This week I sat down with Wes Carter, President of Atlantic Packaging and Founder of A New Earth Project. Wes takes us on a journey from his grandfather's Pulitzer Prize-winning fight against the Ku Klux Klan to Atlantic Packaging's rise as North America's largest privately-owned packaging company.
Business success is only part of Wes’ story. He also shares his personal journey of self-discovery through yoga and plant medicine, and how these experiences led him to revolutionize Atlantic Packaging's approach to sustainability with A New Earth Project. From collaborating with pro surfers to eliminate single-use plastics in surfboard packaging to helping major brands reduce their environmental impact, Wes shows us how focusing on health and wellness can create positive change while still clearing a profit.
If you prefer a listening experience, catch the episode here:
Here is my conversation with Wes:
We've got a really unique story. My grandfather started Atlantic Packaging in 1947 as a weekly newspaper in Tabor City, North Carolina. He was just reporting on tobacco farming news back in the late 40s, but quickly became aware that the Ku Klux Klan was active in that community.
He began writing scathing editorials and publishing articles about their activities. They threatened to kill him, kidnap his children, burn down his house. What his wife and three young kids went through was pretty profound. Eventually, the FBI contacted him and said, we'd like you to help us infiltrate the Klan, which is exactly what they did. They arrested over 300 Klansmen, including the Grand Dragon of the Carolinas Klu Klux Klan. My grandfather and his newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 1952. He was the first weekly newspaper to ever win a Pulitzer, and he was only 32 years old at the time.
A lot of people wonder how a newspaper became the largest privately held packaging company in North America. In those days, if you were in the newspaper business in small town America, you were also in the paper supply business. We started selling converted paperboard to local businesses, which were primarily apparel and textile companies. Pretty soon they asked my grandfather to sell them boxes and tape and bags. My father, Rusty, came on board in the early seventies and took the packaging business to a whole lot of different levels.
My father made a strategic decision in the mid-nineties that he did not want to be a commodities broker, which was a lot of what packaging companies were back then, just sort of a middleman. He made investments in sophisticated packaging equipment and technical support infrastructure.
When I joined the company in the early 2000s, we talked a lot about the packaging optimization guys. We're the guys that go into a manufacturing environment, audit every part of the packaging process, and recommend how to improve efficiencies and reduce their overall packaging spend.
I became the president of Atlantic about 10 years ago. I built our sustainability program in collaboration with our leadership on top of that optimization value proposition. Ultimately, "use less" from a sustainability perspective is always the right answer. Then it was like, we just gotta take it a step further and get really mindful about the materials themselves and start to consider end of life scenarios and those kinds of things.
We have a packaging solution center in Charlotte, North Carolina that is our anchor for innovation. There's probably 40 people dedicated to the packaging development and testing. That number's hard for me to pin because we're hiring people all the time. We're not only developing packaging, we're also doing a lot of package testing.
We have a lot of really sophisticated ways to certify that the packaging is fit to ship. We do all that transport testing in-house so customers don't have to do field testing, which is a lot more expensive. Most of our customers are a part of that. We bring their representatives to Charlotte to be a part of what we're doing because they know their products better than we do. It's real collaborative.
That's all about my father, Rusty. He deserves all the credit. My dad always wanted Atlantic to be a sales organization that was customer focused. What he saw as the downfall of a lot of organizations is as they got bigger, they got bureaucratic. And as they got bigger, they felt like they needed more and more layers of checks and balances. It just makes companies slow or it can. So it's always been very, very intentional.
We don't even have titles on our business cards. My dad liked to say operational excellence was never his goal. He said, we're always going to have a little slop because we are so flat, but we're going to outrun the slop with our sales effort. As we've gotten larger and larger, the slop gets larger and larger. So we do focus more on our operations today than we ever have before. But ultimately, we want to be nimble, creative, and innovative.
Anything that I've accomplished professionally has been a direct result of personal work. It requires a level of courage and vulnerability. We all carry wounds, and those wounds impact how we show up in the world. It started for me when I walked into Blue Turtle Yoga in Charleston, gosh, 16 or 17 years ago. That practice immediately resonated with me. After one class, I was like, damn, this is for me. I was getting a lot of spiritual teachings, the Eastern philosophy, the Buddhist philosophy, the Hindu philosophy, and a lot of that knowledge is about mastering the mind.
The big breakthrough for me was psychedelic plant medicine. When I finally started doing that work in a therapeutic environment, it was mind-blowing for me. It opened me up to another level of understanding of what it just means to be a human being. Plant medicine helped me get to the layers inside of me that my conscious mind didn't want to look at. I was able to understand that some of the ways I showed up in the world that I wasn't really proud of were based on gnarly stuff that had happened to me in the past or ignorance. And I was able to forgive myself and start making better choices. It wasn't a straight line, it still isn't, but it enhanced my life and I really started to see like, holy shit, this is about health.
December 26th, 2020 at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I remember the exact moment in time. One of my sales guys had a good buddy who was in the branding and marketing business who was following me on social media. He happened to work for Hurley, the surf brand back in the nineties. He called me and said, "Wes, I think what you're doing in sustainability is really interesting and different than what I've heard from your industry before."
He connected me with Peter King, who was actually the first professional surfer that Bob Hurley ever signed. Peter and I had a call the day after Christmas. I was in Park City, Utah with my family on a ski vacation and Peter was on the North shore and we had a three hour zoom call and it was pretty much fireworks. The idea that Peter and I had was what if we engaged the surfing community, the surfing brands, the shapers, the pro surfers around sustainability and we'll use the infrastructure of Atlantic to create sustainable surfboard packaging and create a little documentary series about eliminating single use plastic from surfboard packaging.
Surfboard packaging isn't a huge vertical in packaging, but it was a great way to tell a story. And ultimately a surfboard was just a widget. If we can do this for surfboards, we can do it for anything. But doing it with surfboards is just interesting. I found myself on Kelly Slater's back porch interviewing him. We had people like Carissa Moore, Kyle Lenny, Ben Bourgeois giving us input.
There was skepticism by certain longer-term stakeholders within the organization that said, "Hey, this is the way we've operated for a really long time. It's been really successful. This is a pretty big gamble." I realized in order to do this well, I had to be super honest. And part of being honest was acknowledging that our industry had created a lot of these problems. It's pretty unpopular to call out your own industry.
However, I will say the energy that I felt and continue to feel, the inspiration, the passion came from somewhere deep inside of me and also from outside of me. There was this energy and there continues to be this surge of positive energy that this is the way, health is the way. And I felt like the more I committed to it, the more opportunities came my way.
I started getting resumes from some amazing humans that were like, hey, I'd love to be a part of your organization. What you're doing is really transformational. When you can give people a platform that has foundational purpose, they bring their A game and they have endless energy for it.
One of the metrics is people buying it. As an example, just a few months ago, Firewire, which is one of the largest producers of surfboards in the world, transitioned all of their surfboard packaging for North America to New Earth Approved Packaging that we designed. We were working with dozens of surfboard companies.
A lot of our customers have plastic mitigation goals. William Sonoma was one of our early adopters. We transitioned them out of all bubble wrap, inflatable air pillows, foam packaging, to all fiber-based curbside recyclable packaging. That eliminated 400,000 pounds of single-use plastic annually.
People ask me all the time, what do you think is the biggest driver of sustainable change? Easy, consumer demand. Nothing will ship the supply chain faster than consumer demand. And I believe you influence consumer demand more out of stoke than out of fear. So, I want people stoked about sustainable packaging, not terrified of non-sustainable packaging.
For every product that we innovate sustainable packaging around, sometimes it’s very simple, like we're gonna replace bubble wrap with a type of accordion cut paper for cushioning. Other times, like for single surfboards, that took us four or five months to figure out. Not only does a surfboard have to be shipped without damage, but we also needed something that was easy to pack, because they often don't have a lot of space. We couldn't increase the shipping cost. I like to say if it costs too much, it's not very sustainable because no one's going to buy it. So we have to find practical, economically viable, sustainable options.
As an example, the traditional way of packaging surfboards with bubble wrap and tape and foam, for most of the shapers, was a 20-minute process. Our process takes three minutes. Well, that's a big cost savings. You can ship out a board in three minutes versus 20. FedEx & UPS, they charge by dimensional weight. So if we can find ways to reduce the amount of air in a package, we can bring down the dimensional weight. In some cases, the freight savings can offset the material increase if there is one.
Ultimately, I want our company to represent health. Today in our world, if all companies would pull up a seat at the negotiating table for a healthy life, I think it can change the world. And that's what we're trying to do. Every decision that we make of any consequence, I'm asking myself, is this supportive of health. And if it's not, then I pull way back and I try to find another way.