Dolphin Blue Targets Small Firms and Government

Way back in 1992, Thomas Kemper, then an office products sales executive and environmental activist in Dallas, noticed that a local Shakespeare festival was not recycling all the bottles and papers theater goers were leaving behind. There might, he thought, be a market for these goods.

He volunteered his time and effort to collect the recyclables, but could only find one local junkyard to take them. He soon realized that (a) that the most commonly recycled item was paper and (b) nobody wanted recycled material unless they could be used to make other products.

The next year, that led Kemper to found Dolphin Blue (http://www.dolphinblue.com), a $2 million-a-year company that sells office stationery, business cards, recycled toner cartridges and the like to small businesses and government agencies.

Getting off the ground wasn’t easy, Kemper recalls.

In the past two and a half years, business has picked up for Dolphin Blue, which Kemper attributes in part to the efforts of former vice president Al Gore and a subsequent growing public awareness of environmental matters.

The four-person company now boasts about 1,600 customers from the ranks of small to medium sized businesses in addition to the Social Security Administration, for which Dolphin Blue last year manufactured and sold nearly 80 million envelopes made from recycled material, Kemper notes.

Today, more than 95% of Dolphin Blue’s business comes in through its Web site, says Kemper, noting the company relies heavily on search engine optimization to draw in customers.

“If people go to the Web and want office supplies, no matter what the item is if they Google that word and put the word recycled in front of it, we will come up 1-2-3,” says Kemper, noting this has been the case for about the past two and a half years.

Indeed, a spot check of Google unpaid listings earlier this week ranked Dolphin Blue at number four for “recycled office products” and number five for “recycled envelopes.”

At this moment, Dolphin Blue is looking for opportunities in specific industries such as financial services as well as design and architecture, “because from what I’ve seen there’s been so much conversation about sustainability and green building so it just makes sense,” says Kemper.

In five years, he hopes to bring Dolphin Blue’s annual sales volume up to $20 million.