| HAPPY EARTH DAY! Did you know that when we opened in 2004, we were the first pet supply store in the nation to specialize in sustainability? We searched far and wide and couldn't find another.
Our first task when we set up Green Dog was to define what makes a product qualify as "Green" Here's what we decided.
The next step was the design of the store. We bought an old pickup truck and put it to good use. If you look around the store, every single piece of furniture, every shelf, etc was something else. We made a decision that we would never purchase a single piece of new commercial retail furniture or racking, etc. It was important to us that the inside of Green Dog was designed to reflect our philosophy, and we wanted to show people that designing with reclaimed materials can be cost effective and beautiful. We were able to create most of the store from reclaimed and scavenged materials, including the walls and built-in shelving. Looking around the space, you’ll find windows, weathered barn wood, vintage doorknobs, a screen door, stair banisters, old wooden doors, picket fencing, wash basins, a coal scuttle, and many other antique and found pieces.
The ramp from the main store into the food room is made from old shipping pallets. The long barn wood border around the top of the store was from a 40 x 80 barn from the Drewes family farm, built in the 1880’s. We built the sliding door at the back of our food room with Doug Fir that was reclaimed from a Portland home’s deconstruction.We found an old weathered wooden fence (some of it is in the back of the big orange shelf and we made a table from the scraps. You can see the gate right now through the front window).
We had a lot of fun with old doors by building tables with them and hanging leashes on them (we've been to a few pet supply stores that borrowed that idea after they visited us - it's a good idea!). Slat-wall to display toys and jackets were purchased used. Almost all of what you see was originally installed in our old location and carefully refitted to our new space. Check out the The giant supplement wall. It was the first thing we built on our first location (at 46th and Fremont). Every bit of it was scavenged wood to begin with, and the big long plank that now serves as a counter that stretches the length of the supplement wall was being used to roll wheelbarrows full of cement during the construction of our first location. We nabbed it, sanded it and put a glossy coat on it, and it’s is still gorgeous. Other old doors were cut to size and made into the the cabinet doors for storage under that unit. When we moved locations, we took apart that whole thing and rolled it down the street on our little food carts down to where it stands now. We're proud of our unique showroom, and it did garnish us with visits from local news crews, and a variety of articles about us in pet trade magazines (here's a recent one ), and on a TV show that featured Best Friends animal sanctuary and its connections with our unique store.
(Fun Fact, when this current location was first certified "Gold" by the City of Portland's Sustainability At Work Program, we had the highest marks of any retailer of any kind in all of Portland!)
|
