In these turbulent, politically charged times, you might think that the hard core optimistic innovators might be getting a little bit down, feeling cowed, or on the retreat. Nonsense. For the past three years Chivas has been running an awesome initiative, Chivas Venture. Each year they scour the planet for 30 incredible impact leaders, bring them all together, take their business models to boot camp with my dear friends at the Skoll Centre and then award USD 1 million to those that rise to the top at a live pitch session in the US. Imagine X Factor where the singing is replaced with people making a positive impact and where the judges want to help more than judge... Imagine X Factor if it were awesome.
I was honored to represent Elvis & Kresse on a panel of 3 speakers including Innocent’s coFounder Richard Reed and Belu Water’s Karen Lynch. We were asked to formulate our remarks around a tweaked yet very familiar phrase: Make Society Great Again. There was resounding agreement on how much good can be achieved with the right team, total focus, and the daring to challenge status quo mediocrity.
It was simply, outstandingly fun. There was François van den Abeele of SEA2SEE, who works with fishermen in Barcelona to clean up the abandoned fishing nets polluting our oceans, transforming them into glasses frames. Then Daniel Vach from Sens Foods, who makes tasty sustainable protein from insects. And Dickson Ochieng of Sanivation who turns poo into power in Nigeria.... Yep. Poo. If you want to meet all 30 of my new friends, learn more here.
What was my takeaway? If you mix equal parts of mission driven entrepreneurs with Chivas based cocktails you get a very strong sense that Society is just getting started and that nothing, and no one, will stand in the way of those who are delivering a better world for everyone.
Today Kresse is speaking about what it means to build a purpose driven business at UCL - here is a little taster of her thoughts.
Purpose is popular. This doesn't mean it is new, but suddenly it is taking on an elevated role. Do a little online searching - Chief Purpose Officers are popping up with increasing regularity. But why?
In the business context there is no real agreement on what purpose means. In a narrow sense companies always have a purpose, whether it be making money, creating jobs, meeting a market need, eliminating an inefficiency or generating shareholder value etc. More broadly though we should be asking two fundamental questions from organisations that are talking about their purpose.
1. What is their purpose?
2. Do they deliver on it?
Ask the first question so that you know exactly what they mean and ask the second because if the answer is anything other than yes, absolutely, then their purpose is actually aspiration.
Elvis & Kresse was established to rescue London's decommissioned fire hoses. This was our first purpose. We have been doing just that since 2005.
Don't be afraid to evaluate an organisation's purpose too. For us, there is no point in pursuing narrow definitions of purpose that any business could claim. Purpose should be about goodness. It should be about making the world better. It should be about honour, ethics, transparency and sustainability because we don't have time for anything else.
It is wonderful that more businesses are aspiring to be good, we just want them to transition from aspiration to purpose a whole lot faster.
Keen to learn more from those delivering the best kind of purpose?
And to hear it straight from a Chief Purpose Officer who has been delivering solid good gold for years?
The off-set printing industry, the one that prints 1000’s of leaflets at a time, uses a synthetic, composite textile to transfer ink from the roller onto the paper. If the blanket is damaged or wears out it can no longer be used as any defect would appear on every single leaflet. Due to their composite structure this material can't be recycled by traditional means. We reclaim these blankets, clean them up, re-engineer them and create a new (vintage) raw material.
This all sounds very straightforward - but it hasn't been easy. We have been working with the blankets for several years and are only now really able to use it across our collection. Last year we introduced the Compact Briefcase, then the Print Room Wallet, a Weekender and just this week a hose backed black belt.
We have great plans for this material. These few initial pieces are just the beginning.
To view all our Print Room Edition items please click here.
Fashion Waste. If you are going to tackle it, you have to question something fairly fundamental. Most definitions of fashion imply something that is popular for a defined period of time. The industry is geared for this, churning out entirely new offerings according to the seasons. Some fast fashion brands have gone even further, offering new pieces on a weekly basis. Retailers crave new products because consumers have grown accustomed to constant change. If we are prepared to celebrate the impermanence of fashion, then we have to deal with waste. In the UK we have almost a complete churn, according to WRAP we buy 1.14 million tonnes of clothing each year to replace the 1.13 million tonnes we discard...
There are lots of ways to resolve this, but for this post I am going to focus on one of them.
At Elvis & Kresse our solution is to abandon the concept of fashion. We don’t do seasons. We focus on executing classic, utilitarian design with high quality craftsmanship. You shouldn’t ever need a second belt from us. Even if you grow or shrink, we will help your belt adjust. We will repair it for you. We are happy to do MOTs, to keep products in great running order. There are lots of brands that work this way, who make well and make once. But most of them are not in the fashion arena.
My Mother still uses pots and pans that she received as wedding gifts, back in 1971. Her lifetime guaranteed deep orange Le Creuset cast iron casserole dish is still in service. The website www.buymeonce.com features all kinds of products that are built to last, including the Le Creuset classics. There are other great examples too. Well built, solid wood furniture should easily last several lifetimes. Elvis made the chair in the picture from a reclaimed whiskey barrel. The wood was already a century old when he started! Another personal favourite is the Alberta Boot Company; their cowboy boots can be resoled and repaired forever. I inherited a pair of these from my younger brother when I was about 16, I still wear them all winter and I am 39! Elvis & I are also fans of the Saddleback Leather company. They make excellent leather bags, the kind ‘they’ll fight over it when you’re dead’. If you have a dog it probably isn’t the best idea to read founder Dave Munson’s post about Blue - but maybe you should read it. There is something uniquely inspiring about people who wear their heart on their sleeve. I think it makes them better craftspeople. Emotional attachment is actually quite important if you are going to love and cherish something, if you are going to keep using it, decade after decade.
Although many products that will last are also quite costly, there are many which aren’t, many which can be acquired second hand on ebay and many which will end up being cheaper as they won’t have to be replaced. Maybe it requires a bit of research, but trust me, buying this way whenever you can is absolutely worth it.
Don’t be fashionable, be forever.
Yesterday I got the chance to chat with a group of students at Central Saint Martins, they are doing an MA in Innovation Management. It is a fascinating program; we are so glad that CSM is championing the circular economy and exploring disruptive business models. After a brief introduction to the Elvis & Kresse story we went deep into fantastic questions about the nature of fashion, the structure of retail, how difficult and complicated it will be to shift to a circular economy, and the definition of luxury.
When we first started to rescue fire hose, back in 2005, we felt we had just one mission: to save London's damaged decommissioned hoses from landfill. However, when we started to make our first range of belts, bags and wallets we discovered that our very singular mission meant we would have to face many additional challenges. We had to effectively invent a new textile and several new manufacturing and cleaning processes. We learned to design, make and ruthlessly improve the quality of our pieces. We had to build a market for our products and convince people that 25 year old vintage fire hose was indeed a luxury material.
Historically luxury was about quality of materials, production and design. In the last several decades it has also become synonymous with specific global brands and displays of wealth. Elvis & I have a different definition of luxury, one that we are still working through; it reflects what we do and how we do it.
Never think we aren't focused on the quality of materials, production and design, but that is a very low bar. Luxury is also about community, the environment, the freedom to live according to your values and pursue your dreams. If the whole process of producing luxury goods is wonderful and sustainable for absolutely everyone involved, then it is what it should be, a genuine celebration of the best that we can do.
We are redefining luxury. We would love to explore this with you. Tell us what you think luxury is and use #thisisluxury to share your thoughts.
Elvis & Kresse is an environmentally motivated design practice. By environmentally motivated I mean that we exist to solve environmental problems. We started by solving London’s hose waste problem, and over time found more and more wastes that no one had tackled yet. Wastes that didn’t deserve the indignity of landfill but were perhaps too niche for mainstream recycling companies to see potential in. By transforming burnt out redundant fire hose into luxury goods and accessories we have developed a reputation for alchemy. Our Fire Hose success proved that we could do it, that we had just a little bit of magic in our methods; this is why our small design practice is now involved in design projects with much larger companies, ones with equally large waste problems.
Being circular should be the ultimate in design, the pinnacle that every designer aspires to achieve. But it is tricky, it also has to be commercially viable and attractive to our wonderfully complex customers and clients. Our new leather reclamation project is set to achieve this.
We have been working on it for years. It has had clear, evolutionary phases, it is designed to adapt, to be re-imagined by consumers and other designers, to have a life long past our ‘tinkering’. It will only ever be truly circular if it ceases to be ours; if it becomes yours, theirs, and then someone else’s, in some other form. It could be our best work, but we won’t know that until we lose complete control of its future. How exciting.
Maybe this is why it is going to take a while for designers to truly embrace circularity. They are trained to make something that is the best, but if you are going to be circular you are aiming for the best being yet to come.
Last month we did a live interview for the Australian Waste & Recycling Exhibition (AWRE) direct from Tonge Mill in the UK. A week later we received the most incredible thank you gift; AWRE planted 74 trees, one in honour of each speaker. The trees were planted by Steve Joblin and his team at Flowerdale Landcare, Vic.
As many of you may remember, this area was devastated by bush-fires in the summer of 2009. For the past 8 years, Flowerdale and Kinglake community groups have been working endlessly to help the revegetate the district and entice the wildlife back. They are doing a mighty job.
No words, no cards, just trees... this was the best thank you we have ever received.
Imagine the impact we could have on climate change if the money spent on thank you cards was spent on planting trees. We have a few ex-tree planters in the wider Elvis & Kresse family, they were paid an average of $0.10 per tree. Your average gift card costs more than 10 times this amount, which means 10 trees.
And then we learned about One Tree per Child, which was launched by Jon Dee, the same Australian that interviewed us for AWRE. One Tree per Child is a charity that aims to help every primary school child plant a tree as part of their curriculum. The charity wants children to make a genuine, quantifiable contribution to our battle to protect the environment. It is a powerful idea. If all goes well that child can watch that tree grow over the entire course of their life.
www.15trees.com.au
www.onetreeperchild.com
And if we want to be really audacious... take a look at these guys. This is possibly the best potential use of drones.
www.biocarbonengineering.com
Kresse is currently in New York where we are launching our leather rugs with FLOR, it is an exciting collaboration with a company that shares our environmental values and goals to create a circular economy.
There is a little bit of Britain in SOHO tonight, with Pimms, Union Jack FLOR tiles... This is going to be so much fun!
The weather was mixed for this first of the May Bank Holidays, but that didn’t stop The Bowlerman from, touring around with our Weekend Bag. If you want to see what else he has been up to, check out thebowlerman on Instagram.
Elvis & Kresse featured with some of our fantastic fellow social enterprises, Jamie Oliver's Fifteen and Belu Water.
Heading to Madrid on July 1st for the launch of a new book Sustainable Luxury and Social Entrepreneurship and the awards for Sustainable Luxury. We can't wait to meet the other Pioneers and collect our copy, we are very proud to have been asked to contribute a chapter to the book!
