WHY DID ELEPHANT JOURNAL GO PAPERLESS?
The change is, as it happens, was partially inspired by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s experience in the early ’90s, when his company’s next move, if they wanted to continue to grow, was to begin selling Patagonia clothes in department stores. But Yvon didn’t want to impact the integrity of his products—so he decided to keep Patagonia (relatively) small, and keeping walking his environmentally-responsible talk. By the same token, to grow beyond our circulation of 30,000 (available in Whole Foods and such around the country), elephant journal was ready to start distributing to Barnes & Noble, Borders etc…which was great… except that our sell-through rate would have plummetted from 8/10 (eco-responsible, and good for advertisers) to 3/10 (the national average, shameful considering even recycled paper magazines are milled/shipped/reshipped/re-reshipped up to six times). So…elephant journal went paperless, sacrificing 6.5 years of building up revenues but maintaining our commitment to
