About Us
TEN YEARS AFTER - January, 2008
In March, 1998 I drove from Chetumal, Mexico, into Belize, Central America, blown
away by the extent of the deforestation I had observed all over southern Mexico.
Thousands upon thousands of square miles of what was jungle, the last time I was
in the region in 1973, had been reduced by chainsaws and cattle grazing to something
looking like concrete slab that couldn't even support a cover crop of weeds twenty-five
years later.
Until then I hadn't bought global warming because I didn't believe human actions
had the power to transform the climate of something so vast as our planet.
But seeing the aftermath of such destruction I understood that six billion people
going on nine, trying to live the life to which we all aspire while using the same
hydro-carbon fuel mix we use now would make living that life impossible.
Of course, witnessing wholesale habitat destruction does not prove global warming.
I had an intuition, like Paul on the road to Damascus, the truth of which only time
can prove.
But to be fair, Nobel laureate vice-presidents notwithstanding, science has not
absolutely 'proved' that the rise in concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide
is caused by humans and neither has it proved that the shorter winters we all have
observed are caused by that rise.
However, the preponderance of evidence runs so heavily in that direction that not
to take ANY steps to ameliorate the likely consequences of what look to be very
big changes is, to say the least, incautious, if not downright foolhardy.
As it is, regardless of our opinions about 'climate change', the real threat to
our way of life is the accelerating, planet-wide loss of biodiversity because of
habitat destruction due to human population pressure. This is what is going to sneak
up and bite us on the rump.
Lost species cost us medicines undiscovered, rare genotypes that won't be bred into
potential food crops and, if we knock enough pieces out of the Web of Life, there
exists the very real possibility of eventually killing off the biosphere altogether
along with the oxygen it provides free of charge.
By the time I got to Belize City I was consumed with the strongly felt need to plant
trees, to reforest the ravaged land, but without the least idea of how I might go
about it.
Until I ran into my old friend, Marta.
Back in the summer of '69 Marta's husband, Antonio, had given me a lift out of Guatemala's
Sierra de las Minas to the town of el Estor, where they lived, on the shore of Lake
Izabal.
After they fed me supper I spent the night on their floor and, thanking them profusely,
I left the next morning on my way to the ruins at Copan, in Honduras, never thinking
I'd lay eyes on them again.
Yet there was Marta, twenty-nine years later and despite all expectation, running
a waterfront gasoline station in a very tough section of Belize City.
That day he'd picked me up in '69, since we never spoke anything but Spanish, I
assumed Antonio was Guatemalan when he was, it turned out, a British Honduran employed
in Guatemala by a Canadian mining company.
They had met in British Honduras when Marta, who was Guatemalan, attended high school
there, and, after Antonio parted ways with his Canadian employer, they had returned
to his home to start a business and raise their growing family.
However, Antonio had suffered a fatal heart attack just two months before I showed
up and Marta and her two daughters, who helped her run the place after he died,
were already starting to get robbed.
Not surprisingly, they were open to considering doing something else and over meals
at their house we hatched the idea of making dog beds, not entirely out of the blue.
In 1996, after buying a series of disappointing beds for a girlfriend's elderly
labrador retriever, I felt like I had discovered a real need and, hence, a business
opportunity and so, over several months' time, taught myself to sew well enough
to be able to experiment with several dog bed designs.
I also discovered how hard the work is and how far I was from being able to turn
out a commercially acceptable piece of goods and so, yet another of my 'great ideas'
bit the dust.
But I still had the heavy duty single needle machine and a very fancy five cone
Juki overlock, both mounted in commercial tables, sitting at home gathering dust.
Marta had the space and refugees from all over Central America were stacked up right
there in Belize City with the necessary skills and who needed the work.
I shipped my two machines and denim, muslin, zipper, thread and fiber content tags
from Port Everglades and then went down myself to cut patterns. We started making
three sizes of round, gusseted, indigo denim dog beds in June of 1999.
Not quite a year later, with inventory stacking up and the first website, having
cost six thousand dollars, a total washout, I had just started talks with a new
web development company, when Marta was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In short order she lost her lease on the gas station and suddenly landed up in the
dog bed business full time.
While I debated what to do (all the while shelling out for the development of the
new website), I was bumbling around, happily distracted, in the jungle in southern
Belize.
I was befriended there by a group of Mopan Maya, men who taught me to recognize
mahogany seeds and seedlings and who agreed, for a modest fee, to harvest mahogany
seeds and to start them and it wasn't long before I was planting trees.
But when it became evident following her surgery that the chemotherapy would soon
exhaust Marta's savings I realized that, website or not, I had to turn dog bed inventory
into cash and so by July of 2000 I was flogging dog beds on eBay.
Remember Y2K? What a simple world we lived in then, back before 9/11.
Sadly, the Federal Reserve, having jacked up interest rates by six and a half percent
over the prior eighteen months, hammered that world into coming unglued in a quick
hurry and fourteen months later, in a well-timed attempt at finishing us off, 9/11
slammed us to our knees, the stock market plunged and our economic life nearly came
to a halt.
Our Government, however, exhorted us to spend and spend we did. And our Government
spent aggressively right along with us, borrowing large sums via Treasury auctions
(the budget surplus evaporated in the Fed induced recession in 2000) from our own
citizens and also from, among many others, the Chinese government (lent to make
certain we could afford to keep on buying their goods), and our economy although
badly staggered kept most all of us employed and we managed to dodge that fatal
bullet of "the loss of consumer confidence" and the great game of getting and spending
kept rolling.
Through all the turmoil, Victoria Peak dog beds continued to make new friends but
by 2003 Marta was dead and her second round of chemo and the course of radiation
treatments which followed it had left me insolvent, not to mention very sad.
Shutting down crossed my mind but so many old customers were coming back, replacing
Victoria Peak dog beds that had served well for years with new ones, that I finally
grasped what all the lovely notes from happy customers, about how much they and
their dogs loved my dog beds, really meant.
I had actually pulled off the proverbial "better mousetrap" and to allow having
done right by my friend to be what took me down just felt wrong and I resolved that
somehow or another Victoria Peak Trading Company would survive.
The bobbing and weaving got pretty creative (it's amazing how much money they'll
let you borrow) but finally, forced to the wall, I had to dump my house in town,
move to the Shenandoah Valley and start looking for a cut-and-sew contractor here
in the United States.
Marta's illness had made operating in Belize expensive but after her death other
problems developed and since I couldn't be full-time in Belize keeping production
on track and also be selling that production in the US at the same time, though
I regretted it terribly, I found myself with no alternative but to shut the Belize
operation down.
To be truthful, despite using American made fabrics, zippers and thread, I had always
felt semi-cheezy about making a product offshore to
be sold here in the States. And although it was
precisely the production's "offshoreness" that allowed me to
explore and plant trees in the Maya Jungle, I stayed conflicted about it the entire
time I manufactured in Belize.
As it turned out, as pleased as I was to be able to say,
"Made in USA", there was
a price to be paid. Production costs doubled just as the flood of imported competition
was cresting and by the middle of 2006 the financial situation got so dire that
anything not contributing directly to the production and distribution of dog beds
went over the side.
Along with having to drop the hosting of a global warming website, I haven't traveled
outside the country in over two years and I've had to accept that the trees I planted
will be looking after themselves for the foreseeable future.
For now, unless the national real estate belly flop gets worse which it well may,
the worst appears to be over. Sales are up a tad in general and the numbers for
Christmas '07 represent a healthy improvement over last year. A leaner, tougher
Victoria Peak Trading Company is still in the game.
So what's next?
Sales are still nothing to write home about and profitability remains elusive, so
the first order of business has to be more and better marketing.
Dogs and their humans love Victoria Peak dog beds once they have the goods in hand,
just not enough dogs know about them. I have a marketing plan, already afoot in
a small way and already showing some small signs of success, so further efforts
along those lines will be made.
Once the cash flow picks back up, the next step would be to return to Central America
and get back to planting trees. For now, you'll find a discussion of some of my
thoughts on that subject on the Plant a Tree page.
When Jared Diamond and E. O. Wilson are both wringing their hands over the threat
of an extinction bottleneck in the next twenty or thirty years, ignoring them
would be extremely unwise. What these Pulitzer Prize winning scientists are worried
about is the potential scenario where we wind up losing the entire planetary ecosystem.
Habitat is key.
Wildlife habitat is under pressure everywhere. Global warming, whatever the truth
of it may be, will only make the effects of that pressure worse and many more species
whose existence is totally dependant upon their natural environment will inch closer
to joining the hundreds of others that we humans have already driven to extinction.
We all need to conserve, promote and plant habitat wherever we can but, because
the neotropics are so species diverse, reconstructed habitat there gets a lot more
bang per buck.
Since 1999 Victoria Peak Trading Company together with our customers (the seedling
and planting expenses were all paid for with funds derived from dog bed sales) have
planted not quite nine hundred indigenous tropical hardwood trees in Belize. In
the course of that process I have learned enough about jungle horticulture to know
how to do very much more and with much better efficiency.
Your purchase of one or a few of the most comfortable, durable, and user friendly
dog beds on the planet will enable me to get back to doing it. Thank you!
Jack Fleming
Pres/CEO Victoria Peak Trading Company
|
