We have mostly been planting trees at New Barns Farm, but we have also been dealing with long dead trees. What is our plan? We are strategically stacking wood to create wildlife habitats. Smaller branches that would blow away are chipped for our compost. But the stumps? We are transforming these into bee hotels by drilling holes, or rooms for the bees to colonise.
Here is our quiet boutique hotel, tucked away between an Apple Tree and a Rose Bush in a secluded spot on the farm.
But this one is our show stopping 7 Star sail shaped epic, offering a view of the vineyard and wetland and boasting all kinds of amenities.
They will offer different but unique experiences for guests we hope will stay forever.
Today we are proud to announce that we are one of 226 organisations nationally to be recognised with a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise. We have been specifically recognised for our excellence in Sustainable Development.
An amazing honour and another reason to go to Buckingham Palace to celebrate with some of the most sustainable businesses in the UK including some great friends, COOK and Birdsong.
Just before leaving for Buckingham Palace, dress from eBay (DVF, already worn several times) and more importantly, standing in front of our amazing Discovery Apple tree at the farm.
We are proud to announce that we have re-certified as a B-Corp. One of the best aspects of this community is that a company has to re-affirm its membership every three years, and is mandated to improve its performance.
We were one of the founding UK B Corps and then recertified in 2019 so this was our third assessment. We are very proud to announce that having made significant improvements in our production of renewable energy and treatment of wastewater that we have received an overall score of 147.6 which puts us in the top 25% of all global B Corps. The average UK B Corp score is 91.9.
This is an exciting time to join our team at our amazing new workshop, just outside Faversham in Kent. We can't wait to meet someone who shares our ambitions and really wants to make their mark.
You will be responsible for managing all digital marketing channels and developing further growth opportunities, working closely with and reporting to the CEO and Co-Founder of the business. The role is mixed and ideal for an experienced “all rounder". You will have your fingers in many pies, but that will not scare you. You thrive on change and the success of the wider team working with you. You are a proactive individual with a hands-on approach, but you will also be capable of managing a few agencies, while inspiring current and future colleagues.
We have a current social media focus with channels such as Facebook and Instagram, which have a strong following of 28k and 25k respectively. There is room to further improve both, along with Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok.
The business uses affiliate marketing too, specifically Rakuten. This has strong foundations, but can be further improved and grown with other channels, such as Awin. There are also many marketplaces and platforms that the company utilises; experience in managing a multitude of partners in this field is beneficial.
Google Adwords knowledge is required and use of Analytics is important. This channel will need to be grown and continually adjusted as the company evolves. There is scope to grow into Bing advertising and YouTube marketing.
The main Elvis & Kresse website is your focus so e-commerce management will be required, ideally using Shopify. This will include SEO best practice, product updating when required, suggestions on product page best practice etc., with the hope of improving these moving forward.
Our customers are our community. Content management and production are vital. You will need to be able to generate ideas and run with them - from start to finish. We have a strong database and experience with email marketing is essential.
Communication with our stakeholders is important too as you will have to be able to translate workshop life into a digital experience for our community. This is a mission driven business, while your focus is on growing our positive impacts you will have to be analytically minded and understand the importance of KPI’s.
You will join Elvis & Kresse, an organisation at one of the most exciting times as it branches out from luxury fashion into regenerative agriculture (we will be growing grapes and making wine on-site). This role is based just outside Faversham, Kent, UK and is available immediately for the right candidate.
Please email your CV etc., to kresse@elvisandkresse.com
A group of world class Farmers was asked to review Clarkson's Farm... and as a real newcomer to the world of agriculture, so were we!
Thank you to Live Frankly for the opportunity. For those of you that don't know Live Frankly, it is a genuinely good lifestyle guide that breaks down thorny sustainability issues, features pioneering businesses, and delivers the thoughtful honest truth. We are proud to be a part of their directory.
Our views are below but if you want to read the full piece, here it is!
When I first heard about Clarkson’s Farm, I have to admit, I didn’t think I would be a fan. But I am always happy to be wrong, and in this case I was.
Is the show perfect? No. Is Clarkson a regenerative hero? No. But, is he a man in transition that could take his audience along for the ride? Absolutely.
What I like best about Clarkson’s Farm is that he very clearly shows how incredibly difficult the profession is.
Elvis and I started our own farming adventure in December 2020. We bought a small 17 acre farm outside of Faversham in order to pursue regenerative agriculture. We watched the Biggest Little Farm, we watched Kiss the Ground, we got in touch with everyone we knew who knew anyone doing this kind of farming and we started researching… hard.
It has been a lot like going back to university. Except this time, instead of studying Politics (useless), we are getting to grips with soil health, microbiology, weather patterns, holistic planned grazing, permaculture… We have never been so physically drained while so simultaneously intellectually jazzed. We have found some incredible mentors and a deep well of support from our community and new neighbours.
As a society we seem to feel entitled to cheap food; the result is that farmers are overworked and underpaid and the land suffers. Diddly Squat made almost no money in Clarkson’s first year at the helm, and he took no salary.
The transparency of the show is great. Day after day the natural world is bringing Clarkson round to its way of working – it’s slow, complex, unpredictable and yet perfect.
He is bearing witness to climate change and his eco efforts – rewilding, wetlands, wildflowers, insect corridors – are all fantastic initiatives that frankly, we need Clarkson’s seven million Twitter followers to love, too.
We have sheep and are planting 11,668 vines in the spring. Hopefully, we’ll be making wine by 2025. We are planning to go beyond organic and biodynamic and have a soil-first approach. But, this is experimental and risky, as there are few precedents.
The main reality of farming, one that Clarkson also presents incredibly well, is that it unfolds very slowly. You have to watch everything as closely as possible and there are no certainties. No matter what the industrial chemical and seed companies may promise, there are no absolute inputs, and no absolute outcomes.
The best we ever hope to be is a symbiotic partner for nature. This partnership is already messy and erratic but also achingly beautiful and endlessly interesting.
And, maybe I am being too optimistic, but I think Clarkson is heading in the same direction…
We are very lucky to be a part of a community of businesses (B-Corporations) that are doing their utmost to ensure that they work with nature and for society. What is amazing about this community is that each business is finding its own path. There are some common themes - living wages, vertically integrated supply chains, carbon tracking, repairs, renewables - and certainly a lot of companies have a specific tree strategy.
One tree planted per sale? Ten trees? Whole forests to account/offset for the pesky fossil fuels you haven't managed to eliminate from your transport or manufacturing? If you are looking for organisations to plant with we can recommend Tree Sisters and Trees for Life.
Our strategy has just started, with our own planting at the farm. This means Elvis & Kresse are taking full responsibility for the planting and stewardship of the 4000+ trees and bushes that we aim to plant by the end of February 2022. We are planting a diverse range of native species including varieties of Cobnut, Cherry, Cherry Plum, Plum, Apple, Pear, Mulberry, Sea Buckthorn, Dogwood, Birch, Medlar, Juniper, Rose, Cistus, Arbutus, Pine, Holly, Oak, Elder and many, many more. We aren't linking these to purchases. We aren't using them as an offset. We are just doing it. Right now we feel that this is one of the best investments we can make in our valley, for our farm and for the future.
This weekend we had some incredible helpers - in just over 3 hours we planted 165 trees. Each root was dipped in our own compost tea, and planted with our own compost. We have used off-cuts of our very own decommissioned fire-hose to protect the trees from rabbits. What an absolutely amazing day!
In the weeks before Christmas we had a lovely message from a local artist, Patrick Morales-Lee.
I had recently met his wife, founder of the Warrior Women Network. She is a force of nature that had been lovely enough to include me as a guest on her podcast and also a speaker at an incredible event in London earlier this year where we talked about new political systems, social entrepreneurship and how mass collaboration is required to solve global challenges.
Patrick wondered if it would be possible to make a trade, one of his prints for a special piece of ours for a Christmas/Birthday present for Karla.
Now, this particular request came at precisely the right time. We are about to completely change the landscape at the farm with 11,668 vines, the associated trellising, completing our workshop, renovating and restoring the other buildings and planting thousands of trees. We really wanted to capture the farm as we found it and despite having a lot of drone images there were none which managed to contain the whole site. One of the corners of a field was always missing, or one of the buildings, or the slope... We knew that an artist's rendering could help; angles can easily be defeated by skill and imagination!
We are now very proud to unveil the 'before' illustration. It is just fantastic, and something we will always treasure.
Keep checking in, it won't be too long before we have the next instalment for you. Patrick has agreed to produce an 'after' illustration when everything is complete and in bloom.
Although no one could ever accuse us of being conventional, sometimes we even surprise ourselves. Lets just say that the last few weeks have been amazing.
In a normal December Elvis & Kresse generally don't make anything new, we are busily packing up and sending out Christmas orders. Of course we continue to make our beautiful pieces and packaging from decommissioned printing blankets, failed military-grade parachute silk panels, and tea sacking; we have several hundred tea sacks arriving from our friends at Clipper Tea tomorrow in fact! But this year is different, this year our Research and Development has continued at pace.
On the 4th of December we had our first anniversary as farmers. It was on this day in 2020 that we became the custodians of this incredible hillside farm in Kent. And a year later we were marvelling at the progress we've made but also the work that is still to be done.
The Most Beautiful Sewage Treatment System in the World at our new farm
After 8 very slow months planning permission for our new eco-workshop came through, we broke ground almost immediately, but it will take months to finish. Apparently we are building the largest straw bale structure in Europe? It will also be solar powered and air source heated. Digging a foundation has certainly caused a mess in the farmyard, but we also did a lot of digging in the top of one of our fields, where we have sited the most beautiful sewage treatment system in the world. It is a nature based solution, requiring gravity, a centrifuge, some tiger worms and a series of stunning swales (long ponds) which deploy a hugely biodiverse planting, and crucially the roots of these plants, to treat all of our own waste water. Just a few months in and it is already a hotspot for birds, small mammals, and insects. We also built and turned, and turned, and turned the blackest treacly compost I have ever seen. Our compost is made entirely from local organic wastes, so never think the circular economy has to be an urban thing! The ingredients for our treacle are organic cow manure (this was a tough one to source!), spent grains from Mad Cat Brewery, wood chip from Invicta Tree Care and food waste from our favourite local farm shop, Macknade Fine Foods.
Elvis & David building the compost - adding organic orange peel from Macknade.
By this time next year we will have our workshop complete, our vines (we will be planting 11,668 vines in April!) in the ground, and we will have had our first summer of market gardening. What an adventure ahead!
So, back to the last two weeks and the two things we have been working on. Both of these make our souls sing and certainly tell the tale of our two big Covid adventures, the Farm and the Solar Forge.
On the left you will see a vial of our freshly brewed compost tea. The reason we needed the compost in the first place was to wake up our very neglected, lifeless, soil. This farm has thin topsoil (according to local legend one of the previous owners sold it off via a turf cutting enterprise); it was also super-compacted, full of weeds and contained only 3% organic carbon. A healthy soil can contain up to 50% organic carbon! Our precious compost, the one we spent eons turning and lovingly feeding, has been designed to produce a cornucopia of microorganisms. When we brew it in giant 2kg tea bags and drench our farm soil with the water (i.e compost tea), this is how we awaken the soil and bring it back to health. Before we drench our land with this compost tea we checked... David, our newly hired co-farmer and vineyard manager, put this precious tea under the microscope to make sure it was teeming with healthy, balanced, life. We are very happy to report that our brew is a roaring cauldron of life! Exactly what our soil needs.
On the right, next to the vial of compost tea, is a lump of 100% rescued, melted, and cast aluminium. I think it looks a little like a rooster, perched on a ball (yes, a little like the Tottenham Hotspur crest). I love it. This week I cast this myself, it is my first rescued aluminium piece from our solar powered aluminium forge. The forge works, but as you can see, my casting needs improvement! Here is a picture of me with our beautiful forge which is still in the lab at Queen Mary University, but it will soon be on its way home to our farm and new Head Quarters...
For these two new products you could say we were 50% successful. The tea is ready to go, but the rescued aluminium casting is still a work in progress.
Wow, what can I say. We love December!
We have been doing some research into this: there are certainly some in-depth articles, online debates, academic research and books which look into the idea of the statement piece at length and they offer various definitions including:
We also know from the amazing exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Bags: Inside Out, that Statement Pieces have been around for a very long time. One of the earliest examples in the exhibition is a ‘burse’, a pouch used to carry Elizabeth I’s Great Seal of England; its detailed embroidery designed to convey her personal power as a monarch. Imagine how this feels for us, that our Weekend Bag is in the same exhibition and now part of the V&A’s permanent collection!
Over the years we have been gathering lovely stories from the people who carry our bags, wear our belts or rely on our wallets and purses. Our pieces might be gifts, considered purchases, ways to propose (at least twice now!), and also conversation starters. What we tend to hear, again and again, is that people love what our pieces say about them.
You may have noticed that our branding is pretty subtle, there are no big logos. So we think that our pieces might whisper rather than shout, but this is what we think they are saying:
- That you care for resources; that you would rather help to rescue and reuse materials than opt for something new.
- That you care about makers; that you understand how much time and skill it takes to make a high quality piece and that you are really happy to support a company which pays real Living Wages as a minimum.
- That you want something unique. No two fire-hoses have had the same life, or bear the same scars or are precisely the same shade of red.
- That you want to give back; that sharing is a fundamentally awesome thing to do. The best day of our year is the day we make our annual donations to our charity partners. I can promise you that the joy of giving outweighs any other high we have had as a company.
- That you love the fire service; 50% of our profits from the Fire-hose Collection is donated to the Fire Fighters Charity and fund (among many other things) exercise therapy sessions, hydrotherapy sessions, physio sessions, psychological support sessions, family counselling, food boxes, and a help line.
- That you make slow, considered purchases. You would celebrate our focus on utility, durability, classic design and refusal to produce seasonal collections. You want to know we are here to repair your piece over time and make your belt shorter or longer as required. Your bag is not just for Christmas, it is a long-term commitment.
- That you think women will make amazing solar engineers; 50% of the profits from our rescued leather (Fire & Hide Collection) go to Barefoot College, an incredible charity that tackles almost every single Sustainable Development Goal by design. It educates and empowers women, tackles poverty and ensures a renewable energy future for their communities.
- That you support Social Enterprises and B-Corporations, businesses solving social and environmental problems and using business as a force for good.
- That you can spot the difference between a business who is making a small proportion of their goods in an innovative way, let's say ‘consciously’, while making the bulk of their goods unconsciously. Intent is important, it is wonderful that some companies are on a genuine transition, but it is always better to invest in action.
Is this your image? We found it on eco_alyn’s insta… Love it!
- That you appreciate ingenuity. Transforming fire-hoses into a usable textile, developing an entirely novel multi-stage process. Creating a circular system for leather scrap to ensure that our pieces can be deconstructed and reconstructed through time. And now, with Queen Mary University, we are designing an open-source, safe, and inexpensive solar forge to rescue littered aluminium!
- That you are a story-teller. We met someone who has proudly been carrying our first ever purse. We only made 200 of these, and they were all sold around 9 years ago. She was so proud to still be using it as an ice-breaker and telling the story of rescued hoses, ingenious design and donations. Almost ten years of narrative makes this a timeless source of statements!
- That you just love red.
We aren’t saying that statement pieces shouldn’t also be bold, stylish, beautiful and well made, but we should also demand that what we wear reflects our values and vision for the future. At a time where it very much matters that everyone does everything they can for the planet and people, your clothing and accessories need to work just as hard.
How is the Solar Forge Project you ask?
Our team at Queen Mary University have been hard at work throughout the pandemic. Although access to the labs became incredibly difficult and working remotely became the norm they somehow managed to experiment extremely wisely and here we are. We have a working solar forge!
We can now wash, dry, shred and melt littered aluminium cans with the power of the sun. And we can do this safely and inexpensively.
This image is of 'Pure Can' - melted in our forge and cast into sand. The little grip marks on one end are where we grabbed this first sample to pull it apart for strength testing. We are now in the phase of testing performance, ensuring that our cast pieces can function.
For now we are just enjoying this lovely victory. Our main goal was a safe and inexpensive solar forge. Mission accomplished!
We are nearing the finish line, we just need to perfect our casting methods and launch, hopefully by late 2021.
We get so many questions around this topic, so here goes...
There is a hierarchy among all of these ‘Re’ words. Some are more important than others and need to be tried first. We all share limited resources, we are all facing incredible challenges like climate change and rampant biodiversity loss. If we want to save our civilisation then we can’t just stand still, we have to do more. We have to actively solve problems and bring back a balance, a harmony with the natural world, and a deep and abiding respect for all people.
This means that your activities are actively making the world better. You are not depleting natural resources, you are building them up. You aren’t exploiting people, you are fostering communities. Elvis & Kresse have moved to our new HQ, New Barns Farm, in order to launch a regenerative agricultural project; along with producing lovely crops (grapes and wine in our case) our main aim is to increase topsoil, sequester carbon into the soil, improve overall soil health and design for biodiversity and complexity. This will be a regenerative farm.
We need to slow down. We need to think long and hard about what we are buying and why we are buying it. Who made it? Were they paid well? How was it made? Was it energy intensive or chemically intensive? What are the overall impacts of this product?
We don’t need clothing to be delivered in an hour, we don’t need items that we only intend to wear once. We need to reduce our consumption and take pride in what we do own. We need to cherish raw materials, water, food… our lives literally depend on it.
This is the category of Reuse. Essentially this means that you are not making a material change, you are using the material as it is. Elvis & Kresse rescue or reclaim all of our materials. We collect them when they are considered waste by their custodians and we take on the challenge to re-invent them. But we don’t alter the materials. Take our fire-hose for example. We don’t shred it, melt it, and make a new material. We don’t dye it or treat it with chemicals. We cut it, we clean it, we split it, we cut it again and then we sew it or rivet it, making new goods from old materials. As our pieces are more valuable than the decommissioned hoses we started with our work is considered to be upcycling. You could also say that we repurpose our materials, because we give materials that had one life a completely different future.
We are also kind of second because our choices are designed to help you reduce consumption. We don’t use virgin materials, which means we are reducing the overall burden of creating something new from something new. We don’t make seasonal collections either, which means we don’t want you to replace the belt you bought last year with a new design. We want you to keep your belt on your jeans until your jeans die and then move your belt to your next pair. If you grow or shrink we will help you grow or shrink your belt accordingly. We make classic pieces, not this season’s trends, we want them to work for you year in, year out.
This is the practice of collecting materials back, breaking them up into their constituent molecules and starting again. The recycling of metal globally is somewhat efficient; we collect, melt and re-manufacture steel and aluminium particularly well but there are rare earth metals that we are recycling at rates much lower than 30%. The recycling of plastic is patchier still. A whopping 91% of plastic just does not get recycled. If it is recyclable but does not get recycled, then what is the point?
Whether that be in an incinerator (even if it is an incinerator that produces electricity as a by-product it is still a total defeat to be burning precious resources), a landfill site, or illegal dumping.
This is where we are. In the UK we fail to recycle 2 billion aluminium cans each year because we put these cans in the wrong bins. We also litter (i.e. we illegally dump) 16 million aluminium cans each year into the landscape where they, along with other littered drinks containers, lead to the deaths of 3-4 million small mammals (just one of the many facts that spurred us on to invent a solar forge). This is a truly noble material that is perfectly recyclable. Recycled aluminium is more than 90% less energy intensive to generate than new, mined aluminium. So even if recycling is the 4th best practise it is still absolutely crucial.
Learn to love your 'Re' words, learn the hierarchy. Regenerate, reduce, reuse, recycle…
Elvis & Kresse started with reusing, and then embedded reducing along the way. Now we are on this farm to regenerate... Slowly but surely we are working our way towards the best solutions.
