Green business spotlight: Jessica Lohmann

Welcome to our interview series where we speak with purpose-driven business owners and ecopreneurs from around the globe. Every few weeks, we’ll dive into their journeys, learn about their wins and challenges, and the resources they couldn’t do without.

Prepare to be inspired and learn something new!

Today’s guest is Jessica Lohmann from Ethical Brand Marketing.

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Please tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, and what you did before starting your own business.

I graduated with a marketing degree in 1991 and led marketing teams in the US and Germany in the music, pet medical supplies, IT, and hospitality industries. In 2013, I became self-employed to started shifting my client base toward nature-led work. Five years later, I founded Ethical Brand Marketing in 2018 to build a brand that also promotes ethics.

What inspired you to create a purpose-driven company and how did you come up with the business idea?

When I started marketing, there was false advertising. When the internet came, the abuse of marketing increased tremendously. Everyone’s a marketer now and most learn how to use scarcity, urgency, and fomo tactics to get the sale, no matter the cost. This “no matter what” attitude increases environmental, societal, and psychological harm, and while people have talked about ethics in marketing for decades, I haven’t really seen it being practiced in real life.

So, I decided to build my brand around ethical marketing practices, proving that giving consumers the information to make a conscious choice is also effective. In fact, it’s more effective because it ensures customer loyalty.

In your experience, what are the main challenges of starting and running a green business?

Starting a business as a solopreneur. I believe it would have been easier if I’d started my own business with a co-founder, someone you can trust to share the decision-making, the financial risk, and who brings different, complementary skills. I think it just would have made everything easier.

What is your business mission & purpose and why?

I design ethical marketing and messaging strategy for nature-led brands in responsible travel, entrepreneurship, and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) so that they attract mission-aligned travelers, clients, and investors, grow revenue, and protect the local communities and ecosystems their work depends on. I believe the root cause of our societal problems is our complete disconnect from nature even though we are nature. We have forgotten who we are and that we are interconnected with all species. My clients are the solution: reconnecting humans with nature.

How does your work address societal and/or environmental issues?

Greenwashing does real damage. It erodes trust in genuine environmental progress and makes it harder for anyone to tell which brands are doing the work and which are just talking about it. My job is making sure the ones doing the work say so clearly and honestly, so travelers, investors, and clients can find them and back them instead. That shifts money and attention toward the businesses actually protecting ecosystems.

What are the most common mistakes you see green businesses make?

The biggest mistake I see is not being clear and transparent with their messaging, which leads to failing to inspire people to care and act. They use industry jargon or talk about carbon which often doesn’t resonate with those outside the bubble. They just see the ecological side of the word sustainable, so replacing that word with regenerative is confusing and complicated, and doesn’t invite anyone in. People need stories that resonate and make clear why investing in ecosystem restoration is the most important thing we can do to secure our future. We’re not “saving the planet,” we’re saving our species.

Another common mistake I see is not getting strategic with their marketing. They all have a strong purpose and a great product or service, and either skip the marketing strategy creation part and engage in misaligned marketing tactics or they base their strategy on other brands, hoping for similar success. Marketing is as individual as the business.

“We’re not “saving the planet,” we’re saving our species.”

Jessica Lohmann, Ethical Brand Marketing

What makes your business unique?

Aside from not using harmful tactics such as scarcity, urgency, fomo, I build the strategy, the frameworks, and the decision systems a brand’s marketing runs on, then implement the parts that need my expertise and train the team to do the rest. I can act as a strategist, consultant, and fractional CMO, depending on each brand owner’s needs.

People are also searching differently now, with Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools. AI search isn’t a trend, it will only grow, and fast. At cheetah speed. People have deep conversations with AIs that know their needs, which means the brands being recommended are carefully selected and, therefore, viewed as more trustworthy.

I now offer AI search optimization so my clients attract more aligned leads who already trust them. Since AI search is a new development, not many are offering this as a service for nature-led brands.

Is there anything that you do outside of your business that is driven by similar (sustainability) objectives?

I do what I can and can always find ways to improve. A few things I do: being vegan, hardly driving or buying anything I don’t need, sharing eco-positive stories with those around me, planting native flowers for pollinators, keeping my garden wild as much as possible, and connecting with trees, plants, and wild animals every day.

What do you like the most about the work you do? 

Getting nature-led founders in front of the people already aligned with them. I also love the strategy creation part because I’m using my analytical brain, and I find the ideation process exciting.

In which area of your business are you struggling the most to reduce your environmental impact?

My digital footprint, which is growing due to AI. While AI tools save time and improve efficiency, they also use a lot of water and energy. The data centers will become more eco-friendly with time. Even so, it’s still going to harm nature no matter what is done. I don’t have a solution for this except reducing the amount of usage, continuing to search on Ecosia for basic answers, and using my brain.

How do you grow and scale your business, and what are the main growth constraints and opportunities?  

I find what my audience needs, co-create it with them, then iterate. Marketing by Nature, my signature marketing program, came out of that process.

My biggest constraint has been shiny objects: misaligned projects and collaborations that eat time and energy. I’ve learned to say no. Another has been hiring the wrong people at the wrong time. I learned to be as conscious investing in humans as I am in material things and already have the system set up and ready to scale before publishing that job opportunity.

The biggest opportunity is knowing which opportunity to grab and which one to ignore, which is why I don’t chase trends. I have gotten caught up with shiny objects and radiant humans, and have since learned to be very selective. The opportunity I grabbed this year was AI search, because nature-led brands can become the answer in a small room of competitors who aren’t nature-led, and you don’t need a big budget to get recommended. Huge opportunity that will increase revenue and positive impact.

What green businesses/sectors do you see growing the fastest right now and/or will become mainstream within the next 10 years?

Responsible travel. I feel people are getting tired of “Europe in a week” and city tours with thousands of others. Many travelers are looking for better ways to experience a culture and see new worlds. They are starting to search for these experiences, yet don’t know the industry’s responsible travel terms. I can’t say it enough: you have to meet your audience where they’re at by speaking their language. While we want to invite those outside the bubble, we also want to cater to existing conscious travelers who are sick of vague eco-friendly labels; they want proof of impact on the ground.

Nature-based Solutions, reforestation, rewilding, ecosystem restoration, is pulling in serious investment as companies face pressure to show real outcomes instead of carbon offsets on paper.

Nature tech, the tools tracking biodiversity and species health, is smaller and still growing quickly. Earth Species Project is using AI to decipher what animals are actually saying, giving them a voice for the first time. The use cases are hard to overstate: this could push governments to finally ban and enforce real protections against whaling, animal testing, and industrial animal farming, along with things I can’t even think of yet. This warms my heart. Within ten years, I’d expect NbS to be as standard a line in corporate strategy as carbon reporting is now.

In your opinion, what are the top skills necessary to be a successful eco-entrepreneur?

Translating complex environmental or social impact into language a completely different audience understands. Understanding how people think in order to do that translation work most effectively. And resilience, because building and maintaining a business is not easy, and I feel many go into it thinking it is, or should be, especially since they’re “doing something good in this world.”

Any “lessons learned” or advice you can share with aspiring or current green business owners?

Hire well and consciously instead of quickly throwing money at others to solve a problem for you. I believe I’ve finally learned this lesson.

My advice is to make sure you have a solid marketing strategy foundation before you go out there and promote your brand. If you don’t know how, either learn or hire someone (consciously) to do this for you.

What inspires you every day to wake up and keep going?

My daughter who’s now 19 and heading off to university. We all doing this work for our children and future generations.

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