While I definitely agree that we can be a lot more responsible with our environment, I often wonder  about the motivation of green items. Every where I look these days, either someone is talking about green or there is a green item for sale. Green articles are all over printed media which seems a little counter productive to me. Then there are green grocery bags and water bottles. When I see a $20 price tag on a reusable water bottle it makes me wonder how much it cost the manufacturer to make that water bottle, if they are using green production methods and if they REALLY want the masses to use them, could the cost be much lower?

All that being said, I recently came across a furniture store here in the Denver area called NINES - REMADE IN THE USA. This small shop takes great modern classic furniture and refinishes it. I was in the market for office furniture and was dumbfounded at the asking prices for particle board and wood veneers. That is until I found NINES. You can either purchase a piece of furniture off of their showroom floor or find a piece of furniture prior to being finished and select the finish you desire. I paid the same price for high quality furniture in the exact finish that I wanted that I would have paid for a much lesser quality piece at Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn or West Elm.

I will bring my reusable grocery bags (that I got for free), drink from my tap in my good old plastic cup and definitely shop at NINES again!

Another great article on Entrepreneur.com asks the question, “Why did you build this business? Think about the difference you were trying to make.” When we built Darby Inventory, we wanted to create a product that was full featured, but simple to use while keeping the price low.

Beyond that, we want our users to be really excited about our product. We want them to be excited about it because it saves them time over manual processes or overly complicated software. We want them to be excited for new releases because they know there will be cool new features. We want them to be excited about it because they know we will provide excellent customer service.

We want to build a community around our product where our users have a say in the development of new features. That is the difference we are trying to make with Darby Inventory. My business partner has told me on a couple of occasions that people do not talk about Inventory Software at the dinner table — I want to prove him wrong!