Customers Buy, Company Gives
Written by Katrina Daniel Wednesday, November 24 2010
Snapshot: June Wilcox
June Wilcox is one of the founding partners of Times Two, Greenville, S.C.
After graduating from the College of Charleston, then earning a master’s in international business from the University of South Carolina, Wilcox went to work for Motorola and spent two years in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
She has already founded her own consulting company, the Adec Group, but also has joined forces with two business friends to form dogoodtimestwo.com, a unique company that promises to donate to charity an equal item for every item the company sells. Wilcox’s title in her new enterprise is chief giver. It means she seeks out and forges partnerships with charities set to benefit from the company’s sales.
Womenetics: The name is unusual, the company premise is unusual. How will it work?
June Wilcox: We believe our business will be to provide good choices and to make it easy (for people) to help each other. The basic principle is that for each item sold, an item is donated to a local charity. Our current offerings include baby products, such as snap shirts, blankets, towels, and bibs, but we will add products based on needs of local nonprofits. For every baby product we sell, we will give the same item to a local children’s agency, The Family Effect. 
Our next two launches will include personal hygiene products and school supplies.
Womenetics: So if I buy three baby blankets and a baby shirt and things like that, you will give the same items to The Family Effect? How did you come up with this idea?
Wilcox: My current company is composed of a very strong team with diverse backgrounds and amazing talent. What has been missing for each of us (partners John Hampson and Tim Mesaric) is a sense of purpose, a need to do more with the hours we have in a day than just pay the bills. There’s no question that everyone in our company has a servant heart. Each quarter we take turns choosing a service project we all do together. Those days, we’re happiest and most satisfied. So it just happened that I saw an interview with TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie. He was sharing his story in the hopes that other businesses would copy his model of business built to do good. I took the idea to my colleagues, and we completely changed course. 
Womenetics: Is it possible for this model to be profitable?
Wilcox: It’s tricky. Critical to our model will be streamlining.
We have to be completely efficient because we are working with such tight margins. For every product we sell, we give one away. The more we make, the more people we help. That’s the beauty of it. We will expand our network of community partners, continuing to make the recipients of donations local to the givers. We don’t worry that people might think we’re a charity. It might be a little confusing at first, but in five years when everyone recognizes our logo, they’ll get it.
Womenetics: What is your vision of Times Two in five years?
Wilcox: Five years from now, I hope Times Two has provided baby products for 4,000 struggling families, brushed 30,000 sets of teeth, and given 10s of thousands of school supplies to children who need them. I hope people will see our brown and red logo and automatically think: Buy. Give. I can do that.
Katrina Daniel is an award-winning journalist and broadcast reporter/anchor. She has worked in Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and as a national correspondent for several networks. She commutes between Miami and the Carolinas, writing for magazines and news organizations. She lives with one horse, four dogs, and a cat.
