Being my Boss – Joshua Onysko

September 25, 2006 in Being My Boss

A high-school dropout and a vagabond by nature, Joshua Onysko, has probably done it all. When I interviewed him, I remarked how he has lived several lives in this one lifetime, a feat many of us aspire to achieve. Barely 30 years old, Joshua has stories to share. Real stories. Perhaps he can share with you his experiences saving green sea-turtles in Nicaragua or maybe you can chat with him about his time working for the Yakuza, peddling fake Louis Vuitton bags in Tokyo. But mostly, Joshua only has one story to share. And he does that through his company, Pangea Organics.

The story

While visiting his parents in upstate New York before leaving for a trip to India with a one-way ticket, Joshua glanced upon a soap-making book on his mother’s living room. Curious about the process, he bought the ingredients from Whole Foods the next day and made a batch of soap with his Mom and was quite excited with the experience. After giving some soap away to friends and family, he took two bars with him to India and quickly depleted them in a few months. Short on cash, he returned to America to pick up another job and save some more money so he could sustain hsi wanderlust. But instead, he just made a couple batches of soap and sold them at a garage sale and scooted back to yet another far-flung place in the world. As he traveled through the world, he realized how little Americans knew about outside it’s peripheries and ambiguous ideas about starting some kind of a non-profit started taking form in his head.

By the time he hit 24, he was running out of money and had been traveling for a few years. On one serendipitious moment, Joshua met with a friend in Thailand and revealed to him that he was going to start a non-profit institute in America that educated corporations on sustainable living and business practices. He had seen plenty in the world outside and it was time to go back and do something worthwhile. "My friend said to me, why don’t you start a company that mirrors what you want your non-profit to teach. And you should name it Pangea," said Joshua. (I asked why Pangea —Pangea because when the world was one huge land-mass, it was called Pangea. Remember 4th grade geography?!)

So Joshua returned to America, moved to Colorado, found a job as a baker at Whole Foods and sold his homemade soap at garage sales. Today, five years later, Pangea Organics operates out of a wind powerd 10,000 sq foot factory overlooking the mountains in Boulder, Colorado and is the largest organic products factory in the country.

The philosophy

This is perhaps the most difficult part of my interview to narrate. How do you really convey the rich and profoundly impactful practice that Pangea is founded upon? For instance, the lowest minimum wage that Pangea pays it’s employees is $12.50/hour. "Even if he’s just coming in to sweep the floors," stresses Joshua. "That’s what it really costs to live here(USA)" And all his employees recieve full health and insurance coverage. Additionally, a chef comes in every afternoon and prepares organic meals for the employees.

Every tiny detail from packaging Pangea products to sourcing the materials for the products breathe the notions of sustainability. "It is a new paradigm of corporate culture," says Joshua. Pangea is working on a new kind of product packaging that once the empty package is immersed in water, it will be able to grow tiny plants like basil. Some kind of embedded seed technology, I suppose. But the point is, Pangea hasn’t left a venue un-explored or a method untried if it falls within it’s vision.

I haven’t used any of Pangeal products. I only learnt of the company a few days ago and was intrigued enough to speak with Joshua. But Pangea does not use petroleum based ingredients or artificial colors in any of their products. They company practices fair-trade and all products are handcrafted.

Spreading the word

Even as the company enters it’s first year of profitability, it relies largely on its customers and people that believe in it’s philosophy to spread the word. "I don’t want to band-aid something Jinal, I want to fix it." Joshua tells me. "This is an experiment and if people accept it, it will succeed." Joshua talks to anyone who will listen and to people that believe and support his cause. The company has hired a National Educator who flies city-to-city, holding sampling parties with organic cheese and wine. Literally, reminds me of the time door-to-door salesmanship was powerful enough to drive sales. Now, there’s also the internet and a consciousness about doing good, being good. Really, there’s no excuse pleading ignorance anymore. And thanks to the media and social entrepreneurs like Joshua, there is a growing awareness about companies that support pure practices. As Joshua said, "The future lies in the fringe and we are as fringe as it gets."

Did you know:

You can go to Starbucks and ask them to french-press you a fair-trade coffee?

Only 8% of Americans have passports?

Women grow 70% of world’s food and the own only 3% of world’s land?