Commerce with a Conscience: Parks Project

Many of our favorite adrenaline outlets happen to be national parks. And we’re not the only ones, as some parks see millions of visitors each year. Parks Project knows that heavy traffic makes constant upkeep necessary. When you purchase a Parks Project product like a 5-panel cap, leather passport cover or park-centric T-shirts, proceeds fund preservation efforts around the country. Here’s an inside view from a recent conversation with Project leaders. 

Active Junky: How does Parks Project partner with parks and conservation groups?

Parks Project: We take referrals from the National Parks Foundation on which groups/organizations are the best potential partners. From there, we conduct due diligence and research to assess their park-specific impact. Conversations follow to understand which projects to spotlight and how we can support them via sales of our T-shirts. As we sell batches of 50 T-shirts, we incrementally fund portions of the project, hopefully selling lots of T-shirts, funding the entire project and closing out the work! (Check out our about us section on out website to see a list of our projects.) 

AJ: What’s your favorite project/shirt you’ve worked on and why? 

PP: We really enjoyed working on the Channel Islands T-shirt because it's close to home for us. It was an incredible experience to do a volunteer day on the island. We recently posted in our Field Notes section about how that experience went; boy, is it another world out there. Also, the graphic designer that worked on the project, Gabriel Lactman, is very passionate about this park, so the design encapsulates the wildlife project and magic of the landscape on the islands. 

AJ: What was one of the toughest projects you worked on?

PP: We enjoy using these projects as a means to discover new amazing places, and there are so many awesome parks across America. It’s been fun to highlight some of the lesser-known parks because those are the gems that we should all experience. White Sands National Monument is an incredible landscape, but it’s actually hard to translate into a graphic design a T-shirt. However, after visiting it and understanding it’s closed a few times a year for missile testing, we had some great ideas for an exciting T-shirt!