Last year, we got an out-of-the-blue email from a group we’d never heard of called This Good World. Most of the time, those emails hold links to low-cost Canadian pharmaceuticals, Nigerian prices in need of financial help, or ways to “please my lady in the bedroom” (hey-O!).

Luckily, This Good World wasn’t interested in any of that. No, they were actually in the midst of their initial membership building for their new Web service which aims to become a sort of craigslist or Angie’s List for customers who like their consumerism to have a benevolent edge.

We wanted to find out more about the idea behind TGW, so we talked with founders, Gavin Thomas + Lisa Kribs-LaPierre (above).

raven + crow: So, first off, for anyone who doesn’t already know, tell us what This Good World is.

Gavin Thomas + Lisa Kribs-LaPierre: This Good World is a platform that connects and supports good businesses so individuals can more easily discovery and support them, too.

Succinct; I like it. So how did it start—what made you all think of this in the first place?

It really started as a “scratch our own itch” project. We always had a tough time finding businesses that share the same values as us. We like supporting businesses and organizations that do really great things…it was just too hard to find them.

Makes sense. So how did you find the businesses that were involved up front? Like, how did you find us?

We spent a lot of time researching companies of all different shapes, sizes, industries and structures in our initial target cities. We identified a good mix of different types of companies doing different types of good and reached out to them directly. It was really important to us to not only highlight different types of business members right out of the gate, but also bring in businesses and organizations that could offer unique specialties and resources when the time comes for them to collaborate with one another to bring more good to the world.

Cool. Now, this is a broad one, but how do you define ‘good’?

Our short answer: This Good World never wants to be the judge of who or what is “good” or “not good enough” (passes/fails, wins/loses, etc.). The step up to that pedestal is too high for us, so we’d rather not try to go there.

Long version: Most importantly, we recognize and celebrate that we (as individuals) probably each define good differently on some level. That set the stage for our approach to the purposeful lack of definition or judgement of what’s good and what’s not. Through This Good World, each business gets to highlight what they think is “good,” while each individual who visits the site gets to decide who they want to support based on their individual interpretation of good. There are a lot of certification agencies and orgs out there that set out to define good by a list or test and tell others what ‘good’ is. We really admire and support these organizations. However, we just happen to believe ‘good’ should be left up to everyone individually. We also believe good of all sizes deserves to be highlighted, celebrated and supported on an equal playing field. While the so-called “impact scale” of varying types of good may differ, the importance of each bit of good is equally great.

Yeah, I imagine you’d never do anything but deliberate if you got caught up in the whole “good enough” debate on individual members. Do you feel like you all are re-creating something that used to exist maybe more naturally in smaller, less…connected societies? Like town hall meetings?

Funny you should mention this.

Our approach and collaborative mission is based on the recognition of “how it used to be.” Businesses, especially in small towns, seemed to come together in one room to talk about problems, challenges, objectives, events…the list goes on…all centered around ways they could use their business or organization resources to make their town a better place. Individuals in that town knew which businesses were making these extra efforts and, more often than not, those were the ones they supported. Given the hyperconnection and technologies we have today, why can’t we do this on a much larger scale? We think we can.

Yeah, it’s funny, when you think about it—and I’m sure much more agile minds than mine have tackled this concept with more depth + success—but the internet may give us the ability for the first time ever to be a large, yet still healthy, peaceful society via more effective communication. I don’t want to come across as a doe-eyed dreamer, but I’ve always thought that, for the most part, if you set any two people down for long enough, no matter how different they are, they’ll get along eventually because they’ll grow closer and closer to understanding each other. And the further a group gets from that initial concept and the more a society grows, the harder communication gets. But now we have the means to communicate instantly and so effectively. Was that something you all were trying to tap into somewhat…or am I just rambling at this point?

Love your way of thinking on the background of this question. We definitely agree. Today’s technology has a funny way of making the world feel smaller. Targeted discussion around one particular goal (in this case, doing more good) can lead to real action…and real action at scale.

Nice. So you all launched in, what, mid-January? How’s it going so far?

Things are great! We’re loving reading the stories of all these amazing brands and organizations who are doing good. It’s really, truly inspirational for us and makes what we’re doing fun. 

Awesome. Post-launch, do you all have a new phase of work you’re in now? Are you focusing on finding more businesses to bring in or…something else?

We have a ton going on post launch, but really have three main focuses right now:
First, we’re definitely focused on growing our membership and user/visitor community.
Second, we’re actively starting to push out content and the stories about our current members and the good they are doing. We’ve gotten a ton of positive response from this content and are super pumped that it’s providing a good amount of support to our members. We’ve had a surprising amount of “we went there because of what we saw/read” or “one of our customers mentioned This Good World,” which is really exciting for us this early in the game. We’re going to do as much sharing and storytelling as possible.
Third, we’re really focusing on the collaboration piece—both building the on-site tools our members can use to talk to one another and making direct introductions between current members that we think can do really great things together.

From a technical/design sense, one good problem I could see you all having with the map interface is getting too many participants making it really hard to find what you’re searching for. Any plans to add a filter-by-service/-product kind of filter or anything?

We’ll be rolling out some cool filters for the map soon…stay tuned.

Nice. As of now, it looks like you all are covering stateside and then a company in Manchester—any plans to pull in companies from other countries?

The current international members actually reached out to us, which was great. We stress inclusion and openness with this platform, so we definitely didn’t want to turn them away. We’re focusing our outreach on the US right now, but definitely plan to move beyond that geographically when it makes sense.

Want to give a quick shout-out to any awesome and/or interestingly quirky This Good World businesses that people might like to hear about?

There’s a really great creative agency called raven + crow out in LA that we really dig!

Oh, stop.

Beyond that, we can honestly say that each member has their own really awesome story, so it’s genuinely hard to give a shout out to individual ones. That said, we are telling some individual stories through our site and social channels, so we recommend checking those out!

Not to make this into a crummy commercial, but, for any business-owners reading this who might want to get involved, what’s the best way to do so?

Really simple – just head to thisgoodworld.com/join to see the different options of membership and select the one that makes the most sense.

And say someone doesn’t own a business, per se, but wants to get involved—anything they can do?

On an individual level, we threw together a page that details some ways to get involved, but, mainly, just checking out the site and supporting our members either with their wallets or voices, and following us on twitter/facebook where we spread the good word and invite everyone else to, too.

Superb!

You can find out more about This Good World on their site and/or the group’s Facebook page. And, if you haven’t already, feel free to check out their spotlight piece on us from a little while back.

Just added to the design portfolio—our work for the twice-yearly fund-raising events held by the California League of Conservation Voters. CLCV is the non-partisan political action arm of California’s environmental movement, working to protect the environmental quality of the state by increasing public awareness of the environmental performance of all elected officials, get environmentally responsible candidates elected, and then holding them accountable to the environmental agenda once elected.

The work we did for their most recent event (above) references the Lilya Brik poster art by Russian artist, Alexander Rodchenko, bringing into play additional California- and environmentally centric illustrations.

You can see more materials from this past year’s events and previous events in our print portfolio.

In honor of the best summer movie of all time—Dazed and Confused—and the stellar year that the honorable Mr. Matthew McConaughey has been having, Katie made this excellent poster, which now and forever hangs on our wall.

Hats off to you, sir, and keep on L-I-V-I-N!

One we thing we love about LA is our particular neighborhood—Beachwood Canyon. It was a part of town we knew absolutely nothing about seven months ago, but it has this unique, small-town charm to it that we never would have expected from Los Angeles. There are local theatre performances in an old silent movie theatre, bingo nights, square-dance jamborees, and we’re told our particular street is “legendary” for its street-closing Halloween parties.

At the hub of much of the community activity is the Beachwood Cafe—a beautifully designed, sun-filled cafe about halfway to the Hollywood sign up Beachwood Drive. We took a little time out to talk with owner, Patti Peck, about the cafe and to find out more about our new neighborhood and what makes it so special.

raven + crow: So, how did Beachwood Cafe start? I hear there used to be a more scaled back coffee shop there before you all opened.

Patti Peck: Right, the same family operated it for 37 years and I remember coming up here in the 80s and being aware of what a time bubble it was (and still is). I loved the feeling of the place, so when the landlords asked chefs and restaurateurs to put in their proposals, I jumped at the opportunity. And here we are.

Who did your interior design? We LOVE the wallpaper and overall aesthetic.

Thank you so much for saying that. We got a lot of grief about the changes we made to the place at first, but Barbara Bestor—who is the goddess diva of architecture and design in Los Angeles—was very mindful of echoing the old place (instead of the slash and burn approach) with a fresh face.

And the logo/branding? Again, we’re fans—such a nice blue.

Yep, again that’s Barbara I have to thank for our logo. Someone on her team has a letterpress printing and design company called Krankpress, and she’s a genius named Elinor Nissley.

Well it’s awesome. It all works so well with the cheery mood of the space. How would you describe the cafe to someone who hadn’t been before? I feel like you’ve got takes on pretty traditional cafe fare and home cooking, but then you’ve got some nice dishes like your bowls + your banh mi with some Western influences.

I would describe it as a healthy California coffee shop. We make everything from scratch including our pickles and jams and we source all of our proteins and produce very carefully so we can make the cleanest and tastiest food possible. We do have some ‘all over the map’ dishes on our menu and that’s because the menu has evolved through consensus—these are the things that stuck.

While we’re on it, is it possible to do the chicken banh mi with tofu instead of chicken? …we love banh mi….

Oh gosh yes—why didn’t we think of that? I’m going to put it on the next menu, which is coming soon. Thanks for that.

Oh awesome. We will promptly eat that. Even to an outsider or someone first visiting the cafe, I think it’s fairly obvious that you really try to emphasize local and house-made foods and ingredients. Was that something that was important to you going into this?

I grew up on a farm and I am always trying to get back to that place where you are close to the land and make everything on your table, including the table itself. Also, the first people I met in Beachwood Canyon were the residents who were just starting the Hollywood Orchard, which is a virtual community orchard. Lucky for me, they are really great and do fun stuff in the community, which I get to be a part of. Also, I get to be a recipient for local fruit that gets canned or jellied.

Yeah yeah yeah! We had no idea we were moving to Ground Zero for the Hollywood Orchard when we moved to Beachwood. We were just planting some new trees with the team a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, I don’t know who thought of starting the orchard, but I’m so glad they did. We made grilled loquats last year that went on a pork chop and Minh made some coffee cake with them; she also pickled some.

Right—we heard that Chef Minh, who helped open the restaurant, has moved on after these initial few years. I know that was planned from the start, but how do you see that changing the Cafe in the near- or long-term?

Minh brought so many good flavors to the menu and we’ve kept a good percentage of them as our back bone, but it changes depending on who’s designing the menu and how the backbone fits the body.

Nicely put. We’re both long-time vegans, so we were especially excited to see so many vegan options on your menus. Do you feel like there’s more of a need for restaurants to cater to a meat-free crowd than there has been in the past?

Yes, and I hope that keeps expanding until it gets popular with our country’s interior. I think so many people think of eating vegan as a punishment—I know I did once—but I feel like it is more sophisticated and comfortable for people to cook vegan now than it used to be. I mean, you still have the vegan food that is trying to mock chicken or bbq beef, and is all processed, but I like the vegan food that is delicious because of the same things that make all food delicious, ie., the sweet and sour or salty and the crunch vs mush ratio. Just honest ingredients in a clever combination; that’s what i like.

Hah. I’m going to start a band called Crunch vs Mush. Love it. Now, I know you all have daily specials—Taco Tuesday; Whatever Wednesday; Curry Thursday; Fish n Chips Friday—but we haven’t check any of those out yet. Are any of those…veganizable? …I know, that’s totally not a word. Oh, and what’s ‘Whatever Wednesday’—culinary catch-all?

Yes, we can do tofu tacos and the curry on Thursday is…oops, no it’s not vegan because it has fish sauce in the curry paste…darn it. Also, Wednesday became Meaty Meat Pie Wednesday, so not vegan there.

Ooh, if you’re keen on trying other curry pastes, the brand we use is mostly vegan except for a few of their kinds (Maesri is the brand—I think they do bulk sales). Just a thought, but definitely let us know if you give them a try. We can be official taste-testers. So tell us more about what drew you to open a cafe in Beachwood specifically? What do you like about it?

It’s a small town in the middle of the big bad city. I love the kids and the families and how Astrid’s parents told her if she ever gets lost, to just go to the cafe and we would take care of her. So it’s the community that draws me here and our cafe is an anchor in the community. It’s a place for people to connect.

Ah. I don’t know who Astrid is, but that’s super-cute. Do you get a ton of people coming in asking for directions to the Hollywood sign?

Yes and we tell them directions are free with purchase. 

Nice. Any specific goals or future plans for the cafe?

We just started doing delivery and that’s going well. I am in the process of expanding our baked goods with some savory and sweet stuff, as well as vegan and gluten-free options. Then I want to tackle a prepared food division for families to stop and get dinner to take home.

Oh, that’s cool.

Oh and let me plug this cooking show that will air in April that I’m a contestant on—it’s called Chopped and I had so much fun doing it. When it airs, we’re going to do the menu from the show that night and watch the show in the cafe—can you come? It’ll be fun!

We’ll totally come!

Becahwood Cafe is located at 2695 N. Beachwood Drive and open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner Tuesday – Saturday; breakfast + lunch Sundays. You can view their menu online and take a look to see if they deliver to your area. We recommend the vegan burger and Sophia’s Bowl.

Below, the cafe menu; Sophia’s Bowl; the vegan burger; Katie enjoying a fresh basil lemonade; a Red Eye; Hollywood Orchard merch; house-made pickles; and window butterflies.

We have this potentially mythical concept, I think, that one day we’ll finally be ‘settled’ in our new lives here in California and that, somehow, things will suddenly become normal. That may well be true—though, if it is, I’m sure it’ll be one of those realities you only recognize well after it’s become a fact—but, regardless, I’m beginning to realize two things:
1. Normalcy isn’t arriving any time soon; and
2. Our normal lives here, in LA, are going to be very different than our normal lives in Brooklyn.

That last bit should be obvious, and it is if it’s thought or talked out, I think—it’s why we made these big life changes, after all, for something different + new. But it’s still something we consciously have to remind ourselves of because I think our natural tendency is to wait for the normalcy we left behind that was our former lives.

All of that serves to say—in a wildly over-dramatic, long-winded manner, I might add—that I have to keep stopping myself from saying ‘Now that we’re starting to get settled in, (insert things we’ve been meaning to do).’

So, without having found a good alternative as of yet…. Now that we’re starting to get settled in, we’ve finally managed to add the work we did on MooShoes‘ new Web site to our portfolio.

As you may or may not know, MooShoes is a NYC-based shoe + accessories store that specializes in cruelty-free (i.e. – leather-free) products. What’s more, after 12+ years of being in business, MooShoes has become an institution of sorts, with their Orchard Street store serving as a de facto hub of the cultural + social side of the animal rights realm and their online presence growing year by year.

We’re happy to count sisters and store-owners, Erica + Sara Kubersky, as friends of ours after so many years of work, so we were more than happy to dig in deep when they asked us to work with the company they’d chosen to overhaul their point-of-sale system and site back-end, NYC-based Microbizit.

After rounds of initial front-end designs and proposed site structures, we created a number of page templates that covered the extent of the fully built-out site and then trouble-shot the design as Microbizit worked to put our design into action. After the initial site went into development, we built out brand + category pages with custom headers and continued to edit copy + imagery leading up to the site launch.

The final product updated the MooShoes site to bring it up-to-speed with modern, mainstream online stores while growing the brand we developed for them back in 2005 + 2006.

Take a look at the site in full when you get a chance—who couldn’t use another pair of shoes?

For more information on why we choose not to support the leather industry, check out PETA’s write-up, including a message from Stella McCartney, a handy infographic (also pictured to the right), and a cruelty-free clothing guide.

Clearly we like this.

Greeting cards + matching pins by Portland, Oregon’s Phun House. See their full line of greeting cards, pins, really awesome medals, and various other gifts on their site.

Many friends + clients may already know this about me, but I have a mild-to-emphatic obsession with the non-standard punctuation mark, the interrobang.

If you don’t know already, the interrobang is a little-used but wildly useful punctuation mark that combines the exclamation point and the question mark into one elegantly functional mark that clearly, intuitive expresses any of the following: “?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”; “WTF?”; “WHAAAAAAAAT?!”; “HUH?!”; “I AM CURRENTLY EXPRESSING SURPRISE, SHOCK, AND POTENTIALLY JUDGMENTAL DISBELIEF!”; and so on.

The interrobang—in its unquestionable sophisticated state of style + grace—doesn’t trifle with all-caps or redundant punctuation. No, in a single simple-yet-effective stroke, the interrobang communicates what so many taps on a tiny, tiny keyboard can not nearly so well.

According to Wikipedia:
“American Martin K. Speckter conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. …He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin for “a rhetorical question” or “cross-examination”; bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation mark.”

So tragic, some might say, that such a useful punctuation mark is so difficult to put to use. There exists no pre-set keyboard shortcut on conventional computer operating systems or hand-held devices (I’ve seen it written that typing alt+8253 on a computer keyboard will result in an interrobang, but when I do that on a Mac, I get •™∞£, so it may indeed be the one up PCs have on Macs…).

On my work + home computers, I literally just keep a TextEdit window open at all times so I can easily switch between programs and copy + paste the mark with relative ease to express my outrage/confused shock. It’s less than ideal, but it gets the job done.

On my iPhone, the situation was far more dire—I’ve perpetually kept the Wikipedia entry on the interrobang open and, when I deem it appropriate to use, I painstakingly leave the app I’m in, head to Safari, highlight the word next to the interrobang in the entry as the mark’s too small to highlight on its own, extend the highlight area to include the interrobang, reduce it to not include the extra text, copy, return to the app in which I want to use the mark, and paste. No fun.

So I was elated to find that someone smarter than I came up with a much more streamlined solution for interrobang use. A self-described Apple nerd spells out the particulars on his blog Traveling Nerd, which we’ve written out and updated slightly for the most recent iOS.

1. Find an interrobang online, like this one—‽
2. Press, hold, and copy the interrobang
3. Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Add New Shortcut (at the bottom of the screen)
4. Paste the interrobang in as the “Phrase” and enter an exclamation followed by a question mark with no separating space for the shortcut
5. Tap Save
6. Repeat using the same two punctuation marks in the reverse order (“?!”)
7. Tap Save

Anytime you want to insert an interrobang in your text, email, et cetera, just type ?! or !? on your phone, and you’re good to go. What‽

Now, will someone please start a petition at change.org to get Apple, Microsoft, and all other smartphone + computer companies to make this a standard character with a set shortcut? I know there’s a lot going on in Syria and Ukraine and Venezuela and stuff, but this is a serious issue people. Serious.