Meet Our Founder

<<A Seed Planted>>

You could say the original seed for United Islands was planted right on the childhood dinner table of our founder, Eric Johnson.  

He grew up on the mainland (St. Louis), but with family roots in Hawai‘i, where his mom's family owned a small restaurant in the 1950s to 1970s - Shige's - next to the old Honolulu Stadium in Mōʻiliʻili.  

As young as 8-9 years old, he remembers noticing the peculiar label of the salad dressing bottle on the table.  It didn't look like any other label he'd seen.  Curiously, the label had a playful sketch of a manʻs (smiling) face on it.  Even more curiously, it read at the top: 100% of Profits to Charity.

Little did he know at the time that the smiling man was the megawatt movie star, Paul Newman, and the company - Newman's Own - was launched as a side project of the wealthy and philanthropic-minded actor, who could afford to run the company like a non profit!  

Nevertheless, the seed was planted: this idea of leveraging business for good.

Fast forward to 2007 and that idea from childhood had still stuck with Eric.  He took on a role within a newly formed division at the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) that had been created by entrepreneur-turned-politician Mayor Bloomberg, who recognized there needed to be an arm of city government that directly collaborated with private industry on common ground sector-wide issues.  Leveraging government & industry to do good?  Yes please.  

Always interested in fashion and design, Eric worked for the better part of a decade building strategic programs on behalf of City Hall to bolster the fashion industry there.  Working with private industry, he created brand incubators, entrepreneurship programs, manufacturing reinvestment funds.  

If his role in New York was to support the industry from the top-down, the idea of United Islands was to help bring change from the bottom-up.  That is, from the brand side, using the company as a vehicle for doing positive things locally. 

United Islands is an experiment that brings together ideas & interests Eric has long harbored in the areas of design, entrepreneurship & economic development.  In other words, an experiment in "business for good" that's been 30 years in the making.