This project is born out of the desire of one man, one regular dude, to do something cool with his passion for climbing.
That dude, if you wanna know, is me, Flavio Martines.

I am a regular guy (Italian expat living in Berlin) and an average climber who at some point decided to invest his savings (which was not much really) and have, for the first time in his life, his own project.
So I won’t lie about it: I am not doing this just for altruistic reasons. I wanted something mine, I wanted to build something, I wanted to be the one making the decisions and not be responsible to anyone else but myself. 
Since climbing is my biggest passion, I wanted to do something with, and about it.
So I put some thought into it and asked myself what I could do. I didn’t want to start just another climbing company as there are already tons out there, almost all cool, and the market is really competitive. So I wanted to do something different.. but I didn’t know exactly what. 
And then the idea just popped up.

I had always told myself that at some point in my life I would have to give back, I would have to do something good for the world. 
I have been, all in all, a lucky guy. There have been ups and downs, of course, but I was born in the right part of the planet, never suffered poverty or hunger, never had to worry for my safety, or the safety of my loved ones. I am an average first-world lucky bastard. And a part of me always felt guilty about it. 
So I always thought: when I am “successful” in life I’ll give back. I’ll do something good. But it was a pretty vague idea, also because you have to define “being successful in life” first. It was something in the back of my mind, something I was thinking about doing… during retirement maybe?

But this idea popped back up when I was thinking about what project I could start. It was actually a conversation with a friend that made me connect the dots: what if I could do something with climbing AND do something good at the same time?
That was it. That was the idea I was looking for.

So I looked at it from my perspective as a climber, and it was clear to me: as climbers we are going to spend money to cultivate our passion. We are going to buy new equipment and accessories. We are going to train and travel. I know a lot of us are trying to do it in a sustainable way (as much as possible anyway). 
But what if at the same time, the money we spend on climbing, could do something good as well?
Given the same quality: if you would have to choose between a product from a company and a product from another company who donates the profits for a good cause, what would you choose?  I would choose the latter. I would choose the latter even if it was a bit more expensive.
I think a lot of climbers and outdoor lovers see it the way I do.

So that’s the whole point, a really simple idea: keep climbing AND do something good with it. 

And so I founded this project: I want to offer climbers the opportunity to buy a product that they were going to buy anyway and at the same time do something helpful. 

I want to turn our consumption into a donation. I want to create a win-win situation.

I want to climb. And I want to make this world a better place (even if just a little). Hopefully you want it too.

Let’s climb for a better future.

How it works:

We are still at the very beginning. We sustained and we are sustaining a lot of costs. The money we receive through the sale of the merchandise and the chalk help us to cover these costs but we still have to reinvest everything in order to keep growing and expand our offer. At the moment we are still investing money in this project and we are still far from the tipping point of our income exceeding our costs. So as a “business” we are for the moment “not profitable”.
That means there are actually no profits to be donated at the moment. 

BUT! 
…but we don’t want to wait to be profitable to start donating! 
It could take years for us to arrive at the point where we are profitable. And let’s face it: we could also never succeed. We don’t want to fool anybody and we don’t want all the effort we are putting into this project to be for nothing.
So we have already started donating.

How? We decided to collect part of the income (around 20%) from each product we sell as a donation. For example: we sold the first t-shirts at Boulderklub for 22,5€. The t-shirts (we ordered 200 of them) had cost us more or less 10€ per shirt, so our “profit” would be 12,5€ per shirt. We decided to collect 2,5€ per shirt as a donation and when we sold 100 shirts we donated 250€ to one of our partners (the Infopoint). 
That happened already! So all this wasn’t for nothing.. ALREADY. 
That is satisfying :)

So we’ll keep doing this. For each product we sell, we’ll take part of the profit and donate it to one of our partners. We’ll do this until the moment we are actually making real profits. At that point, we will donate all of them!

Who gets the Money:

We are free to choose where the money goes. So, along with projects that help people in need, we would like to sustain projects and organizations that protect nature and/or fight climate change. We want to be sure that our donations don’t go to waste, that’s why we personally get to know the founders of each project or the people who work on them before we choose one to support.

For now, we are starting with just a few projects (check out the “donations” section to learn about them) but we would like to help out and collaborate with more along the way.
But for that, we need to grow first. The more we grow, the more we generate money, and the more we can donate!

The intent of this company is to produce all kinds of accessories for climbers and outdoor lovers and devolve all the profits to projects that aim to preserve nature, fight climate change, and help people.

We are choosing to do everything right: we want high quality for our products and we want to produce (or buy) things that are sustainable, local, fair and whenever possible vegan too. It would be kinda contradictory for us to exploit nature and people during the production process, and then donate those profits to fight the exploitation of nature and people.. wouldn’t it? ;)

Also, we don’t want to create goods that only the elite can afford. We would like our products to be affordable for all.

So we would like to produce and offer good and affordable products that will last. Products that are made in a sustainable way without the exploitation of nature or people.

And we want to donate the profits we’ll make!

Sounds good right? Too good. We are not sure if this is even possible.. without going bankrupt. At least for a small company without huge capital to invest.

We’ll try though. Step by step. And if we don’t succeed we will have done something good in the process.

There isn’t much to lose anyway.. besides money. But money is overrated. It isn’t worth much if you don’t use it to fulfill your dreams.

If we had billions we would cultivate our own bio cotton (or maybe hemp?) and own our sewing factories. All powered from clean energy. We would offer respectable well-paid jobs to people in need (refugees, poor people, and so on..).

With the profits we would buy pieces of rainforest ensuring that stay untouched from human greed. We would fund schools and hospitals. We would support all the cool people and projects out there who struggle to make this world a better place for all.

But we don’t have billions, not millions, not even hundreds of thousands. In fact all of this started with 10.000€ (which are already gone). So we’ll try with one or two products first and then see how it goes.

This could become a little company that donates a few thousand euros per year. Or this could become something bigger and, who knows, maybe have a real impact in changing things for the better.

We could also fail. But not without having done a few donations first ;)