Federico Garcea

Since 2021, Marcolin has worked together with Treedom, the digital platform that enables companies and businesses to plant trees and help “re-green” our planet, thus ensuring that tons of Co2 are absorbed. To learn more about it, we met Treedom founder and CEO Federico Garcea, who was recently hosted at the first Marcolin Talk at the Milan showroom.

In 2006, after many jobs, I ended up working in a bank in Barcelona. A job that I found boring, however. Every day was exactly the same, I felt like I wasn’t making a contribution to the world. One day, though, I got a phone call from a group of ambitious environmental engineers whom I had met in Copenhagen: they wished to implement renewable energy projects in Africa and so, suddenly, I quit my banking job and embraced the environmental cause. We soon came to terms with the big illegal deforestation issue in Africa: farmers earned their living by selling off hectares of forest land, where trees were being cut down. And that’s when we got the idea of creating a project that could support farmers to plant rather than cut down trees. At the time, moreover, I often played an online game that allowed you to build virtual farms, so I used to buy trees to adorn my virtual farm. In the end, we joined the dots and thought of creating an online platform where people could buy real trees, an idea which we thought could work. And that’s what happened. Today, by combining sustainability with the digital world, more than 4 million trees have been planted across the world thanks to Treedom».

«Treedom today works with over 10,000 companies in Italy and around the world, companies spanning across all sectors, basically. And while in the beginning we were being contacted by energy-intensive companies for the most part, today we are happy to work with businesses that have already started going green, so it’s a lot easier and more natural for us to connect and find common ground with them. It’s all about the numbers: an ever-increasing number of businesses have embraced sustainability, not only by planting trees. Our collaboration with Marcolin, for instance, started thanks to our collaboration with one of their license brands, Timberland Eyewear, and then extended to the whole Group and became part of their corporate strategy. The initial goal was to plant 10,000 trees, now we’ve reached more than 15,000. The idea is to continue this collaboration over the next years, planting forests all over the world and thus supporting the local communities».

«Even though the signs we’re getting from the planet are far from encouraging, a lot has changed over the past 15 years. Ten years ago, just 1 business out of 10 used to embrace sustainability, today it’s the opposite and the only business that hasn’t put the issue on its agenda is more than likely destined to shut down. It’s a positive message, promoted by the whole Fridays for Future movement, which changed the rules of the game. Sustainability today is imperative if you want to make your business survive, grow and prosper in the market and I think that this upward movement is an extremely powerful and positive message that can really make a difference, along with technology, which must also do its part to achieve the net zero emissions target».