In more than 20 years of war, foreign American soldiers overlooked rubble, destroyed fields, and destroyed houses to see the possibilities.
Some tasted tea for the first time during his unfolding. The other was shot with flip-flops made from combat boots. Female soldiers met women in Afghanistan and imagined the lives of economically empowered women. A military helicopter pilot returned to illness from exposure to burning plastics and changed his view of the environment.
Many veterans are inspired by their combat experience and utilize small business programs to build businesses that are tailored to address the social or economic problems of the countries in which they serve. I attacked with.
Nick Kessler, a veteran advocate who once ran a non-profit consulting firm dedicated to helping businesses inspired by this kind of development, said the veterans behind them said, “Let’s help them. I know the true cost of family instability and conflict. “
“These companies are creating a connection between uniformed life abroad and now civilian life at home,” he said.
Below are the stories of four such businesses.
Brandon Friedman, who grew up in Louisiana, just tried tea in the form of ice and thought it was “the worst thing ever.”
“My tea idea was an English woman with a big hat,” he recalled.
It was Iraq that drank his first real tea, a Kurdish fighter wearing an AK-47 bandolier. It was one of his many spectacular moments during his deployment to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Outside of taste, Friedman said drinking tea in Iraq represented “stopping and slowing down.” “It was a way to get out of everyday life.”
When he returned to Dallas in 2004, he was hunting for a brown bag of loose tea at a halal grocery store. Marriage, graduate school, children, and political work have made my life progress. “I left the war and left tea in the past.”
In 2016, Friedman began studying the origins of the tea he enjoyed. (The black Ceylon tea he had in Iraq came from Sri Lanka and other countries.) He soon began to explore how he could import tea from the former conflict zone. He learned the aroma and taste of each and started to teach tea in earnest.
Working with a non-profit organization and seeking money on a kick starter, he and his army associates (formerly Green Berets) in 2017 in a 250-square-foot office space behind a small building imported from Nepal, Colombia, and Vietnam. Started business in and other countries where it may be difficult to find tea in American stores. It currently has a 2,000-square-foot facility with a storefront and ships 45 teas from 9 countries.
Report from Afghanistan
There was a challenge. In Vietnam, for example, the 300- and 400-year-old wild tea trees that grow in the mountains and forests of the northern states of Ha Giang and Yen Bai are difficult to manage.
Some suppliers were “much more casual about the timeline” and were difficult to push to meet their holiday sales schedule. But the biggest problem arises when post-conflict countries like Myanmar and Ethiopia “return to their current conflicting countries.” On top of that, of course, there were supply chain challenges posed by the pandemic.
Selling tea is an extension of his military mission, said Friedman, who still supports Ceylon tea, which he first drank in Iraq. “I’m convinced that the way out of conflict is for people to talk to each other and do business,” he said. “We call this peace through trade.”
Emily Miller recalls the first deployment to the Army in Afghanistan over a decade ago. At that time, the U.S. military finally realized how culturally inappropriate it was for male military personnel to trample the village and talk to women and children. In 2011, she joined a team tasked with “the remaining 50% of the population has been largely ignored.”
She ended the two developments “quite disillusioned with the efforts of the war and how we are not making a difference.” She believed that business would be a more effective force of good. Shortly after, Miller was at Harvard Business School and had a Skype call with her classmate Kim Jung and her third friend Keith Alanis. Everyone in the call was an Army veteran who had toured Afghanistan.
Alanis told his friends about his second tour in Maidanwaldak and his encounter with saffron farmer Hajj Joseph, who is eager to enter the US market.
The three friends started mixing saffron together. They wondered if they could connect farmers to American restaurants. In the process, they talked about starting a business that could improve the economic situation in rural Afghanistan.
A trip to Afghanistan, where the three met farmers in 2014, sealed plans to make Lumispice, Jung said. (They later added Dari-speaking citizen Carol Wang to the mix.)
“When Saffron came into the room, the room was filled with this wonderful scent that the chef thought he would faint,” Jung recalled their visit. But it’s in a string-wrapped cardboard box that teaches local students and farmers the US standards for packaging and food safety, and years of work to centralize treatment in previously unheard areas. I had a feeling.
Since then, Rumi Spice has trained nearly 4,000 local women to work in their processing and fulfillment centers, some of whom are paid for their work for the first time.
The team was careful not to match the Americans and the Afghan government they supported.
Even after the collapse of the country’s government last year, LumiSpice (now with 12 products in 1,800 stores nationwide) continues to employ thousands of women and farmers.
During his deployment in Iraq, Chris Bido couldn’t help but notice all the trash. There were mountains of it everywhere, and the black haze of pollution darkened the sky. The stink of burning plastic was hanging down.
The military burn pits, a huge dumping ground ignited by jet fuel, glowed so violently that military helicopter pilot Bido was able to navigate with their light.
Mr. Vido was among the tens of thousands of people exposed to burn holes while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, many have filed disability compensation claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Congress also took up their cause.
When Vido returned to Kansas in 2007, he thought he left behind burning waste, as well as many parts of the deployment. But by 2008, his morning run began to suffer. A doctor who had an x-ray said his lungs “looked like 70,” even though he was in his early thirties.
“I started thinking about plastic,” Videau said, and soon he and his wife began to remove it from their homes as much as possible. “It changed my outlook on life.”
But he still couldn’t avoid the plastic laundry detergent tub. In 2017, he began researching whether laundry sheets could replace standard soaps. After some complex negotiations with a company that holds patents for such seats, Videau and his partners started their business. They immediately sold 25,000 boxes of soap sheets.
Since the first year, Sheets Laundry Club has sold more than $ 9 million and has blocked the sale of more than 615,000 plastic containers, Bido said.
“The intention wasn’t to raise awareness of Burnpit,” he said. “It was to create a sustainable business for my family. I believe that if we do the right thing, money will come.”
Mr. Vido’s journey has been completed. He now insists on donating his products to foreign troops.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “I know what it’s like not to receive mail.”
Matthew Griffin is a fourth-generation military man, and West Point graduates entered the war shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “I grew up in’Rambo’and thought the best way to serve my country was to be an Army Ranger,” he said.
After resigning as captain in 2006, Griffin found a way to the world of contracts and returned to Afghanistan in 2008 to help establish a clinic.
One day he visited a combat boots factory in Kabul. There he was impressed by the workers making boots that emulated flip-flops. Many Afghan fighters who had their shoelaces removed seemed to “lose tens of thousands of hours a day” suffering from the vast shoelaces of their combat boots.
The factory owners invented military sandals that “conform to their cultural norms,” Griffin said. After the war, when the owner told him that there were no plans for the factory, Mr Griffin sought to transform the business into a viable and permanent one that would benefit the country that once fought.
He called another ranger companion, Donald Lee, and they figured out how to get Afghan shoes into the American market. They started making flip-flops in the country in 2012 and “immediately failed,” he said. They eventually moved production to Colombia, benefiting from a bilateral trade agreement with the United States, and began selling Combat Flip Flops online in 2013.
“When we first started, our customers were 80 percent of the army and army families,” Griffin said.
As they added scarves, bags and jewelry made in Afghanistan, Laos and the United States, their customer base grew and diversified. After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan last year, Combat Flip Flops pivoted a textile factory in Afghanistan and made blankets and winter clothing for refugees Afghanistan suffering from the harsh winter. Part of the proceeds from the sale will be used to fund girls’ education in Afghanistan, demining in Laos, and services to wounded soldiers in Washington. “It was a pretty wild vehicle,” Griffin said.
