Get to Know Eco Expert Derrick Emsley, CEO of Tentree

Tentree—the Canadian apparel company that plants 10 trees per item sold—has just planted its 50 millionth tree worldwide

What started as a small-town tree-planting business in Saskatchewan has become a worldwide fashion brand focused on responsible consumption.

Tentree is an intersection of comfort and sustainability  “It’s maximum comfort, minimum footprint,” says Derrick Emsley one of the co-founders and the CEO of Tentree. “We look at ourselves as a tree-planting company that sells apparel, not an apparel company that sells trees—that’s a distinction that’s unique to us,” he says.

The genesis of Tentree goes back several years to 2006 when Derrick and his brother Kalen started a tree-planting company while they were in high school.

“People were talking about the Kyoto Protocol, An Inconvenient Truth and the world ending, which felt super disempowering—it also felt like nobody was doing anything about it,” he says.

The duo came up with the idea to buy some farmland near their home in Saskatchewan, plant some trees, and sell some carbon offsets. They ran the business for five years and sold the equivalent of $150,000 in offsets to crown corporations.

While the tree-planting part of their business grew, the carbon offsetting side of things didn’t develop into what they expected, so they shut it down. “That was the gateway to creating Tentree though,” says Derrick. “We met so many incredible groups that were doing tree-planting globally, which was providing jobs, food security and poverty alleviation.”

Then came the idea to create a product and use that as a means to plant trees. “We knew tree-planting, we knew how to do it scalable, we knew great partners across the globe to work with to create incredible messaging, and we knew the impact,” he says. “Trees have an incredibly compelling narrative around them, people have an emotional connection to them—it’s tangible, and we knew we could create a story around it that is empowering.”

The product they chose was apparel, but admittedly, says Derrick, it could have been anything. We’re a tree-planting company and the product is just the vehicle for doing it. “People were just excited about being a part of it and to say, 'Do you know that this shirt plants 10 trees?'”

Read the full story on Environment 911 here.