The Inspiring Story Behind a Business to Help the Homeless

0:00Hey, guess what? Shopify Masters is now on YouTube. You can watch our interviews on YouTube. Just search for Shopify Masters. And as always, thank you for listening or watching. Now, without further ado, here is this week's episode. I wasn't unfamiliar with taking a leap of faith into the unknown and having a lot of moments where I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm willing. Hey, what's going on? I'm Benjamin Gottlieb and you are watching Shopify on location from Los Angeles. These days, customers want to know where their money is going and what you're going to do with it, be that environmental, economic, or social.

0:43The business sector as a whole really moved from being very success-oriented to how can we as a company make a difference. In the case of Bob Dalton, he focuses on the social impact. His company, Sackcloth and Ashes, sells blankets, and for each one that you buy, he will donate another to a local homeless shelter. We all have a responsibility to help bring some relief to an injustice that we're particularly connected to in some way. It's a model that's been incredibly successful for him and is here to tell you why you might want to follow that lead. Bob, how's it going, man? Good. Thanks for having me.

1:20It's such a pleasure to have you. We're so excited. We're in this new space here in Los Angeles. And I want to start with the idea of experience. Experience can be a powerful motivator and And your family had one. Your mother found herself living on the streets about a decade ago. Tell us what happened. Yeah, she went through a series of events that, you know, she's not somebody that you would ever expect to find herself in that situation. Like my mom's the hardest working woman that I know. She has two college degrees and just not somebody that you would look at and be like, oh, she's gonna end up in that kind of a situation.

1:58But through a couple series of events and through trying to start her life over, she found herself living on the street. In a tent, in a car? It was like a two-week time period where she slept on beaches and benches. Wow. So she flew from Oregon, where we're from, to Florida, thought her aunt would take her in, aunt didn't take her in, and then she slept on like lifeguard stations. Unfortunately, it's such a common story in this country right now, especially here in Southern California where we are. Homelessness continues to be an enormous problem. Um, and like you just described, it can affect anyone.

2:34Yeah. I mean, I had the perception of the homeless and I was about community work and making a difference and everything in my early twenties, but homelessness was always at the bottom of the list. I was the guy that would drive by people on the street, whisper under my breath, go get a job. And cause it was difficult to see somebody like holding a sign outside of McDonald's and you're like, why don't you just walk into McDonald's and apply for a job? So that was my perception of homelessness. When my mom ended up in the situation, it changed my paradigm and made me realize like anyone can end up in that situation at any time.

3:06And so I think that's what we're really seeing now is like you're seeing an increase of the homeless population. But these are people that are just every have experienced a lot of normal lives or something traumatic has happened in their life to cause them to end up, you know, on the streets. And it could be due to a lack of community or it could be because of addiction. There's a lot of different causes, but these are people that are ultimately mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. And so when it hit that close to home, it completely changed my understanding of why people could end up on the street.

3:41Changed your understanding, but it also motivated you in a certain way. This became the impetus for your business. Walk me through how you went from seeing your mother going through this, for lack of a better description, horrific time in her life to you starting this brand? I was moved to do something and it was difficult to help her at that time. She was going through some things and she was across the country. And so I just started calling homeless shelters in my area to see what they needed. And they said blankets. And I was familiar with the one-for-one model because Tom's had pioneered that whole concept.

4:20And at the time, I really wanted to figure out a way, how can we take the one-for-one model to the next level? because I thought it was a great business model, but I felt like there was an evolution to it. And because homelessness is such a local problem, like it's everywhere in the United States, there's homeless shelters all over the United States. I thought it would be interesting to localize the one-for-one model and for every blanket that I would sell, I'll donate a blanket to that person's local homeless shelter, giving people an opportunity to make a difference down the street from where they live.

4:51We're going to talk a little bit more about the one-for-one model later in this interview, but just for folks listening, this is for every purchase, essentially, you're doing something else. There's a secondary donation or action from one sale. Yeah, we'll send a blanket to your local homeless shelter and we base that off of a zip code. It's an interesting business model, but when you think about it from an economic standpoint, basically you're giving your blankets away at half price, right? And when you started your business, you didn't have any business experience, right? You had, I think, somewhere around two grand in the bank, right?

5:25Right. No college degree, if I'm right. I mean, these are extraordinary hurdles. You didn't start with that cushy or I mean, to maybe to use a Beatles reference, that silver spoon, right? You, you were starting with basically from the ground, from the ground. Yeah. What was the first thing you did to start that business? Yeah. The first thing I did was basically park my car and have a depressing moment of trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Like I was 24 at the time I was applying for jobs. Nobody was getting back to me. My mom's going through this situation. And then I came up with this blanket idea and I wasn't doing anything about it.

6:07And so everyone knows like there's a difference between having a really good idea and actually doing something about it. And so I found myself in my car parked in this random parking lot. and yeah I'm like sitting in my car seats lean back all the way my knees are up on my steering wheel and my coffee cup was sitting on my knee and I looked up and on the coffee sleeve it said what are you waiting for and that was like a it was just a weird moment because your first thought is like what the hell coffee company puts quotes on their sleeves but you have this question like staring at me in the face what are you waiting for and I just took it as a sign I actually took took a photo of it and said, one day when I give a TED talk, I'm going to blow this photo up on the screen and tell this story.

6:50And that ended up happening. But I started my car, drove down to Joanne's Fabric, bought a sewing machine and a roll of fabric. And that's what you do when you're starting a blanket company. You sewed your first blanket. I sewed the first blanket. It's pretty janky. But then I realized after that one, I'm like, I'm horrible at sewing and had to find local seamstresses in my community to like help make blankets and, you know, something that was actually sellable. Yeah. What an inspiring story. I mean, here you are sitting in your car, this kind of kismet moment where you're like looking at this coffee cup.

7:25But there was something else that I think maybe you're selling yourself a little bit too short on, which is this idea that, sure, we've all sat with great ideas. Sure, we've all seen this moment of motivation. but you took that and did something. You did something about it. How did you encourage yourself? How did you take yourself from idea to execution? Yeah, I mean, to give a little bit more context, at 19 years old, I moved to Monmouth and there was no Young Life there. Young Life is a Christian nonprofit and Young Life had had a huge impact on me when I was in high school. And so at 19 years old, I'm like, okay, I'm going to start young life here in this community.

8:09And that's where I got a lot of my experience of building a team, forming a committee, calling people on a mission bigger than themselves. And that really, I was coming off of literally seeing an entire community be transformed off of starting something with absolutely nothing. So by the time I was 24 and I had the idea for Sackcloth and Ashes and the Blankets, I was coming off of a pretty strong season of momentum of feeling empowered to be able to start something out of nothing and actually do it. And so a lot of people were like, oh, how did you find the motivation early on in sackcloth? And I'm like, this was not unfamiliar for me at that time.

8:48It was difficult for me to get started because I knew nothing about blankets or fabric or anything. But I, and or business, like that was new territory. But I wasn't unfamiliar. Blankets, business. But I wasn't unfamiliar with taking a leap of faith into the unknown and having a lot of moments where I'm looking up into the sky and being like, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm willing. That courage is integral to the entrepreneurial experience. Back to this idea, though, of the problem you're trying to solve with your products, right? Homelessness and the epidemic that we find ourselves, particularly in this part of the country, in Southern California.

9:28You can't go anywhere in our town and not see someone who's suffering through this in different stages, whether it's addiction, whether it's financial insecurity. When you're sitting and thinking about what your business can do, where do you see yourself in the, let's call it the solution or the remedy to this systemic issue? We've gone through, as most businesses do, a few different evolutions. and one of the things that I really picked up on was that the business sector as a whole really moved from being very success oriented, like it's all about profit, all about the bottom line, to how can we as a company make a difference?

10:12And that was right in the Tom's era of companies really starting to come on the scene that were like, we can do business and use it for good. and I feel like the next evolution to that is not look at how much good that we're doing as a company but look at how much good work that they're doing as an organization or as a person. So business in this next season is going to transform from a lot of do-good brands to companies that are empowering people to do good and it's going to go from look at what we're contributing as a company to how can we help empower people to contribute? That's where the companies that figure that out are gonna be the leaders in the future.

10:59Those will be the leaders in the future. And you yourself have seen some significant growth with your company since you started more than a decade ago or about a decade ago, right? 25 employees, revenue, annual revenue in the millions. And you did have a very big first break getting into anthropology. how did you make that happen and how important was that getting yourself into a big retailer in terms of the growth of the business yeah I mean I was bootstrapping it as much as you could like a local seamstress named Tammy was making me blankets I put them in my trunk and I knew that I needed to launch a website and I needed to get into about 10 to 20 shops so that I can put them on the website and make it look like we're actually a legitimate business that was like goal number one, you know, post on social media once a day, get into 10 shops.

11:48So I started driving to shops up and down the Oregon coast and walking into shops with boxes of blankets and being like, Hey, would you guys like to buy blankets for every blanket you buy? I'll donate a blanket to your local shelter. The majority of them thought I was nuts. And I was asking for 15 % off because I didn't know what wholesale standard was. And I got into about 10 to 20 shops. And one of the shops out of like 200. So it was like, you know, what typical entrepreneurship, like one out of every 10 things works out. But that one thing is what's going to help you get to the next phase.

12:24And one of the shops that I walked into naively was anthropology. And I walked in like beautiful store box of blankets. And I was like, Hey, do you guys want to buy some blankets? And they were like, it doesn't really work like this. So I was like, okay, fair enough. Like I left my business card and it just made it to the manager. And then just so happened that the corporate Anthro team came through that week and they emailed me and they're like, Hey, we love what you're doing. Um, we'll take 8 ,000 blankets. And yeah, I mean, I, and I was still working like a part-time job and I remember getting the email and like falling out of my chair and I called the local seamstress and I'm like, damn, we just got 8 ,000.

13:04I'm like, how many blankets do we got? It was like, we need some more seamstress. Tammy's like, we got 20, you know? So I was like, well, make as many blankets as you can. And I was like buying fabric off of fashion fabrics.com. Oh my God. It just is like wholesale fabric or whatever. And I'm getting rolls of fabric shipped to my house, taking them to Tammy's and then Tammy's making these blankets. So they were really unique blankets. Cause it was unique fabric that you really can't find anywhere now. And, and that's what Anther bought. And we were only able to fulfill like maybe 800 of the 8 ,000 blanket order.

13:38I'm just picturing you in your car, the beautiful Oregon coast. You got, you can't see out of the rear view mirror because there's just blankets in the back and just driving around. Yeah. I mean, you can't replicate that hard work. Entrepreneurship is hard work, right? But it paid off for you in this way. Yeah. And, you know, early on, like you have obstacles, like you have obstacles for the last decade, You know, there's obstacles every month. It feels like that pops up. And even from month one, like me realizing I can't sew. That was an obstacle. And I had to make a decision. Am I going to continue on with this concept and idea?

14:13Or am I going to toss it to the side and say, maybe I'll look for something else, you know? But I figured out a way. Maybe there's somebody who can make blankets for me. And, you know, just that constant, like you come up to these walls and it's easy to give up on the idea, especially in the early stages. Um, and just be like, I don't know if this is worth it, but the, the courage to keep pressing on despite those obstacles and getting creative to say like, maybe I can't do everything, but I can find somebody that can help me out. Um, is what kept me kind of getting to the next phase. So in other words, knowing what you're good at and what you're not.

14:52Yeah. And being okay with that, you know, being okay with like, you don't have to have all the answers right out the gate. You don't even know how to do everything. You know, Shopify was awesome. Like I give Shopify a lot of credit in any interview that I do, because it allowed me to create a website by being somebody who's not a coder, who's not a designer. And it allowed me to like put some photos up on a website and be able to make sales. And I'll never forget my first sale that I ever got was from someone random in Georgia. And I was on a run and I saw a notification from Shopify and I remember stopping and just like taking a moment and being like, whoa, somebody bought my product online and I'll never forget it.

15:37It was crazy. Back to this idea we talked about earlier, the one for one model, really interesting. And again, dovetails with this concept of conscious consumerism. How did you know that was the right fit for your business? There's so many ways you can go with this. Yeah, to me, it just felt like the most simple. Like it was very, it was something that people can wrap their minds around. Like I buy a product and then a second product is going to be provided to someone in need in my community. And that's what I liked about it. Like there was a lot of brands that were popping up on the scene that are like, we're going to donate 10 % of our proceeds or, you know, that kind of thing.

16:12And that was such a clear understanding of exactly the type of impact that you can make if you buy our product. So that's why I liked it. and it takes more than just having business knowledge right with this type of model you also need to know how to interact with all of these local homeless shelters which i would imagine depending on the state or the county or the city municipality there are different rules for what you can donate perhaps there's um you know health or environmental constraints how do you how did you educate yourself on those topics yeah the biggest thing was finding a database that already existed of homeless shelters in the United States.

16:50And there was already a database that was really strongly put together a network of rescue missions around the United States. And at the time they were called Association of Rescue Gospel Missions. And so I was able to utilize their database and be able to say, okay, here's all the shelters in the US and being able to see when an order comes through based on their city or zip code, we'll provide a blanket to the homeless shelter that's closest to that order. And when I was starting out of getting to know these shelters, we weren't necessarily contacting everybody, but we were definitely trying to understand what do they actually need.

17:28So we would contact some of them and the feedback that we got were, hey, don't send us wool blankets. Like we can't wash wool blankets that well. And shelters were like, we need fleece blankets, something that's easily washable that we can wash every night. And so that was really helpful for us early on was, and it helped with our margin because we can sell wool blankets on our website, but we're providing these really quality fleece twin size blankets to shelters that need them. That was more practical need for them. How interesting. So the actual blanket you send is an adaptation of your product that is better suited for the shelter.

18:08Yeah. Yeah. And at times we'll donate our wool blankets to like men's and women's programs because they're more long-term programs. So we really try to tailor it based off of what is the actual need and what are they wanting? What are they requesting? And what's been the feedback so far? I mean, what is it, what are you hearing from shelters? If anything, perhaps folks, anyone, any stories from folks who've experienced homelessness and, you know, were aided in some way by what you're doing? Yeah, a lot of the shelters are grateful. And surprisingly, whether it's hot or cold weather during the year, like they're all stocking up for blankets.

18:44Like it's never been something where shelters are rarely calling us off and being like, hey, we don't need any more blankets. It's a really practical need that they go through quite often. but what was amazing about the donation of the blankets to these shelters was they started to connect me with really amazing grassroots leaders that are doing good work in their communities and I quickly realized that the donation of blankets although a practical need and it's an admirable thing I started to get connected to our bigger purpose and our bigger mission as a brand which was getting to know these grassroots leaders and figuring out creative ways to elevate their work.

19:23And I started to find very quickly, these are the true leaders and heroes of our communities. And started asking myself the question, how can I use my platform to shed light on the work that's going on, the solutions that are being created to help the homeless problem? And you did that very intentionally a couple of years ago, traveling around the country and interviewing folks for a podcast series you did, right? Yeah, I started a podcast called Love Your City and took the entire year of 2022 and every week I went to a different grassroots organization in the US. I wanted to make sure to interview them in person so that I could see their work, learn about their work, and then have a conversation about it.

20:03But I was already doing blanket drops for about five years where we'd go and we would invite people that follow our brand or invite executives of companies that we're partnered with into these blanket drop experiences where they can pass out blankets, but even more so get a tour of the organization, learn about them, and then stay connected with them. And so we started saying often blankets are the bridge. Blankets are what's connecting us to companies that we're partnered with that give our blankets as gifts to their clients. And the blankets are connecting us to grassroots organizations that are doing amazing work in their communities.

20:36Just got the chills a little bit because I was thinking about just blankets as a article of clothing and almost as a necessity. Everyone needs a blanket. Every single person on this planet needs a blanket, some sort of blanket. Maybe if you're in a hot climate, it's a little bit thinner, but everyone needs a blanket. Um, and I was thinking about your mom. I mean, does, how often does she pop into your mind when you're doing these blanket drops? You're sitting down with grassroots organizers or sitting with folks like me. Yeah. I mean, one of the most frequently asked questions when I speak at events now is how's your mom doing now?

21:08And it's an amazing story because I was doing a blanket drop in Portland, Oregon uh in 2018 and it was at a women's program and I was just doing my normal thing passing out blankets getting to share with the women in the program and I usually share like the backstory of the brand and why we're here yeah and they were like well how's your mom now and I'm like oh she's still struggling you know and they're like well we have 38 out of 40 slots filled can you get her here for an interview and I was like I'll try so was able to get her there she got accepted into the program uh she had moved from florida to ohio and then i was able to move her back to oregon because she wasn't doing good and so she was already back in oregon and um so we got her into the program and 12 months later she 12 months sober graduated the program stayed for another 12 months got hired on to staff and now she's working full-time at a detox facility, helping people transition off of their addictions.

22:10So I'm extremely proud of her. And not only is she was motivating and inspiring to starting the business, she's truly an active contributor in her community now. So it's her story of redemption and recovery is so powerful because it shows that somebody can actually make it off the streets, make it off of addiction, but even more so not just to be a healthy person, but to be a contributor in their communities. and she represents everything that I'm really promoting and I believe in. And so when she comes to Blanket Drops with me now, it's really powerful. I always have her come up and share even though she's like, ah.

22:47She's modest about it. Yeah, but she comes up and every time she shares, it's so powerful because it's coming from a place of being able to relate where people are at. And that's something that I don't have. And so her story and her recovery and her message is just getting started. I believe. And there's, it's amazing to watch her story unfold on the other side of, of addiction and, and, uh, and homelessness. It's really inspiring. It really is. And so glad she's doing well. And, uh, wow. What a, what a journey that she's been on related to what you're doing here. You know, speaking of people adding their own, let's call it story to what you're doing.

23:29you also collaborate with a lot of artists. These artists help design some of the blankets that you end up selling. What has it been like working with artists, and how do you find the right ones to collab with you on a blanket? Yeah, it's been a really fun journey. In 2019, I really wanted to start collaborating with Native American artists. Why? I don't know. I just had a curiosity about it, learning about their culture and their history. And it really inspired me to look deeper into it. And I met with a Native American artist and he brought to my attention, what if some of the designs that you're currently selling right now is culturally appropriating?

24:14I had been pre-selecting designs at my manufacturer. And I said, well, yeah, I'm open to changing that. And so we ended up discontinuing nine out of our 10 best-selling products and really cleaning house. And it was about a six-month process to get everything swapped out. How interesting. Yeah, that were kind of Native-inspired designs. And that opened up the door for me to start building relationships with Native American artists that wanted to collaborate with us. And now we've partnered with four different artists that have designed beautiful collections. And now they're off doing incredible things.

24:49it's so fun to see like where these artists end up going. And I get the chance to work with them like right at the beginning stages of where their careers are. And you actually still stay connected with them too, yeah? Absolutely, yeah, they're good friends. Being able to work with artists is a really fun part. You know, I think collaboration is the most powerful form of marketing because it really hits on storytelling and it hits on the ability to like really market something in an organic way where you're not just selling your product or your brand, but you're being able to elevate an artist or tell a story.

25:21And yeah. And it harkens back to what you mentioned earlier about knowing what you're good at and what you're not, taking advantage of the skills of others, right? And then leaning into what you do best. Speaking of which, if you could give some advice to someone who is either just starting their business or has one and is looking to emulate your success, what would you say? I would say it needs to be connected to your purpose And what I mean by that is the way to really discover what your purpose is, is by answering two questions. What brings you joy? It's the thing that wakes you up in the morning.