Last fall, Teresa Fudenberg blurted out a bold statement during a holiday gifting segment on Minnesota Live, a local TV news program: By 2030, Storm Creek (asi/89879) will have donated at least $5 million to charity.

Teresa Fudenberg, CEO of Storm Creek

“I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, I just said that,’” the CEO of the Eagan, MN-based sustainable apparel supplier recalls. Soon after making the announcement, however, Fudenberg and her husband, Storm Creek President Doug Jackson, decided to lean hard into the goal that was initially just an internal metric and make it an integral part of the company’s marketing. “We started working it into our conversations; we changed all of our value prop and all of our materials for our customers and distributors,” Fudenberg explains. “Now it’s in everybody else’s world, and we’re accountable to doing this. I’m super excited about it.”

Storm Creek is already well on the way to reaching its stated goal. So far, it has donated $1 million to various charities, including $350,000 in cash and in-kind product in 2022. In December, for instance, the supplier held its first corporate branding giveback with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Minnesota-based distributors could opt in to have 10% of the proceeds from orders with Storm Creek donated to the charity; the effort generated over $10,000. “It was kind of a way to align together toward something that people could relate to,” Fudenberg says.

The supplier has also donated to a slew of other nonprofits, including the American Cancer Society and Ronald McDonald House. A 1% for the Planet member, Storm Creek supports the National Park Foundation and other environmentally focused organizations.

But it’s not just national nonprofits that feel the Storm Creek love. Fudenberg says the firm recently helped a local high school replace its ’70s-era marching band uniforms after one of her employees let her know of the fundraiser. “We don’t want to leave these lesser-known organizations in the dust,” Fudenberg says. “They needed an extra $2,000 so that everybody could get a uniform, so the Storm Creek Community Fund wrote a check for that.”

“We could make clothing cheaper or faster by not using sustainable materials, but we have an obligation.”– Teresa Fudenberg, Storm Creek

Giving back is one of three pillars of Storm Creek’s business model, Fudenberg says. The other two? Creating high-quality products and focusing on sustainability. As of the end of 2022, the supplier says it has prevented more than 20 million plastic bottles from ending up in landfills or oceans, thanks to its use of recycled polyester (rPET) fabrics. “We have nearly 1 million garments leaving our building every year,” she says. “If we’re not ensuring that they’re high enough quality not to end up in the landfills, we’re not doing our job. If there’s an option to make it better, we can’t not do it. We could make clothing cheaper or faster by not using sustainable materials, but we have an obligation.”

Fudenberg and the other female employees of Storm Creek celebrate International Women’s Day.

A devotee of the Orangetheory brand of high-intensity workouts, Fudenberg brings energy, passion and endurance to her CEO role, and employees of the growing company thrive under her positive leadership style. “From personal experience, I know Teresa will drop anything to help solve a problem, do right by the customer or just be there for an employee,” says Chloe Ward, marketing manager at Storm Creek.

Indeed, Fudenberg – who has a great love for mentoring – has also started putting employees first when it comes to the company’s charitable-giving initiatives. “I was keeping it as kind of an owner’s thing, writing all of those checks at the end of the year and arranging all these donations and meeting people at the back of the warehouse,” she says. However, during the 2022 holiday giving season she delegated those feel-good tasks to staffers. “They got filled with all this joy that I had selfishly been keeping for myself,” she explains. “I can’t believe it took me so long to figure that out.”