Logo contest: Green Harmony Living

What we do:

"Your Affordable Source of Top Quality, Truly Healthy, Animal & Earth Friendly Rawfoods, Superfoods, Superherbs, Wholefood Supplements, and Natural Dental Care!"

Description: Green Harmony Living's 12 point Green & Social Standards Criteria

Since we want to leave as small a footprint on this planet as possible, we employ animal, planet, and human friendly business practices wherever possible.

Our environmental and labor standards that we follow:

1) Best Designed Products: We offer the highest quality products ever made, which we define as the best designed, the easiest to use, that really works, that is the most durable, made of the highest quality materials, the healthiest foods, and that is a product that you really need for everyday life.

2) Greenest Products: Our sustainable criteria that we use to evaluate potential products are whether they are vegan (animal friendly), organic (chemical free, soil friendly, and small family farmer friendly), biodegradable, non GMO, nontoxic, organic, recyclable, recycled, reusable, and have a low carbon footprint.

3) Healthiest Foods: Healthiest foods criteria we use to select our foods to sell are fair trade, non GMO, organic, TruGanic™ (beyond organic standards), rawfood, vegan, vegetarian, macrobiotic, chemical free, gluten free, nonirradiated, preservative free, superfood (highest amount of nutrients), and/or wholefood.

4) We Support Fair Labor: We follow fair labor criteria in our own business and we only purchase from companies that support fair labor as well. We follow the Ethical Trading Initiative Base Code in our own business, which includes, employment is freely chosen; freedom of association; working conditions are safe and hygienic; child labor is not used; living wages are paid; working hours are not excessive; no discrimination is practiced; regular employment is provided; and no harsh or inhumane treatment is allowed. In addition, we follow and encourage our suppliers to follow: community and environmental investments, and employee training programs.

5) Green Shipping Policies: We strive to use the most environmentally friendly shipping practices that includes, using new and/or reusing only 100% biodegradable boxes and packaging material, using smaller boxes to reduce the amount of material used, and primarily using UPS and USPS as our shippers because of their strong environmental policies. Any new material that we purchase must be biodegradable, nontoxic, preferably plant based, recyclable, and/or recycled.

6) Green Office: We strive for green practices in our office including, using 100% renewable wind energy to provide electricity; office building is located in a lush garden with vegetable garden, fruit trees, many native flowers and grasses for wildlife, large deciduous trees located on the south side provide summer shade and cooling, and no wasteful lawn; 100% post consumer recycled paper in our copy machine; use both sides of copy papers; use energy efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs; purchase a minimum amount of materials to reduce waste; recycle all materials that may be recycled; our building uses passive solar orientation and natural ventilation when the weather allows for it thereby minimizing our energy use; and our office is located in our home which greatly reduces energy spent on commuting and heating/cooling another building.

7) Green Warehouse: Since our warehouse is located in a well insulated building, our energy use for heating/cooling is minimal. Our warehouse uses nontoxic, non offgasing materials like metal shelves and cardboard boxes for products storage to ensure our inventory stays fresh and is not harmed.

8) We Support Charities: Since we feel it is important to give back to humanity and to improve life on Earth, we donate a portion of our sales to what we feel are important causes including, animal rights, bicycling & walking, drug policy reform, environmental & biodiversity protection, and/or social support nonprofit groups. Groups we support include Defenders of Wildlife, Drug Policy Alliance, East Coast Greenway, FINCA International, Gorilla Foundation, National Wildlife Federation, The Nature Conservancy, PETA, Rails to Trails Conservancy, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, and The Trust for Public Land.

9) Green Supplier Policies: We place a high priority on purchasing products only from manufacturers who show an environmental and social commitment. Our supplying manufacturers must use at least one or preferably more of these criteria: animal friendly, carbon neutral, chemical free, climate friendly, cruelty free, fair labor, fair trade, green office, green packaging, green shipping methods, natural (non synthetic) products, non GMO, nonirradiated, nontoxic, organic, permaculture, renewable energy sourced electricity, sweatshop free, US made, vegan, vegetarian, and/or the closest supplier since this means less transportation distance. We prefer not to sell products made in China since their organic standards cannot be verified and have been found to be contaminated with chemicals in the past.

10) How We Verify Companies’ Values: We verify potential suppliers’ green and social record and continually monitor their record through online research, asking other businesses their experiences with these suppliers, asking potential suppliers our questionnaire, and sending potential suppliers the ETI Base Code and asking them if they follow fair labor practices outlined in the code.

11) Always Improving Our Practices: We continually look for ways to improve our practices in order to leave less of an environmental footprint on our planet earth, support animal rights, ensure biodiversity, and create social equity for all. Our goal is to run the greenest, most people friendliest business possible. We have recently improved our business practices to meet Green America’s Green Business (www.greenamericatoday.org) certification and will continue to seek improvements in the future. While doing our part to create an animal, planet, and human friendly world demands more effort and is an ongoing process, we are committed to this cause.

12) Challenges We Face: Challenges we face in being green and socially aware and how we deal with these challenges include, a lack of organic, non GMO, and fair trade suppliers; a lack of information about companies fair labor practices; higher prices due to organic, non GMO, and fair trade designation and/or lack of competition; manufacturers and suppliers highly varying protocols and restrictions (some do not sell to online only retailers like us; some have high minimum orders); communicating to our potential customers that it is better to buy from us because of our green and social standards than other typically larger websites or retail stores that may offer cheaper prices, slicker marketing, but no green or social standards, so we aim to do a better job marketing our strong green and social standards; researching for the best quality green products with truly animal and environmentally friendly, nontoxic, healthy, vegetarian, vegan, rawfood, etc. ingredients demands much time, effort, and money; being aware of all of the bad ingredients that are synthetic, animal & petroleum derived, socially harmful, unhealthy, and/or environmentally or wildlife destructive (for instance we are phasing out the use of palm oil since its use encourages the destruction of the orangutan and the rain forests in which it lives in Indonesia); and recruiting happy, eco, health, and socially conscious people to work for us is difficult since these people are hard to find.

Desired Demographics: Age: 30-100 Sex: Female Location: USA Income: $60,000 + Occupation: Career Professionals and Moms (Housewives) Interests & Lifestyles: Organic foods, Fitness, Sports, Healthy Living, Raising healthy children, Green Living, Sustainable Living, Compassion for Animals, Vegetarian foods, Vegan foods, Raw foods, Natural dental care, Alternative health care

Obviously, since "green" is in our name and is one of our core values, the color green should be a central color. Also, orange and blue may also be used in the logo. Perhaps not too many colors should be used since that raises the cost of printing. Something the Starbucks logo is nice since there is only two colors, but is still visually appealing.

We really want a new design for our logo. In the past, we created three simple kinds of logos that did not seem to be great logos.

FYI all three past logos are uploaded as attachments, and two of them can be seen on our homepage at www.greenharmonyliving.com/store.

However, these three ideas don;t seem to fully encapsulate what we are about and what we are trying to communicate, and don't capture people's attention enough. We want a logo that is truly memorable b/c it stands apart from the rest and it tells the viewer who we are in simple terms. That is why we want a designer with a fresh idea for our logo!