Mart survives through its ongoing reinvention; Starbucks is now buckling under its own weight – in fact, its new experiments are going community-based as unbranded local shops; Amazon.com and a myriad of niche online booksellers continues to threaten the very economics of brick-and-mortar stores. And don’t get me started on the really easy pickings, The Banks That Were Too Big To Fail, But Did.

On that note, the Global Financial Crisis of ‘08-’09 swept across the industrialized nations – their financial institutions becoming a worldwide domino of economic disaster. Tackling this dangerous web was no longer something that the G8 could address in isolation, and so to deal with it they had to involve an expanded group, the G20.

The most-developed, largest countries which just a decade ago seemed invulnerable flirted with disaster and economic depression.

This breakdown in large 20th century institutions certainly has me thinking : maybe Being Big isn’t that – pun intended – big a deal anymore.

From 2010 onwards, maybe it’s time to revisit the other side of the spatial spectrum and get reaquainted with the virtues of smallness.

—

It’s no secret that The Rise of Smallness is being fueled by the Internet’s overarching disruptive shadow. Call it what you will – Wikinomics, The Groundswell, The Long Tail, an Army of Davids – the fact is that no other time in history has power been so democratized and redistributed – from multinational companies into a mosaic of startups; from large institutions into the hands of collective individuals.

Indulge me now by sharing with you Exhibits A & B  (both hailing from the same source : uber-brain-food magazine, Wired’s Issue 17.06 – a major, major influence on my thinking with regards to this matter).

Exhibit A is the article, The New New Economy : More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity -  which showcases the decline in number of the Megacorporations and the viral proliferation of an Ecosystem of Startups.

Exhibit B is more a mindbend, if you will.  Kevin Kelly talks about The New Socialism : Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online – and this is where it makes the leap from mildly interesting to extremely interesting.

Because the secret sauce isn’t really in The Small per se; it’s the aggregation of what I can only call as ‘The Many-Small’ into an almost sentient-network, mimicking swarm intelligence.  And so it’s not just the empowered individual which is the focus of the matter, but rather the groups of individuals bound together, moving from Web 2.0 Guru Clay Shirky’s hierarchy of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collective action.

What does this all have to do with the Philippines?

Because for better or for worse, Nick Joaquin is absolutely right. We are indeed a nation of smallness, divided across a myriad of 7,107 islands.

From sari-sari stores to barangays, from nipa huts to sachets, from farming small plots of land to microfinancing – it is the small that dominates the Filipino landscape.

But if we mirror the Internet model, then we can arrive at the logical conclusion that we’re sitting on a goldmine. And it’s not in The Small. It’s in harnessing The Many-Small.

Our work in Hapinoy is an extremely relevant example to the thinking here. The smallest, minutest unit of retail – the humble sari-sari store – by far dominates the number of retail outlets in the country. While there may be a few thousand supermarkets and groceries nationwide, there are almost 700,000 sari-sari stores sprawling every nook and cranny of the archipelago. 700,000! Numerically, that’s more than 90% of all retail.

So individually, the sari-sari store is too micro to make a dent in the universe. But as a Hapinoy network, the aggregation and alignment of hundreds of thousands of sari-sari stores represents a massively untapped economic opportunity. It’s most definitely not Wal-Mart, but it is a powerful force in its own right.

What makes this model more resilient is that its not solely reliant on a centralized nervous system. Close one Big Box Hypermarket and your business goes under; Close a couple of hundred sari-sari stores and you’ve got an equal number of stores that can willingly take its place. It’s self-healing on the fringes, with a high tolerance for fallouts.

Now extend this Hapinoy model into other Filipino Many-Small realities.

Micro-Businesses.

Barangays.

Public Schools.

Agricultural Plots of Land.

Seven. Thousand. One Hundred. Seven. Islands.

And then add layers of technology to mesh them together – wireless networks, mobile communications, the web as a platform – and the possibilities just effortlessly, exponentially grow.

Let me make it clear that this I am not proposing mere consolidation; The model is hinged on networking and connection. Every point in the mesh retains its individuality – every Hapinoy Store retains its freedom and ownership – it can link and de-link with the chain. But whenever it is plugged-in, then it benefits from the power of the unified group.

—

To end, the challenge of Nick Joaquin wasn’t only in the Filipino’s limited capacity of churning out small things; It was also very much a commentary on the smallness of our thinking – of our lack of ambition, of grandness, of boldness.

But just because we’ve got small things doesn’t mean we have to think small.

The fact of the matter is that we probably won’t be building grand pyramids anytime soon;

But the good news is that we might not even have to.

We can embrace our heritage of smallness;

We can embrace the small things this heritage has given us.

Because at this point in history, we can make enormously gigantically big things out of them.

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Sharing with you Hapinoy’s Music Video, “Bagong Araw”.

The serendipitous story here is that last year, Bam attended a concert wherein our Head of Field Operations RG Salazar was performing with his band, Project Fusion. One of the songs they sang was “Bagong Araw” – to international friends, that’s translated as “Brand New Day”. Bam liked the song so much that he asked RG’s permission to use it as a Hapinoy Song, to which the band gladly consented to.

“Bagong Araw” was actually written by the band’s vocalist, Pabsy Pabalan; And the serendipitous twist here is that Pabsy would eventually apply to join the Hapinoy family – and is in fact, now in charge of our Communications. One of her key achievements has been the relaunch of our Hapinoy website, which has never been more true to our spirit.

Eventually, the song gave birth to this music video – thanks of course to our partner-sponsor, Smart, as well as Manny Angeles whose video production company made the MTV.

Enjoy!

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Heima is a lifestyle & home designs store in the center of the creative universe, Cubao X – which by no accident is also home to Rags2Riches.

Love2010 – an art exhibit with corresponding candles, cupcakes, and  cotton candy machine – was celebrated in true Heima fashion, which is to say that it was a hyper-real kitsch-kicking experience :

Love2010 instructions for the night

the Art Exhibit

the centerpiece Cotton Candy machine; photo credit www.arlenesy.com

No odd wheel here – (4) couples Lex Reyes & Marielle Nadal, Birdie Salva & Arlene Sy, Heima’s Bong Rojales & Rossy Yabut, Moi with Reese

Now, the reason I can’t help but talk about Heima is that everytime I go inside the place, I just feel an inexplicable sense of joy; Almost as if some unknown happiness buttons were pushed and lights would go up inside my head.

And it really has everything to do with the overall experience and feel of being there – as Reese and I have had the pleasure of being so innumerable times already :

You see, one has to go inside Heima in order to fully appreciate it.

The place is literally a canvass of Rossy’s playful designs coupled with – intended pun on its way – the couple’s eclectic taste. It’s as if every turn, glance, movement you make reveals new eye candy that makes you say ‘oooohhhh nice!!!’

Whether it be Rossy’s happy couch, intriguingly beautiful art & decor, Bong’s lomo collection, Counting Sheep’s wall stickers, etc etc etc -  it’s curated happiness-delivery to design enthusiasts at its most unapologetic; a veritable assault on one’s aesthetic sensibilities.

This rumination on Heima and their Art of Happiness actually reminded me of Don Norman – a leading global design thinker who wrote landmark books The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design – and his talk in TED.

Fittingly enough, his presentation is entitled “The 3 Ways that Good Design Makes Me Happy”, and it pretty much elucidates what i’ve been waxing about in this blog post :

No related posts.

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Well, the truth of the matter is that lately, I’ve begun to become more comfortable explaining Hapinoy’s Business Model in this way. Most especially now that we’re in a stage wherein we can more tangibly share the next phase of our evolution.

You see, a lot of people look at Hapinoy and mistakenly think that the whole plan is simply to organize, aggregate, and makeover a chain of sari-sari stores.

That’s actually an intuitive observation, as aggregating thousands of sari-sari stores is indeed a significant chunk of the Hapinoy program.

But from the very beginning, we never really saw the Hapinoy Stores to remain as ordinary sari-sari stores. Since a major thrust of Hapinoy is to grow the business of our micro-entrepreneur storeowners – captured in our Path to Prosperity Program – then we have to go beyond traditional business thinking in order to realize new revenue streams. And in a situation wherein commodity goods provide only commodity margins, then innovation and evolution will play a key part in our Hapinoy Stores’ growth.

And so, while one whole path of growth for the Hapinoy community is growth through backward-integration and creating an “inclusive supply chain” for community-based producers (a whole separate blog entry in itself) …

… another big area of growth is really the evolution of Hapinoy Stores into what we call Hapinoy+ (Hapinoy-Plus):

Simply put, Hapinoy+ Stores are those stores that go beyond the traditional sari-sari store model – beyond the basic assortment of commodity products.

A few quick examples :

- Due to our partnership with Smart, we’ve converted Hapinoy Stores into a cellphone-loading platform. In fact, our top stores have been computerized and wired – paving the way for Hapinoy Internet Cafe’s. After thinking through on how to maximize the very same PC’s, we partnered with Intel and have an ongoing experiment on a simple photo-printing solution called HapiPrints.

- With Ateneo School of Government’s iBop-Asia project, we’re actively researching the Hapinoy Healthcare Hub, our exploration into medicine distribution and marketing.

- Just recently, we met with a large beauty-care company’s CEO, and will now explore a new category pillar of products for the BoP,  thus reimagining the Sari-Sari Store are as a center for beauty care.

And the list goes on and on : agriculture, simple technologies for the BoP, food and nutrition, et cetera. The possibilities are almost limitless.

And as these limitless possibilities emerge, this is where the iPhone metaphor begins to rear its head.

Because Hapinoy’s strategy and Business Model is NOT retailing. The truth is that – much like the iPhone – our business model is to be a platform.

To the non-geeks, let me explain that most of the functionalities of the iPhone are unleashed through the applications installed on it. It’s what has allowed the iPhone to go beyond being just a normal phone. Literally, it has simultaneously become a GPS device, a gaming machine, an ebook/comicbook reader, a location-sensitive information tool, a PDA/organizer, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth (all the way up to 100,000+ apps)

But here’s the beauty of the platform business model :

Apple manufactured the iPhone and got it into the hands of millions of people; And yet equally as important, Apple also developed the distribution mechanism to bring the Apps to the iPhone – the much-venerated iTunes Store.

But if you dig down to it, all the applications that you can buy and install on the iPhone – all of these were developed by independent third party software developers. Which then points to the fact that Apple didn’t have to invest in huge resources and manpower in order to develop all those applications from scratch; It just had to open itself up as a platform, and then relied on an ecosystem of these companies who then developed apps for their device.

The beauty is that it’s a win-win-win situation. iPhone users get more functionality, App developers gain sales from selling their Apps, and Apple derives revenue from every transaction.

And so, applying the same thinking to Hapinoy – in order for the Hapinoy Store to unleash the true potential of the network, then the ecosytem must be opened up as a platform to independent entrepreneurs who want to develop “applications” for sari-sari stores. And these apps can take so many various forms — whether it be new products for the BoP, new services even (such as the Hapinoy+ examples mentioned above), most especially new livelihood opportunities for the BoP.

And it will also be win-win-win : you’ll make money, the Hapinoy Store will realize higher revenues, and MicroVentures also benefits from the transaction.

So if you’re an entrepreneur out there who wants to start a social business enterprise, we enjoin you to start with Hapinoy. You won’t have to start from scratch in trying to make an impact; We’ve already got a large network, an ecosystem, a platform, upon which you can build your big idea. Email me : mark@hapinoy.com

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The SkyEye team listed above. Not in picture are : JB , Chemical Engineer from La Salle; Serge Gonzales, 2nd Year Management Student (Chief UAV pilot), and Philip Cheang 4th year BS Information Design.

—

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) that can do aerial video/photography, SkyEye envisions itself as providing Aerial Imaging and Mapping, Interactive Mapping, and enabling Traffic Support Systems, as part of its portfolio of commercial services.

Now, an amazing factoid is that this team – Matt, Roy, Martin, Vinni, Kylo, and Happy – are still undergraduate students of the Ateneo – tinkering with technology and figuring out a commercial business model out of it.

So, never being one to miss an opportunity to try something novel – as this certainly falls into my ‘One New Thing A Week’ category – I met up with the group in the Ateneo SEC Field to check out this intriguing project :

Serge Gonzales and Matthew Cua of SkyEye, with their UAV.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with a Lumix LX3 attached

You can view the UAV’s camera through goggle displays while the pilot mans it with a radio controller

Picture of me face-to-face with SkyEye; Pilot Serge Gonzales manning the controls.

Picture taken from SkyEye. Also in the picture are Dr. Greg Tangonan and Paul Cabacungan of the Ateneo Innovation Center (more on that later).

Here’s a video of SkyEye in action :

—

All-in-all, it was a really cool experience to have actually tried out SkyEye. It was like playing a Flight Simulator using Terminator vision goggles.

But beyond the nerdgasmic angle, my entrepreneurial mindset eventually kicked in and my mind was racing through real-world applications of this technology. And Aerial Photography is just the tip of the iceberg.

—

Now, I’d like to take a step back and look at the SkyEye Project in a larger context.

Because the SkyEye Project is the kind of student-centric innovation being cultivated at the Ateneo Innovation Center, a nexus point wherein Ateneo School of Science and Engineering undergrads can collaborate with other colleges – as well as other schools – in order to explore, tinker with, and apply new technologies to the real world.

But while it’s fraught with practical experimentation and applications – as evidenced by the SkyEye project – it also has an eye of incubating student projects, interfacing them with the industry, and bringing them to market.

In fact, I have two hats in dealing with AIC — #1 as a resource (Greg Tangonan, the Director, has invited me on board as a resource), but also #2, as a customer. And this is because Hapinoy and Rags2Riches are collaborating with AIC on a few key projects.

Ultimately, the AIC gives me hope that a new generation of tinkerers with business sense are about to set loose to the world-at-large. And maybe somehow, this will catalyze a new wave of technology-based entrepreneurs.

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Last weekend, Reese Fernandez – President of Rags2Riches, Inc and my other/better half – conducted a transition workshop with the Rags2Riches Cooperative’s Board of Directors. The main content of the workshop was – and stay with me here – finance and managerial accounting.

To appreciate the concept on why it’s a transition, one has to understand first our philosophy and business model.

I’ve often said that the easiest thing Rags2Riches could have done – in order to impact the community – was to have set-up a Rags2Riches factory and hire the Payatas Nanays as laborers. The Nanays would have ended up with a production area, they would clock-in time in/time out from 9-to-5, get decent wages, and live a slightly more financially secure life.

It would have made things absolutely simpler than our complex arrangement right now — the Nanays as part-owners/shareholders of Rags2Riches Inc., and also fully owning – independently – Rags2Riches cooperative. In fact, it would also make things simpler on the business and production side — if the Nanays were hired employees, then we could demand specific work-hours, impose targets, and let all hell break loose if production wasn’t up to speed – quite unlike the current experience wherein production and time commitments are continuing negotiations.

But mere employment, strictly speaking, wasn’t – and isn’t – the goal of Rags2Riches.

It’s about a psychological/cultural upheaval; A directed transition from dependence, patronage, and entitlement – into independence, participatory equality, and empowerment.

And this is something that will only happen if there’s a conscious movement to the community having, owning, and running their own business. And this will only take form once the community becomes their own Rags2Riches cooperative. It’s a necessary, albeit potentially difficult, step.

This is a much harder route to take, but one that we feel is more sustainable and long-term; After all, this is what differentiates us as a social business enterprise as opposed to a traditional business.

Through time and experiences of success, the community – through running their own business – will discover self-confidence and a can-do attitude. And that paradigm shift leads to a luxury a lot of people take for granted — the belief that you can indeed control your own destiny.

When this happens – this psychological shift towards empowerment – the community’s culture fundamentally changes. And this, we believe, is the true goal and challenge. It’s not just about putting more money in marginalized communities’ pockets (although indeed, providing livelihood is an undeniably important factor), it’s really about working with the community so that they can eventually stand on their own two feet.

And so, this leads us to Rags2Riches Inc’s business model.

Other schools of thought position the social entrepreneur’s philosophy as making oneself obsolete. Find a social problem, come up with an innovative solution, disappear, and move on to the next problem. While I can imagine how this would be true for certain cases – climate change, human trafficking, spousal abuse, prostitution, to name a few – our particular context in Rags2Riches (and indeed, Hapinoy) points us towards a difference perspective. Given that we’re in livelihood, we see an ongoing business relationship with the community, even – and actually, most especially – after they have been set-up into their own cooperative.

This is the business model we’re looking at :

What we’ve essentially done is look at the entire value chain, and ask ourselves fundamental questions : Which portions of the chain would the community of Nanays be best at, that we at R2R inc wouldn’t be able to touch with a ten-inch pole? And what could R2R inc be potentially best at that could deliver value to the R2R cooperative?

Which leaves us with this equation : R2R Cooperative would focus on production, while R2R inc would focus on product design & development and marketing & sales, thus creating a configuration that would allow for a continuing business relationship. A business partnership between equals.

How do we ensure it is indeed a partnership of equals?

Well, here’s a peculiar fact – the R2R cooperative is not exclusively tied to R2R inc – meaning that the cooperative could choose to “fire” R2R inc and do business with another organization, if they choose to do so.

With this arrangement, we can then truly say that the cooperative can determine its own destiny.

Some people who’ve seen this model have asked us if we were crazy. After all, why expend so much energy and effort into organizing the community into their own cooperative, and then not lock them in to your system?

It doesn’t seem to make any sense to a lot, yes. But for us, it does.

After all, the goal of community empowerment is at the core of what we’re doing, and this is the route, the decision, that increases our chances at achieving that. But furthermore, there’s also business rationality here. Given that the R2R cooperative can choose to work with any organization it wants, this then forces R2R inc to continuously strive to give the coop the the best deal (in fact, the Nanays negotiating with us for the best deal is a welcome and good thing — it spells equality!); it also forces us to make sure that we are indeed the best business partner, keeps us on our toes, and creates a healthy tension and pressure for us to innovate.

And so this is what brings us back to the workshop that Reese and team conducted.

The whole exercise was working with the Nanays in crafting the financials of their cooperative. There was most definitely a managerial view — as they saw first-hand the relationships between wages, product-costing, and overheads – and how all this affected the selling prices of what they produced. And since this is a partnership of openness, R2R coop also saw how their decisions affected the financials of R2R inc.

Summa total, the cooperative took an important step to managing their business from a financial perspective — from simple things such as what ongoing expenses should they rationalize, to more sensitive topics such as how much they want to pay the members and in what schemes. It wasn’t a light conversation, but it was definitely something that had to be done.

And personally, I can’t help but say that it was indeed quite fulfilling to have seen this whole thing unfold.

While the Rags2Riches model is definitely a work-in-progress, it seems more and more that we’re along the right path.

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After getting the invitation from our friends in YouthVotePhilippines, Reese and I went to support :p

Since it’s an advocacy project, each person participating for the Headshot had to make a stand for a specific Millenium Development Goal (on top of YouthVotePhilippines core of involving the Youth in the 2010 elections).

Lo and behold, a couple of months later the headshot images have been put up on the website of One Youth.

Here’s my headshot (doesn’t look like me! :p), and I guess it’s obvious which MDG I’m voting for : alleviation of Poverty and Hunger.

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Now, while i won’t hypocritically claim that I don’t get a lot of “free” stuff from – ahem – alternative sources, the flip-side is that I’m pretty much willing to fork over hard-earned dough for highly-selective content (more on that later), especially when the content meets my price-i’m-willing-to-pay-for requirements.

This, after all, has become the current fodder of discussion and debate — in the age of the internet, how do you get people to pay for content that they could otherwise just download for free?

I don’t know the absolute answer to that.

But what I do know is this – of all the new music loaded on my iPod last year, two albums came from CD’s that I actually bought from the record store –  U2′ ‘No Line on the Horizon’ as well as Sugarfree’s ‘Mornings and Airports’.

Traditional marketing will say people will pay for value. That’s inarguably true. But then again, i’ve got a lot of other valuable content that I didn’t pay a single peso for. So the answer must be something that pushes the boundary on “value”.

The truth of the matter is – and this is quite corny – what ties together content that I am willing to pay for is something quite intangible — it’s the unexplainable emotional loyalty I have to the content/artists/magazine/movies/etc.

It’s almost as if I’m telling FastCompany, as an example — “Take my money! I want to contribute in my own way to your continuing existence.” Or with Sugarfree — “I respect your music too much to just buy the P35 pirated CD.”

It’s absolutely irrational, I know.

But those who crack this irrationality – this human quirk – will, I earnestly believe, win in this new age of content.

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I would like to invite you to become part of Rags2Riches, Inc.; a social business enterprise (Corporation) creating Eco-Ethical fashion bags and home accessories, created by empowered women from Payatas, who upcycle scrap materials discarded by factories around the Philippines. We create Eco-Ethical lifestyle products with our partner designers Mr. Rajo Laurel and Ms. Amina Aranaz-Alunan.

Rags2Riches is the recipient of the 2008 Social Enterprise Award from the University of San Francisco Business Plan Competition, the Body Shop Grant, and the Business In Development Challenge, Philippines, and Business in Development Challenge International.

We are looking for dynamic, creative, and Eco-Ethical Partners-In-Change who could join us in enriching the Rags2Riches Social Business Enterprise!

Are you interested in Sustainable Design? Do you believe that the world could be changed by designing Eco-Ethical lifestyle products? You could be our next Product Development Manager (Full-Time)!

Job Description:

• Manage the entire product line life cycle from strategic planning to field implementation, customer training and product suppo
• Work closely with  multidisciplinary experts to ensure effective, efficient, and Eco-Ethical Product development that meets the customers’ needs
• Interface and work with Production and Community Product Development team to properly and effectively communicate product development processes
• Develop partner and customer specific product service plans covering troubleshooting, product repair and field service strategies over the product lifetime
• Develop guidelines for product development and quality control that comply with local and international Eco-Ethical standards (e.g. Cradle to Cradle)
• Continuously search for innovative products and product processes that follow Eco-Ethical and Sustainable Principle

Qualifications:

• Bachelor or Graduate Degree in Industrial design, fashion design, or sustainable design (preferable but could be evaluated further depending on the qualifications of the applicant)
• At least two years experience in sales, marketing and/or product management in fashion, sustainable design, or industrial design
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills including public speaking, and the ability to communicate with openness and transparency
• Interest in social entrepreneurship, Sustainable Design, and/or Eco-Ethical Businesses and processes

Are you into advocating for Eco-Ethical lifestyle products? Then you could be our next Sales and Marketing Associate (Full-Time)!

Job Description:

• Coordinate public affairs for Rags2Riches, Inc and Rags2Riches communities
• Assist in the preparation, issuance, and delivery of sales materials, exhibits, events, and promotion programs.
• Promote positive relations with partners, vendors, and distributors.
• Recommend and administer policies and procedures to enhance operations.
• Assist the Sales and Marketing Manager in monitoring inventory, delivering goods on time, and managing Rags2Riches distribution outlet

Qualifications:

• College level (any business-related course)
• Interested in Social Entrepreneurship
• Willing and able to travel
• At least one year experience in Sales and Marketing activities such as handling bazaars, creating promo materials, organizing events, and interfacing with clients.

If you think YOU or someone you know could be an Eco-Ethical Change-maker through Rags2Riches, send your CV and cover letter to reese.fernandez@gmail.com and r2r_matt@yahoo.com on or before January 15, 2010.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

–
Reese Fernandez
President, Founding Partner
Rags2Riches, Inc.
Unit 3B Cubao Expo, Araneta Center Cubao,
Quezon City, Philippines

Phone: +632 6664520
Mobile: +63 9178040406
reesefernandez@yahoo.com
reese.fernandez@gmail.com
www.rags2riches.ph

“We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?”–Cradle to Cradle

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