The Man Behind OrganiMark
Heinrich Schultz founded OrganiMark in July 2008, with the aim of creating sustainable value chains through long-term strategic partnerships with industry value chain stakeholders, aligned with OrganiMark’s brand integrity and identity to promote economic, social and environmental responsibility.
For many years, retailers and brands have relied on lowest-cost sourcing and distribution strategies to enhance profits and grow sales, but these improvements have begun to show diminishing marginal returns and high sustainability risks. Having joined the Textile Exchange in 2007, Heinrich witnessed the frustration of many brands and retailers to scale sustainable sourcing initiatives into the core of their commercial business operations, while their sourcing and merchant functions battled to come to terms with the business process changes required to do so.
This brought the realisation that the next big frontier would be to develop and implement a retail business model that effectively combines Sustainable Sourcing and Quick Response with Value Chain Optimisation – which has been the main inspiration for Heinrich’s work over the past 10 years. During this time, he worked with various international and national brands and their value chains to develop a model that offers an innovative solution to enable brands to virtually integrate their value chains, which has culminated in OrganiMark’s Integrated Value Chain Programme (IVCP) model.