Social entrepreneurship is a way of creating business that emphasizes a greater care for the people and natural resources employed. Producing organic cosmetics and benefiting to the welfare of its workers, this Philippine company also found a way to build a profitable and fast-growing business.
Natural and affordable cosmetics from the Philippines
Through the use of natural products and methods of production and the reliance upon well-paid and well-trained workers, the Philippine company “Human Nature” and her founder, Anna Meloto, commercializes socially responsible, organic cosmetics in the Philippines and around the world through their website.
Aside from being a trendy marketing tactic and engaging sales argument, the success of social entrepreneurship relies on building a profitable business. To make a deeper positive impact on the environment, Human Nature is providing affordable natural cosmetics to a larger population rather than focusing on making big profits from a select few.
Engagement in the Philippine community
Human Nature redistributes some of its profits to pay for schoolteachers and make children go to school instead of getting involved in armed combats in difficult areas of the Southern Philippines. They also collaborate with a poverty-alleviation movement to provide better salaries and conditions to the workers they employ.
The same logic is implemented for the sourcing of their raw materials and the farmers that grow them. Introducing new methods of organic agriculture to increase yields, they pay farmers a fair price for their products while enabling them to learn new techniques.
The company’s own employees are also paid double the market wage, making Human Nature a country-wide sought-after employer in the Philippines. This strategy helps them to retain their workforce and ensure that they are involved with the company.
Forgoing the pure “profit-making” aspect of business, social entrepreneurship also motivates the founders to feel happier about themselves and how they give back to their community. Their long-term objective is to foment the creation of a movement of social entrepreneurs that will help take 7 million Filipinos out of poverty.
Video from May 2013 by Deutsche Welle
