Last night we had a very brief cameo on The One Show - what an adventure!
As the main guests, Cara Delevingne and Orlando Bloom, are both very interested in sustainable and ethical fashion the team decided to feature brands, like us, who are on a mission to rescue materials. It was great to finally meet Georgia, the founder of Wyatt & Jack, who has been rescuing beach chairs, bouncy castles and inflatables for ten years.
First, the guests were challenged to examine our Overnight Bag and guess what it used to be... I can't tell you how much we loved the fact that they couldn't do it! Our aim is to truly transform a material and this was definitely a 'job done' moment.
Then we gave host, Matt Baker, a brief history of Elvis & Kresse:
And when we got to the end of the story and our work with The Fire Fighters Charity (50% of the profits from our Fire-hose Collection is donated to them), this was Cara's reaction! Mind blown.
The evening ended with two belts leaving with their proud new owners - Cara has a red fire-hose West End Belt and Orlando literally left with the belt I was wearing, which meant my jeans were a little loose on the way home. Orlando's belt is now officially on its third adventure; a fire-hose, Elvis' belt of the last 5 years (yes, I occasionally borrow Elvis' belts), and now it's off to Hollywood.
If anyone wants a full debrief, just let us know! Or download the episode on iPlayer, it was the August 29th, 2019 edition of The One Show.
"Everything about this Elvis & Kresse purse is thoughtfully designed, from the hand-woven leather made from offcuts that would otherwise be discarded, to the decommissioned fire hose trim and reclaimed parachute silk lining. There are a mammoth 12 card slots, a zipped coin pocket and additional slots roomy enough to hold an iPhone. Plus 50 per cent of the brand’s profits go to charity."
A few weeks ago we received a fascinating image of one of our wallets on Henderson Island. Its owner (James Beard), an Elvis & Kresse fan, was letting us know that he had taken our wallet on an incredible journey to clean Henderson's beaches. We asked James to share his story. All I can say is wow and try not to cry... we all need to do so much better to protect and care for our home.
"Although I’ve always been interested in the environment, my interest in sustainability issues has grown as I have got older. In part this has been fostered by my role at Valpak where I work on environmental issues every day, and it was through my colleague, Emily, that I first heard about Elvis & Kresse (Emily is the proud owner of an E&K Rucksack). Through my work in waste management and environmental consulting I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to take part in a very special project this summer.
Despite being uninhabited and located thousands of miles from the nearest continental landmass, research conducted in 2015 found Henderson Island in the South Pacific to be the most densely polluted beach on the planet. 99.8% of that pollution is plastic. We arrived there on the 8th of June 2019 – World Ocean Day. Our expedition team was a mix of scientists, artists, journalists and “beach cleaners” which is where I came into it. Our aim was to clear the Island’s East Beach of all plastic greater than the size of a bottle top, analyse each item to work out what type of plastic it was and to deduce the possible origin, and then to set up cameras which would remain on the island long after our departure to monitor the inevitable return of more plastic to replace what we had cleared. It is anticipated that all of what we cleared would be replaced within 5 or 6 years.
After a week’s travelling from the UK I finally arrived at Henderson Island. The plan was to land on East Beach via a rigid-hulled inflatable boat each day to do the clean-up. However, due to prevailing winds and large swell it became impossible for us to safely land on East Beach itself. Instead we had to arrive at the more accessible North Beach and then hike across from there. There was no path on the uninhabited atoll, so the team had to create one by cutting back the dense vegetation. The journey from North to East was roughly a 90-minute hike each way and involved wading around headlands, climbing cliffs and trekking across razor sharp corals. This added a huge amount of extra physical exertion onto an already grueling day of picking and documenting the waste.
Whilst the science team conducted their research, the visible impacts of the plastic on the local nature became clear. Prior to the expedition I had seen photos of turtle tracks crossing the plastic to reach the nesting grounds and whilst there we saw first-hand the impact plastic can have; we found a baby turtle which had become trapped in a plastic container which unfortunately didn’t survive. We saw birds pick up plastic as if to see if it was food, and we saw nets and ropes snagged on the reef and cliffs. Henderson Island contains a huge volume of things that simply don’t belong there, it was incredibly sad to see.
One of the more unusual items we came across during the clean-up was a glass fishing float which was most likely made in Japan in the 1940s. Fishing equipment was a sizeable proportion of what we found and included buoys, nets, ropes, crates and lures. This is particularly concerning as Henderson Island is in the middle of one of the wold’s largest Marine Protected Areas, where commercial fishing is prohibited. Prior to the expedition I had never come across the term Fishing Aggregation Device (FAD), but I am now acutely aware of the damage they cause. Up to 121,000 of these large devices are launched each year with a view to attracting large fish thus making the catch easier. Unfortunately, they can easily drift ashore where they can get caught on reefs. Pitcairn is now looking at whether it is possible to track the source of these FADs and prosecute the owners.
After 11 days, 351 man-hours and a total of 151 hours spent hiking across the island the team had collected 6,000kg of waste from the 2.25k long East Beach and a further 250kg from two other beaches and the reef around Henderson Island. And yet despite our efforts, all of that waste is still on the island. Due to the large swells and rough seas, it wasn’t possible to remove much plastic and
as such it will have to wait until a later date to be retrieved. For me this is the most damning fact about marine pollution; Despite a dedicated team comprised of international experts, it simply isn’t possible to clean up many of these remote places. Clean ups paired with research can help raise awareness and educate, but our attention must turn to preventing waste from entering the oceans, and this is where the work conducted by the likes of Elvis & Kresse is so important.
By making informed choices regarding what we buy and choosing items that have been given a second life we can all do our bit. Every member of the team contributed significant resource to help plan, coordinate and deliver the
expedition. It is also recognised that specific individuals and institutions made financial donations to the expedition, without which it could not have taken place These include: Valpak, Toughsheet Environmental, the Pew Trusts, CEFAS, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Blue Belt Team and Pitcairn Island Office), Architectural and Community Planning Inc, the Zoological Society of London, Howell Conservation Fund and Schwab International. A special thanks to the Pitcairn community and its Mayor Shawn Christian, without their support and ambition the expedition would not have been possible."
Note: Valpak is the UK’s leading provider of environmental compliance, helping businesses meet their legal obligations in fields of packaging, electronics, batteries and waste management.
You can see James' journey through videos and images taken throughout the beach clean via the Instagram Account @henderson_beach_clean
We were asked to contribute to the Summer 2019 edition of INFO magazine, here is your sneak peak!
Solve an actual, crisis level problem. Most entrepreneurs consider themselves to be problem solvers. They roll-out ideas that make life easier, more entertaining, healthier, or safer. But this is 2019, you can’t avoid the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, or global social inequalities… If you are building a sustainable brand you absolutely must be engaged with the big problems and if you need inspiration, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a good place to start. We didn’t set Elvis & Kresse up to create a luxury goods brand, our sole reason for starting the business was to rescue London’s damaged, decommissioned fire-hoses and keep them from languishing in landfill. For reference, by mounting this rescue and working in an ethical and sustainable manner we are tackling the following SDGs: 8, 9 and 12.
Focus on Multiple Positive Objectives. You also have to remember that you can’t solve a big problem sustainably if your solution causes other problems. It isn’t enough to just rescue and reuse the fire-hoses, we also:
Love your Problem. Be an expert at your problem and be totally committed to it. Remember that the solution might change over time. By remaining wedded to fire-hose we never fail to have impact. By being experts in our waste materials we can adapt our business over time while continuing to solve our chosen problems and deliver real change.
Be genuine. Remember that a brand is meant to stand for something, so stand for something and then deliver. A brand isn’t a stunning logo or a catchy strapline. It is the recognisable manifestation of a team, their activities and the goods or services they provide. There are a lot of companies whose brand or identity is more sustainable than their actual work. This kind of disconnect is essentially a lie. Don’t do that. We rescue materials, transform them into beautiful products and donate 50% of our profits to charity. The authenticity of our brand is that we deliver, every day, on these promises. We don’t need a marketing strategy, the truth is interesting enough. 50% of the profits from our leather rescue project are donated to Barefoot College. Last year our donations created three scholarships for female solar engineers.
Through the design, manufacture and sale of accessories, we transformed around 3000kg of leather that would otherwise go to landfill into 3 scholarships. I think when the choice is between creating 3 tonnes of waste or 3 scholarships we all know which is the right choice.
A few weeks ago I sat down with James Mitra, founder of JBM Consulting, to contribute to their 40 Minute Mentor series.
James met Elvis on a train years ago by complete coincidence and it started a small butterfly effect we couldn't have foreseen, which we also talk about in this podcast. It goes to show how even the smallest encounter, conversation, or deed can make a significant difference.
This podcast is a great way to learn a bit about my personal background, the foundation of Elvis & Kresse, the hurdles we had throughout the years, and our plans for the future.
And for a play by play?
Please do listen to it here or skip to the part that calls to you the most.
Enjoy!
- Kresse
We have created 3 scholarships for female solar engineers!
As most of you will know, we donate 50% of our profits to charities linked to the raw materials we rescue. With our leather system, we were determined to support renewable energy causes and we are now able to announce that our charity partner for our rescued leather project is Barefoot College.
Here is Barefoot College, in a nutshell:
This is the start of a beautiful partnership and we hope to share more and more of our Barefoot story over the coming years. For now, lets go back to the beginning...
Barefoot's founder, Bunker Roy is a social enterprise legend and Kresse has always been a fan. In 2018, at the Cartier Women's Initiative Awards Kresse met with Barefoot's Director, Meagan Fallone. You could credit this meeting to luck, but really you should credit it to Cartier's incredible effort to build a community of impact entrepreneurs.
It takes a year to go from a first meeting to a first donation and that moment is now. Initially we predicted that Elvis & Kresse would be able to create one scholarship. But thanks to our incredible customers and supporters, thanks to you, we have been able to create three!
Meet María, Silvana and Angelica, these amazing women from Guatemala are currently in India becoming solar engineers.
The entire Elvis & Kresse team hope you have a lovely festive season and we look forward to seeing you again soon in 2019.
Our workshop will be closed from around 10am on the 24th of December until the 2nd of January. Please do note that all orders placed through our website during that time will still be safely registered. Shipping will commence on the 2nd of January, 2019, when our workshop re-opens.
Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season,
Elvis & Kresse
To put it very simply, we don't like Black Friday. We don't participate in Black Friday, other discount days or sales seasons.
Let me explain...
1 - Elvis & Kresse is not a fast moving consumer goods brand. We aren't fast at all. We are slow. Our materials are rescued and their transformation takes time. We build to last, not for obsolescence.
2 - We believe in good value every day, not just for a few days each year. Our pricing is based on labour, creativity and innovation; we have a highly skilled team, our goods are labour intensive and built to last. Our prices reflect the costs of running a pioneering ethical and sustainable business, which is more interested in impact than profit.
3 - We don't do seasons. We don't have different pieces for different times of the year, and we certainly aren't interested in the weekly collections or even 'daily-drops' being released across the fashion industry. Seasons or other forms of entrenched 're-freshing' naturally result in over-production and waste.
Our washbags photograph well in the snow, but they aren't just for Christmas.
What you care about matters, and now it can make a difference through every purchase decision you make. This month an exciting new shopping platform will be announced. One that has been in the works for over 10 years. A world-first technology that will transform every pound you spend into a vote for a better future, while connecting you with businesses that share your values.
Every transaction you make tells businesses what it is you care about. Whether that be issues such as climate change and worker rights, this new App encourages business to adopt new practices in these areas. We took a moment to ask founder of CoGo, Ben Gleisner, what sustainable luxury is to him and what it is he wants to see change in the world.
We believe together, our voice can be a powerful motivator for change! See the good work the CoGo community is already doing. Your voice can absolutely make a difference to how businesses operate and this new innovative technology lets you see exactly how. Elvis & Kresse are proud to be one of the founding businesses to join CoGo. Being transparent and listening to what our customers care about is now even easier.
In the past year, the Burberry Foundation has created a unique partnership with sustainable luxury company Elvis & Kresse to transform at least 120 tonnes of leather off-cuts from the production of Burberry products into a range of new luxury accessories and homeware.
By demonstrating what can be achieved when leather waste is revalued and created into entirely new products, Elvis & Kresse and the Burberry Foundation aim to affect real change in the supply chain of the leather goods industry. Where leather waste is usually destroyed, the partnership with Elvis & Kresse is disrupting traditional approaches and revealing new solutions.
Read more about this innovative approach in an interview with Kresse Wesling MBE, Co-Founder of Elvis & Kresse.
How did your relationship with Burberry begin?
Kresse: Burberry first approached us in 2014. They were closing out an existing five-year social and environmental plan while planning their next ambitious five-year programme. They were impressed by our commitment to materials rescue and charitable donations and we started to discuss how we might collaborate. As you can imagine it took quite a while to develop a plan capable of saving significant material and worthy of both our businesses. When Burberry launched their new agenda in the fall of 2017 our project was a key component of their vision and we are now implementing and evolving this plan.
What does your partnership with the Burberry Foundation involve?
Kresse: We have partnered with Burberry Foundation to solve our most ambitious material challenge to date: the vast amounts of waste created through the production of leather goods. It is estimated that each year, 800,000 tonnes of leather waste is produced by the global leather industry. Through this partnership, we will demonstrate how the traditional leather goods supply chain can be disrupted and changed for the better. We will also transform at least 120 tonnes of leather off-cuts from the production of Burberry products into new luxury accessories and homeware. Half of the profits from this range will be donated to charitable causes focused on renewable energy. The remaining half will be reinvested to expand our work in reducing and reusing waste, protecting the environment and inspiring craftspeople. 
Tell us about the process behind turning Burberry’s leather off-cuts into brand new products.
Kresse: No matter how carefully patterns for leather goods are planned, high quality, unused, freshly tanned and dyed leather falls to the cutting room floor as seemingly unusable pieces. Our system transforms leather fragments from the production of Burberry leather goods into components. The first step is to coordinate with Burberry production to ensure the smooth collection of off-cuts. When they arrive at our site in Kent we sort them into size and colour. We typically only start the cutting process when we know which item we will make, ensuring that we don't over-cut any particular shape. We then plan our cuts carefully, ensuring that we produce as little of our own off-cuts as possible. Each component of our system is then individually cut before it is hand woven, piece by piece, into whatever it is we need. This could be anything from a panel for a bag, a large leather rug or tapestry, upholstery, pouffe, or works of art.
Elvis & Kresse captures the imagination of people around the world, and you’ve sometimes had some unusual requests for bespoke products. Tell us about the most unusual project you’ve completed for a client.
Kresse: We designed and built an entirely circular kitchen using only reclaimed pallets and scaffolding wood. It consists of hundreds of pieces, with no two the same, and had to be built twice. We first built it in our workshop to make sure it was perfect, then we numbered each piece before taking it apart and then rebuilding it in its forever home. It is the most beautiful and yet utilitarian jigsaw-like installation; to us it feels like a genuine cross between a kitchen and a piece of art.
What are some of the other raw materials that you transform?
Kresse: London's hoses will always be our first love, but we rescue more than 10 materials on a regular basis and have created unique products with all of them. We work with failed parachute panels and auction banners for our lining materials and dust covers. We collect Yorkshire Tea Sacks, transforming them into our brochures, leaflets and mailing envelopes. Additional packaging and labeling is made from second hand shoe boxes and coffee sacks. As range staples we also reclaim printing blankets, split scaffolding wood, and Burberry leather off-cuts. Finally, we always enjoy welcoming people to our home and workshop in Kent, Tonge Mill. We began a restoration adventure here in 2013 working the same way that we make our products, with rescued or reclaimed materials. It is a difficult and slow way to renovate a building, but it is the only way to create a truly luxurious, bespoke result that doesn't compromise on our environmental values. 
Is there any other material that you would really like to work with?
Kresse: Unfortunately, we live in wasteful times. This means the list of materials we would like to rescue is incredibly long and represents millions of tonnes of valuable material. We know that our particular style of alchemy is a powerful solution for all kinds of materials but we have to focus. Right now, we are committed to solving the leather issue.
Find out more about our partnership with The Burberry Foundation, here.
Elvis & Kresse is a pioneering sustainable luxury brand established in 2005 to rescue London Fire Brigade’s damaged, decommissioned fire-hoses. For more than a decade we have been transforming all of London’s hoses into luxury accessories and donating 50 per cent of the profits to The Fire Fighters Charity.
We started Elvis & Kresse to solve a waste problem, and to change an industry by setting a completely different example. For more than a decade we have been redefining what waste, luxury and business are. Here are my fives rules for succeeding as an environmental entrepreneur.
Don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. We face unprecedented environmental challenges: we have lost 30 per cent of our bees, and by 2050 there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans, much of it too small to see or capture. If you want to run a truly rewarding, impact-driven business, choose one of these challenges. When I first moved to the UK in 2004, 100 million tonnes of waste went to landfill. This provoked an exploration that continues to this day and explains why when we learnt about the damaged fire-hoses in 2005, we knew that we had our problem – the one we could solve with Elvis & Kresse.
This means knowing what it is, why it exists, how big it is, what or who causes it, where it is and what makes it worse. We traveled to see the fire-hose manufacturer to understand how the product is made, why it has a health and safety lifespan, and what else may cause it to fail. We met fire brigades across the country to understand how they work with the material, the extreme situations it is designed to survive and the workload it has to bear. We researched the entire life-cycle of the hose, from birth to death. We also spoke with academics to understand the base materials that make up the products and did a lot of research around where and how these materials are used beyond the fire service. We became hose and hose-waste experts.
Be ambitious. Ensure that your solution could be scaled up to eradicate the problem. The love that we pour into each and every one of our fire-hoses is the reason why it becomes the perfect material for guilt-free luxury, and why we have been able to rescue all of London’s decommissioned hoses since 2010; however, it also means that there is simply not enough to make products for the mass market, and the process involves an intense amount of labour. Thus, in 2010 we started to tackle another problem: the fact that 800,000 tonnes of leather waste are produced as off-cut each year. For us this was a much more ambitious challenge to take on, and it required an equally audacious and innovative solution. Instead of designing products, we focused on designing a modular system, looking at specific shapes that could be woven together and taken apart to create whole new hides. This approach has the potential to solve the leather-waste issue, but only if we scale up, which is why late last year we were excited to announce our five-year partnership with the Burberry Foundation.
This encompasses environmental, social and financial aspects, the latter because positive cashflow means you won’t have to compromise on your solution. Just because you are a purpose-driven social enterprise that exists to do good doesn’t mean you will be immune to wider economic issues. Like any business internal problems such as the loss of key staff or suppliers, or other shocks can damage your business. We encountered virtually every possible challenge in 2011 to 2012 and only survived because we reacted quickly, moved to a new location (in a new county!) and set up our very own manufacturing during the 10 most difficult and exciting days we have ever faced.
This is something we talk through with Elvis every time. The world doesn't have time for exploitative, destructive businesses. Those days are gone.
