What is Outsider Innovation?
Following the belief that it’s possible to build better products, more efficiently and with a lower environmental footprint, Ben Galphin founded Outsider Innovation to share and accelerate adoption of cutting-edge best practices in sustainability, social responsibility and material innovation. We work with companies in the Carolinas, the United States and Internationally, considering worldwide current events, recent developments and burgeoning trends to ask the right questions in the right parts of the consumption and value chain. By drawing from an international contact base across broad expertise and providing more than a decade of in-depth experience building, selling and using some of today’s most technical and sustainable products, Outsider Innovation can bring new solutions to the drawing board.
Ben Galphin
I founded Outsider Innovation with the belief that a responsibly made product is not only better for the planet and its people, but also the company that made it.
Who is the founder Outsider Innovation?
Ben spent most of his early years outside, giving him an appreciation for our natural resources and beautiful places. While pursuing his Textile Engineering degree at North Carolina State University, he worked in retail sales for a major outdoor gear supplier. This close, daily interaction with customers and manufacturers helped him develop an appreciation for the importance of the customer’s voice to a product’s success.
Following university, Ben found a role in Patagonia, Inc., working with their renowned Quality Lab. Through his time at the company he gained extensive hands-on experience working with international and domestic manufacturers, testing and developing technical materials and product, and eventually was responsible for the material innovation strategy for some of the company’s most technical material and product.
Working alongside some of the best people in the industry, Ben and his team oversaw materials for more than four-hundred million dollars of product growing in sales by greater than thirty percent in five years. They helped improve the lives of over two-thousand workers in the company’s tier two and tier three manufacturing supply chains and increased the company’s responsible material usage to over seventy percent of the raw materials.
Inspired that companies can be successful through dedication to a multiple-bottom-line, Ben began Outsider Innovation, a company dedicated to the belief that better product is ultimately better for our planet and its people, more sustainable and profitable.
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