For those of you who are familiar with Ripple Effect Gifts, you will know that our core values are love, kindness and generosity. In fact, we wrote about it on this very blog site last week.
These core values translate into Integrity, Authenticity and Following Our Dream.
To us it is a no brainer; that is how we run our business. But we are aware that those values might seem incongruent with the corporate world.
So let me explain……
In her own words, the founder of Ripple Effect Gifts Stephanni Richards, ‘is passionate about supporting women in small business.’ As a testament to this, the majority of our suppliers are in fact, women in small business. Read here for information about women supporting women.
Ripple Effect Gifts is on the ball concerning the environment. We gleefully discredited Kermit’s woeful lament of ‘it’s not easy being green’ with our environmentally friendly credentials. Click here for the full blog. A report by the Green Journey found that an average shopping basket of 29 common food items traveled over 70,000 kms. That’s nearly two times the distance around the Earth. Just four imported items accounted for nearly 50,000 kms.
By sourcing quality products from local, small businesses, we keep the food miles of our sourced products to an absolute minimum. We also pride ourselves on ‘good old fashioned customer service.’ If you would like proof of that, check out our blog about our recent 1500km round trip to fulfil promises made to customers. And to keep to our values of integrity and authenticity, we used low carbon cars using an average of 4.6 litres of fuel per 100km. Mindful driving!
How do we incorporate our dreams into a business?
We would like to say that it is easy. So often we hear or read in social media that all you have to do is have the right attitude and success will flow to you. If only that were true, we would all be living the dream! The reality is different. It is long days (and sometimes nights) of ensuring our customers are happy, sourcing new products, ensuring our customers are happy, keeping our business records up to date, ensuring our customers are happy, making hampers, ensuring our customers are happy and arranging delivery. Oh yes, and ensuring our customers are happy.
So why do we do it?
Because all of us at Ripple Effect Gifts are inspired by Steph’s desire to make the world a better place. Steph dreamed of using her creative flair to design an imaginative business with outstanding customer care as the driving force. Over the last 3 years, Steph’s dream became a reality and Ripple Effect Gifts is going from strength to strength. We are the only local hamper company that offers same day delivery to a large area, at no extra cost.
And we ensure that all our interactions are ethical, responsible, friendly and professional.
Of course we understand that selling hampers doesn’t, in its own right, make the world a better place. But we do know that it is our ethos of love, kindness and generosity combined with outstanding customer service which makes a difference in our customer’s lives. We are all connected, so our positive thoughts, beliefs and actions truly have that ripple effect. Just like the ripples of a pond which travel outwards.
We won’t cure the common cold, we can’t stop it raining on Grand Final Day and reducing unemployment figures isn’t a possibility either. But we can, and do, go the extra mile. Literally and figuratively.