Making the most of our weekly trip to Burlington

About once a week we head into Burlington to meet with our creative team (Dave and Steve at Place, above), do some market research or customer development, have lunch with an investor, stock up on groceries at City Market or Healthy Living, etc.

Often, if we have enough time, we'll try to hit one of our favorite places for a bite to eat (or a cold beer!): Stone Soup, Open Arms Cafe or American Flatbread. Sometimes, in the summer, we'll even get in a walk or run at Shelburne Farms, one of our favorite places anywhere.

On today's weekly visit to BTV we kicked off Round 2 of our creative work with Place (Round 1 centered on logo development). Now the focus turns to how we bring our brand to life in a powerful, authentic manner out in the 'marketplace' (packaging, merchandising, web site, collateral, etc).

It's exciting to finally be exploring a "visual vocabulary" for our brand in earnest and we'll be sure to share the highlights here. Hopefully some of you will weigh in as we go!

After our session at Place, we dipped into Healthy Living and EMS as part of our 'customer development' effort. The idea here is to talking to customers to introduce Ursa Major (well before we launch), learn more about the market, get feedback on what we're doing, test our key assumptions, etc.

We've now hit about 10 stores in the local area over the past week and we're encouraged by the response we're getting from local retailers. There seems to be interest in a natural, sustainable personal care brand for people who love the outdoors (oh, by the way, that's a riff on our updated mission!).

Starting down the sustainability path

• What does 'sustainability' mean to Ursa Major?
  
• How can we design sustainability into our business in a way that's authentic and adds value for our stakeholders?
• What is the role of business in today's society? How do we define progress?
• How do we measure our progress towards becoming a sustainable business?
• How do we know when we have achieved success?
  

We pondered and discussed these important questions this morning during Ursa Major's first 'sustainability workshop' hosted by Greg Strong, principal of Spring Hill Solutions.

I first met Greg about a year ago at what I recall was billed "Vermont's first carbon management workshop for business", put on by Greg's firm at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

Since then we've met several times (usually over coffee at Stone Soup) to talk about what we can and should be doing at Ursa Major to design sustainability into our brand from the outset.

These discussions have morphed into today's loose collaboration whereby Greg and his firm will hopefully be serving as an inspired guide/partner along our sustainability journey.

We share a conviction that businesses must become net positive contributors to the communities in which they operate after a full accounting of their economic, social and environmental impact.

With this in mind, we'll be drafting a sustainability plan together over the coming weeks, with specific goals for 2010 that should move us towards our longer-term goals. (We'll keep it simple.)

It's exciting to think about the possibilities - even for our embryonic, pre-revenue organization - and we'll be sure to share key insights and lessons learned here on this blog.

Ursa Minor

In her element.

Vision strategy brand workshop

Spent all day cooped up in a conf room in mid-town cooking up some
seriously blue ocean strategy for the Big Bear! This is Mark, one of
our mad advisors. He's good. Very good. We're lucky to have him.

The Ursa Major squad, as of today

After months of being holed up in relative isolation in Stowe (mostly, in planning mode), we're starting to form some important relationships around the idea of Ursa Major and it feels fantastic to feel things start wiggling to life.

Working with committed, values-aligned folks to sharpen a vision and help bring it to life is one of the most satisfying - and important - things entrepreneurs get to do so we're taking our time to try and do it right.

With that in mind, here's a crack at mapping our current stakeholders (r'ships we've put in place over the past nine months) and others we expect to add in 2010 (in green), including some paying customers!

Amazingly, when you look at the map, there are already 20 people collaborating in some manner (product development, logo design, accounting, trademarks, seed investors, etc) to help bring Ursa Major to life! This mobilization of talent and experience is a wonderful thing to be a part of.

Thank you to all our stakeholders! We would nowhere, stuck in our home office planning, without you! We're incredibly excited to be working with you to bring Ursa Major to life in 2010. Onwards and upwards!

Resource tip: entrepreneurs interested in using 'mindmaps' like the one above might like to check out Mindmeister.