One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you..

Ask anyone from the world of ethical business to name their top 5 companies and the same names tend to crop up again and again. I’ll bet you 10 to 1 that one company, Timberland is always on the list. It’s perhaps not all that surprising then to see that last week they were snaffled up by corporate clothing giant VS corp.

VS corp? Who the hell are they? Well They are as US super-corporate that make Wranglers, North Face, Vans and half a dozen other clothing brands. Their turnover last year was close to $10 billion.

So what do they want with Timberland? Timberland are the company who use renewable energy in their factories, recycled and organic materials in their footwear and have done more than any other brand to stamp out exploitation of workers in their overseas factories including China. Timberland are one of the good guys.

Well VS corp apparently want a part of that. It’s a business strategy that seems to be coming increasingly popular with other corporate giants too - see also Cadburys (Kraft), see also Innocent (Coke).

There is a definite trend in the Mergers&Acquisitions market now for major corporates to buy in leading sustainability brands. But is the motive to learn from them, or just to exploit their good reputation?

The great hope for the future was that relatively newer companies like Timberland and Innocent with sustainability and social responsibly at their heart could demonstrate a way of doing business that maximised return while remaining true to those core values. These were the brands that were meant to become the champions of the future.

So the stage is set to see whether those core values can win out in the end, which will depend on whether they are strong enough to become transferable within their new corporate families. Otherwise they will merely get swallowed up in old-school profit maximising and eventually be frittered away.

Time will tell.