Source: Timberland’s Pillars for Community Service
Two weeks ago, I wrote a scathing post on Timberland. My frustration stemmed from Timberland’s apparent lack of support for their positions on social injustice and their lack of support for the Black community when they are one of the few outdoor brands who has consistently benefited from the Black and Brown dollar:
30 Years of Co-Opting, Ignorance and Growth | How Timberland Pimped Hip-Hop to a Billion Dollars
In my typical fashion I didn’t hold back and rightfully so… Timberland has entire pages dedicated to the environment on their site, but there isn’t anything readily available detailing what they’ve done for the underserved communities that continue to make the 6 inch Wheat Timberland one of the most popular shoes in fashion… or so I thought. The reality is Timberland is like a lot of companies. They work in silence. I think this happens, as I’ll discuss later, because diversity within the company isn’t as strong as it can be and this diminishes the dialogue that could be taking shape at not just Timberland, but at many companies.
I was wrong about Timberland. I will always express when I’m wrong, but I don’t feel that I wrote in haste. If had done all of my research and written a different post then the dialogue that has taken place around the brand wouldn’t have happened. In this sense I was creating “Good Trouble” (yep, that’s a nod to our hero John Lewis).
In my post, I stated a few things that weren’t quite accurate. I needed to dig a bit deeper. The ad Timberland shared from 1992 was not in response to their mishandling of Hip-Hop as a demographic. The ad derived from a partnership Timberland created with City Year and it focused on Youth Leadership and community service. It was a partnership that Timberland maintained for over 20 years. Proceeds from Timberlands “Give Racism the Boot” tees went to City Year.
The partnership has ended, but if the brand has been making an attempt to be active, what else could they have done? More important, why would the brand fail to have a page on their site dedicated to their community activism? Again, I made an oversight in stating that there wasn’t information available. Buried in sublinks at the bottom of the page are sections on Responsibility. Once again, I want this to be more prominent, but cancel culture is vicious. Why isn’t a more prominent statement on the homepage?
My answer is a difficult thing to consider. No matter what Timberland writes on their site, it will never be enough. Just as I wrote last week that the company has pimped the Black consumer, if they had a statement on the site touting that they had worked with City Year for over 20 years I would have asked, “Yeah, but where are your Black employees?” In this instance Timberland is in a no-win situation. It’s often the uncomfortable place race relations sit in the corporate world and in social settings.
I kept digging:
- Timberland employees worldwide are given 40 hours each year to work in underserved communities. This has led to employees at Timberland dedicating over 1.2 million hours of community service.
- Timberland has been creating green spaces, renovating parks, supporting schools and shelters in underserved communities for 30 years. They’ve also done work with the Harlem Children’s Zone in the 2000’s.
- Contrary to my post, they removed all ads from Facebook as part of the July campaign in protest over Facebook’s policies allowing racist information to flow.
- On June 12th Timberland dedicated all of their profits and donated $50,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative
Timberland has a 3 pillar company ethos: Better Product, Greener World, Stronger Communities. I had to search to get this information. This should not be the case. Transparency is now a buzzword in the sneaker industry. It seems that it only applies to sustainability. It should also apply to the racial makeup of a business and businesses should be required to list community service initiatives and support given to maligned and systemically oppressed people. Right now on Timberland’s site is a page titled Nature Needs Heroes. I hope that in the near future the brand has a page titled Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Headed.
I hope that page, or series of posts in their blog on community service, lists past support and details clearly future programs. I know for a fact the company is working on a program with PENSOLE to bring a more diverse group of designers to the campus. That program was postponed due to the pandemic. Timberland has also created an inclusiveness and diversity program. Beyond design however, I’d like for Timberland to create outreach programs to diverse student unions on primarily White campuses. I’d like to see an emphasis on programs in logistics, sustainability and tech to recruit BIPOC.
Timberland has had the Black dollar for 30 years. They didn’t pimp us as I claimed. They simply failed to generate bolder programming, but it seems they are correcting this, and I look forward to the where they’re headed.
