In Colonial America, most houses had their own cow to provide milk, and were situated near a community lime pit for agricultural and construction uses, says Anne Thibeau, president of the Old-Fashioned Milk Paint Co. Itinerant painters wandered the countryside, offering their services to homesteaders and shopkeepers. They carried rainbow sets of pigments, which, when mixed with a customer’s own milk and lime, would create a milk paint that added soft color to furniture and walls.

Working alongside migrant farm workers in California as a young man, Thomas Fricke developed an appreciation for organic agriculture firsthand, dodging the pesticides raining from the overhead crop dusters.

As the daughter of a State Department diplomat and social investment professional, Sylvia Blanchet grew up with an interest in international affairs and a tendency toward economic activism.

Humans have harvested honey, our oldest sweetener, for thousands of years. As recently as 100 years ago, honey was still typically sold as a raw and unheated product, which tended to crystallize within a month of its harvest. Although gentle warming easily returns crystallized honey to a liquid state, modern honey production methods strive to keep most super-market honey in its liquid form for as long as one year by introducing heating and filtration steps that also strip most of the nutritional value from the finished product. Honey Garden Apiaries, a direct-to-consumer producer of raw honey in Hinesburg, Vermont, still harvests its products the old-fashioned way. Its final product retains traces of pollen, beeswax and “propolis” (a resinous substance made from leaves and tree bark) within the honey, all of which add healthful minerals, vitamins, enzymes, and amino acids.

Eric Hudson’s dentist always told him he needed to hold his toothbrush at a 45-degree angle when cleaning his teeth, but Hudson hadn’t found a brush shaped to encourage that positioning. By using boiling water to soften conventional toothbrushes, he was able to bend them into a shape he found more comfortable—and that dental professionals praised. In 1996, Hudson combined his dental-hygiene interest with his environmental dedication and business expertise when he founded Recycline, which manufactures toothbrushes made from recycled plastic.

Stacey Edgar didn’t intend to launch a women’s Fair Trade boutique. “I had no idea how to start a business,” admits Edgar, the founder and president of Global Girlfriend.

But in early 2003, Edgar’s mother-in-law was working at the UN World Food Program, and her overseas site visits sparked something in Edgar. Her mother-in-law would return from abroad with beautiful, handmade souvenirs for her, full of stories of the impoverished women trying to sell their goods in developing countries like Afghanistan.

When Levi-Strauss moved its last US-based blue-jeans plant to Mexico in 2004, company spokespeople insisted that such outsourcing was an unfortunate necessity for businesses to survive.

The Certified Jean Co. respectfully disagrees. Since 1999, Certified Jean has manufactured men’s and women’s blue jeans right here in the United States, without a thought of moving overseas. From the cotton grown in Texas and California, to the fabric milled and manufactured in North Carolina, to the final dyeing of the jeans that takes place in Certified Jean’s home-base of Seattle, their blue jeans are 100-percent home-grown. All that, and they’re made with organic cotton besides.