Why Buy with Viv? 
A few of the many reasons to buy with Viv include our:
- Low Prices
- Product Selection
- Quality / Durability of Products
- Verification of Eco Claims
- Determination to Stay Ahead of Green Issues
Click on one of the links above to learn more about a specific benefit or check out some of our many Member Testimonials.
Low Prices
By pooling the purchasing power across all of our members, we’re able to get each of our members access to big volume based discounts that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. We’ve run the numbers against the competition and on average Viv members are saving >40% versus other retailers & wholesalers of green supplies.
Product Selection
We offer a number of different categories today including food packaging, flatware, office supplies, janitorial products, and cleaning supplies. But we haven’t stopped there. We are already working on relationships with other suppliers to expand into more sustainable products & services (e.g., lighting, energy efficiency, water savings, sustainable building). We also make sure that we “fill” a category– for instance, when it comes to food service ware and packaging, we offer 7 sizes of compostable bowls (e.g., a typical big-box retailer offers 1).
Quality / Durability of Products
We have seen a lot of green products that really fall short.
I recently walked into a Berkeley cafe where the hot-top coffee lid started to melt & droop after going on a fresh cup of coffee. Ouch. What coffee drinker would want to use that?
- Arul, Viv Co-Founder
We make sure our products have high durability/effectiveness and that green for your business doesn’t mean reduced quality. It’s easy for a supplier to have a green option, but it’s completely another issue whether a customer wants to keep buying it.
Verification of Eco-claims
More and more stuff is flooding the marketplace claiming to be green. Plenty of it is not. Part of our work is validating products & services offered. We screen the products & services that our suppliers offer – we’ve even pulled a few SKUs that have been in our suppliers’ green catalogs but were not up to snuff when it came to eco / environmental benefits. One big reason we’ve partnered with suppliers like World Centric and Office Depot is the amount of research they had done into the sustainability of their green suites. No one is perfect, but we want to set a high standard.
Determination to Stay Ahead of Green Issues
Recently, Whole Foods was notified by Golden Gate Disposal in SF that their compostable cutlery was not actually compostable. We had a report on the polypropylene in that product line a few months before then. While we don’t promise to always know ahead of the news, we do our very best to stay ahead of the game. In this case, it is important to us that clients are up-to-date and moreover get on top of suppliers before things get prickly. We have also seen our national suppliers be pro-active about such eco-issues, which is a big plus in our book.
If you have more questions, don’t hesitate to see our FAQ or contact us.
