Tara Milburn is the Founder & CEO of Ethical Swag, a sustainable promotional products company that helps organizations make their values visible through responsibly made branded merchandise. With over 30 years of business experience, Tara maintains a focus on integrating and managing sustainability as a core business function. With a background in communication, strategy, and sustainability, Tara built Ethical Swag not just as a sustainable promotional products company but as a Certified B Corporation rooted in inclusion, ethical sourcing, and social impact.
Company: Ethical Swag
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Tara Milburn: I have been interested in entrepreneurship ever since I was young. My father was an entrepreneur and, through him, I saw all of the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey from a young age. At age 52, he went bankrupt, and the next morning he got up and started all over again. His perseverance was an inspiration to me throughout my professional career.
When I founded Ethical Swag, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to start a different kind of business. There were aspects of the corporate world that never sat right with me, and I wanted to prove that a different approach was not only possible but preferable.
Ethical Swag grew out of that commitment. We are a promotional products company that makes it easier than ever for companies to find, customizable, certified sustainable products. A Certified B Corporation, we offer well-designed, sustainable goods including products sourced from recycled, organic, and biodegradable content, and make it easy to align product selection with company values. In doing so, we empower companies to make their values visible, enhancing their sustainability performance while helping strengthen company culture. We employ a stakeholder model that allows us to create value not just for our shareholders, but for our employees, our clients, and the communities in which they are all embedded.
Can you share a time when your business faced a significant challenge? How did you navigate through it?
Tara Milburn: Most of the challenges I’ve faced in business come down to human dynamics. One example was when an employee’s personal circumstances changed — they needed to step back from their role, but they also needed the income, and we needed their knowledge of our systems.
I started by asking: what do they need, and what does the company need? I believe that, no matter how tough the business challenge, human leadership has to come first. By supporting the employee through the transition, we created space for them to thoughtfully consider their family’s needs without rushing into a decision that could have caused further hardship. At the same time, we protected the business by planning for a knowledge transfer over several months, minimizing disruption.
In the end, we parted ways, but because we stayed anchored in both empathy and accountability, we found a solution that worked for both sides. This experience reinforced my conviction that real leadership isn’t about choosing between people and performance — it’s about making sure both are considered at every step.
How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?
Tara Milburn: Early in my career, while I was helping build the first privately funded arena for a professional sports team, our team created a program to offer jobs to street youth in Vancouver. I was eager to make a difference and personally mentored one young woman. I quickly realized that the challenges she faced were far deeper than I understood. She left suddenly, and I took it hard.
That experience stayed with me. It taught me that using business to create change is possible, but it demands much more than good intentions. It showed me that leveraging business to drive change demands not only passion but also preparedness and accountability. This setback forced me to confront hard truths and ultimately laid the foundation for a leadership style that balances impact with responsibility.
How do you build a resilient team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?
Tara Milburn: I view treating people with respect as the most important bedrock in business and in life. I want Ethical Swag to be an organization in which everyone feels respected and treats each other, clients, and stakeholders with respect as well. Achieving this level of respect requires a great deal of trust and open communication, so I am always careful both to seek out team members who demonstrate these qualities and embody them in my own everyday interactions. We empower our employees to make decisions and bring their creativity to work. Instead of a permission-based model where action requires prior approval, our approach encourages initiative where team members are free to act unless explicitly told otherwise.
Thriving in such a dynamic environment requires innovation, agility, and a robust sense of personal responsibility, qualities I actively look for in team members. When people feel trusted and empowered rather than constrained and stripped of agency, they tend to form a deeper connection to their work and find greater fulfillment in what they do.
We’ve been intentional about building a company vision that’s reflected at every level of the organization—and we hire with our core values at the forefront. Our focus on values has been beneficial to attracting top talent as more individuals come to prioritize purpose-driven work. . They are not only invested in the company’s overall success, but in the change we are trying to make in the world. This level of commitment and purpose helps create a deep sense of resilience that allows us to navigate any challenges that come our way.
How do you maintain your personal resilience during tough times?
Tara Milburn: For me, maintaining personal resilience comes down to maintaining the right perspective. Instead of seeing problems, I see opportunities: for that reason, tough times actually increase my motivation instead of reducing it. When I focus on what I can do rather than what I can’t do, I find it much easier to keep a positive mindset, and I think that this positivity not only helps me navigate tough times, but helps encourage the people around me too.
I also think it’s important to note that resilience does not just mean pushing yourself as hard as possible at all times. Knowing when you require rest is an essential part of the ability to work hard. I try to be very careful to monitor my emotional state rather than trying to suppress or ignore it. If I notice that I’m lacking focus or energy, I try to be proactive about taking a break and recentering myself so that I don’t end up just kicking these feelings down the road.
What strategies do you use to manage stress and maintain focus during a crisis?
Tara Milburn: Ultimately, a crisis situation is just another opportunity to adapt and create a stronger, more dynamic business. They can be a tough but valuable lesson, revealing weaknesses or gaps in your approach, but they are a golden opportunity to address these weaknesses and emerge stronger. Stress often feeds on itself–you start out anxious about a specific issue, but before long, you’re stressing out about the stress itself, spiraling into imagined scenarios that have little to do with the actual problem. I make sure to always be aware of the external forces affecting myself and the business, but to direct my focus towards the levers of change that I have control over. I tend to avoid stressing about things I can’t control and instead work to consider and manage the areas of my life and business that are within my control.
How do you communicate with your team during a crisis?
Tara Milburn: I try to communicate with my team during a crisis as I would during any other time: clearly, openly, and respectfully. Tensions already run high during crisis scenarios, and unclear, inconsistent, highly emotional communication only serves to add fuel to the fire. Crisis situations require coordinated, decisive action, which ultimately comes down to strong, intentional communication. Catastrophizing or blaming a particular person or group for the crisis only serves to draw people’s attention away from the practical issues at hand, increasing their anxiety levels and potentially creating divisions within the group. Focusing on clearly identifying the problem and discussing actionable steps to solving or mitigating it helps channel your teams’ energies towards productive ends rather than getting caught up in fearmongering and playing the blame game.
What advice would you give to other CEOs on building resilience in their organizations?
Tara Milburn: My biggest piece of advice would be to define what success means to you from the very beginning. When it comes to building resilience, nothing is more powerful than having a clear mission and purpose. It gives you and your team a north star to help orient your decision-making during challenging times and provides you with a consistent source of motivation and inspiration to keep going. It doesn’t have to be complex: in fact, the simpler and clearer your message is, the easier it becomes to internalize—and to communicate effectively to others.
For me, it’s important that this purpose extends beyond profit—it should reflect a deeper impact and a meaningful contribution. I like to view profit as a byproduct of purpose, a natural result of meeting real people’s needs and providing products and experiences that they resonate with. Our stakeholder model is not based on maximizing profits for shareholders, but creating value for our stakeholders at every level. It’s because we create value that has a tangible, positive impact on people’s everyday lives that we are also able to generate a profit. Rather than defining success as profit, I view profit as a consequence of success.
How do you prepare your business for potential future crises?
Tara Milburn: The decisions we make because of our stakeholder model have proven to be a competitive advantage in times of crisis. Implementing decisions based on a broader definition of what success looks like is helpful during good times, but when times get tough, it becomes absolutely essential to helping your business stay on course. For example, our focus on B Corp Certification and leveraging technology-based solutions to meet our vision of creating meaningful work meant that we were disproportionately ready for COVID when the world shut down. Nowadays, with ongoing instability regarding tariffs, our commitment to supply chain transparency and responsible sourcing is not just an ethical commitment, but a powerful strategic advantage.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership in times of crisis?
Tara Milburn: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that crises should not lead you to compromise but to improve. I remember a time when I was talking about order sizes during a team meeting. We do a lot of customization at Ethical Swag, which can take a lot of work. During this time, we were receiving large quantities of smaller orders, which could take the same amount of time as larger ones while generating less profits.
I floated the idea of implementing a minimum order threshold, but a team member immediately said that doing so would not align with our mission, which is to make sustainable products more accessible. I knew they were right and deeply inspired by their commitment to our mission. Rather than limiting access to our products and services, we made a conscientious effort to streamline our processes and address the issue at its core. This approach allowed us to improve profitability without having to compromise on what is most important to us. I look to this experience as a valuable lesson in the importance of treating challenges as opportunities for insight and growth.
