Roozt turns one year old today! It’s been a whirlwind of a year and we are so grateful to our community of changemakers. Together, we have achieved so much! Here are a few highlights…
Category Archives: What We’re Up To
Brent on KFWC Business Rockstars Radio Show
If you didn’t get to catch Brent live on the radio segment of Business Rockstars last week, here is the podcast!
Brent appeared on the 200th episode accompanied by Brian Lee, CEO/Co-Founder of The Honest Company & ShoeDazzle.
You can view the episode and podcast below. Brent’s interview begins at 49 minutes & 30 seconds.
Roozt is Back!
What’s up Roozters!
Roozt is back and better than ever.
Featuring the world’s sexiest cause-related brands and products all under one roof, the new Roozt lets you Discover, Shop, and Share the hottest and most inspiring companies at the click of a button.
Roozt saves you time and money by letting you browse multiple brand’s products and deal catalogues in one streamline shopping experience.
Earn points for discovering new brands, making purchases, and sharing with your friends. The more points you earn, the better the prizes and discounts you unlock.
Being a Roozter now means that you will never again sacrifice how you look for how you want to feel.
So check out the new Roozt and take the pledge to bring sexy back to giving back today!
Inspire & Be Inspired,
Brent Freeman
Founder / CEO
Countdown to New Roozt Site – And Awesome WeWOOD Giveaway!
The watch is ticking for the launch of Roozt’s Marketplace and we are as busy as ever! To celebrate this big occasion and also as a warm THANK YOU to all our dedicated fans, we are giving away an earthy-chic, eco-friendly WeWOOD Date Watch to one lucky winner!
WeWOOD first began in Italy as an ‘emblem of eco-luxury and design’. The company is dedicated to the health of our planet and follows strict sustainability guidelines. Every watch is free of artificial and toxic chemicals, leaving only the most natural touch on your skin.
To bring to life their philosophy of sustainability, WeWOOD works with American Forests, the nation’s oldest nonprofit conservation organization, to plant one tree for every watch purchased. Talk about bringing nature back!
Roozt is so proud to support companies like WeWOOD and all the hardworking, wonderful, socially innovative companies that we have encountered. We can’t wait to finally give our customers a platform to shop and engage with all these businesses and hope you’ll find it as inspiring as we do!
But for now, enter for a chance to win your own WeWOOD watch and help us count down to the big day!
Entrepreneur Week in Chile!
Chile will play host to the upcoming Entrepreneur Week on November 15th – 17th, 2011. Created to address the ‘mounting global shift toward placing entrepreneurship as the core focus of economic policy and programs in countries around the world,’ EW works to connect the entrepreneurial community and inspire those who wish to start and grow a successful business.
This Entrepreneur Week is especially dear to us here at Roozt because our founder, Brent Freeman, will be a guest speaker at the three-day event! Among the various events, Brent and others will be having breakfast with Chilean President Sebastian Piñera and learning from the Chilean business community.
Nothing is more inspirational than great minds willing to share their insight with each other and aid aspiring business owners on their journey to success. We’re certain that this week’s event in Chile will be an eye-opening experience for all who attend.
To learn more about who and what Entrepreneur Week is, watch this video:
Social Entrepreneurship Gathering Featuring Roozt & Project 7
!deation organizes a conference annually by gathering some of the most innovative thinkers and practitioners in the field of doing good (e.g. businesses, organizations etc). Their goal is to help fellow practitioners develop thoughts and tangible next steps for greater impact in their respective work. Between the yearly conferences, !deation also creates smaller, more intimate social entrepreneurship gatherings and the next one is featuring Roozt and Project 7!
The gathering will be held at the new offices of Project 7 in Costa Mesa, and it’ll be an evening of great networking, shared learning and of course, food & drinks! There is a limited seating for this event, so be sure to buy your ticket early by clicking here. (Note that the $10 ticket for admission covers food & drinks).
Event Information
Date: October 20, 2011
Time: 7:00p.m. – 10:00p.m.
Location: Project 7 Offices – 3195 Red hill. Unit A, Costa Mesa, CA 9262
Special Guests: Brent Freeman- Roozt Founder & CEO
Tyler Merrick - Project 7 Founder & Social Capitalist
Project 7 is an amazing inspirational company that exists to give. They are a cause-related company that makes every day consumer goods, like bio-bottled water, gum, mints and coffee. Projects that you may already buy, but by buying these products from them; you give back, and create change in the world!
To all our Roozters, Rooztees, & Roozt-a-holics…
Holy moly, I can’t believe it’s been a year since Roozt launched. It’s been an incredible journey delivering you amazing deals from inspiring brands these last 12 months and there’s some really exciting new changes to the Roozt shopping experience coming very, very soon. But before we look forward, let’s recap where we have been in the last 12 months.
In the Past 12 Months…
- Your Roozt purchases supported over 100 truly inspiring socially conscious brands using theirbusiness to makea positive impact on the world
- Through Roozt’s partnership with B1G1, your orders were able to provide over 1,000 children across the globe with access to clean drinking water, school supplies, or life changing medicine
- Roozt designed and launched a Social Venture Competition in LA for low-income high school students in conjunction with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and saw 15-year-old Hayley Hoverter, a member of the Roozt’s inaugural class, win the entire LA competition for her eco-friendly business concept.
- Roozt received a humbling feature in Forbes as a “Name You Need To Know in 2011” for our work in the social entrepreneurial space.
- And lastly, we began developing the next generation of the Roozt shopping experience (deals, products, rewards & more) that is very close to launching!
As you may have noticed, there have been a few changes this week with your regular Roozt experience, so I wanted to personally let you know that behind the scenes our team of ninjas, elves, and gnomes have been working extremely hard on creating a really cool new Roozt shopping experience which will be launching very soon.
The Next Generation of Roozt Shopping will let you:
Discover all the coolest, trendsetting cause-conscious brands and their entire product catalogues (and deals!) under one roof – making those hard to find companies, easy to discover and shop from in one simple & rewarding purchase.
Engage with the inspiring story behind each highly curated Roozt brand and learn about what they do that makes the world a better place – simply as you shop!
Shop from all your favorite Roozt brand’s in one easy shopping experience, making multiple product orders convenient, streamlined, and backed by the Roozt Guarantee.
Share your fav products, purchases, and brands with your friends and get rewarded with cool schwag and sweet prizes!
You Got Questions? We Got Answers!
What about deals? Not to worry! Deals will still be a part of your Roozt experience and we will continue to bring you “limited time, limited quantity” deal gems into your inbox on a weekly basis.
What about RooztBux? All your points and discounts that you earned with RooztBux will roll over into the new site and we will honor all issued Roozt Gift Cards or issued discount codes.
What is a Roozt Founding Member? Roozt Founding Members are a part of an elite club of change making people who actively vote with their wallets to support the right types of companies that helping make the world a better place (aka Roozt Brands).
Am I a Roozt Founding Member? Yes. Why? Because you’ve been with us since the beginning and we want to thank you for your continued support. As a Roozt Founding Member you will: get VIP access to special promotions, schwag giveaways, and get first crack at the amazing deals when they go live on the site.
What can I expect in the next few weeks? We will be sending out a 2-3 emails as we get closer to the “big day” of launching the next generation of Roozt shopping. We won’t send many, so when we do, make sure to check out the latest update – you might just win a prize!
How can I stay engaged? Facebook. If you haven’t already, click this email to “like” us on Facebook to enter pre-launch promo / schwag giveaway contests and to be the first to know when we launch.
Questions? Phew, that was a lot. But if you have any questions, you can always drop us a line directly at WeMakeYouHappy@Roozt.com and we promise to get back to you within 24 -48 hours (or sooner). If you decide to test that theory out at 1am on a Saturday night, we prob won’t get back to you till Monday since even our ninja, elves, and gnomes like to go out on the weekends…
Come Out Saturday and Join Roozt at Solarize KPFK!
If you are in Downtown LA tomorrow, please join Roozt in bringing your dusty, unused, or broken electronics to be recycled for a chance to win gift cards and prizes! Roozt will be at the 7th and South Park View corner of McArthur Park from 11am – 6pm Saturday for the ReGreen Corporation’s Electronic Recycling Fundraiser. The proceeds will go towards building a solar panel for local radio station KPFK. Participants who bring in electronics will also be entered into a raffle to win cool prizes, including a $10 gift card for Roozt! Twenty Roozt gift cards will be raffled out by ReGreen and if you stop by the Roozt booth and don a cool Rooster hat for a picture, you will be automatically entered for a chance to win a $50 gift card! Please come support your Roosters and ReGreen at a day of fun, food and music. We look forward to seeing you there!
Roozt and Buy One Give One Partner to Spread Social Good
There have been a lot of exciting changes around here lately. After working with B1G1 for a number of our past causes, we at Roozt have partnered with Buy One Give One (B1G1) to be its exclusive cause giving platform in the United States! B1G1 is a social enterprise that ‘gives businesses the power to change lives’ through connecting them with high impact and worthy causes around the globe.
B1G1 links businesses to over 600 humanitarian projects worldwide so that businesses can give back in definable, high-impact ways by just focusing on their core business model.
- courtesy of B1G1
Through B1G1 and Roozt partnerships in the past three months, Roozt and all our our socially saavy shoppers have already:
- given 516 children access to clean water,
- provided school supplies to 400 children,
- distributed life-saving medication to 314 children in Kenya and,
- adopted 379 plots of endangered rainforest land!
B1G1 Chairman, Paul Dunn, said that the Roozt partnership represented the company’s first major link in the US. Roozt will be B1G1’s exclusive partner in the US, helping Roozt to promote social entrepreneurship and the integration of social responsibility into emerging businesses.
Roozt founder, Brent Freeman, believes that the power of B1G1 is in embedding the giving into the platform. “Because B1G1 has done such great work in finding great projects, our partnership allows us to focus on what we’re both good at while achieving the highest impact possible in our giving.” he said. “It’s not something that’s tacked on — giving is part of who we are, our customer purchases, and the entire Roozt shopping experience.”
“B1G1 has already impacted 1.6 million lives through over 4 million giving transactions, and that’s before our US presence” Mr. Dunn said. “We’re thrilled to be playing a part with Roozt to harness the power of eCommerce to create a positive impact in the world. Roozt’s focus on providing a central online destination for socially conscious companies to sell to is just the perfect place for us to be.”
Thank you to all our deal subscribers and shoppers for making this possible. We’re thrilled to be partnering with B1G1 and look forward to creating a tangible impact on the world of social entrepreneurship!
Click HERE to find out more about B1G1 and the impact your purchases will have around our planet.
15 Year-Old Social Entrepreneur
What I need you to do is to close your eyes and think back to when you were 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. Go ahead, think of something you did that year that you were proud of, excited about, or thought was going to affect your life forever. (Seriously, go ahead, I’ll wait…)
Pretty amazing what emotions were just evoked, huh? Whether it be a sporting event, play you were in, dance you went to, or party you attended, chances are it’s a fond memory that you have kept with you for years. But while this memory may have seemed significant then, truth for most of us (including myself) is that this memory probably didn’t involve starting a business that could be a game changing innovation.
Cue Hayley Hoverter, the 15 year old sophomore at Downtown Magnet High School in Los Angeles. Hayley is currently in the process of creating her fond memory from sophomore year, except her memory involves developing an innovative for-profit-for-difference business that could eliminate paper sugar packets in coffee shops all across Los Angeles and beyond. With an average coffee shop in LA tearing through 1,000 or more paper sugar packets every day, Hayley is on to something.
But where did this concept stem from? That’s where we come in. Roozt set out in the Fall of 2010 to teach a for-profit social entrepreneurship class to a group of high school students in a low income area of Los Angeles, who will soon become the business leaders of tomorrow. The thought process was that if we could help instill the values of for-profit-for-difference business acumen into these students, as they go on to college and the workforce, they will be progressive leaders helping use business as a vehicle to create positive change in today’s world.
To implement this idea, I approached the Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship chapter in Greater Los Angeles and proposed a pilot program where we would modify their existing curriculum to teach social entrepreneurship. The idea was to have students identify problems in their communities they were passionate about and then create for-profit business models around helping solve those same problems. No easy task, but if done right, could be a game changer.
Roozt / NFTE Social Entrepreneurship Class - Los Angeles 2010 (Center Back Row: Roozt Founders Brent Freeman & Norma LaRosa, Left Front: NFTE Teacher Michael Jaquias)
So September of 2010, I found myself in a class of 35 low-income students, in a highly under-funded LAUSD school district with zero prior teaching experience. My counterpart was NFTE teacher Michael Jaquias and for the next year, we taught the fundamentals of business, entrepreneurship, and giving back– all through the lens of a social entrepreneur.
Students were challenged to create cause marketing campaigns with “pop-up” retail stores in their high school where they were given $20, taken to a local wholesale market, told to negotiate and create retail products to sell at lunch. The kicker was that every “pop-up store” had to have a cause attached to it. Through this exercise, students learned the value of balancing good business practices with solid marketing and communication practices so their customers could understand “why” they should buy their products, not just the “what” they were buying.
But this class wasn’t just an ordinary class where students said “I don’t know when I’ll ever get to use this in real life.” And let’s be honest, we all said that at some point in High School. So this was my opportunity to make this class real for the students and show them that through social entrepreneurship they can control their own destiny, future, and happiness. To make that happen, Roozt teamed up with MyCorporation.com, an online platform that helps entrepreneurs with their legal needs, to offer a real-life business launch kit that the winner of the class room social venture business plan competition could use to actuallylaunch their company. This included everything from a free entity incorporation, website, logo, accounting software, business guide books, and much more. This carrot at the end of the stick made the class have tangible real world outcomes that our students truly resonated with.
Roozt / NFTE Students watching peer Grand Prize Winner, Hayley Hoverter (center) test her prototypes before presenting
And that resonation manifested into results with each of our students creating and presenting a for-profit-for-difference business plan at the end of the semester, with Hayley Hoverter taking the Grand Prize at their classroom competition hosted at USC, with judges like Bobby Bailey – Founder of Invisible Children, Adlai Wertman – Director of the USC Society Business Lab, & Larry Kopald – 1% For The Planet Board Member.
Now, what does Hayley’s business do? SweetSerendipiTea wraps single servings of sugar in soluble rice paper that is completely tasteless and odorless, eliminating the “paper sugar packets of the past”. Dispensed from a cylindrical bamboo container with tongs that sits on the coffee shop counter, these sugar packs are not only innovative and 100% sanitary, they are totally eco-friendly as Hayley has partnered with the American Forests so for every box purchased they will plant a tree. Beyond that, Hayley already has customers in hand with 10 of her local coffee shop managers wanting to buy from her. Drop it in, stir, and enjoy. Brilliant.
As a finalist is the NFTE Greater Los Angeles overall competition Hayley competes against two other students for a chance to go to New York to the National NFTE Competition and win $10,000.
Amidst her success, Hayley maintains her cool, nonchalant attitude simply saying “All that paper waste heading into the landfill for something so trivial as putting sugar into your coffee just seemed so old-fashioned.” Indeed it is Hayley, indeed it is.
-Brent Freeman, Founder / CEO of Roozt.com
Read more about the Roozt / NFTE Social Entrepreneurship Pilot Program here on Forbes.com
Or Watch the Forbes Video here:
http://www.forbes.com/video/embed/embed.html?show=44&format=frame&height=342&width=480&video=fvn/names/roozt-social-entrepreneurship-is-the-future&mode=render