Ari Zandman-Zeman, a former college basketball player, had some difficulty finding ways to stay in shape while in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. So, he decided to try to simulate his old gym routine and spent his three years in Latin America developing and refining a workout regimen using rubber bands.
After leaving the Peace Corps, he founded Rubberbanditz to manufacture and market his resistance bands. Today, Ari still owns and operates Rubberbanditz as a for-profit company, while channeling proceeds from the company into community development projects for underserved communities around the globe. “It is what drives me and is the backbone of the company,” he says. “We are fundamentally a quadruple bottom line company focused on people, planet, profit and power.”
Having finished his first year at UCLA Anderson, Ari spent this past summer at Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, where he designed an “all-in-one” dashboard that enables Patagonia’s COO to monitor Patagonia’s factories so that they can improve in necessary areas. “I built a vendor scorecard tool to extract and quantify Patagonia's finished goods factory performance around metrics that covered cost, quality, production, lead-time and social and environmental impacts,” he says.
After graduation, he wants to use his MBA skills to enhance his altruistic impulses and create lasting impact. Says Ari, “I aspire to leverage the power of for-profit enterprise to address some of today's most pressing social and environmental issues.”
Head to Linkedin for more on Ari.
Comments