Using Cause Marketing To Bring Technology and Wood Back Together

Back when the Beaver and Jack Benny show were on television, the TV sets on which Americans watched those shows was wrapped in glorious wood. The stereo in the age of the Mad Men was a piece of wood furniture as organic as the asparagus at the Farmer’s Market in Portland. But nowadays, as Fast Company recently pointed out, electronics can be metal or plastic or some combination thereby, but wood is as old fashioned as, well, an Old Fashioned.

Now a Massachusetts audio company called Vers is using cause marketing to help make people comfortable again about the combination of wood and technology. Vers makes compact speakers, earphones, and iPhone cases with wood. Vers systems have a reputation for sounding better than plastic, and wood is perhaps the most sustainable material on the planet. Vers uses farmed eucalyptus and pine, plus common sustainable hardwoods for its veneers.

The cause marketing piece is this: for every tree that Vers uses, it plants 400 trees via its partner, the National Arbor Day Foundation. “Harvest a tree – plant a forest,” is how Vers puts it.

The company also evidences a strong environmental and conservationist mindset. Vers generates scant waste in the manufacturing process. Vers audio components require low power. The systems are meant to be repaired and, when the time comes, easily disassembled, since they’re held together with just screws.

Sorta like back during the Golden Age of Television when if the TV went on the fritz, you took the thing apart, pulled out a few vacuum tubes and took them down to Western Auto store and tested them to see which one was bad. And then replaced only that tube. Home electronics back then wasn’t just gear, it bears repeating, it was furniture.

With their business model and cause marketing approach Vers demonstrates that everything old is new again. And not a moment too soon.

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