Tegu ToyWorks: Wooden Toys Create Jobs And Protect Environment

One of the greatest challenges of sustainable development is to decouple world economic growth with negative climate impact. It's not an easy task, but some young social entrepreneurs are devising impressive solutions. Residents of Guayabo, Sawacito and Mahor, villages in the rainforest of northeastern Honduras, used to take part in the rampant illegal trade in mahogany, but recently they have formed a cooperative and learned to harvest the prized wood in sustainable ways. Currently, they harvest only fallen trees and do it in a sustainable way. They are working on getting certification for their wood from the Rainforest Alliance and they already have a big customer, the famous U.S. guitar company Gibson (who I'm sure will capitalize on sustainable branding). The wood harvesters are doing better business now than ever, but they still suffer from a problem common to almost all sustainable initiatives: in order to continue sustainable policy, more wood products will need to be sold to finance operations (good decisions come at a cost). In order to continue their sustainable logging, they need new customers which is why Craig Doescher (MIT Sloan) has started Tegu Toyworks, a company that will be based in Honduras and manufacture wooden toys for export to stores in the United States and Europe. The toys, crafted by Honduran craftspeople, will be high-end, innovative creations, appealing to all discerning consumers who will pay a premium allowing Doescher to pay his employees nice wages. Doescher is keeping his workers in mind not only for social reasons, but also because he once worked in a manufacturing plant prior to arriving at Sloan. Tegu Toyworks hopes to have its first factory in operation by next year. Currently, the founders are struggling with determining the right mix of human and machine input. Eventually, Doescher would like to see the Hondurans take over the management positions; one social goal of the project is to promote entrepreneurship among the Hondurans. Therefore, the right systems will need to be developed and deployed to automate most of the production process. Tegu is currently entered in the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition. We wish them the best of luck in their noble cause and will follow up with results!