This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.
I have written before about the great eco-friendly products from Leed’s. Their EcoSmart brand covers a lot of territory from totes to notebooks using both post-consumer recycled materials and organics. It is very popular with green clients.
I have been after Leed’s and other manufactures to start offering eco-only catalogs as many of our clients only want to see eco-friendly items and it is a waste of paper and shipping costs to send them a 200+ page catalog if only 10-15% of the products are green.
Well yesterday I got the attached letter in the mail (click image on right to see full letter). Apparently Leed’s sees it as wasteful as well and is sending out letters to distributors to ask them if they wish to stop with catalog mailing entirely.
This works for me as our office generally works from the Leed’s website at www.leedsworld.com not from catalogs. Now I only wish they would supply us with .pdf versions of their green catalog pages Iike what we use for our green overview, and the transition away from bulky paper will be complete.
Of course I realize that a large driver of this change is likely the cost of printing and sending 100,000s of catalogs each year. Still it is a good change.
It will be interesting to see if the other industry leaders like Norwood and Logomark follow Leed’s in this offer of no more catalogs.
For more information on Leed’s green line visit their website or email us at info@proformagreen.com.
Adventures in Green Marketing 
Leeds sent me a note on this posting. Here it is in its entirety.
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Hi John – I am the manager of marketing promotions for Leed’s. I just read your posting on our recent environmental effort to reduce the number of catalogs we send to distributors.
I am happy to let you know that we will be producing an electronic version of our EcoSmart catalog for 2009, that will be available for customers to browse on our website.
This will include all of items in our EcoSmart offering, and will be similar to the e-catalog we have provided on the site for Holiday Gift (see link http://www.leedsworld.com/wrapitup/wipus/index.html.
We are also planning on posting additional online only catalogs throughout the year.
If you have additional questions on our EcoSmart effort, feel free to contact me or our PR representative Melissa Lehman at mlehman@leedsworld.com.
Thanks,
Erin Lewis
Manager of Marketing Promotions
Leed’s