For our continuing series on B Corps we love, we look to another Bay Area company that’s doing its best to advance social causes with its business practices. Bixbee is, on the surface, a company that makes backpacks for school kids.

Now, that may not sound like anything special, but when you consider the health studies that have shown how children can suffer with back problems from too-heavy and poorly-designed backpacks, there was clearly a hole in the market for someone to create a better product for smaller bodies.

From Luxury Brands to Social Impact

This is where Luis Garcia enters the picture. After spending twenty years working with luxury beauty brands (namely Sephora, Ralph Lauren, and Bobbi Brown) as a designer, he took a look at his career and decided he wanted to pursue something with a little more social impact, something that would actually make a difference to people.

He took some time off from work and did some traveling, visiting children in developing nations and volunteering to help out at schools in areas where financial struggle is a daily concern.

He started to think about how even small gestures can make a big difference in the lives of people in need.

 

While volunteering in India, one day Garcia gave pencils to a classroom of students. The children’s reaction, a mixture of excitement and gratitude, floored him, and he started to think about how even small gestures can make a big difference in the lives of people in need.

In particular, children who are eager for the opportunity of education are often thwarted by economic obstacles that stand in their way – for example, not being able to afford the necessary school supplies that are required for attendance and proper participation.

Experience Breeds Ideas

So as he headed back to the United States and his home in San Francisco, Luis Garcia was armed with excitement about how he could help school children the world over, given his background in high-quality design and his ability to create products that are both beautiful and functional. The result was Bixbee, a line of backpacks and other accessories specifically designed with children in mind.

Bixbee started in 2011 as a project called Schoolbags for Kids, a line of great-looking bags designed with children in mind. Garcia adopted a unique horizontal design for the bags, spreading the weight of the pack over the top of the back, rather than going with the more common design of a taller pack that hangs lower.

Bixbee started in 2011 as a project called Schoolbags for Kids

The point of this design is to keep the weight from hanging below the child’s waistline, thereby taking the pressure off the lower back and creating a more ergonomic way for kids to carry around the things they need for school.

The bags were an instant hit, taking over the mommy-blogosphere and being featured in countless mainstream media outlets. The success of the the backpacks allowed Garcia some financial wiggle room to look at where the product line was heading, make some adjustments, and aim for a more formal product launch on a bigger scale.

When Schoolbags for Kids became Bixbee, it was clear that Garcia and his team were serious about both the product designs, and the potential for turning those products into hope for children around the world.

Helping Kids Near and Far

Bixbee works on the one-for-one social enterprise business model (which they call “One Here, One There”), giving away one of their backpacks for each one purchased. This means that just by purchasing a really cool, highly-functional backpack for your young student, you’re also giving a backpack to a child whose family cannot afford one.

That’s not all, though – each bag that Bixbee sends to a child in need is also stuffed full of other school supplies, so the child will not have to worry about things like pencils, notebooks, and other essential items.

Bixbee works on the one-for-one model, giving away one of their backpacks for each one purchased

Bixbee’s backpack giveaway projects have taken these fantastic bags to groups of children who were absolutely overwhelmed to recieve them. This summer, more than two thousand bags went to students in the Philippines, and other donations have been made to schools and orphanages in India, Thailand, and all over southern and eastern Asia.

That’s enough to make most people want to help Bixbee in its mission, but even if, as a consumer, you don’t care about things like helping out underprivileged school children in faraway places, Bixbee school bags are still a fantastic choice for all the more obvious reasons.

The designs are unusual and varied to appeal to kids of all personalities, and the ergonomic construction means that you give your child a much better chance of avoiding the back problems that plague so many students from a young age.

Eventually Garcia hopes to start a foundation for school kids, giving them more than school supplies and bags.

Luis Garcia has spoken a bit about his vision for the future of Bixbee. Eventually he hopes to start a foundation for school kids, potentially being able to give them more than just school supplies and bags.

Given the success that Bixbee has had so far, it seems reasonable to assume that the company will reach its goals, and that its success will in turn inspire other socially-conscious entrepreneurs to create companies centered around the idea of helping others in the course of conducting business.