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Hello and welcome back to Fashion and Founders The Podcast, my name is Victoria Smith and this week I spoke with Mary Korlin Downs. She has become a fashion tech thought leader through her Tiktok, Instagram, and Substack where she posts weekly job boards, fashion tech news, and more. Mary used to work at Bipty, a fashion rental company and I actually have an episode with the founder Natalia. She then went to Recurate a company powering brand owned resale. She then started her own agency Cropd working with fashion tech clients. Mary talks about how she got started in fashion tech by working on a startup while at a full time job in medical device sales. So if you have questions on how to transition into fashion tech listen to this episode. She shares great advice on how to build your portfolio, get started as a student, and her transition into being a founder and starting an agency working with fashion tech clients. This is the fashion tech episode to listen to, it's a bit longer than other episodes because I went through all the comments and DMs I had gotten on fashion tech so I could get Mary's take to share with you all so lets get into the episode. Follow Fashion & Founders:Podcast IG: @fashionandfoundersPodcast Website: fashionandfounders.comVictoria TikTok: @vfsmith11Podcast LinkedIn: Fashion and FoundersVictoria Pickle Closet: @victoriasPodcast Substack: Fashion and FoundersFollow Mary Korlin Downs:IG: @marykorlindownsTikTok: @maykorlindownsSubstack: All Things Fashion TechLinkedIn: Mary Korlin-DownsFollow Pink Antique:IG: @pinkantique_IG: @emilyanndeutschThank you for listening!
SummaryWilson Griffin, CEO and founder of Recurate, discusses the importance of embracing the secondhand economy and circularity in the fashion industry. Recurate helps brands manage their own resale programs, extending the life cycle of products and reducing the environmental footprint. By participating in the resale economy, brands can benefit from the second, third, and fourth sales of their products. Recurate offers a modular approach to resale, allowing brands to choose different channels, such as peer-to-peer resale, take-back repair, or selling e-commerce returns. The integration of new and used items in the buyer experience creates a seamless shopping experience for customers.Keywordsresale, circularity, fashion industry, environmental footprint, secondhand economy, peer-to-peer resale, take-back repair, e-commerce returns, buyer experienceTakeawaysBrands can benefit from embracing the secondhand economy and circularity by extending the life cycle of their products and reducing the environmental footprint.Recurate offers a modular approach to resale, allowing brands to choose different channels, such as peer-to-peer resale, take-back repair, or selling e-commerce returns.The integration of new and used items in the buyer experience creates a seamless shopping experience for customers.Resale can be a marketing tool for brands to reach out to existing customers and reactivate lapse customers, fostering loyalty and increasing lifetime value.TitlesEmbracing the Secondhand Economy and Circularity in the Fashion IndustryRecurate: Helping Brands Manage Resale Programs and Reduce Environmental FootprintSound Bites"Ooh, I'm biased here, but definitely resellable.""We've created a really easy tool where based on that product, we can actually reach out to the customers who have already bought it and say, Hey, you know, we know you bought this jacket. Uh, people love it. We hope you love it and you're wearing it every day, but just so you know.""On the brand's primary website, um, you can actually shop new items and used items next to each other."Chapters00:00Introduction and Background04:01The Problem of Resale10:39The Life Cycle of a Garment10:56Resale OS 2.016:01Expanding to Non-Branded Options17:02Modular Approach to Resale21:58Frank and Eileen's Re-Loved25:17Concierge Listing Service28:08Marketing Opportunities and Sustainability31:09Moving the Needle on Sustainability33:37Shameless Plug
Welcome to the second episode of our intriguing mini-series on HappyPorch Radio-"Exploring Circular Tech: Re-commerce in Fashion". Your hosts, Barry O'Kane and Emily Swaddle, navigate the fascinating realms of re-commerce in the fashion industry alongside esteemed guests Joe Metcalfe from Thrift+, Jessica Potter from Used and Loved, and Wilson Griffin from Recurate.In this compelling episode, dive into the exploration of different marketplace models, from managed marketplaces like Thrift+ to peer-to-peer platforms like Vinted and eBay. Our hosts and guests untangle the complexities of pricing, underline the critical need for quality control, and shed light on optimising the shopping experience for both buyers and sellers in the re-commerce context.Our guests share their valuable experiences and insights on how technology bolsters re-commerce. Discover the transformative power of software solutions that assist brands in managing resale and creating distinctive listings. Let's also venture into the future landscape of AI, image recognition, and predictive intelligence in the re-commerce sphere.However, our mini-series isn't just about us revealing insights—we want you to shape the final chapter of this narrative with your unique experiences and perspectives on re-commerce. Connect with us at hosts@happyporchradio.com. Your thoughts, questions, and feedback are invaluable, and we aim to include them in the final, third episode, airing this May. We don't want you just to listen; we want you to partake in and influence the unfolding story of re-commerce in the fashion industry.
The How of Business - How to start, run & grow a small business.
How Adam Siegel launched Recurate, a tech-enabled resale service that empowers brands and retailers to establish their own integrated resale platforms directly on their e-commerce sites. Show notes page: https://www.thehowofbusiness.com/503-adam-siegel-fashion-resale-business/ From Aerospace Engineering to starting a business in the fashion resale business, Adam shares his fascinating entrepreneur journey. Brands they work with include Steve Madden, Michael Kors, Christy Sports, and many others. Adam shares the details of co-founding and launching this business and their current business model. Henry Lopez is the host of The How of Business podcast – helping you start, run and grow your small business. The How of Business is a top-rated podcast for small business and entrepreneurs. Find the best podcast, resources and trusted service partners for small business owners and entrepreneurs at our website https://TheHowOfBusiness.com
TC Gill converses with Adam Siegel, co-founder of Recurate, a trailblazing retail tech startup. Siegel discusses his transformative journey from early computer enthusiasm to pioneering sustainable solutions in the retail sector. Listen in as he shares insights on creating a remote-first, mission-driven company culture, the challenges of balancing product development with market demand, and his unique approach to tech leadership in the dynamic startup world. Key takeaways from the podcast are: - Leadership by Example and Service - The effectiveness of leading through personal involvement and prioritizing team support and empowerment. - Adapting in the Startup Ecosystem - Strategies for managing rapid changes, focusing product development, and keeping teams motivated amidst the unique challenges of startup environments. - Harmonizing Sustainability with Business Objectives - The importance of integrating sustainable practices into business models to create a beneficial impact on both the environment and the retail industry. Our Guest: Adam Siegel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adammsiegel/ Website: https://www.recurate.com/ Intro and background music: Craig MacArthur - Power Shutoff (www.youtube.com/watch?v=x74iB_jtauw)
Cynthia is a circular-programs expert with 15 years of experience and the owner of Molte Volte. She previously managed EILEEN FISHER Renew for many years before working at tech-resale startup Recurate. She now works independently, helping brands and circular service providers to understand and navigate the fashion circular landscape, including building and scaling resale and reuse programs. She (like most of us) is passionate about the high quality, durable goods that already exist and how we can prolong their useful lives. In this episode, Cynthia speaks with Michelle Doyle about how a project she did to raise money for a college club she was in served as the launching pad for her career.
John-David Klausner is SVP of Business Development & Strategic Alliances at Loop Returns. JD has led & scaled commercial teams in high-growth companies across different continents.He loves building partner ecosystems, channel sales programs (via agencies, consultants and technology partners) that drive revenue impact across all GTM functions and solving corporate challenges with strategic partnerships that unlock new revenue streams. JD's mantra is to lead with energy, creativity, clarity, and empathy. When he's not hard at work with Loop, you can find JD spending quality time with his three kids in Miami.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:43] Intro[01:20] JD's journey towards Loop[03:12] Always prepare big for the peak season [04:32] Look for opportunities to decrease expenses[05:02] Build cost-effective returns flows[06:00] Be on the lookout even after success[06:46] Diversify carrier strategy to save shipping costs[08:14] Use automated rate shopping[08:45] Get pre-negotiated rates with carriers[09:10] Leverage return vendors for discounted rates[10:00] Communicate with 3PLs and warehouses[11:07] Optimize supply chain and logistics operation[11:48] It's all about the customer experience[12:43] Improve customer satisfaction & its lifetime value[13:13] Balancing shipping costs and inventory[13:55] In-person return bars vs at-home pickups [15:13] Eliminate the cost of the reverse logistics flow[16:23] Approach business, sales and returns strategically[17:28] Deliver convenience & flexibility for the customer[19:10] Reduce returns and abuse with integrated RMS[21:40] Be wise with return products and their costs[22:47] Item grading and dispositioning with Loop[24:01] Make shopping easy & seamless for customers[24:27] Helping brands solve returns and limit impact[24:47] Sustainability with resellers/recommerce partners[25:16] Check out resources from JD and LoopResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeReturn management platform that grows with brands loopreturns.com/Seamless returns management solution, book a demo at loopreturns.com/book-a-demo-today/How to Optimize Your Reverse Logistics During Peak Season loopreturns.com/how-to-optimize-your-reverse-logistics-during-peak-season/Peak season content on Loop website loopreturns.com/peak-season/Follow John-David Klausner linkedin.com/in/johndavidklausner/If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!
From designer fashion to sports equipment, the resale market is experiencing a renaissance like never before. In fact, the resale market has grown so exponentially that it is projected to reach $77 billion within the next few years.This is a big victory for sustainability, especially given the carbon footprint of the fashion industry. Keeping a t-shirt or pair of shoes in circulation longer is one of the greatest ways to counteract the impacts of fast fashion.With this rise in resale, there is a golden opportunity for the brands behind the products to get involved. This idea led Adam Siegel, now CEO, to co-found Recurate. Recurate is a platform that empowers clothing brands to embrace the circular economy through the potential of resale, offering tools to allow customers to buy resale and secondhand products seamlessly. By facilitating the transition to a circular business model, Recurate not only helps brands make a positive impact on the planet but also opens up new revenue streams and enhances their brand image in an increasingly conscious marketplace.Listen for insights on:The consumer data supporting the resale model for individuals and brandsHow to help consumers balance their desires for sustainability, convenience, and price — and how Recurate satisfies all threeRecurate's vision for a fully integrated resale experienceWays you can buy and sell through Recurate's brands — and how to become one!Resources + Links:Adam Siegel's LinkedInRecurateRecurate's BrandsThe Circular Fashion is Now ReportEllen MacArthur Foundation's Butterfly Diagram for Visualizing the Circular Economy (00:00) - Welcome to Purpose 360 (00:13) - Recurate (03:09) - Meet Adam Siegel (04:49) - Founding Recurate (06:51) - Circularity (08:25) - How They Work (09:39) - Resale Models (12:55) - Doing the Research (15:12) - Brand Loyalty with Recommerce Options (17:16) - The Terms (19:03) - Motivations (21:03) - Successful Business (22:16) - Examples (25:26) - Challenges (27:45) - Death to Fast Fashion in EU? (29:24) - Measurement (30:54) - By 2030... (31:55) - Recommendations (33:27) - Last Comments (34:09) - Wrap Up
The resale market is fast becoming a key segment in retail, driven by shifting consumer trends. Dive into its value for businesses and the planet, its role in the circular economy, and practical integration tactics. Join Oliver and Recurate's co-founder, Adam Siegal, for a concise exploration of modern recommerce.Listen to this podcast episode and hear:The growing significance and evolution of the resale market in today's retail landscape.Which niches and categories resale excels in.How businesses are avoiding cannibalising their core market - and even growing their new product sales!Ways of educating and communicating with customers to source preloved items plus attracting prospective buyers. Find the full show notes at www.obandco.uk/252.
There are high expectations for resale as pointed out by The Guardian. Next-generation customers will seek out pre-owned items that will allow the fashion industry to automatically transform a 100+ year-old linear model into a circular model. This will not happen in a straight path, nor will it happen overnight. Today, we live in the wild west, where it's hard to distinguish the positive forward momentum from the PR plays.The Fast Company article, ‘We buy too many clothes. Can fashion's secondhand boom change that?' really brings this point home. The piece starts by asking the question, despite all the resale news, “why the boom in resale isn't putting a dent in new clothing sales.” This would be like asking, despite all the eCommerce websites in 2002, why hasn't commerce changed? eCommerce has changed commerce, and resale will change new clothing production, but business model change on this scale takes time.What is more relevant is how brands are approaching the change. Fast Company spoke with Patagonia's @Asha Agrawal and Madewell's @Liz Hershfield. Agrawal points out that Patagonia must ensure that its resale platform makes money because this will allow the company to reduce the number of new products it produces while remaining a thriving business. “[Worn Wear is] already a profitable business for us. So now, it's just about scaling this business proposition, which will allow us to cut back on our net new production.”In contrast, Fast Company points out that most resale platforms don't generate revenue for brands, including ThredUp and Recurate, which helped launch resale sites for Mara Hoffman, Steve Madden, and Outerknown. Madewell's Hershfield states, “We weren't looking at profitability, but we want to break even financially. We do this to ensure we're meeting our sustainability goals.”Madewell's Forever (their resale partnership with ThredUP) is indeed good in many ways, including keeping items in use and driving customer expectations for resale. But because Madewell doesn't have a business model to make money on selling pre-owned items, Madewell isn't set up to shift its business away from a linear model. This and many other brand resale programs work in a philanthropy model rather than a business model change.The importance of a profitable business model extends beyond sustainability as more brand items are sold everywhere. EXPRESS Pre Loved, powered by LXR, quietly added 150+ luxury products to its online storefront, including Gucci, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton. EXPRESS makes it easy for their customers to shop across new and pre-owned as part of their marketplace program, including shared cart, which only 25% of brands offer today. All of this works for EXPRESS but not for the brands they now sell. The obvious risk here is that brands who never choose to sell to EXPRESS have zero control on how their items are priced, merchandise, or authenticated.Chloe made news this week by announcing it would digitally label all pieces by 2025, starting with a 20-piece capsule collection this year. As WWD reports, this part isn't new news, as many brands do this today across their full range of products. This is an essential strategy for the authenticity and future value of their products.What was more interesting, was the splashy headlines such as Vogues, Chloé launches ‘instant resale' using digital IDs on Vestiaire Collective. This is a great headline, as it speaks to the potential brands have to monetize the total value of their items. While details of the program are scarce, Vestiaire Collective may be offering immediate payout on these items rather than requiring a buyer. In this case, Vestiaire would take on the risk of the item's condition, pricing, and selling. Given this is a 1-year pilot for a capsule collection of 20 items first available in early April, we are likely talking about a handful of items ever being bought and sold in this way.Digital product IDs are an excellent move for brands. While this is a demonstration project, Chloe's direction to digitize all items by 2025 makes sense. Digital IDs have tremendous potential for brands to authenticate items and own the total value of their items. Digital IDs don't make a resale program. Brands still need to own their brand, and their customers via brand resale. Digital IDs will make that easier.The So WhatTo create more sustainable models brands need to make money selling their pre-owned items. Otherwise brand resale programs will never shift their business away from linear to circular models.Digital IDs are the future but don't change the reality that brands should not depend on anyone else to own their digital authentication keys and the resale models built on those digital IDs.
The secondhand luxury goods market grew 28% in 2022 to reach $45.21 billion, according to Bain & Company and Fondazione Altagamma. This is 1.3X higher than the growth rate for new luxury goods. For a related growth stat, eBay shared they saw a 24 percent increase in circular fashion businesses joining their site last year, and searches for pre-loved clothing on eBay UK have skyrocketed 1600 percent since last summer. This is likely why eBay recently participated in the $9 million capital raise round for Cudoni, a luxury resale platform based in London.Kirsty Keoghan, eBay UK's global fashion GM, shared her views on the two drivers of the growth in the City A.M. “The first is related to consumers' growing awareness of their environmental footprint, and the second is related to their expectation of high-quality products at a great value, which is more important than ever as we grapple with the cost-of-living crisis.”This week Canada Goose launched its branded resale program, Generations, powered by Trove's Recommerce Operating System. More than a decade ago, when I discussed branded resale with retailers, brand execs, and VCs, Canada Goose was a go-to example of a brand that would massively benefit from its heritage and category –so kudos to the team. The resale program has all the elements we've expected these days, with a few notable callouts, such as combining a vintage section with periodic drops and an ‘always on' ability to shop ‘certified' Canada Goose.Just Style reported on recent findings by EURIC, the confederation representing European recycling industries at the EU level. The study found a “massive” 3kg of CO2 saved for each reused piece of clothing, equating to a 70X lower footprint for secondhand fashion.The industry needs to recognize the importance of secondhand as the new business model challenges the existing make-and-sell models. But awareness and change are too important to stay in the background, especially with social influencers. The South China Morning Post reported influencer Masego Morgan was shocked when a fast fashion giant offered her $1,000 for a single social media post to promote its brand. Sustainable fashion influencer Dr Brett Staniland provided close to $5,500 for a post. Both are fighting back against these fast fashion models. I don't believe this is the core reason for Shein's recent headwinds, as reported in BoF. Still, it's a headwind nonetheless, and that all adds up for both customers and investors–especially for investors with reputational risks to consider.So what does all this mean for brands? In an article titled, Inside fashion brands' new integration of resale and retail, Glossy shared the many reasons brands are launching their resale channels, including customer acquisition, loyalty, and sustainability. The article highlighted a range of commercial success for brands in resale: with brands such as M.M.LaFleur and Peak Design sharing new customer acquisition and loyalty business benefits. In contrast, others appeared to be loss leaders for sustainability reasons. Karin Dillie, VP of partnerships at Recurate, shared, “We predict that it's not just going to be the Patagonias of the world that are investing heavily in this in the future.”I love that, so long as these investments are against viable resale programs for the business. As the article points out, there is a wide range today. I'm concerned about brands rationalizing or hiding poor business programs behind sustainability. This is bad for the brand and rarely does much for sustainability. For quality brands, this is about understanding your customer and sound program design.The South China Morning Post ran a story on rental, ‘Renting clothes? No thanks, it's too expensive and not as green as buying second-hand. Aside from the overly aggressive headline, there are some cases where rental makes sense. We must start with the customer, potential economics, and environmental math, not simply launching rental or resale as a cookie-cutter program.Ultimately customers will continue to move toward value, and getting more use out of what we make is a prominent area of growth–both for enjoying better brands for less and less wasteful production models urgently needed for sustainability. But just like fashion, one size doesn't fit all. Over the long run, the brands that align themselves with innovative resale programs will win.Why It Matters:Secondhand continues as the fastest-growing channel in retail, so those not offering these options to customers are simply losing market share.The design of resale programs matters to create the correct business value. Without business value, these programs will struggle to scale and reach their potential environmental benefit.
Happy New Year, and Welcome to what is sure to be a dynamic 2023 for Resale.Let's start with Glossy's article, The state of resale in 2023: Competition, consolidation and a push for profitability. The piece assessed players from The RealReal to Treet and summarized with “twin challenges of an overcrowded market and the growing expectation for profitability will be difficult to overcome.”A critical element is missing in this assessment. The distinction between The RealReal, which is a third-party marketplace building its brand and customer base, and Treet a service provider aimed at supporting brands who are adding resale to their existing business.Third-party marketplaces, such as The RealReal, Thredup, Poshmark (now part of South Korean internet conglomerate Naver Corp.), and Vestiaire Collective, are retailers who focus on their brand and build a profitable customer base. They exist in a reasonably mature market, and most players are now public. Vestiaire is the exception, who just raised $80B in debt as they work toward profitability. While there is room for a few players in the space, it is overcrowded today. Given the lack of profitability and the economic climate, valuations are lowered, and more consolidation is to be expected. In this part of the industry, Glossy is right on the money.Service providers, such as Trove, Recurate, Archive, Reflaunt, and Treet, are not building a customer-facing brand or a loyal customer base. They are service providers who support brands whose items are being resold on marketplaces such as The RealReal the Thredup. This part of the industry is far less mature and is poised for incredible innovation and growth as more brands enter Resale and work to scale their offerings.Scale will be the test for the service providers as the brands mature and look for more scale, but it's likely too early for consolidation here. That will be in 2024 and beyond.The second Glossy article, What to expect from fashion rental in 2023, details the up and down year for rental in 2022, including new brand launches into rental such as Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, and MatchesFashion all launched rental while both Ann Taylor and Banana Republic quietly shut down their rental programs.Rental is a new customer behavior, and brands must determine if rental is right for their brand. Customers aren't going to want separate rental programs for every brand and need in their wardrobe. Hence these programs will likely make sense for multi-brand retailers such as Rent the Runway, Selfridges, Nordstrom, or REI and possibly for specific use cases such as Burton's rental kit, including snowboard, boots, bindings, and outerwear for hitting the ski slopes. The Key TakeawaysIf your brand is exploring different circular models such as rental, think about the value for your customers over the long term. Brands will learn the most as they enter the space in the most customer-centric way for their products.Brands need to be aware of who they ‘partner' with as customers look for more preowned options. Third-Party Marketplaces, such as ThredUP need to build their brand and loyal customer base and are not aligned to do the same for a brand.Subscribe to The Resale Edit Newsletter Here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6966761821013753856/
5 Resale Predictions for 2023 As the news slows down for the Holidays and New Year, we'd love to share our resale predictions for 2023. Let's start with how the end of this year. 2022 will be the year Branded Resale became table stakes. We went from 31 to 120+ brands with dedicated resale programs. There is no going back.Brands didn't start the shift, customers did as pioneers such as The RealReal, Poshmark, Rent the Runway, and ThredUP made it easier than ever to shop secondhand. Brands took it from there. Eileen Fisher's ‘Green Eileen' was the first in 2009 but still positioned as philanthropic. Patagonia x Trove launched Worn Wear in 2016 as the first branded resale program, quickly followed by Eileen Fisher x Trove and REI x Trove later that year. ThredUP launched RaaS in 2019. Reflaunt was founded in 2017, Recurate in 2020, Archive in 2021, and most recently Treet all of whom make it easier than ever for brands to launch branded programs.The customer shift continues to make resale the fastest-growing retail channel and the more brands with resale programs, the more customers expect brands to have resale channels. There is no going back. So what's next? 5 Predictions for 2023 Brands with newly launched resale programs move to build resale businesses. This requires a path to scale and profitability and will ultimately require logistics. 2023 will start to really separate the headlines from the businesses moving hundreds of thousands of single SKU items to new homes.Brands further integrate the customer journey more fully realizing the power of resale and trade-in. We saw the start of this in 2022 with integrated carts, order history, store trade-in, and returns, and that trend will accelerate.Continued consolidation of third-party marketplaces. There is room for a few third-party marketplaces, which are really simply retailers but fewer than the number today. We saw the start of this in 2022 with Tradsey, Poshmark, and Grailed but there is more to come as these marketplaces work to both scale and prove long-term business viability.New innovation models that mix historically separate ideas such as resale, rental, and discovery. These lines are blurring and there will be more companies starting to pioneer on the backs of what brands are now doing.Luxury's wake-up call. Luxury will realize it's time to act in order to protect their brand from being sold in channels they can't control. Retail is a large marketplace and as Amazon, Walmart, Saks Off 5th, and more start selling Gucci and Louis Vuitton, there is a risk to the luxury brands themselves–in both brand equity and authenticity.
There Will be a ‘Before and After' of the Recent Rolex Pre-Certified AnnouncementRolex continued to make news this week as the industry digests the implications of their pre-certified program. Charles Gorra of Rebag was quoted in PYMTS saying “It's incredible. I think [Rolex entering the market] is the biggest news that I've heard in the last decade in terms of the resale world. I think there will be a ‘before and after' with that news. It changes everything,” he added, saying that it further legitimizes the resale industry.According to Glossy, Rolex makes up roughly 30% of the luxury watch market and a far larger share of the secondhand market, estimated to be between 40-50% with some 30 million Rolexes circulating today. Regardless of changes in the commerce landscape, the best brands are designing and creating worthwhile items that maintain brand relevance with culture, this increasingly includes where and how existing items reflect on the brand. Rolex's own pre-certified program is a watershed example for the luxury market. This a step all brands will ultimately take as more of their brand items live on in the secondary market.In other news, Rebag launched a wallet feature that rewards sellers with 1% interest for leaving their payout in their ‘Wallet'. Rebag has always been on the edge of new customer-centric features most notably the Infinity Program which allows buyers to trade items back in for known amounts within given time periods (aka, rental without the need for a contract). In a similar vein, these new features drive loyalty on the supply side. As an example, a client who sells an item leaves their payout in their Wallet for the full 12 months, then puts the money toward a Rebag purchase will see their spending power increase to 24 percent. Today's $5,000 offer, for example, would be worth $6,200 at Rebag in 12 months.I am not sure if this will make a material difference in items sold as touted, but it is a nod toward supply-side loyalty. As BCG published findings this week that sellers are most motivated by time savings and making room in their closets. Recovering the residual value of their item was an additional motivation. But what I like about the Rebag Wallet is the long-game incentive to build loyalty at the supply level. Ultimately for the best brands, all markets will be supply-constrained and platforms such as The Real Real (TRR) and Rebag as well as brands such as REI are wise to begin building loyalty for those customers who trade in valuable items.Finally, as covered in BoF and WWD, peer-to-peer player, Archive raised $15M last week. Congratulations to Ryan and Emily and the Archive team. While funding isn't everything, building capabilities for brands is an investment and this puts Archive in step with peer-to-peer provider Recurate in terms of the ability to invest in needed technology. The increased competitive environment with a number of peer-to-peer platforms makes it easier than ever for brands to move forward with brand resale platforms. An incredible step for the resale industry. Longer term the test for these platforms will be scale, which I expect will require reverse logistics operations and far more investment, but the more providers and the more brands able to offer branded resale, the better.Key TakeawaysProtect your brand. All great brands must maintain brand relevance with ever-evolving culture, which increasingly includes where and how past items reflect on the brand. Rolex's launch of its pre-certified program is a great example of brands taking control.Scale will be the name of the resale game.There are more options than ever for brands to enter brand-owned resale. Brands who launch programs will over time need to assure they can achieve scale which will include reverse logistics and operations.Until Next Week,Andy Ruben | Founder & Exec Chair of TroveWeek of December 13thCan Rolex's new resale program and booming secondhand market coexist?GlossyOn December 2, luxury watch giant Rolex made an announcement heard throughout the watch world: It will officially begin selling secondhand Rolex watches certified by the brand through its 1,816 authorized dealers. It's starting with six retailers immediately, and more will be added throughout 2023.Rebag Debuts Wallet Feature to Help Break Resale Supply BottleneckPYMNTSIn announcing its new Wallet feature Wednesday (Dec. 7), the reCommerce platform is hoping the incentivized savings feature will entice more sellers into the market, Rebag founder and CEO Charles Gorra told PYMNTS, while also encouraging consumers to embrace an investor-like mentality as the 8-year-old business — and the industry — grows.eBay UK Expands Secondhand Clothing Options Through New PartnershipRetail TouchpointseBay has launched a new UK partnership with clothing resale, sanitization, and repair platform ACS to expand the online marketplace's secondhand offering and help reduce waste in the fashion industry. The partnership aims to help more brands create and scale resale offerings while adding more secondhand options to eBay UK's platform.Resale Start-up Archive Secures $15 Million in FundingWWDWith this new influx of capital, Archive's total funding is up to $24 million following a raise earlier this year in January. Today, Archive powers resale experiences spanning peer-to-peer, brand-managed, vintage marketplace and in-store resale models counting 32 brands — among them M.M. LaFleur, Filippa K, Dagne Dover, and Oscar de la Renta — in its resale camp.Resale Platform Archive Raises $15 Million Series A RoundBofFCreating tailored resale programs for each of its brand partners, Archive is one of several startups that enable brands to offer consumers a secondhand option. One of the Archive's competitors, Trove, which counts Lululemon, Levi's, and Patagonia as clients, raised $77.5 million dollars last autumn. Unlike Trove, Archive does not handle logistics on behalf of its brand partners. The bulk of its operation involves building peer-to-peer marketplaces where users can sell and purchase pre-owned pieces from one another. In recent months, Archive began to offer a managed resale model too.The death of DepopThe Michigan DailyThe popularity of thrifting, especially among young women, often drew the ire of video essayists and journals alike. According to “Gentrification in Thrifting,” published in UCLA's FEM newsmagazine, “Affluent shoppers often purchase excess inventory they found at low prices in thrift stores and resell it on websites such as Depop or Poshmark at substantially higher rates.” Due to this purchasing of clothing in bulk, blame often falls on the young women purchasing and selling these clothes online for the rise in prices and scarcity of clothing in stores like Goodwill or Salvation Army.Driven by Gen-Z, Preowned Clothing is Expected to Make Up 27% of the Average Resale Buyer's Closet By 2023Business ReviewThe secondhand market is already worth 3% to 5% of the overall apparel, footwear, and accessories sector and could grow to as much as 40%. While resale products make up approximately one-quarter of secondhand products buyers' closets, they are expected to comprise 27% of closets in 2023. Gen-Z consumers are the most apt to both buy (31%) and sell (44%) secondhand items, with millennials close behind.Has Secondhand Gifting Finally Become Acceptable This Christmas?Huffington PostFor a lot of people, the idea of buying our friends and family a gift from a charity shop feels odd. Will I offend someone if I buy them a second-hand gift? Will the gift be in good condition? What will I do if they want to return it? But, 38% of people said they had gifted someone a secondhand item over the past 12 months, according to a survey from Vinted. Another 65% of people said they would consider gifting someone a secondhand item in the next 12 months.
Fashion-forward resale is getting a makeover. With technology as the tool to scale and increase accessibility, recommerce has emerged as a lucrative revenue generator for brands and an opportunity for consumers to save money and reduce their environmental impact. Karin Dillie, VP of Partnerships at Recurate, discusses the intersection of retail and sustainability, branded resale, and the future of circular fashion.
The Resale Edit: WeeklyEdition #3-This past week we saw the launch of three new brand resale platforms: Michael Kors, Marimekko, and PrettyLittleThing (PLT). Dicks Sporting Good expanded a local trade-in program, Amazon invested in Cashify, an Indian electronics trade-in marketplace, Trove reached 700 U.S. stores with trade-in technology and The Cut gave us a not-so-nice peak inside The Real Real.Michael Kors and Marimekko launched resale programs with beautiful splash pages, gorgeous photography, and activated with paid media budgets. The sites are powered by Recurate and Archive respectively. They follow the pattern that will likely define resale in 2022– low resource lift and high media exposure. As more brands offer resale, it will further accelerate the shift of branded resale from innovation to expectation.As Sourcing Journal writes these programs provide brands a low-lift way to launch resale by putting the work of listing, pricing and sell thru on the customer. Over the longer term these programs will require additional investment to go from marketing to business relevant. For example, as of August 30, Michael Kors had 74 items for sale, Marimekko 1,203: when shopping across 13 categories and half a dozen sizes on Marimekko it quickly becomes hard to shop.Trove shared a milestone of their Recommerce Operating System powering trade-in technology for 700 stores nationwide. Physical retail trade-in provides a tremendous advantage for brands making it easier for customers to bring back items, driving foot traffic, and cementing loyalty. This approach is a good example of the technology necessary to scale profitable resale for brands.Dicks Sporting Goods expanded local trade-in events with partner SidelineSwap. It's a no-brainer as stores fight to become community hubs. And, Amazon's 2% stake in Cashify, an Indian electronics trade-in marketplace is another early signal of the importance of electronics supply globally. I anticipate more shakers and change-makers to come over the next decade.Finally, The Cut exposed a “very real” look into The Real Real. The piece did its best to add a small dose of sugar with ‘but I can't stop shopping' however that is where the sugar high ends. The viewpoint is fairly accurate but in the broader context, early marketplaces such as The Real Real have been the innovators that have made resale of today mainstream. These marketplaces will face additional pressure as brands launch resale programs with lower customer acquisition costs, existing supply chains and store base.The So What?Resale is quickly becoming a customer expectation rather than innovation as more brands launch resale programs.Many brands are finding low lift ways to launch programs in the media. While these programs are a good start, they will require additional investment and technology to become meaningful to the business and customers.—----------------------------Week of August 30: Michael Kors Pre-Loved, a New Resale Marketplace, Launched FridayWomen's Wear Daily Looking to support the circular economy, Michael Kors launches a resale marketplace on PreLoved.MichaelKors.com. With this new marketplace, Michael Kors wants to re-invent the meaning of timeless luxury. Only Kors VIP members are able to sell previous products.How Michael Kors is Offering ‘Low-Lift' ResaleSourcing JournalMichael Kors PreLoved recommerce marketplace is an example of a brand managed peer to peer resale. It's relatively low resource as the VIP Micahel Kors members do most of the heavy lifting. VIP PreLoved members upload photos, set the asking price, write the descriptions and current conditions. MK just has to verify and approve submissions for accuracy.Heinz and thredUP Drop Vintage Drip Collection Celebrating the Iconic Ketchup Stain PR NewswireYou want a designer ketchup stain with that? Heinz Vintage Drip released it's first-of-its-kind fashion collection featuring 157 secondhand streetwear and designer piece. Each item with a unique HEINZ ketchup stain taking the stigma out of ketchup stains. In partnership with thredUp, Heinz will donate 100% of profits to Rise Against Hunger while also promoting fashion sustainability.DICK'S Sporting Goods Expands Resale Partnership with SidelineSwapPR NewswireUsed sports gear accounts for approximately $20 billion of unused items in a typical U.S. household. DICK'S Sporting Goods and SidelineSwap, the world's largest online recommerce for new and used sporting goods, are continuing their partnership to offer a variety of new trade-in events in seven states.PrettyLittleThing launches resale Partnership with Sideline SwapJust StyleIn response to customers wanting to sell their PrettyLittleThing garments that they no longer wear, PrettyLittleThing rolled out a community resale marketplace. Consumers can access resale items from their existing PrettyLittleThing orders making it efficient and easy to sale and upload products. PrettyLittleThing hopes to inspire customers to recycle garments using the three R's, re-selling, re-wearing, and re-using.The key fashion pieces right now? Clothes you'll want to still wear (or sell on) in five years' timeThe GuardianWith the rise of sustainable fashion, comes the emergence of a different fashion style, Timelessness. The most fashionable statement you can make is not giving into the fashion trends of the moment. Although pre-loved items aren't as transparent on an environemntal impact it's obvious that the most coveted look is one that will still be desired in five years.The RealReal Is a Total Mess, and I Can't Quit ItThe CutThe RealReal is a Real hot mess and what customers believed to be growing pains of a startup seems to only have gotten more chaotic since the company went public. It's more about quantity than value of products and employees have said they have felt overworked and underpaid. However, clients say they will still shop there because it's the only place with reasonable pricing.How And Why To Promote Resale in Your OrganizationForbesFounder and CEO of Rebag Charles Gorra shares how and why retailers and brands should adopt a circular business model. Vintage Gucci soars as hottest resale brand, demand increases 500%New York PostThe Real Real released it's annual report which declared Gucci the most sought after resale brand. Gucci is most likely to cash in higher when flipped along with Chanel, Prada, and Hermes. The Real Real saw a 44% increase in purchases and 5.3 million new site users this year.Marimekko Partners With Archive to Make Resale and Vintage PossibleForbesResale is going global, this week sought-after Finnish design-house joined the recommerce market powered by Archive. This new platform is inspired by the thought that timeless designs bring joy to consumers. For now Pre-loved Marimekko will only be available in Finland with plans to service other markets in the future.Amazon Exclusively Invests in Cashify, A Re-Commerce MarketplaceCashifyTechByteRe-Commerce is all the rage and Amazon has joined the race, by investing in the re-sale marketplace Cashify. Through the solution, smartphones, laptops, and all other electrical needs can be bought second hand directly from customers. Cashify works through a variety of retail and online channels that will only increase with Amazon's investment into the future of re-commerce.Resale Going Mainstream in Canada with Consumers Particularly Valuing Brand-Owned Resale: ReportRetail InsiderRecurate reports major takeaways concluded that 85% of shoppers would try a new brand if resale was offered, 75% of all participants said recommerce would increase their brand loyalty but third party marketplaces are their only option, and 72% of recommerce shoppers shop at least every two to three months participating in frequent fashion without fast fashion. Most shocking, 74% of people across all major markets, ages, genders and socioeconomic status shop recommerce.Beni Scours Internet for Best Price, Alternatives for Resale ShoppersWomen's Wear DailyMeet Beni, a woman-founded resale start-up. No, it's not another marketplace, but a free google chrome extension making secondhand shopping easier. With this extension you can see real time marketplace listings with 18 of Beni partners including: Nearly Newlywed, Rent the Runway, TheRealReal, and eBay to name a few. Beni hopes to get people in the habit of shopping more sustainably by the ease of the scrollable pop-up that appears on the desktop during online window shopping.
Joining the show today is Karin Dillie, coming to talk about Recurate's newest report, all things resale, from Gen Z to Boomers, omnichannel, and more! Tune in now! Reclaiming ResaleRecurate started as a way for brands to reclaim resaleRecurate has recently released a new piece of research called the Recurate Resale Report, they wanted to dig in and find the data on what is happening in resale“What we wanted to do was dig in a bit more into primary data and really understand the motivations and behaviors that are happening and what consumers want from brands.” – KarinIn their research, they found a new cohort of customers called “Circulars”: people who are buying and selling.Resale has happened in previous generations but it's happening differently now, you can interact more than you used to, and you're able to interact across all the different channels, ages, and genders“63% of people want brands to do more. Customers are already doing this, some version of it, whether it be localized or online, and they want more help in doing it well.” – Karin“This is an element of omnichannel that is never talked about.” – PhillipEverything in direct to consumer era in a nutshell is the level of loyalty and experience that comes with the brand Brands need to learn how we create this omnichannel relationship with resale in the same way that we've done with channel flexing for buying IRL or turning to Amazon for staples.It's all about building the resale operating systems that meet your customers where they want to be. The biggest part of this is helping customers understand that there is value in their items. Associated Links:Learn more about Karin Dillie and RecurateDownload Recurte's Resale ReportSubscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes! Download VISIONS 2022 NOW! Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceCheck out our newest Step by Step launching Monday!Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
The Resale Edit: Weekly Edition #1-Kaley Roshitsh's WWD article on Thrifting reminds us that while the lion's share of resale is online, the 25,000 US physical thrift stores still make up a bulk of the resale industry. She also highlights the growing value and importance of well-made items in the greater cause of sustainability in the past few decades. Tommy Hilfiger's launch of their resale site provides a sustainability win for the brand. While co-branded and powered by ThredUP, the merchandise and trade-in programs are Tommy-specific (aside from the small mention of competing brands on the trade-in page). While these programs are good sustainability marketing play, they are not viable long-term solutions for the brand as they lack brand control and customer ownership.Eddie Bauer's foray to pull together resale and rental, on the other hand, is a bit more problematic. The idea of seamless integration of new, used, and rental is compelling and we see it working in Europe but the execution, in this case, creates risk for the brand. Navigating through the site I experience items that could not be added to the cart, items canceled from my cart, and a very confusing and problematic UX to name a few. I applaud the bold move by Eddie Bauer but this is another cautionary tale that brands should experiment in a ‘do no harm to the brand' mode.Sustainability remained a throughline this week including Louis Vuitton's new logo on a 90% recycled sneaker. It shows a leading brand's recognition of customer importance for sustainability. However, this fits many current marketing efforts that ultimately will fall short of customer expectations for brands–that is more meaningful business model innovation. On a related note, I am a fan of ThredUP's new campaign against Shein with Stranger Things star Priah Ferguson. Shein is a big and visible target and the effective call to action will support the growth of ThredUPs thrifting model for next-gen customers.Finally, Recurate published its first Resale Report. The world is not lacking data that resale is big and growing. There were, however, a few value-added data points such as the breakout by behavior groups including those who buy, sell, buy and sell and those who don't participate in resale. Of course, I am a big believer in brand-owned resale which is also highlighted in the report. As resale grows, brands need to protect their brand and stay close to their customers. This will require profitable resale programs integrated with their core business that can operate at scale.The So What?1. There's no substitute for learning from your customers in the market, but you can't afford to put your brand at risk — even for resale. Events this week further highlight the need to move aggressively but intelligently as experience matters. 2. Sustainability matters for brands because it matters for customers and society. Customer expectations are high and those brands that emerge successfully will innovate at the business model level–marketing alone won't cut it.About Trove:Trove's Recommerce Operating System™ powers trade-in and resale for world-class brandsand retailers, delivering profitable and sustainable growth at scale. Lululemon, Levi's,Patagonia, REI, Eileen Fisher, and Arc'teryx are among the leading global brands leveragingTrove's technology to create and profit from their own branded resale programs. A CaliforniaBenefit Corporation, Trove is accelerating the shift to a new era of commerce essential to amore sustainable future. The company ranked number 1,944 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2022. Tolearn more, visit Trove.comSources:Tommy Hilfiger Partners With thredUP, Expands Involvement in Resale TrendPymnts.comTommy Hilfiger is the latest brand to partner with ThredUp's Resale as a Service. The offering is listed on the main URL's global Nav and both trade-in and sales are limited to only Tommy Hilfiger items–breaking from historical programs where customers can receive brand credit for any items sent back to ThredUP.Logomania Is Coming for SustainabilityBusiness of FashionLouis Vuitton has given its classic monogram a sustainability-focused makeover for its newest sneaker–comprised of 90% recycled material. The new logo was created by late designer Virgil Abloh and first appeared in a series of upcycled garments and accessories featured in the brand's Spring/Summer 2021 menswear collection. Will a Recession Stunt Sustainable Fashion?Business of FashionThe last major downturn in 2008 was a huge setback for an emerging movement. But this time, consumer and business culture shifts mean things are likely to be different. A recession is also likely to fortify the rise of resale and rental, already fast-growing markets that play into the desire for value and bargains that usually accompany a downturn.Why Thrift, Upcycling Are the ‘Only Relevant Conversation' in Fashion Right NowWWDNational Thrift Shop Day on Wednesday counts scores of new (and longtime) admirers in fashion for thrifting's history, trendiness, and relevance. According to the National Association of Resale Professionals, or NARTS, the physical thrift store count sits at 25,000 in the U.S., contributing to the multibillion-dollar resale industry that is estimated to reach $77 billion by 2025.ThredUP enlists ‘Stranger Things' star to help turn the fast fashion world upside downRetail DiveFast fashion has long been criticized for its negative environmental impact. Now online resale retailer thredUP is launching a campaign with a celebrity Priah Ferguson of Stranger Things who is espousing the ills of fast fashion while advertising the type of outfits the online secondhand shop offers.Majority of Secondhand Shoppers Buy Mid-Priced Brands, According to Recurate's First Resale ReportFootwear NewsRecurate released its first resale report — and a key insight shows that 74% of people across all major markets, ages, genders, and socioeconomic status shop resale. The report also sectioned off respondents according to certain behaviors and demographics: re-commerce shoppers (ages 21 to 40, female and suburban earning $30,000 or less), re-commerce sellers (ages 21 to 40, female and urban earning $50,000 to $100,000), the “circulars” (ages 18 to 40, female and urban earning $50,000 to $100,000, including freelancers) and “non-actives” (ages 41-plus, all genders and suburban earning less than $75,000).Eddie Bauer Launches Resale ‘(Re)Adventure' ProgramWWDEddie Bauer launched their unified rental, and resale storefront called (Re)Adventure this week. They had previously launched a gear rental program with Arrive and now added a resale program with ThredUP. Under the program, customers can rent a range of everyday and outdoor items, from flip-flops ($2) to tents ($21.50 and up).
Welcome to The Multi-usiverse! Alongside your guide, Garr Punnett, explore worlds of opportunity within the use of physical resources across companies and organizations. In this episode we're joined by Karin Dillie, VP of Partnerships at Recurate. Enjoy Episode Twenty-Three of the Multi-usiverse! Learn more about Rheaply and it's award-winning resource management and exchange platform that helps world-leading organizations better visualize, quantify, and utilize their physical assets at Rheaply.com. Full episodes can be found on our YouTube Channel. Watch the full episode here.
Recorded on 06/17/22 On this episode, we host Adam Siegel, Co-Founder & CEO of Recurate. Recurate sets itself apart by offering a tech-enabled peer-to-peer resale service to help brands launch their own resale channel. Topics explored: differences in branded resale vs. peer-to-peer marketplaces, resale's financial and lifetime value benefits, and Recurate's key priorities ahead. For Disclosures, click here bit.ly/3cPHkNW
As the VP of partnerships for resale tech company Recurate, Karen Dillie draws on her deep retail and resale experience honed from previous roles at Sotheby's and The RealReal, to help brands integrate a peer-to-peer marketplace seamlessly into their existing eCommerce platform. Fueled by her passion for sustainability and circularity, Karin gives us the inside scoop on why resale is imperative for brands, both as a positive environmental approach and as a revenue driver. Listen now to discover how Recurate leverages the blockchain to ensure authenticity, why it is the only tech resale provider that directly integrates into a brand's eCommerce, and how it uses data to drive smarter decisions at the companies it partners with.
This week, Ryan speaks with Wilson Griffin and Karin Dillie at Recurate. Recurate promotes the idea of resale within the fashion industry. In this vain, topics such as resale, sustainability, and the future of fashion were discussed. Ryan's Rants & Raves is a podcast series on fashion, design and all things Québec produced by the Québec Government Office in New York and hosted by Fashion Attaché Ryan McInturf.
Charity shops and thrift stores have been firm fixtures of the modern retail space since at least the 1950's and primarily second-hand product websites like eBay and Craigslist are now both running into their mid-twenties - resale is certainly not a new phenomenon, but it's in recent years that advances in technology and shifts in consumer habits have allowed the second, and even third-hand market to flourish like never before. In episode 78 of The Resilient Retail Game Plan, I speak to Wilson Griffin and Karin Dillie of the tech-enabled resale service, Recurate. Recurate's mission is to look at the whole life cycle of a product and extend it. They aim to build circularity through partnering with brands and retailers by putting the resale capacity of their own products back into their own hands. In this podcast, we discuss how the perception and culture around shopping second-hand has changed and how conversations around supply chains and materials have become as important to some consumers as the products themselves. We also touch on how harnessing pre-existing resale infrastructure and peer-to-peer behaviour could help you see great returns with little risk or commitment to your bottom line. Check and connect with Wilson and Karin at: https://recurate.com/ https://twitter.com/recurate https://www.instagram.com/recurate.app/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/recurate/
Today I have a conversation with Wilson Griffin of Recurate to talk about why and how brands can take charge of their secondhand market capitalization while doing the most impactful thing a fashion brand can do where it's sustainability.
This week Karin Dillie, VP of Partnerships for Recurate, joins us to talk about how they're building the technology for independent brands to resell their products on their own platforms. Love Frye boots? Now you can shop their site and decide whether you want a crisp new pair or one that's been pre-loved, for a fraction of the cost, all on the same trusted Frye website. The resale market has exploded from independent thrift shops to billion dollar public companies in the past decade, fueled by a desire to escape the model of constant consumption and planned obsolescence. Consumers at the point of purchase can also see the estimated resale value of their products, potentially enticing them to shop for higher quality, longer lasting items knowing there's a better than decent shot they'll be able to recoup the value of that product down the road Recurate offers an option for brands to keep the resale in house, offering products that have provenance- a known history of when it was first sold and the ability to authenticate it as a genuine article. Karin knows a thing or three about provenance from her time working at Southeby's, and a heck of a bunch about the resale econonomy from four years at the RealReal. Tune in to get her perspective on how the technology is advancing today and her vision about what's next for second hand markets.
For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Cynthia Power, an expert in brand resale programs. Cynthia currently helps brands build and optimize their resale programs at Recurate, a full-service recommerce partner for brands, whose clients include Mara Hoffman and RE/DONE. Before that, Cynthia worked as the Director of Eileen Fisher's take-back and resale program. And as you may know, Eileen Fisher has been a major trailblazer in the brand resale space.Cynthia is also an avid thrifter and self-proclaimed vintage fanatic herself, so she has a lot of great insight into the secondhand fashion space.In this episode Cynthia is addressing topics like:What are the differences between brand-led resale programs vs. third-party platforms like a ThredUP or Depop?What do the logistics look like for a brand's resale program? And what are the challenges to getting a resale program off the ground? And how can brands design for resale from the very beginning? Cynthia is also addressing some of those big difficult-to-answer and hotly debated topics, like:How can we start to get fashion to *finally* talk about reducing new production?And does resale give brands an "excuse" to continue to overproduce since they have a home for that unsold stock?Let's dive into this conversation with Cynthia to get the answers to all of these questions, and more.Quick reminder: If you enjoy this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app! so that you don't miss future conversations like this one. FULL SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPThttps://www.consciouslifeandstyle.com/fashion-resale-recurate/ WATCH THIS INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE (coming soon):https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIKaxSd78Hqa8XA6cQf8tvg LINKS MENTIONED:ThredUP 2021 Resale ReportRecurate's Brand PartnersCS Podcast Episode about Clothing RentalThe Sustainability EDIT 2021 ReportCS Podcast Episode with Natasha Halesworth of The Consistency ProjectBrass Clothing Case Study CONNECT WITH RECURATE:WebsiteInstagram CONNECT WITH CONSCIOUS STYLE:Conscious Life & Style WebsiteInstagramPinterestConscious Edit NewsletterYouTube
On this episode Douglas Hand meets with Karin Dillie of the fashion resale platform Recurate. They discuss sustainability in fashion, the circular economy and how fashion misses it and how the next five years will see massive, radical change in consumers' relationships with their clothes and the notion second hand. Listen in! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
"How do you sell snowflakes?" - Andy Reuben CEO of Trove In this case, snowflakes = resale product, and to figure out the answer to that question we had to call in an expert in the circular economy and resale. In the latest Ask An Expert series, Omni Talk's Anne Mezzenga is joined by resale expert and VP of Brand Success at Recurate Cynthia Power. Cynthia started her retail resale career at Eileen Fisher running their "Renew" program, one of the first upcycling and resale programs in the business. In this episode, Cynthia talks about the variety of approaches brands and retailers are exploring as they add resale to their platforms and the reasons why they've been moved to do so -- from seeking sustainability to more successful customer acquisition. Anne and Cynthia conclude the episode by discussing the latest resale headlines, from Resale-As-A-Service to resale storefronts and the advantages and disadvantages of each. For more information on Recurate or to get in contact with Cynthia, head to Recurate.com. *Sponsored Content*
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find One Circular World:One Circular World - WebsiteWhere to find Claire Potter:Claire Potter - Email: claire@clairepotterdesign.com Where to find Recurate:Recurate Where to find Adam Siegel:Adam Siegel - Email: adam@recurate.com Links Mentioned in Episode:University of Sussex - Product DesignGlobal Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI)Surfers Against SewagePatagoniaPatagonia - "Don't Buy This Jacket" AdLoopFairphoneMud JeansRent The RunwayCradle to Cradle - bookEllen MacArthur FoundationLimeLoopPeak DesignLa LigneRe-Ligne - La Ligne's Resale MarketplaceBrass ClothingJackaloTotem Brand CoLululemon Resale LaunchShownotes:Krissie Leyland 0:00 Hello, and welcome to The MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie!Rich Bunker 0:11 I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community. Krissie Leyland 0:18 The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good. Rich Bunker 0:30 You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking "Community". See you there!Krissie Leyland 0:35 Hello, this is the second episode of our series where we upload our special panel events with our ecommerce and sustainability experts. This event is all about the circular economy: why ecommerce brands should get involved and how can they go about it in the easiest and most efficient way possible with our incredible guest speakers Claire from One Circular World and Adam from Recurate. Claire is from One Circular World, which is an educational resource exploring the circular economy – not just for business managers, politicians or policymakers, but for all of us, including those in the ecommerce world. And Adam is from Recurate. Recurate enables a beautifully integrated resale marketplace directly on ecommerce stores. So this means you can very easily integrate a secondhand store directly on your website, which is great for your brand and great for the planet. If you're a regular listener, follow us on social media or have gone through our incredible Sustainability Framework, you'll know that I talk about Recurate a lot, so this was a long time coming. So thank you, Adam and thank you Claire, so so much for taking the time to deliver your knowledge to us. Thank you to those who attended the event live and thank you lovely listeners for being here with us on the podcast. So if you enjoy this event, you'll love being in our community. We are introducing live training events in our community group, so it's a great time to get involved if you want to learn about growing your ecommerce business in the most sustainable and positively impactful way. You can join the community for free by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking on "Community". I'll also link to the direct link to join on the show notes. Okay, let's get right into it and let's go over to the event. Enjoy.Claire Potter 2:50 Good afternoon, everybody. Hi! Thank you so much for having me. We're gonna be talking about circular economy, and what can basically people do with it, particularly from a commerce perspective. Firstly, I'm going to give you a quick, quick introduction to me. So like many of us, I wear many different hats. I run a design studio, I identify as a designer, I trained as an interior architect, and I specialized in eco sustainable ways of working that eventually became a circular economy way of thinking. That was founded in 2008. Also I'm a lecturer at the University of Sussex, and I'm the head of the product design course at University of Sussex. Mostly because of my interference, I suppose we've become quite a sort of a hub for circular economy learning with regards to products, and how it can become an integral part of the educational process because our product designers are making all the stuff that we have in the world. So that's another day job. As far as volunteer stuff, I'm actually the working group coordinator for the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, which is a bit of a mouthful, but basically this is end of life fishing nets, stuff that's been abandoned, lost or discarded. And this is a global thing. So we've got members of the GGGI that are really little organizations like me and my design studio, all the way through to governments. So it's really far reaching and an amazing set of people doing incredible stuff globally. On a more load local scale... I'm based usually down in Brighton, in Lincolnshire. I'm actually based down in Brighton & Hove and I'm one of the regional reps for Surfers Against Sewage, which again is a volunteer role and I'm the plastics person. As I say: disclaimer, I don't surf but I can snowboard and I know nothing about poo, but I know a lot about plastic. So that's basically the stuff that I do for Surfers Against Sewage: leading beach cleans, educating people about plastic, in particular marine plastic, and that's been my specialist nerd niche, as I call it for the last year 12 years. Then everything sort of came together with One Circular World, which is the hats that I'm wearing today and I'm going to talk to you a little about that in a second. But how does all of that knit together: it all knits together because of design – because everything we have in the world is designed from our systems to our stuff. The way that we behave has been designed and influenced in multitude of different ways. A lot of that can be influenced in a good way, I think through behavior change, circular economy thinking, and the value of the products and the materials we have in our lives, regardless of whether there's something that is relatively short term or something that lasts for a very, very long time. So basically, I deal with people and I deal with stuff. That is the sort of the top line of everything I do. I know a lot of you have probably joined this and know a lot about the circular economy but just in case you're not too sure about the terminology, this is the kind of way I explain it to most people: It's basically how the natural world works. So if you think about it, you can have a leaf, that leaf will get eaten by Caterpillar, the caterpillar gets eaten by the bird, the birds sadly dies, that bird falls to the floor, it composts, and then it ends up nourishing the earth itself and allowing a tree to grow more leaves, which can then be eaten by more caterpillars. So you can see here that even though I've put this in a line, it's a system that works in a circle, or a loop in a way, because it's a little bit more complex than that. So whatever is at the end will eventually go back to the beginning. But we don't work in that way. We're the only species on the planet that creates any kind of waste, which is quite staggering. So we work in this linear way: we dig things up, we make something, we sell, we buy things and then it gets to the end of its life, regardless of how long that life is. It mostly ends up in landfill, or ends up in incineration. Sometimes it gets recycled, but it works in a linear way. Not all of our systems work in that cyclical way, just like nature does. So if in doubt, when you're thinking about the circular economy, because it can be pretty complicated, we're going to dial into a few bits of that in a second, think about how nature works. Does nature do this? If it doesn't, then it probably isn't part of a circular system. So another way of calling it is "cradle at the beginning to the grave at the end": it's a linear lifeline. Now I have a bit of an issue with the word sustainable but it is genuinely the word that most people associate with green living, eco living & sustainable living. But if we think about that linear model we just looked at, in the truest sense, that isn't a sustainable way of working. Because we have finite resources & we have finite amount of carbon we can put up in the atmosphere. We're really reaching the limits. So to sustain that way of working into the future, it's going to be hard, if not impossible. This is why I tend to try to not use the word sustainable when I'm teaching because I really need to tell the students, "they need to shake up the system a bit and make the system better."So a lot of people go, "Amazing. Well, that's the reduce, reuse, recycle, isn't it? We've been doing that for a long time." Well, not quite, because we've got the linear economy, the cradle to the grave, stuff gets made stuff goes to the bin/ Then we have the recycling economy, which is better, you can see the bin I've drawn is a lot smaller. But it means that things might take a little bit longer, but invariably, they get to not being a greater quality, or they get broken, and variably they just end up in the bin anyway. But the idea with a circular economy is that we don't have a bin at all. Everything goes round in a circle, or loop. It isn't as neat and tidy as this but it goes round and round and round, sometimes in the same form, ie a plastic bottle to a plastic bottle, sometimes in different forms like a fishing net, all the way through to a carpet tile, for example. But it gets transformed in different ways or it's the same thing again, it goes round and around. And it is a lot more complicated than just making stuff. We have what we call a hierarchy of actions and this is a really important thing to think about when you are understanding how to engage in a circular economy either as an individual or as a brand. So we have the reduce, reuse, recycle in this spectrum here and you can see the biggest one we have is reduce. We need to reduce a lot of things that were buying, using and consuming so quickly. We have got recycling there and we got rubbish, which is basically at the very end. But we've got reusing the stuff again, and again, we've got longevity, we've got repairing, which is part of reuse. So if you have something that needs to last a long time, you might need to amend it to be suitable for how your life has changed. It might be that it needs repairing as it goes along and we know that so many of our products are not designed to be repaired. They are produced with snap fittings, which means that you can't really easily get into them, they break as you try to get into them. It might be we can't get parts. So the way that our stuff has been designed has meant that circularity in the sense has become much, much harder. So that's something we're trying to shake up in the educational system. We do have recycling, of course, but recycling is a destructive process, ie the thing needs to be dismantled, taken to pieces, smashed apart, melted before it can be turned back into something, which of course takes energy. Then we have recovery, which is a fancy word for incineration with energy that is taken from the incineration process. Then hopefully, if we've got a biological waste, we might be rotting it, turning it into compost. And at the very, very, very bottom: we have rubbish, which might be landfill. As you can see here, this is the hierarchy of what we want to be doing: rubbish at the very bottom, and actual reduction at the very, very top.But when we really think about circular thinking, you get even fancier little sketches like this one, which is called the butterfly system or the butterfly sketch. You can see here we've got each of those different hierarchies that we've just looked at but we've sort of split them into halves. So we've got us, as the people in the middle & at the bottom. Then at the very top, we've got our linear system. So we're grabbing the stuff out, we're manufacturing our things, we're distributing, selling our things to us, but instead of it going to the grave at the very bottom, the landfill incineration, it gets split into two elements. So technical materials, which is everything synthetic. Metals go into that as well. Everything that's biological is everything that's organic, not in the certified sense, but in the sense that it's been grown. I just want you to take five seconds to look around your room now and look at every single thing in that room. You will not be able to find anything that is an either a technical material, or a biological material. So where I'm sitting at the moment, I'm sitting at a table, and it's got a wood core. So that's very much a biological material, but it has a plasticized top to it. So that's a technical material. So some things might be pure. I've also got a cotton tea towel looking at me. So that's pure cotton. But we might have something that's a mixture of the two just like this table. So you might have something that's purely technical material, synthetic, like a plastic, something that's biological, like this tea towel that's looking at me, or we might have something in the middle. But each of these things can be split. And we could be thinking about how we might be reusing them, how we might be repairing them, how we might re manufacture them, or at the very end recycle them. Hopefully, the recycling goes into some kind of remanufacture stage. So nothing really drops through the bottom. If this is a big sieve, all of our stuff is sitting in the sieve and nothing's falling through the gaps at the bottom. It's a landfill, or incineration. As soon as we start to mix things together, just like this table I'm sitting at, it makes it harder to reprocess. So when we're thinking about circular systems, we really want to try and keep them as pure as possible to either being a biological material, or either being a technical material if we can. This is basically how circularity works. It's a series of systems that interconnect and crossover in a multitude of different ways. I'm happy for you guys to have these slides as well, because these are all my little doodles in here. It makes it much easier to look back in it when you're thinking about this. So if we go back to our hierarchy of actions, I want to look at a few examples of how different brands are doing really great stuff in different stages. I have a few hero brands that I talk about. Some you might agree with, some of you might disagree with. Yeah, really happy to chat about this. One of my favorite brands is Patagonia and they've been going for a long time. I actually had a very interesting conversation with a friend who wondered whether Patagonia were doing the good stuff, because they needed and wants to do the good stuff, or whether they understood that the good stuff would make them money. In some ways, it's kind of a bit of both because business makes money. Circular economy has economy in the second half. It's not done for fun. It's done for business. So this is something we really need to understand: that you can be a business and work in an ethical manner. Really you should be, there's no question about it. But when we look at the refuse and the reduce, which is the first two of our hierarchy of actions, we can see that this is something that Patagonia did quite a few years ago now, which was the ad that they ran in the New York Times, just before the Black Friday events. And it said, "Don't buy this jacket." Now, that isn't the sort of advert you'd usually see around Black Friday, it would be like "buy this thing", "this thing that you own isn't good enough anymore", "this is how you should upgrade it" & "this is what you spend your money on". Patagonia went the other way and went, "We don't want you to buy this jacket, unless you really need it. We don't want you to buy this jacket unless you pledge to actually repair it and keep it going for as long as possible." So it's almost like you were entered into a contract that you were saying, "okay, I take ownership, and I take stewardship of this jacket." It isn't something that is just a throwaway item, because you understood that the brand wants to help you keep it going for longer. Patagonia do this, they have one of the largest repair facilities in the US and they will help you find a second market and Patagonia stuff holds its value really well, because it's good quality. So this is one brand that's working really well in the kind of the refuse and the reduce sections. Yes, they're massive. But this doesn't mean to say that smaller brands can't do similar things as well. When we get to reuse, we can look at systems like Loop. Now Loop again, originated in the US, and it's just come to the UK. And it's functioning through Tesco, which is really interesting. Loop is a deposit return scheme, but it's actually maintained by the Loop manufacturers themselves. So the interesting thing with refill stores, and I'm sure wherever you are, there's probably somewhere you can go and get a refill of beans, pasta etc. But it's not really a branded item, it's a generic item of pasta, rice, etc because quite often we're not really wedded to any particular brand when it comes to these kind of items. Whereas when it comes to some other things like your deodorant, your ice cream, your tomato ketchup, some people will only buy a particular brand. Now, how did you get somebody who was that wedded to a particular brand to engage with the reuse system because it's very much you go to the shop, you buy it, you use it, it ends up in recycling. Loop bridges the gap: you basically do your shopping as you would do, usually you pay slightly more for your items. But those items come packaged in glass, in stainless steel, and in refillable packaging, and then when your next delivery arrives, you can put your empties into a Loop box and they go back for refilling. So you're getting the actual items in a reusable container, which looks pretty awesome. It doesn't have any leaching of chemicals from the plastic into the item as well which some people are concerned about. But it means that you're able to get your Heinz tomato ketchup, or your Haagen dazs ice cream or something that you really are wedded to. So again, this is a massive example. If you run a business that has any kind of item that is used up, is there a way that you can try get that packaging back to be able to refill it for your customer. There's huge amount of benefits for this because you have to buy less packaging, because you're not giving away the packaging with your item. It also means that you're taking responsibility for that packaging as well, which is actually a really great thing in the eyes of the consumer. So there's lots of wins, if you can incorporate any kind of reuse system into whatever business model you have.As we said earlier, repairing is something that we used to be able to do, there were screws that held things together. Now, if you want to try and get into your iPhone, you need special tools to get into your iPhone because Apple doesn't want you to get into it. But there are lots of companies that are challenging this and Fairphone is one of the best examples of repair. So the Fairphone is designed to be taken to pieces and to be upgraded. So it's sort of every 18 months or so when your telephone provider rings you up and say hey, you're entitled to a free upgrade. Nothing's free. By the way, if it's free, it means somebody else is paying along the way. And all they want is for you to carry on paying your monthly subscription. If you own your handset, you're not making them any money anymore. The way that Fairphone works is that they don't really want you to have a new phone. If you want to upgrade your camera. Great, buy the camera module, take it to pieces, plug your new camera module in and then you can send the old one back to them. So it's an upgradable system, not the entire handset like we have with most of the other manufacturers. So if you have anything that's electronic that will get out of date batteries get old, they wear out. Is there a way that you can take it to pieces which makes it actually easier for you to be able to repair it as a manufacturer, as a producer. But it definitely means that other people are empowered to want to keep it going for longer. As we said, circularity means keeping stuff in the loop for as long as possible before it gets towards the bottom of that sieve, and could potentially fall through the bottom. Redirection. eBay is the best example of redirection. We've had booth fairs, charity shops, anything that means that you are giving something a different life in a different way, with a different owner. But what is interesting from retailers is that it hasn't really been tackled much. It has been very much a person to person or business to business kind of model. But IKEA has literally just launched their circular system, which means that they will take back your old IKEA furniture, and they will help redistribute it. So this is second hand IKEA furniture. Yeah, of course it has to be in working order, it can't be falling to pieces. That is one criticism of some IKEA furniture, that it is designed to be put up and kept up. It's not designed to be put up taken to pieces put back up again, etc. But a lot of IKEA stuff is very solidly made, whether you like it or not. So it is actually great to be actually redistributed. A lot of IKEA furniture isn't seasonal, it doesn't come in and out of fashion, so you find the same thing for years and years and years. It has got quite a utilitarian way of being designed, which means that it's great for redirection. If it's in good condition, why not distributed to somebody that needs it? So this has just been launched, I had a bit of a hold because of COVID. But it's just been launched in the UK. It's be interesting to see how it goes. Hopefully really well. Renting is something we don't really think about. We rent, hotels, Airbnb, we rent cars. But we've never really think about renting clothes. This is something very circular. Sometimes it's you rent something for a small amount of time like a tuxedo or a prom dress. But there are actually companies like Mud Jeans, which allow you to lease your piece of clothing and at the end of that lease period, you can send it back to either be leased to somebody else, to be purchased by somebody else or re processed, if it's completely smashed to pieces. As the founder of Mud Jeans likes to say, they don't weather an age their genes, which is what happens in a lot of brand new jeans, they go through multiple processes to make them look weatherbeaten and worn with holes in the knees. He's like, "Lease the jeans from us and you do the wearing out for us. So if it's a brand new jeans, you know, go climb a mountain in them and rip them for us." It's a really interesting model, it makes you understand a little bit more about fast fashion. So even if you're a clothing retailer , it doesn't mean to say that you can't engage in a rental way of working. Mud Jeans is one of the best examples working at the moment how this is going to work.Here's a quick wrap up for you: Consumers do want change. About one in three consumers that were polled just last year, said that they had stopped purchasing certain brands because they either had ethical or sustainability related concerns about them, which is you know, a fair chunk. One in three, that's a fair chunk. And actually it was the lack of simple information that people found is a barrier to making choices and good choices. So again, about a third said that this is the reason they haven't changed their behavior. People want to change but a good chunk of people don't know enough. So if you can be really clear about what you're doing, the benefits, you could capture quite a large and growing amount of people across a lot of sectors.A quick word of warning: don't ever greenwash. Be very truthful about what you're doing, be very truthful about the lengths that you've gone to, but also the steps you still need to take. Don't make anything sound better than it actually is. Through social media you can be called out very quickly if somebody finds some little loophole that you're trying to misdirect people to. This happens a lot with big brands. And so just be truthful, people really do value the truth. So really, when it comes to thinking about anything about making your business models more circular, it is very complicated, for sure. But always be honest about what you're doing and what you want to do. Always be clear about the steps that people need to take to engage with you and to become more circular in their own way of living. Take responsibility, whether that's through rental, through that deposit return, or even allowing customers to send things back to you packaging wise or the product wise as well. And ultimately create value. If you're creating value for the your customer and you're showing that you're creating value for the planet, you are certainly going to keep those customers for as long as possible. This is what Patagonia has always done and you have brand evangelists for Patagonia. So really, always strive to be more circular and always do the very, very best that you can. So here's a lot of details. If you do want to get in touch, you can find us on all the usuals and website, onecircular.world. Drop me an email, say hi on Instagram. I'm on clubhouse as well, as you can find me on there occasionally getting up on stage and yabbering away about anything circular. It's been really lovely to present to you guys. Any questions? I'd be delighted to help hopefully,Ayesha Mutiara 25:40 Wow thank you, Claire. I love hearing you speak. It's no wonder to me that your lecturer. I wish I could have you narrate everything in my life. I would love that and I definitely learned a lot. So yes, before we get into the questions, I see some people joined us since before we started Claire's presentation. So please feel free to share your contacts in the chat. Especially if you didn't sign up through Eventbrite, then please share your contacts so we can keep you in the loop. Other than that, we will open up the floor. Now if anyone has any questions, please make sure to unmute yourself so that Claire can hear any questions that you may have for her. I think this is a sign that you just explained everything so clearly. No one has any questions... Hi Janice!Janice Wong 26:31 Oh, hi Ayesha. Hi, Claire. I'm sorry, my technical difficulty... I unmuted a little later than I wanted but thank you so much for this presentation. Oh, my gosh, you broke down complicated thoughts and information in such a digestible way and I really appreciate it. Claire, I have a question surrounding your thoughts on the current culture of how some customers think that, "Okay, when I'm going for sustainability, everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be sustainable." And I think as a startup ecommerce owner, I don't have the capital to to offer that, even though that's my goal of where I'm heading to. What are your thoughts on how I can explain to my customers that I'm working towards it? I think I am having this self doubt, or I'm feeling guilty of calling myself a person of sustainability, but not kind of being able to offer that, if that makes sense.Claire Potter 27:43 Yeah, that makes a huge amount of sense. And actually, the Eco anxiety we've seen absolutely explode over the last sort of few years of people saying, "These Instagram/Pinterest, perfect, beautiful, sustainable, oh my god, I live such a wonderful life." That's not reality. We all have the times we forget our reusable cup. You know, even though this is literally my life, and what I live and breathe and teach and love. We all have things. It's like we can't be perfect all the time. So that's the main thing is to really communicate is that nobody's perfect but we are all striving. If you are striving to reach a particular goal, so for example, have only 100% home compostable packaging, great. How would you communicate that to your customers? Say this is the end goal, this might be somewhere that we would love to be at the end of our second year or third year. The other thing is to think about what would make the biggest impact for you and for your customers now. Packaging is a great one. If you're sending anything out the thing that people get really aggravated about is packaging. So even though on your scale of things that you think is most important might not be packaging, if you think about it from that customer experience perspective, that might be the thing that is their biggest bugbear, ie what do they do with this bit of packaging once once they receive it in their home? Actually I've got something. My friend got a new job. So I've got a really lovely brand of donuts. I met this guy through clubhouse, and they sell keto doughnuts, which sounds amazing. So basically, they were like guilt free, apparently. But what was lovely about the package is that the instructions and the different bits and pieces information about the doughnuts came on paper that was really small. It wasn't big, it was really small bit of paper, and it was seeded paper and it quite clearly said we need to tell you all this for legal reasons it was about ingredients and stuff, but we know you don't need to keep it. So basically here's some paper that you can compost. You can grow seeds. And it was a lovely little thing because I was like that is amazing. I have to do this, but they're gonna make sure this bit of paper is as good as this bit of paper can be. It was a lovely experience opening that, of course the doughnuts were insane as well, but that little thing was just a really lovely touch because it made me think that they thought beyond just their ingredients in their doughnuts. They thought about everything that was being packaged as well. So think about that your customer experience, whatever that might be, whether it's face to face, whether it's virtual, and be really clear and upfront about what you can do now, as well as the way you love to be in one year, two years, five years, whatever your vision might be. And get people involved in your journey through your social media, on your website & keep people up to date, the good stuff, and the stuff that's not going so well as well. Always Be honest. Janice Wong 30:43 Thank you so so much.Ayesha Mutiara 30:47 Great. That's such a great question as well as an equally great answer. Actually, we have another two questions and maybe we can try to answer these quickly before we move on. They're from Steven, who always has great questions. First of all, he asked, "Will Loop scale?" and two, "Are there efforts in the zero waste retail world to standardize on reusable containers (that you can use at multiple locations)?"Claire Potter 31:20 Both really good questions. So will Loop scale? Hmm. They've scaled very quickly in the US. What I also thought was interesting when they came to UK is, I automatically thought putting the stereotypical "who would be the consumer that would buy into this type of system" well I thought they would have gone with Waitrose & Ocado, that kind of target market. They didn't, they partnered with tesco, so a much wider customer base, which I think was a really great strategic choice. It's introducing a system to a very wide customer base and maybe people that, as I say, aren't the stereotypical will only buy organic kind of consumer. So I have real high hopes that this could be something that scales as long as people are able to swallow that quick & small cost at the beginning, which is the effectively the deposit. So you do pay a little bit more for products in the outset. That is going to be the barrier and quite often with anything that is ethical, sustainable, eco, you know, however you want to label this type of product, it does come with a higher cost, because our upfront costs are more. Our labor is more, and our packaging might cost more. It is a higher cost. So that's the only thing that might be the barrier for a large scale at the moment. But as everything, the bigger it gets quite often the cheaper it can become. With regards to the zero waste retail world, this is a really tricky one as well, because some places will only allow you to wrap things in paper bags, and then weigh them at the counter. Some things that some stores, particularly smaller ones do, particularly in Brighton, is allow you to put your own containers and put their own stickers at the bottom. So effectively it zeros your container and if you're going back to the same stores, again, you can use that. I haven't seen anything as yet. But it would be really helpful because again, this is a barrier for a lot of people wanting to bring their own containers not understanding the system. Iit would be great to have that as a more standardized system. We will wait and see. It's something that definitely should be tackled. Ayesha Mutiara 33:27 Great, fantastic. So with that, Adam, I would like to give you the floor. Now it is your turn to give us your lovely presentation.Adam Siegel 33:35 Well, thank you Ayesha. Actually, do you mind if I ask a question to Claire before I jump in? Claire, if you're still there? It looks like you just jumped off camera. I had a question and I was curious to hear your answer before I jump in, which is specifically with regard to rental. I had been thinking a lot about clothing rental, a couple of years ago and eventually I got turned off of it. I'm actually not certain of the environmental benefits relative to just outright purchasing an item, especially a used item. So I guess I I'd be interested in your, your thinking about the benefits of rental.Claire Potter 34:21 Yeah, I mean, the benefits of rental take a lot of weighing up. When you say about environmental cost, it's getting the item to the person who's recovering the item from the person & it's cleaning the item. Now because of COVID we've seen a lot of people being a lot more hesitant about something that is owned or being used by somebody else and quite rightly so. So that is put a little bit of a pause and a lot of rentals. But what we have seen is more people being interested in in the rental of very high ticket items, stuff that they would like to wear once or twice but don't maybe want to or cannot afford to actually own. So this is like the prom dresses & the event dresses... Yeah, when we have events, remember that, everybody? We actually used to go and see people in real life. So... that's the kind of way of working. I think it's where it will continue to get much, much bigger like Rent the Runway, which is a US example, we've got other ones around the world as well. What has been interesting with Mud Jeans is that even though it's sort of leasing rental, they're much at the lowest scale. It's still expensive as an item, but it's allowing access for people over a period of time to get something that's a higher ticket, maybe a 150 pound pair of beautifully made organic Italian jeans. If you can't spare 150 quid at the outset, then it's spreading the cost effectively but then it is also rental in the sense that you can send it back. So that is a new way of working that is really started to grow, and is continuing to grow. I think I'm with you. Clothing rental is something that we've had forever and it hasn't really changed too much. So it's an interesting one to watch but it's one that one that I weigh up more than maybe some of the others scrape point.Adam Siegel 36:04 Yeah, in my mind, maybe there's two different types of rental and we can switch over. But there's the occasion where, and I think that makes sense: you don't need to buy a ball gown, if you're only ever going to wear it once makes more sense to rent it so that multiple people can enjoy it. But then in the US we'd start we started to see the growth of monthly subscription rentals. Rent the Runway was pioneering it, where you'd get different items every month and to me, it just seemed like the the costs of the transportation associated with it, as well as the packaging, as well as the cleaning and everything else kind of outweighed the environmental benefits. And it also promoted this culture of, you know, continually wearing new items. Claire Potter 36:57 Yeah, it does, it scratches the itch of fast fashion that some people have but ultimately, you're not changing the behavior, it just means that you're getting something on subscription, rather than just buying it and, chucking it off for a month, which is unfortunately, what a lot of people still do. So should we be scratching that itch in a better way? Or should we just put in something and making that itch just disappear?Adam Siegel 37:17 Yeah, great way to put it. Well, very good to meet all of you this morning. I am representing from this side of the pond. So it is still morning for me for another 20 minutes. Very cool to be here because I recognize a lot of your names from the community, the slack community in particular, but haven't had a chance to see some of you yet. So, glad to be here. Claire, that was an awesome presentation and it makes me wonder what the heck I'm doing here. I'm not sure there's anything more to present. But I was trying to furiously change my presentation as I was listening to yours, to see if there's something new that I could add as well. So I'll share my screen and go through the presentation rather quickly. I'd say that I think what you did was lay a really good foundation for how to define circular economy, which of course is the objective of this call. But then all dive a little bit more into the like actionable or practical steps that small and mid sized brands can take to engage or begin to engage in circularity. I really like what you said at the beginning of your presentation, Claire, defining the difference between circularity and sustainability. I'll try to highlight some of those differences through the examples that I share. I also really liked your hero brands at the end. And I have a few other hero brands that I'll share as well, just for examples, maybe on a smaller scale, that might resonate with some of the folks on the line.So first, I'll just start with myself: Who am I and why do I have relevant experience to talk about this subject? You know, I started my journey in sustainability, I think maybe a good bit later than you Claire. But for me, it was 2006 or 2007 maybe at that point where I read the book called Cradle to Cradle. If anyone's familiar with that, it's basically an early Bible for circularity, you know, thinking about how you can keep materials and products in circulation for indefinitely. I was an engineer at that point and it's written from sort of an engineer's point of view so it it really resonated with me. At that point, I was going back to get my MBA, so I spent two years focused on sustainable business and really understanding corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility. In 2010, I was hired into the trade association here in the US, that represents the largest retailers and brands. My role over the course of eight years was to build and then lead their sustainability and ethical production program. So I had a chance to lead industry collaborations on issues like conflict minerals, worker safety and human trafficking, as well as a number of environmental issues like renewable energy generation, waste and recycling toxics, and chemicals and products. Of course, over that time, circularity was becoming a bigger focus. There's plenty of organizations that are working on circularity, but one of the premier ones that seem to come to prevalence over that time was the Ellen MacArthur Foundation so we had the chance to work with them as well as a number of others. Then specifically, with regard to circularity, one of the programs that we spun off was a global case competition, where we would get MBA students from around the world to engage in circularity challenges, and then ultimately bring the winners to Montreal, Canada. So that started about five years ago and is still going today. So let me just get into things. I'll just say, that if you're a business, the trends are clear: engaging in sustainability and circularity are going to be beneficial for you. I think Claire said it well, but consumers are certainly interested in increasingly so, especially with younger consumers. They actively look for the term sustainability or circularity in the products they sell. Again, it's important to be honest and straightforward about it so you can't greenwash. But customers are looking for this, and that's one of the biggest drivers of change in the corporate world. These business models are becoming a lot more prevalent, as well. I tend to think about circularity from the perspective of individual products. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with a lifecycle analysis or lifecycle assessment and that would generally measure the environmental impacts associated with different stages of a product's life. We're looking at a linear system right here, a product's linear lifecycle, and what we tend to find, now this is over generalized because you have to look really on a product by product basis, but especially with fashion, you'd find that there's two lifecycle stages that provide the biggest impacts: One is the raw materials and you can think about like cotton, for instance, that requires a significant amount of water, fuel and chemical inputs to produce so there's a lot of embedded environmental costs associated with that. Then the second biggest, often tends to be the use of that product. The rationale, again this might be obvious is that you wash your your items a number of times, often in hot water, and it takes a significant amount of energy to to generate that, that heated water. So you know that this provides them a framework for us to think about how we can find the biggest opportunities for reduction. We'll talk about a few of these over the next several minutes but the short of it is, if you can find ways to reduce the raw material inputs, by using recycled material, for instance, as opposed to virgin resources, then that can significantly reduce the impacts at that stage. At the use stage, of course, the individual can wash in cold water wash less frequently, the additional benefit of that is that the product will last longer.If you can find ways to keep items in circulation, rather than rather than needing to dispose of them or recycle them, then that has the potential to significantly reduce the impacts across the board. So let's talk about a few of these. First is materials, you know, I already mentioned this. There's several types of materials, Claire went into it as well. Circular materials would be those that are recycled and recyclable and I think there's probably more that we could add to it as well like, repairable. So if you can if you can find and and design products that use recycled content as much as possible while keeping the quality of the item, and are made in such a way that they can be recycled, then that would ensure that those materials stay within the system. When you're engaging your suppliers, there's really three key questions that you should be asking them because, of course, not all of us have control over our supply chains, but you can still have influence over them. The first is: what's in the product? You know, if you're designing the product, you're likely deciding what's in the product, but there are certain categories of products where you're not that decision maker. And so you need to make sure you know, as well as ensure again, that as much recycled or non virgin content as possible is in it. Second, where does it come from and then third is how it's made. So this is more generally a framework around sustainable production, but it can certainly be applied to circularity. With regard to packaging & the growth of ecommerce, and that's my focus now, there's been a significant increase in packaging as it relates to ecommerce deliveries. So there's the traditional cardboard packaging that's recycled or recyclable and often recycled. That's good. But if you think about Claire's hierarchy, it's not great, that will ultimately go to landfill, and often sooner rather than later. There are new packaging systems that are coming around that are being developed. The one that I have in the middle there is called LimeLoop and it's made out of recycled material. I believe it's a PVC material but that means that it is extremely durable and can be used a number of times. LimeLoop actually rents these out to retailers and brands, who will then use them for their deliveries and returns. Then when they are beginning to scuff or tear, they would then be returned to LimeLoop who will use reuse as much material as possible.Then also thinking about a different level of the hierarchy, there are some new materials that are being developed now made out of natural contents like mushrooms. That's an interesting one and the benefit, of course, to that is that they can rot. I like that hierarchy, they can they can go into compost bins. So shipping is one of the most important legs in the lifecycle of a product. And depending on how you're shipping your product has a drastic influence on the carbon impacts associated with it. Now this is what I would call a linear impact because you know, you can't recycle transportation, you have to deliver it. But as much as possible, you can, you know, reduce the length of shipping and find a mode of shipping that reduces the impact to the greatest degree. Of course, where we're really focused today is circularity. So again, Claire showed that great butterfly diagram, but I'll try to distill this for small and medium sized brands to think about like how can we specifically engage in circularity and taking this linear system and making it more circular? You know, we already talked about resale and reuse and I'll give you a few specific examples of that. That is top of the hierarchy because you can use the product as is without necessarily requiring any recycling operations or handling of the product so there's there's no degradation. Refurbishing: there are some brands now that are doing some really cool things by allowing customers to send in their items to be refurbished. Or, over the course of resale to refurbish products to to increase the resale value of the items. For post consumer recycled content, of course, if an item does eventually end or get to the end of its useful life, then then there are ways to keep the materials in circulation rather than requiring virgin materials. Then there's pre consumer recycling of course and rental which we just discussed. So here are my hero brands, just a few examples to kind of make this concrete. I didn't say it but the work that I do now is very specific. It's with direct to consumer brands, ecommerce brands, and allowing them to enable peer to peer resale directly on their website. We chose resale because it's at the top of the hierarchy. You know, if you have something that's stored under your bed or in your closet or garage, or wherever it might be, then it's not being useful right now. And we want to get that item back into circulation so that somebody else can enjoy that item, rather than having to buy a new item. So one of the brands that we really love that are certainly pioneers in this space is Peak Design. They're based in San Francisco but they sell globally, they have higher end camera accessories like this everyday backpack. It's primarily geared for photography enthusiasts and professional photographers and they just implemented with us this great option to buy used. So if you don't like this item, you can buy it new. It's kind of expensive for a lot of people so there's also USD options available directly on their website as well. This is where it gets you. For all of their items, they have peer to peer listings. So that's one there's 29 listings currently available between $100 - $240. If you were to click into it, you can see all of the different conditions of the items, the colors of the items, and then it would be shipped directly from the first customer to the second customer. We launched with La Ligne recently as well, they have a program that they call Re-Ligne. This is a higher fashion brand based out of New York. The great thing about them, it's beautifully on brand, this is a great visual experience for cost for customers who want to buy pre owned, instead of going to a place like eBay. That frankly is just not a great experience but all of these now are pre loved items. So items that the first customer is looking to sell to second customer.We work with a brand called Brass Clothing. They're based in Boston. This is not our work, this is just their own awesome work for takeback. They offer their customers several times per year the option to buy this bag. It's just a bag, but I think they charge something like 18 USD, they'll send this bag to you, you fill it up with whatever you want and then it ships directly to a clothing recycler. The awesome thing about that is just that it makes it super simple and they actually get tons of interest, you'd be amazed. They get tons of interest. This is a brand that I came across a couple of years ago called Jackalo. They primarily focus on kids clothing, and have this awesome trade up program where you can send your items back to them. They'll clean them, they'll upcycle them and they'll give you a $15 discount on your next purchase. Then, they have a beautifully designed webpage, if you have a chance to go to it where you can see all of the upcycled kids items. Totem Brand Co is also a US clothing brand focused on outdoor fashion. They have implemented the LimeLoop program. But what I think is especially cool is that it's not just that they send it, it's that they create an experience around it and use it as a way to educate the consumer. So anyway, I'll skip the summary since we only have a couple of minutes left and and open it up for questions.Ayesha Mutiara 53:59 Thank you. Thank you, Adam. That was such a great way to kind of go more in depth from the groundwork that Claire laid out for everyone in the first half. So yes, does anyone have any questions for Adam?Steven Clift 54:14 Alright, so I got to come in here. Hey Adam, nice to see you. So my big question is, will efforts like resale circularity... Do you think this is going to be brought to more consumers via new upstart brands versus the big established corporate brands that are already kind of there? Obviously you want both, right? but I sort of feel like there's maybe we need to better understand how will this help upstart brands breakthrough by being more circular?Adam Siegel 54:54 Well, I'll say now I've had a chance to work with the large brands in my last role and now small and mid sized brands. I'll say that the small and midsize brands are always the pioneers, you know that they're the ones that are willing to be more innovative and try things differently. You know, their legal teams are not as big so they they don't have as much to worry about in terms of legal risks and that sort of thing. So, you know, that's almost always the case. But I do believe or I'm already seeing that large brands are engaging in circularity, some of Claire's hero brands like IKEA, and Patagonia, of course, Patagonia isn't pioneering this, but IKEA as well. But then, you know, here in the US or Canada, Lululemon just announced a resale program. They're certainly huge and we're talking with a number of large brands about implementing resale with them as well. So it'll go that way for sure. That said, almost always the case that smaller mid sized are the pioneers.Ayesha Mutiara 56:03 There are a lot of fans of Patagonia here. Peter was just saying his applause for Patagonia in the chat. But yes, definitely, for sure, fans. I hope that of all the hero brands that were mentioned today, basically a spike in their sales, hopefully. We can continue to show them that there is a demand and a desire to support brands who participate in these kind of practices. Krissie Leyland 56:29 Wow, what an incredible, valuable educational, just brilliant event that was. Thank you so much to Claire, and Adam once again. And thank you to everybody who came. Thank you for listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed this, we do have our MindfulCommerce Sustainability Framework, which is available for you to download from our website. It covers six pillars of sustainability and positive impact, specifically for ecommerce businesses. So whether you're an ecommerce brand, an ecommerce service provider, or tech solution, then this is for you, if you want to make a difference in the world with your business. Of course, please do join the free community. We are doing lots of different things all the time is very, very exciting. And you can join by going to our website, mindfulcommerce.io and clicking on "Community". You can download the framework from our website as well. You just go to mindfulcommerce.io/sustainability/framework. I hope to see you in the community and at other events that we run. We are going to be doing 15 minute live trainings inside the Facebook group soon with our experts. And so yeah, just come and join in and let's have fun and make a difference in the world. Have a lovely day!Rich Bunker 58:00 We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.Krissie Leyland 58:07 So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, click on "Community" and register from there.Rich Bunker 58:13 If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Adam Siegel, the Founder and CEO of Recurate, adds his page to the Marketing Playbook. Hear how to listen and learn, cannibalize your own business before others do, make sustainability part of your core strategy, Adam's fundraising tips, and his years studying aerospace engineering. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn and on Twitter at @Recurate
A few years ago, Adam Siegel came to Omni Talk and said he was leaving his position at RILA to found a startup he believed could revolutionize resale by giving brands a new way for their existing customers to resell the products they had previously purchased from them online and in an intuitive way. Intrigued by the simplicity of the idea as Adam described it, Anne and Chris asked that Adam keep in touch, and lo and behold almost two years later that startup, Recurate, has just secured $3.25 million to bring Adam's concept to life. In this podcast, Anne Mezzenga and Chris Walton interview Adam about Recurate, how it enables peer-to-peer resale on brands' own e-commerce sites, and how it plans to help brands form longer-lasting relationships with their customers all the way through discovery, purchase, resale, and repurchase. If you are a brand or retailer contemplating getting into resale, listening to this podcast could be the best move you make all year. *Sponsored Content*
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find Katie Boothby-Kung:Katie Boothby-Kung - InstagramWhere to find Shopify:Shopify - Website (Home)Shopify - Social Enterprise Slack channel (Sign up)Shopify - Open LearningShopify - EnvironmentShopify - Sustainability Fund (Read more)Shopify - Compass, Free Online CoursesShopify - CommunityShopify - Operation HOPE (Read more)Links Mentioned in Episode:Copper Root Collective (Katie's Skincare Brand)TechnovationRecurateGenuseeKiwibotShoppingGivesDailyKarmaKotnSon of a TailorShownotes:Krissie Leyland 0:00Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, ecommerce service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. Today we're talking to the fantastic Katie Boothby-Kung from Shopify's social impact team. Katie is doing lots of incredible work at Shopify and we wanted to chat about it here on the podcast to inspire others to follow in Shopify's footsteps. So hi, Katie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. You know, I'm a huge fan of Shopify and what you're doing so I'm extremely excited to have you here. Do you want to start by introducing yourself and just tell us a little bit about your role at Shopify? And what you help Shopify to achieve? Katie Boothby-Kung 0:46 Yeah, totally. Well, first of all: Hi, Krissie. Thanks for having me, super pumped to be here. This is awesome. So I am Katie, I am the Senior Manager for social impact here at Shopify. In my role, I am specifically focused on working with the social enterprises, on and off our platform. I do that by or through strategic partnerships, building education tools, and working with our partners and our platform so that we can help grow and scale. And even launch new social enterprises, on Shopify, and also to give them the resources that they need so that they can be successful.Krissie Leyland 1:32 Oh, my god, it's so good. It's like the dream job. I love it. Katie Boothby-Kung 1:35 It really is! (laughter)Krissie Leyland 1:37 I'm always like, "oh, how did she get that job?" I'm gonna pick your brains. So what is the definition of a social enterprise business to you and Shopify?Katie Boothby-Kung 1:52 Great question. How we think about social enterprises is that it's at the intersection of environmental action, and human rights. So businesses that are working to create a better climate for generations to come, or be it through supporting communities and workers within their supply chain, making sure that they're treated fairly and with dignity. The combination of the two is really where we see that long term sustainability, long term social enterprise. We like to think about it as a Venn diagram. So you have, environmental action over on one side, and then you have human rights in the other circle. When they come together, and there's that sweet spot right in the middle, that's where we see, where long term sustainability happens: at the intersection of the two of them–social enterprises working on either of these circles, or both of them together.Krissie Leyland 3:01 Nice. So, what do you think then, is the intersection between sustainability and social impact? How do the two work together and do good?Katie Boothby-Kung 3:13 Well, by the sounds of it, you guys are just defining sustainability more from an environmental lens. mean, that's certainly how a lot of the discussion around sustainability has been framed: is that it's, it's environmental. However, we see it as both being environmental and social human rights coming together in that intersection in the middle of those two circles. That's how we define sustainability. So by focusing on either or, and coming together, you are creating social impact. Without getting into kind of the complexities of climate change its effect on human rights, and vice versa, that's kind of see how we see it. If you're working towards sustainability, environmental action & human rights coming together, then you are creating a lasting social impact.Krissie Leyland 4:12 Yeah, it makes total sense. I think I do always think of sustainability, as you know, things that are going on in the environment, but you are right, it does link back to social impact, communities and things like that. So I'd like to talk a bit more about your role in particular. Also, what are the community projects that you're working on at the moment that has a positive impact socially, and potentially environmentally, then?Katie Boothby-Kung 4:48 For my role in particular: I'm working on ways Shopify can better support the community of social entrepreneurs and also support other communities that are hungry to learn more About being socially conscious. Recently, I was able to team up with some of the folks in other teams here at Shopify to help them expand their educational offering to include ways to help merchants inject more sustainability into their businesses. So we have a team called Open Learning that works with a lot of post secondary education institutions. Also, our Shopify for startups, which is our startup program. By working with them, they're providing education that can not only help businesses grow, but to also help them become more socially minded as well. So that's a lot of what we're focusing on this year is just continuing to support this community, and bring that education to communities that maybe aren't thinking about this all the time, so that they're more inspired to not only create businesses, but to create socially minded businesses as well. My team is always incredibly busy and so maybe you saw, we recently announced we have a global partnership with Technovation. Therefore, we can deliver STEM education to young women and girls around the world. Our team is certainly very, very busy focusing on entrepreneurs, and also within the tech community as well.Krissie Leyland 6:24 Hmm. Okay. So on that then, because you know, I love a bit of tech conversation: What do you think is the role for tech partners towards a more sustainable and positively impactful ecommerce world?Katie Boothby-Kung 6:42 Here on Shopify, we can't say enough good things about our partner ecosystem, and the tech partners that are building some wickedly cool tools. I mean, that community is always drumming up really creative ways to support our merchant community. So keep it up. There is a lot of potential for them to impact this space. It's no surprise that sustainability is becoming a top priority for consumers and therefore it's becoming important for brands as well. So I'm sure we're going to see a lot of new offerings from the tech partner community being launched this year in order to keep up with with this growing demand.Obviously, there's Recurate that's working on the resale market, and allowing our brands to resell their their wares, to keep it from going to landfill–giving their products new life, which I think isn't very exciting. Especially because the resale market is growing so quickly and I don't think that's going away anytime soon.We're seeing Genusee. They're a an eyeglass company based out of Flint, Michigan, that have a really cool tool on their on their shop, to allow you to try on their sunglasses so that we're reducing the rate of returns. I say we as if I'm a part of it. (laughter) Their customers don't need to return as much. I'm not involved in that at all. They're doing great work.And then there are even more sustainable shipping alternatives, like Kiwibot. Also the social impact of shopping local, I mean, it's accelerated. So our partners are creating more tailored pickup locations and delivery services. I think this idea of "shop local", is here to stay beyond 2021, kind of like the resale market. So consumers are looking for ways that they can be more supportive of their own communities and the small businesses that are essentially our neighbors. There's a lot of really great tech partners out there doing some, some really, really incredible things to help make sustainability and easier choice for merchants on our platform, for sure.Krissie Leyland 9:07 Do you think that there's been a rise in, you know, apps that are specifically to help sustainability and social impacts because of the pandemic? It just seems to be on the rise? I don't know if it's because I'm involved in it, and I see it everywhere. But yeah, do you think it's because of the pandemic or it was going to happen anyway?Katie Boothby-Kung 9:33 Honestly, is a great question. I don't know if I have the right answer to you. I think perhaps the pandemic accelerated this trend. I mean, we were seeing this, as things were kind of heating up in in March and April: this idea of shopping local and "voting with your dollar" and things like that. That became something that people were really talking about, they really wanted to support brands that were helping people throughout the pandemic. I think that there was a stat that I recently read–and I might butcher it a little bit–I think it was something like, I don't want to say it was specifically like 84%, but it was a percentage in the 80s. That said, more consumers were willing to shop from brands that were out there to help those in need during the pandemic. That's a pretty significant stat. Do I think that there was a trend towards more climate action and human rights? So I think that that there was already, but I think that the pandemic certainly helped speed it up.Krissie Leyland 10:40 Yeah, definitely. I think ecommerce in general is just gone mad. Apparently, five years worth of growth has just happened in six months. Yeah.Katie Boothby-Kung 10:55 Okay, that's insane.Krissie Leyland 10:57 I probably butchered that stat as well. So yeah, we need to be mindful of how we're doing it and how we're doing business and ecommerce to make sure that we continue to protect our environment. Okay, so on the topic of the environment, obviously, Shopify did an amazing thing this year during Black Friday: Cyber Monday, to offset all carbon emissions from sales. I'd love to hear more about that and what Shopify achieved.Katie Boothby-Kung 11:37 Totally. I will, I'll represent Stacy in our Sustainability Fund here. So we purchased a wide range of nature-based and engineering offsets under the assumption that all of the solutions have a role to play in the fight to reverse climate change. Our purchases go beyond just buying the offset itself. We purchase offsets to send a demand signal and we're overpaying for these offsets so that companies can then conduct research and pilot projects to refine their technologies. We're helping these companies to scale and bring their costs & prices down. Then by doing that, more buyers can participate. In 2020, it was really exciting, we invested in 13 companies across 10 different industries. We're already seeing companies gain more traction, in part because of our investments. Again, I'm not I'm not the offset expert so if listeners do want to learn more about this initiative, you can google Shopify sustainability, or you can head to our website, and it's shopify.com/about/environment.Krissie Leyland 12:50 Amazing. Everyone should definitely go look at that and look at the specific projects that you worked with to offset carbon emissions, because that's super interesting. One big thing about offsetting is to always make sure that it's actually going to the right projects or another project that you align with. Yeah, so everyone should go and check that out.Katie Boothby-Kung 13:16 Even these offsetting businesses are just so cool to learn about. There's some really cool things happening in this space, for sure, and I think more people should know about it.Krissie Leyland 13:29 And there's so many of them, I think. Obviously, with the community, we've got app companies & tech partners from Shopify, in the community. Honestly, there's about 10 offsetting apps, but it's so interesting, because each one has worked with completely different projects, people and communities. It's like, if you're a brand and you've got an online store, choose the one that you align with the most and really look into it like, "Where will my customers money go? What's the impact that it's going to have?"Katie Boothby-Kung 14:09 100%. I mean, you should be doing that for anything. That's woven into your brand, right? Just understanding your customers, you should know your customers so well that you know, the causes that they care deeply about. If they care about you buying offsets from kelp farms, and you should be doing that. Or if maybe there are some charities that are really important to them, you have a donation app installed into your Shopify store. What are the causes that speak directly to your consumers and what is important to them? That's super important to your brand building.Krissie Leyland 14:53 It's amazing. On that as well, obviously we know that there are apps out there like ShoppingGives and DailyKarma that put the power in the customers' hands so that they can choose the charity that they want to donate to, or the project or whatever it is. I just think that's great, because you're going to feel good about that, aren't you, as a consumer. Plus, then they'll come back. Katie Boothby-Kung 15:23 Sorry, I'm interrupting you, I'm just so excited! I think there's a lot to be said about building these really amazing experiences so that you can make your customer even closer to the impact that you're making through your business. Whatever you can do to make it so that it's not just a click, or it's not just something that seems simple and almost like at the back of your mind. But bringing them into that experience, bringing them into those choices, really allows them to feel like they're part of the impact that you're making. I think that's super important going forward.Krissie Leyland 15:59 Yeah and that just makes really nice customer connections as well, doesn't it? If they feel good about making a purchase with you, they're going to tell their friends & family and be like, "Look, you can go and choose your own charity or whatever!" I love it. I love it. It's so funny, because whenever I do a podcast, I end up talking about either Recurate or ShoppingGives. People are gonna think I'm sponsored, but I'm not.Katie Boothby-Kung 16:31 There are certainly apps that have been around for a while before this trend–I don't want to call it a trend because that makes it seem like it's going to go away–or movement really took off. So giving them a shout out is really great because when you think about some of those donation apps, they've been around for a long time.Krissie Leyland 16:53 I can just imagine how when we go back to normal, and at point of sale in in an actual physical store, I imagine the shop assistant saying, "Okay, so what charity do you want to donate to with your purchase?" Imagine that... online and offline? Katie Boothby-Kung 17:15 Cool, very cool. Definitely.Krissie Leyland 17:19 It's endless, it really is. So, what are some possibilities for tech partners going into 2021?Katie Boothby-Kung 17:30 Oh, my goodness. The possibilities are honestly endless. I feel like at this moment, you're just opening it up for me to share my wish list, which I'm not going to complain about at all. So, they already existed and I mentioned one of our merchants that's using this, but: to have AI tech or VR tech rather ,across all industries to help reduce the rate of returns. Making returns should be avoided because it is causing a lot of carbon emissions, as as you're all aware. By creating these tools that our Shopify merchants can easily plug and play, I think, will be amazing to reduce those emissions. Right now, if you're coming to Shopify, and you're really excited, you already know that you want to build a social enterprise... that's really, really amazing. However, once you realize that you want to become a social enterprise, the how and sourcing that first product can be a bit of an uphill battle. I know this isn't quite a tech partner, but even just thinking about like the experts in our ecosystem: how can you help brands source from factories that use smart environmental practices and treat their workers fairly and with respect? Brands can source these types of products faster & easier, get up & running and making their first sale. I know again, you're framing this in terms of how tech is in more of the app partnership community, but I'm even thinking about it from all the cool tech and science companies out there that are building really sweet, environmentally friendly alternative materials.Thinking about fashion and in textile, they're doing some really amazing things! Just this past week, there's brands that are building it out of algae, they're making eather from fruit pulp or they're making it out of recycled fishing nets that they've managed to find in the ocean. This is so incredible. However, when when you're searching for these types of textiles, there isn't really an easy way to get your hands on it. There isn't an "order now" or a "grab a sample, click this" button. So just making those choices easier and making the process–or the workflow from going to the website, discovering a really cool material, and then getting a couple samples so that you can start your production–building something like that would be really, really cool.My call to action for any tech partner listening is just to make sustainability easier for entrepreneurs. They only have a limited amount of time. In many cases, as I'm sure all of you guys are, as well, they're wearing between 20 to a million hats in a given day. So if making a sustainable choice is a really long and difficult process, these entrepreneurs are eventually going to have to opt for easier options, because they're going to have to move on to the next task. And then the next and then the next. They're running a mile a minute trying to run this business. So just making sustainable choices easier for these merchants so that it becomes a no brainer: "Why wouldn't I make a sustainable choice because it's right there in front of me and it's so easy!" Then, you know, boom: they have 20 products in their store and they're all made with sustainable fibers.Krissie Leyland 21:24 I love that so much. Yeah, I've heard about people making products out of seaweed and mushrooms.Katie Boothby-Kung 21:34 Honestly, it blows my mind. What is out there? I've seen some of that mushroom material too. And I'm just like, "Holy smokes. What can't we build products out of like that there?" There's a lot out there. I just think the biggest hurdle for merchants is: how do you go from discovering the product, to getting it in your hands and being like, "Okay, I'm gonna make 20 shirts out of this really cool nylon or something?"Krissie Leyland 22:05 Oh, it's just so exciting. It gives me like a fire in my belly.Katie Boothby-Kung 22:11 It's why I wake up and I'm ready for work: because I'm so pumped to work with these kind of entrepreneurs and tech partners. Krissie Leyland 22:19 Oh me, too. It's amazing. So when you were talking, I was just thinking: what are the barriers for the merchant to be able to get such materials and make products?Katie Boothby-Kung 22:40 I can't speak for all of them because I haven't found all of them. Just based on what I have seen in my passive research, is just that a lot of the times there's a lengthy "contact us" process where you have to go in, contact them & set up a phone call. Whereas, it would just be great if you could just click a button and have a whole swatch palette mailed to you, and then you can have a "kick it off from there" kind of thing. I mean, obviously, there are reasons why some of these brands have it. They're really small and they really want to work with specific brands, because they haven't gotten to the point of larger production.So there is that and I can completely understand. I don't want to dictate how these types of materials should get this to be easier for merchants. Based on my perspective, also, as a merchant who went to one of these websites, and was like, "Woah." because I have a skincare company, right? So it's like, "Hey, I can make these really cool. facecloth out of this material! Okay, how do I do it?" And then it was this whole process and it thought, "Oh my god, I have 20 things to do tonight. I can't think about this. I'll get to it next time." It's that mentality of "I have so many things to do, like I'll get to this later." Whereas if they had given me a button where it said, "get your swatch sent to you," I would have been just be like, "Yep, done. Okay, now I have my swatch and I know that I really want this material, I'll give them a call and make an order."Krissie Leyland 24:31 Hmm, that's so frustrating. I could imagine that. It's so interesting that you've got so many hats yourself. You work for Shopify, you've got your skincare business, which is amazing, by the way. I'm definitely going to invest one day. Yeah, I was just gonna ask actually: are these the things on your wish list as a brand, or coming from Shopify, or both?Katie Boothby-Kung 25:07 Both. I mean, from my Shopify perspective, I want these decisions to be easier for merchants, because it means that more merchants are making sustainable choices in their business, because it's a no brainer. But from a brand persepective, I selfishly want things to be easier so I don't need to spend a whole evening trying to figure out how to order something. I mean, just how I even got started... It took a long time for me to get up and running: finding the right partner and finding the right materials. It took me almost a year just to find the products and the charity partner where I felt like I was ready to launch and I felt comfortable. So it's like, "It takes one year of a solo entrepreneur doing all this research by themselves." So, how can we take that one year and turn it into one month, one week or one day?Krissie Leyland 26:10 Yeah, that'd be so great. Going back to Shopify, Shopify makes it easy to start a business online as an ecommerce business. But yeah, if we could make it easy to be ethical and sustainable, and use all these really cool scientific materials, which oh, my god sounds amazing,Katie Boothby-Kung 26:35 Right?Krissie Leyland 26:36 It's just so exciting. It's phenomenal, really. If we could make that easy... then the job's done.Katie Boothby-Kung 26:48 I mean, there will always be something but whatever we can do–and again, like I'll say this again toeveryone listening–whatever anyone can do in this world to make sustainable choices easier, let's do it! It's unstoppable at this point.Krissie Leyland 27:06 Yeah. So what is Shopify achieved when it comes to having a positive impact in the world? How is Shopify using commerce as a force for good?Katie Boothby-Kung 27:22 Wow. Well, that's definitely a loaded question. How much time do we have on this podcast? I mean, I can talk all day... Even just going back to the roots of the company, right? Shopify, by design is bringing social impact to the world. If you think about it, a decade ago, people couldn't just wake up one day and start an online business. They had to consider the huge financial burden, how to get a website set up & who could help them with this. There's so many steps that these folks had to take for starting a business. So when Toby started Shopify, he was able to reduce the amount of time and money to start a business, and then get people to realize their independence without having to spend their life savings to start an online business. So by reducing these barriers, more people can realize their dream of becoming an entrepreneur. I think that's impact itself, right? Just the existence of the Shopify merchants, they're able to contribute to economic growth, building their communities & employing people. So I think it's pretty incredible, the impact that one merchant had on their community and in the economy.Then enter my team. We've been working with communities around the world for quite some time. We've been working with under-resourced tech and entrepreneurship communities via partnerships, education, and even sometimes sponsorship. Just this past year, for my portfolio in particular, I've looked for ways to engage and support our social entrepreneur community. As as you know, Krissie, because you're in part of these. So you know, creating an online forum, where folks can come and ask all their questions and get help from our support team when it comes to specifically creating a social enterprise. We have online networking hubs, meetups & panels. Also just a couple days ago, we filmed our first ever Compass Course on building and scaling a social enterprise on Shopify. So there are a lot of really cool things that are that are happening right now where people can come together. They can learn from from either our education team, they can learn from each other or they can build these networks & these connections with one another. So I think that that's really powerful.Krissie Leyland 29:55 Oh my god, you're just speaking my language. Oh, I love it so much. I love how aligned MindfulCommerce is with Shopify.Katie Boothby-Kung 30:07 It's how we became friends, isn't it?Krissie Leyland 30:09 Yeah, yeah! It's just great... Um, damn it. I forgot what I was gonna say. I was too excited. Oh, yeah! Tell me about the video course that you were filming. I saw a sneak peek on Instagram. Looks very exciting.Katie Boothby-Kung 30:29 So it's like a social enterprise one-on-one introductory course. We do cover a lot of topics. We obviously we talked about sustainability, we talked about what social enterprises and you know, this intersection between environmental action and human rights. Then we drill down into each of those. Like, "What does environmental impacts look like for your business?" and, "What can you be doing within your business to create environmental impact?" then, "How can you befostering human rights and taking care of the people in your supply chain, building diversity and inclusion within your own company?" and then "How to support the communities that you engage with and that your customers really resonate with?" I mean, you're gonna have to write a lot of notes down, and you might have to give it a listen acouple of times...Krissie Leyland 31:29 So if there's somebody listening, who wants to get involved with anything that you're doing, actually, how can they do that?Katie Boothby-Kung 31:41 The community forum is open for anyone. Just head onto Shopify Community, and you'll see it listed there as social impact businesses. You can head in there and ask any of your questions. Whether it's the community that's there to help you answer it, or myself or someone from our Shopify support team, then you know, we have your back, and we're there to help you. Then there's our Slack channel. You just need to fill out a form. I will send that over to you, Krissie, so that if anyone's interested in applying to join the Slack channel, then they can do that. We also always tell folks when we're having these meetups and things like that. So if you are a Shopify merchant, we do our best to put that within our newsletter that we send out so that you know, when these types of meetups are happening. And I don't want to have any spoilers, but there are going to be some other very cool ways that you can get involved too, and we'll just keep everyone posted.Krissie Leyland 32:54 Ooh, very good. And just so the listeners know, if you are in the MindfulCommerce Community, there's a link to Katie's Slack channel in there as well. Anyways, that was funny, because I was gonna say that bit at the end, but it just seemed right, because we were talking about it. Other than Shopify, who else do you think is leading the way to a more sustainable and positively impactful ecommerce world?Katie Boothby-Kung 33:35 Wow. There are a lot of really great players in this space, so I don't think I'll be able to name them all. However, a brand that comes to mind specifically is Kotn, they're based out of Toronto. They've done some really incredible work to support the employees within their entire supply chain, "from farm to T shirt" kind of thing. They're just really leading the way in terms of the transparency of how their clothes are made, and what they're made with. So I think that they're a very good example of that intersection between human rights and environmental action. I think they're doing a really, really great job.Another really cool one is called Son of a Tailor and they're doing made to order, on demand. That in of itself has some very positive environmental impacts. I think that anyone doing made to order successfully are doing some really great things for their their environmental footprint. So that's awesome.And then I mean, obviously, you guys: MindfulCommerce. It goes without saying. You guys are building this really, really incredible community where people can come together. I mean, that directory in of itself! Before you guys there was never really a home for these types of experts and partners who specifically worked with sustainable brands to be all under one roof. Now, you know, you're throwing this awesome epic party for all these partners at MindfulCommerce. By doing that, think of the time and energy you're saving merchants who are looking to work with a sustainable partner because they can know that they just have to come to MindfulCommerce. They're going to be able to find on so much there. So, thank you for doing that because that is having a lot of impact for our merchants looking for work with more sustainable partners.Krissie Leyland 35:47 Thank you so much, that's so nice. And thank you for your input on the research project. I was listening back on this, this is this is amazing. This is just what we needed. That's great, I'm glad you like it. So, it's the start of the year... I just thought might be nice to look ahead a little bit. What's next for Shopify in relation to sustainability and social impact?Katie Boothby-Kung 36:20 We're still charting some of this out, but what I can tell you is that we will definitely continue to deepen our support for black and indigenous entrepreneurs over the coming months. That's including our 1 million black businesses initiative that we announced with Operation Hope, later last year. We'll also continue to build support for our social impact initiatives like Open Learning program that's working with the post secondary education students, our STEM education outreach with young girls in particular, and of course, the work that we're doing to support and grow social enterprises on Shopify. So there is lots happening. I can't speak specifically on the fund, so you'll have to poke Stacy for that information but I'm sure that they have some pretty big and exciting goals that they're going to be working on this year.Krissie Leyland 37:15 I'm just so impressed. There's so much that you, Shopify & the sustainability team are doing. I just hope that other platforms will follow in your footsteps, because that would just be amazing. Finally, do you have any advice for anyone who would like to find a role like yours at Shopify? I added that one in...Katie Boothby-Kung 37:52 I mean, it's a great question. When I think about kind of how I landed in my position here at Shopify: I just kept talking about this all the time with people that would listen to me. I remember, I had this old deck. It's fun to look at, because I made it three years ago. It was all about building social enterprises on Shopify and I remember I sent it to a bunch of people. Then, here I am. Just, if your company has the appetite for it, and this is a job that you want, then go get it. Go start talking to people. Go tell them that this is important to you. Go show them why you're the right person for that job, for sure. Depending on what company you work for, you might need to wait a little bit of time. Maybe there isn't an appetite for this right now and that's okay. Just keep pushing for it. Keep talking about sustainability. Kep talking about social impact. Depending on where you work, if there's nothing stopping you from doing small initiatives off the side of your desk... that's showing initiative, that it's showing that nside of your day to day, this is something you really care about, that you're willing to put in the time for your company. I mean, if all else fails, you should just quit your job and start your own social enterprise so that then, you are doing it every day.Krissie Leyland 39:23 Yes. I like that. I was just gonna say, basically you created your own job! Obviously, because Shopify are very minded in that way, it was good for you. If your company isn't keen, then just do it yourself. Like I did!Katie Boothby-Kung 39:48 Exactly! I think like whether people are ready to hear what you have to say or not, put in the work now. When I think about it, I was putting in the work before we had changed our team name to Social Impact. There were a few other people that were doing the same as me and now we're all on the same team together. Just put in the work now, and I think it'll pay off tenfold.Krissie Leyland 40:18 Great, I love it. So, I think that's it really. Where can people find you if they'd like to chat about Shopify's approach to social impact, or anything else?Katie Boothby-Kung 40:37 If they're interested in learning more about what we're doing as a company, go to shopify.com/about/environment. There's a lot that you can find out there. Take a look at our community forums. Again, like if you're a social enterprise and you want to join this really rad network of other social enterprises that are hanging out together, then come join our Slack channel. If you want to, see teasers about other things that we're working on, you're more than welcome to follow me on Instagram. It's @katiebkung. That's where we had our course teaser just the other day. If you're a social enterprise, and you just want to reach out, or you have any feedback for us, or if there's a partner that we really should be thinking about, orwhatever will help you guys help and grow your social enterprise: lay it on me. You're more than welcome to send me a message and I would love to hear from you.Krissie Leyland 41:41 Great! Especially if you can tick it off the dream list. Katie Boothby-Kung 41:45 Yes. Get to work, people. Go!Krissie Leyland 41:52 Amazing. Thank you so much.Katie Boothby-Kung 41:54 Thanks Krissie, I've loved this. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find Tom Locke:Tom Locke - LinkedInTom Locke - InstagramWhere to find Noughts & Ones:Noughts & Ones - WebsiteNoughts & Ones - InstagramLinks Mentioned in Episode:PatagoniaFinisterreKnow The OriginPeople TreeTwelveRed Bank CoffeeBlossom Coffee RoastersContentfulGithubNetlifySponsor:This podcast is sponsored by the MindfulCommerce Directory.Shownotes: Krissie Leyland 0:00 Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast: a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. Today, we're talking to Tom from Noughts and Ones: a Shopify agency working with purpose-driven ecommerce brands who want to make a meaningful impact online. We love their advocacy for a better world, their passion for Shopify and sustainable commerce... and they're great to work with. And I know this firsthand! Hello Tom, welcome! Would you like to introduce yourself.Tom Locke 0:42 Yeah, so I'm Tom. I run an agency called Noughts and Ones in Bristol. And we're a web agency specializing in Shopify, working with ecommerce conscious brands, helping to make meaningful impact online.Krissie Leyland 1:07 Nice. I love it. What are you up to at the moment? You didn't always have that focus on conscious brands and purely Shopify, did you?Tom Locke 1:19 No, early days, we started out doing actually quite a lot of custom Squarespace design and development. We started doing a bit of ecommerce on that platform but we always knew that other platforms are a little bit better when it came to the functionality for ecommerce brands. Shopify was something that we'd always wanted to really get stuck into. Then, it just happened semi-naturally, although it was definitely our plan. Now we focus pretty much entirely on Shopify and we've replaced Squarespace with an alternative web tech stack basically, that you're obviously very familiar with.Krissie Leyland 2:11 Yeah, definitely. What was it that attracted you to Shopify, in particular? That Squarespace didn't have as much functionality, did you say?Tom Locke 2:23 Yeah, we were finding limitations from a development perspective. But also, we were starting to work with bigger commerce brands that needed more of their platform. Shopify, being a commerce-focused platform, just has a lot more strings to its bow. We were finding that it was a much better fit and we knew that in order to kind of serve those customers as an agency that Shopify was a much better fit as a platform.Krissie Leyland 3:01 I've used both and I much prefer Shopify. It's easy to use as someone like myself, who's not a developer, but then you can also use a lot of different technologies. You can code–do the geeky code stuff and scale. It's also quite simple and easy to use for maybe a brand owner that doesn't really know about the back-end and that kind of stuff.Tom Locke 3:34 For us as an agency, we were born out of working with a platform like Squarespace, which obviously, the idea is that anyone can make a website, upload content and that sort of thing. So our approach to Shopify development is very much focused on the actual kind of day-to-day usability. I guess that's something that has always stuck with us in terms of our approach is that: yes, we can build out really custom themes, but still maintain the actual usability on a day-to-day, on a content management level. Whenever we're building out a specific feature on a Shopify store, we're always trying to think about who's going to be in the seat–that's going to be using that eventually, which is generally going to be the merchant. So we try and build in any custom features within the theme editor itself. That's something that's super important for us.Krissie Leyland 4:44 Also, do you find that the App Store helps? I don't know what the App Store–if there even is an app store on Squarespace... but is that something that attracted you to Shopify as well?Tom Locke 5:02 Obviously, there's a whole host of additional features and functionality that you can plug into Shopify that, you know, at the time you couldn't in Squarespace, and now, it's still very much restricted. And certainly, for us as developers, having that kind of starting point for a particular feature... it just makes total sense to use an existing app as the basis and maybe, tweak it from there or get it to do what we needed to do, basically.Krissie Leyland 5:32 That's very cool. I wish I could do that. I do. I wish I could because I'm always like, "If only there was an app for this, this & this and I could just like tweak one or build one from scratch would be great."Tom Locke 5:45 I think with a lot of things, it'd be great if there was one thing that did everything. But inevitably, you've got to tweak things somewhere.Krissie Leyland 5:54 And then also, you've got to have a focus, haven't you? It's like you said, what's great about Shopify is they only focus on commerce. Whereas Squarespace, you know, they do everything... well, they say they do.Tom Locke 6:10 Sort of a catch-all type thing.Krissie Leyland 6:12 Yeah, which isn't always great. It's good to niche and get really good at one thing. Actually, on that note, so you have tweaked or shifted your niche a little bit. So we mentioned that you're focusing on working with purpose-driven brands, and do you want to talk a bit about that?Tom Locke 6:37 Yeah, it's felt like a real natural evolution for the agency. Ultimately, Noughts and Ones is built around the values of each and every team member. I have an amazing team that works at Noughts and Ones, and generally, they're just a passionate bunch of creative, lovely people. So, I think I've always wanted to shape the agency around the collective vision rather than just my vision as an agency owner. I think that's kind of something that's long been championed through our own values as individuals and now it's all kind of coming together, basically. It is super cheesy, but I said the other day that, "You know, it really feels like Noughts and Ones now is becoming the agency that it should be." So, we're always looking to do what we can do in a more conscious way. Despite the madness of the last–well, it's basically been a year now, hasn't it?–year (not that this is going to be podcast about COVID), I think it is really exciting to see ecommerce growing so significantly. Which, is very positive but I think that means that ultimately, there's a bigger opportunity for agencies and tech partners, to make sure that we're scaling with that growing ecommerce world to make sure that it's happening in a way that is as positive and meaningful as possible.Krissie Leyland 8:39 I love that. Yeah, definitely. That's what we're all about. I remember when we were first talking about it. It was like we both went down this rabbit hole at the same time. Do you remember?Tom Locke 8:51 Yeah, absolutely. We were–I feel like it was maybe almost a year ago, was it?Krissie Leyland 9:00 I think, yeah–no longer. Tom Locke 9:02 Really? Krissie Leyland 9:03 Yeah. Anyway... I was so excited to talk to somebody who understood what I was talking about.Tom Locke 9:11 Yeah and I think it's certainly from us as individuals, but also a collective realization of the impact that ecommerce does have. Obviously, that coupled with how much it's growing as a result of things that are going on in the world. I think it was serendipitous that we connected, and as you say, went down that rabbit hole.Krissie Leyland 9:40 Like you said, ecommerce is growing but so is its impact and we need to do everything we can to lower that impact. Tom Locke 9:50 That's exciting, right? Krissie Leyland 9:51 Yeah!Tom Locke 9:52 It's a huge opportunity to start a conversation and make sure that sustainability in commerce and ecommerce, specifically, is being talked about.Krissie Leyland 10:04 Definitely, and I think ecommerce can be part of the solution to combating or fighting climate change... It's just about working out exactly how we can do it. Talking about it is also the best thing and that's why we're talking now. So, what projects have you got on at the moment and what is it about those projects that are helping to make ecommerce more sustainable?Tom Locke 10:35 We've got a really nice mix at the moment, actually, of projects. So, we've just kicked off a Shopify project with a plant-based, single-use plastic-free deodorant brand called Fussy, as you may have seen on Instagram. They're a recent startup and they're just an incredible brand and they want to do everything right and do right by this "big round thing" that we're on... Which is really exciting. Then we've also got just a really beautiful coffee brand, based up in the Lake District, and they're really focused on the traceability of their products, obviously, and quality. Fundamentally, the brands that we'reworking with want to have a positive impact and do what they do best in as conscious a way as possible. So it's really exciting.Krissie Leyland 11:47 That's really cool, I love it. I bet you just feel so content, so happy with the work you're doing.Tom Locke 11:54 Yeah, so the coffee brand we're working with up in Lake District. It's called Red Bank Coffee. Aside from being an absolutely amazing brand, I don't know what it is, but after every call that I come off of, I just feel so zen. I don't know whether it's Tom, who's the guy that runs it but every call that we come off with as a team, we're all just feeling super chil and it's inspiring.Krissie Leyland 12:26 Oh, that is so nice. I just think it's because you're aligned! It's because you know what you want & what your team needs to feel happy about the work that they do. Great! So, I want to get into the nitty gritty of the projects that you're doing: How do you build or create an online store that is good for the planet?Tom Locke 12:58 It's a very good question. Yeah, there's a lot to that. Firstly, we we feel a huge responsibility for the part that we play in the whole kind of ecommerce world. So as an agency, we do feel that we do have a big responsibility and with that, obviously, opportunity to actually do what we do in a meaningful way and actually have a positive impact. For us, that kind of breaks down into three areas. So, delivering what we do: our core services and how we exist as an agency, as consciously and sustainably as possible. I think the other aspect is supporting like-minded tech partners, as part of our preferred tech stack so that the partners we work with to achieve certain functionalities for a brand are so important–which is where something like the MindfulCommerce Directory and framework is a game changer. Then obviously, who we work with. So that means, partnering with brands that are focused on doing what they do consciously and not on my over-consumerism. Supporting and working with the right people, fundamentally. I think that's our role I see as being to connect with the right people and ultimately lay out the best course of action when it comes to building and growing an ecommerce brand. I know, it's cliche, but we're all in it together and it can only really be achieved by working together.Krissie Leyland 14:58 And by working with people who are on the same journey and are also doing everything they can in the way that they work and the way that they live. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned the MindfulCommerce Directory, which we haven't talked about yet. You obviously helped us to build that, or you basically built it, you and your team... So, what were your initial thoughts when we approached you with this idea for the directory?Tom Locke 15:37 We connected over a couple of other projects and ideas and, as you say, we went down that rabbit hole of sustainability and ecommerce. What came out of that as MindfulCommerce just felt totally right & the right time. It just felt like a really natural kind of thing and I think when the idea was presented, it just sort of clicked. You know, I was super fired up. I just knew that it wasn't an option to not do because it was super exciting! Obviously nothing really like it has properly existed before and I think the amount of work that you guys have put in along with Twelve on the framework is incredible. Honestly, it does feel like the start of something... really... game changing.Krissie Leyland 16:40 Ooh, I like that! Thanks! So the MindfulCommerce Directory is a directory of experts. So: service providers, technologies, to ecommerce apps... anybody who can help sustainable brands to grow or a brand that isn't necessarily sustainable, but they want to be more sustainable, and kinder to the planet. Just in case people didn't know of it yet.Tom Locke 17:11 And actually, I think on that: it doesn't have to be something that's just closed off to a certain number of brands or companies that thinking a certain way. You don't have to be selling sustainable or eco friendly products, to be conscious and to be sustainable in the way that you conduct your business, right? So actually, for me, that's the even more exciting part: is that we can make a real positive impact with brands that aren't necessarily in that space. Then that opens it up to basically anyone, which is pretty cool.Krissie Leyland 17:56 Yeah! I spoke about this app in the previous episode, so it's like I'm promoting them but I'm not–for example, Recurate is a plugin that you can plug into your online store where you basically can have a secondhand shop on your brand's website. So, any brand, even if you're not selling products that are made out of sustainable eco-friendly materials, you can still resell your clothing or your products or whatever, if you can. You know, you can't resell everything–like you can't resell deodorant– but it's accessible to everybody. Tom Locke 18:47 That is what's so important: it's having the conversation and having somewhere that the educationcan happen with those brands that aren't necessarily in that space. Because ultimately t's not just going to take a handful or 200,000 conscious brands with eco friendly products. Really, the proper impact is going to come when people outside of that space or sphere. That's really when there can be some significant changes.Krissie Leyland 19:29 That makes a lot of sense, because if we can shift their mindset to start thinking about it, then that's actually just as powerful as speaking to the brands are already thinking about it. We can help them to improve it, but we can introduce it to those that haven't thought about it yet.Tom Locke 19:54 I think that's where the the framework obviously comes in... Which is just exciting.Krissie Leyland 20:02 Yeah it is just exciting. So that's great... Who do you think is leading the way towards sustainability in ecommerce?Tom Locke 20:20 Yeah, another big question. I think there are obviously a number of amazing brands and individuals that are driving, change or having conversations. On a previous episode, where you're speaking with Lucy from Reverie, you discussed the problem of how over-consumerism is really at the heart of where ecommerce and sustainability & yet also where those issues lie. It isn't necessarily a new thing, but it's not something that can really quickly be fixed. So in my mind, the kind of the people who are leading the way are the people who are willing to talk about it, being proactive in conversations, taking meaningful action by holding events or exactly like you're doing with the podcast. But when it comes to brands, there are obviously some some amazing brands out there. You know, Patagonia, Finisterre, Know The Origin... I don't know if you know those guys?Krissie Leyland 21:38 Yes. Love that website.Tom Locke 21:41 And People Tree. They've been around, obviously, for absolutely ages. They're obviously the kind of brands that focus on not the sort of throwaway fast-fashion, when it comes to those sorts of apparel brands. As far as tech companies go, obviously Shopify, as a platform, does work quite hard on on sustainability, and their impact as an organization or as a platform.Krissie Leyland 22:38 So if you're building a low-impact website for a brand, something that you can say to them is, "Make it really obvious that it is (low-impact)" because then you're communicating the message, and you're building awareness around the fact that a website has a high impact on the planet. So there's advocacy and sharing innovative ideas, as well. You mentioned the coffee brand that you're working with... I don't know if their packaging is fully recyclable, or... I'm not sure because I don't know that brand. But there is a brand in our community, they're a coffee brand called Blossom Coffee and we use them all the time. They're amazing.Tom Locke 23:13 I've had another coffee. That's very nice.Krissie Leyland 23:15 So good, isn't it?Tom Locke 23:16 And actually, Tom at Red Bank, I think he does partner with them. They're in Manchester, aren't they?Krissie Leyland 23:21 Yeah! So is [Red Bank's] packaging recyclable?Tom Locke 23:27 Yes.Krissie Leyland 23:29 Oh, cool! But the thing was with Blossom Coffee: we didn't know that it was 100% recyclable because it didn't say anything on the packaging. So I'm just saying that communication and stuff is really good to do. If you're working with a brand, just remind them to communicate what they're doing.Tom Locke 23:47 I mean, if you're doing something positive, why wouldn't you obviously shout about it from your own kind of brand's positioning? Fundamentally, if you're doing something like that, then make it known.Krissie Leyland 24:06 Yeah definitely, tell everyone! So the directory, the MindfulCommerce Directory... we have tried to build it, for this phase one, with the lowest impact possible. So, because it's a Jamstack... how does that make it better for the environment?Tom Locke 24:35 Well the MindfulCommerce Directory stack, or our approach to web development outside of Shopify: we're building out our own low impact framework that we call 'Conscious Development'. So what we're looking to do, and MindfulnessCommerce is our real first proper project with this new framework in mind. It's an evolving beast, obviously, in terms of both the directory and also the framework. But fundamentally, we have a number of principles that make up our Conscious Development framework–all of which we've obviously applied to MindfulCommerce and the directory. So really, the biggest thing is having a low-impact design principle. So obviously, questioning absolutely everything and making sure that nothing, that is featured on the site, isn't needed, basically, or doesn't serve a purpose. Then, more on the tech side, what we're using is basically a headless approach. Rather than using an overarching platform, like Squarespace or WordPress, we're actually breaking out the individual components that make up a website: content management, asset storage, your code storage, you know, domain hosting–all of the bits and pieces. Which traditionally, platforms like WordPress and Squarespace want to bring under one roof by taking a headless approach. Essentially, you're kind of breaking those out into individual platforms, almost. So the content management is done through a platform called Contentful. All the code is hosted with GitHub and then deployed through Netlify. What that means is, we can build everything that we need, and with none of the stuff we don't, basically. Then within that, we can build super efficient code that ultimately doesn't sit on a server somewhere. We basically try and use the web browser to do as much of the work as possible. Basically, we try and render as much as possible on the browser side. Ultimately, that minimizes impact when it comes to servers and things like that.Krissie Leyland 27:47 I'm just looking at now, it's so beautiful as well. You don't sacrifice it looking nice but like you said, it's your first one and there's still things that we could do to make it better.Tom Locke 28:01 Yeah, for us as an agency, we're still very much on that journey and it's very cool to have you guys as part of that journey. Every day we're learning new things so it's constantly evolving and improving.Krissie Leyland 28:20 That makes so much sense and then you can just put your Noughts and Ones everywhere in the spotlight! Great, so how do you think the MindfulCommerce Directory and framework will support ecommerce businesses (so apps, agencies, brands...)?Tom Locke 28:42 As we've said previously, it's really all about conversations and connecting with the right people or someone that knows one very specific thing. Then, basically it's all about putting all of those pieces of the puzzle together. So, really what the directory enables that kind of connection with like-minded tech businesses, and to facilitate that kind of conversation. Obviously, there's a huge amount that we can get stuck into when it comes to more of the educational piece, which would speak to brands outside of that kind of space. Then further to that, the framework then obviously gives those brands–that are looking to have a more meaningful impact or conduct their business in a more conscious way– it actually gives them something tangible to work with and work towards. It obviously hasn't existed until now.Krissie Leyland 29:55 It's so interesting, because yesterday, I was speaking to Jessica & Naomi about the framework (because they helped us with that) and they were saying, from being so in involved with the framework, that the directory is actually the action. Because in the framework, it's asking you questions and things to think about in your business and then saying, "Here's an example of somebody who can help you." And then it links to the directory, then you can connect with them, and then you can get going on tackling that specific pillar or task that you're working on. It works both ways, doesn't it?Tom Locke 30:38 Yeah, absolutely. Even if, there are brands that may already know tha they really want to work with a tech company that specializes in X, Y, Z or they want to partner with a packaging company that only does fully recyclable packaging, for example. Yes, you might be able to Google that and find someone that potentially does it, but you never really know. I guess that's kind of touching on the realms of greenwashing, but ultimately, now there's a place to look, right? Which is cool.Krissie Leyland 31:32 Yeah and we've taken the time to get to know, everyone who's listed on that directory, because they're in the community. They're doing things like this podcast and events with us and we know that they genuinely want to help with sustainability and social impact. So, I love it. Thanks! It's like this really nice cycle, you know? Like a flywheel of different points of the directory, the framework, the community, education... It is all about education, connection, and collaboration–working towards one goal. I keep coming back to it, but it's just about talking: Just talk, talk, talk.Tom Locke 32:23 Obviously, there's a load of exciting plans that you guys have for MindfulCommerce in both areas. Ultimately, what you're kind of creating is something self serving when it comes to the framework, the education & the directory. You know, eventually, it will just become completely self serving and hopefully become an absolute beast.Krissie Leyland 32:51 Yeah and also, I hope it's the norm. We always said, if it's not actually needed, you know, if it becomes the norm, then it's like, our job's done, if that makes sense? Obviously, it will still be there, but it'll just be "Oh, yeah, that's the place to go to find an expert to help me with ecommerce stuff and it's also good for the planet!" I'm just so excited about it. Ah! Best thing you said, which literally made my brain happy, is: "It's not just about the brands that are already on the journey." I think with MindfulCommerce, we need to start speaking to brands that are outside of the space.Tom Locke 33:55 Those brands that are outside of the space, make up such a huge amount and so there's potential impact that they can have–really, just by making some pretty small decisions on the way they even just do one aspect of running their business. The actual amount of positive impact that could have is incredible. Obviously, it's super important to champion those brands that are taking those steps. They should absolutely be celebrated and championed but, they're already kind of in that mindset, right? But then think about all the brands that aren't in that mindset, then it starts to get pretty big. Krissie Leyland 34:49 Yeah, even just saying to them, "Do you know there are things that you can do to improve such and such", whatever it is. And then they're like, "Oh, yeah!"Tom Locke 35:02 But fundamentally, it is in their best interests, in terms of their brand because people are willing to spend more money to invest and connect with brands who are conscious and who are trying to do what they do in the right possible way. So, although it may seem that it's not the best business decision from a profitability perspective, that really is quite a short sighted viewpoint because ultimately, the conversation is growing and consumers are becoming a lot more conscious. So engaging with that is a no brainer.Krissie Leyland 35:54 Definitely. I always say, "the future's conscious commerce" because if you're not thinking about it, you're just gonna get left behind. So, think about the future, and long term, ecause if you don't, then there won't be a planet to live on.Tom Locke 36:10 [No planet] to think about or sell your products on.Krissie Leyland 36:18 Exactly. So do you think, this is a big question and I love it–Tom Locke 36:22 Oh, stop with the big questions. No, I'm only joking.Krissie Leyland 36:34 So, on that note then: If we tell all those brands that we were just talking about that aren't yet on the journey and we say something to them like "We're going to create this huge wave & educate them all." In 10 years, do you think we could have a fully sustainable world?Tom Locke 36:58 Obviously, that would be incredible. There's certainly a huge amount or there's so much more that can be done. Fundamentally, there is still an incredible amount to unpick, undo or address. So I think something like that could be possible but it does need buy in across the board, which really is where the biggest challenge is. That's only ever going to happen if it is addressed and people are talking about it, just like we're having a conversation right now. I don't want that to be like a sad answer. Krissie Leyland 38:00 I asked because I myself often just ponder this in my head. Obviously, that's the biggest goal.Tom Locke 38:08 But what does that look like, though? Like, the other aspect completely changes things. What that might look like for you might be very different for what that might look like for me. I'll flip it back to you: what's your definition of a fully sustainable ecommerce world?Krissie Leyland 38:29 I think it's all brands, all service providers, all app companies, and operations being mindful. It's them taking a step back and thinking, "Do I need to do this? Do I need to collect this data? Do I need that high res image? Do I need that video?" Taking more time to be conscious about if you're a brand, the materials that you're using to create a product, or thinking about end of life. So: "Where is this product that I've got in my head going to end up once it's created?" So if people can do that–and that's basically what the framework is.It's just asking you questions, the things that you need to think about: about your product, about your business, about supply chains, communications, website... All that stuff is just being mindful, in my head. But then obviously, you've got all the big businesses that are profit-hungry. and don't really... I don't think someone like me and my small community can even get the chance to talk to people like the guy at Amazon. But, you never know!Tom Locke 40:00 It's not something that is not discussed–I said that in a really weird backward way–but it's something that is being talked about and is only going to be kind of growing. So ultimately, it's going to get to a point where that sort of thing can't be overlooked. That's what the challenge is for us: to make sure that we're facilitating and expediting that conversation to get to that point where it's something that cannot be ignored, as soon as possible.Krissie Leyland 40:41 So it's like building the community or just a network, partnerships with people that want to make a difference and just talking about it. Instead of saying "a fully sustainable, positively impactful, ecommerce world," I could have said, "Do you think we can have a more mindful ecommerce world in 10 years?" And it'd be us and like, you know, our community–me and you, our network–will hopefully be able to make a difference. Even if its just someone looks at the framework and takes one thing away about the website data, and the impact it has. It'll just make them just think about it twice a day or in their day to day. Then yeah,I think you'll be more mindful and positive.Tom Locke 41:41 I think that is 100% something that that can be achieved. Like you say, even if this community can connect to a single person that makes a single decision, the the knock on effect that that will have eventually is huge. So, it can totally be achieved. There's a lot of work to be done within ecommerce. Obviously, there's a lot of work to be done everywhere but I think within commerce, specifically, there's a huge amount that can be achieved through something like MindfulCommerce and the community,that you guys are creating, and the framework to give people a platform to actually think about this stuff. Just because a website or buying from an online store is not a physical experience, obviously, it still has an impact through the way that that business has been conducted. I think that the framework gives that platform to think beyond the screen, basically. Well that's a cheesy line. You've got to put that cheesy line in there. Krissie Leyland 43:07 Oh, I will now!Tom Locke 43:10 Looking at the, broadly, business directories that do just become a place to get listed in order to get business... obviously that is an aspect of the directory but really, you're not wanting to connect with brands or tech partners that have that mindset of just wanting to get listed so that they can, you know, work with X,Y,Z. The sort of the weight that MindfulCommerce can carry and the framework, ultimately needs to be at the center of everything. Which obviously, it is and we're working towards that for sure.Krissie Leyland 43:59 Yeah, definitely. So anybody who gets listed on the directory needs to go through our onboarding, which includes the framework. But if it was a Shopify agency, for example, and they're not currently just specifically working with conscious brands, that's fine. Because as long as they have the idea in their head of how they can help a conscious brand, or maybe it's just that we've triggered something and now they do want to. Like you said, MindfulCommerce is at the center and it's making people think differently.Tom Locke 44:47 Ultimately, MindfulCommerce is the facilitator, facilitating conversation within the space and within agencies & tech partners that are already thinking that way. But to some extent, more importantly, facilitating the conversation outside of those outside of those spaces or industries... that's when it becomes really powerful.Krissie Leyland 45:18 That is what I'm taking away from this conversation. I mean, that's changed my mindset a little bit because I've been focusing on people that are already on the journey or thinking about it–at least, they're talking about it–but actually, I think he needs to work harder. Well done, Tom.Tom Locke 45:40 I think you already work very bloody hard. And obviously we're stoked to be a part of the project and to be working with you guys and MindfulCommerce. As I say, it's super exciting because the potential is almost too much to get your head around. Yeah, so for us, it's just great to be a part of it.Krissie Leyland 46:12 Right, so I'm going to try and wrap this up, because I could talk to you about this forever... What is your number one tip for ecommerce businesses who want to build an ecommerce website in a planet friendly way?Tom Locke 46:32 Log on to the MindfulCommerce Directory! Obviously that is something that you definitely should check out but fundamentally, I think it's just to really question everything: every decision that you need to make when you're building your ecommerce brand, or your website. "Is it serving the right purpose? Is it working towards that goal that you set?" That can come down to a content (a page on your site), the tech partners that you work with, or any sort of operational decisions. It's quite a broad answer but fundamentally: question everything.Krissie Leyland 47:27 Yeah, and be mindful.Tom Locke 47:29 And be mindful when you're doing it.Krissie Leyland 47:33 Thank you. That was great. That was a good answer.Tom Locke 47:37 I hope so.Krissie Leyland 47:38 So where can people find you, Tom?Tom Locke 47:43 You can find us on our website, which is noughtsandones.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, my name is Tom Locke. As an agency, we're on Instagram. That's our only real sort of active platform. So feel free to check out Noughts and Ones on Instagram.Krissie Leyland 48:07 Perfect. Your Instagram's beautiful, it's so pretty. Who does your Instagram?Tom Locke 48:15 I do my Instagram when I get a minute, basically. That's why it's fairly sporadic, but when it does happen, there's a lot of thought has gone into it.Krissie Leyland 48:26 Yeah, like it's so good. Everyone go on the Instagram. It's pretty.Tom Locke 48:31 Check out my "rows of three". Krissie Leyland 48:34 Yeah, exactly. That's exactly why it's nice on the eye.Tom Locke 48:40 Thanks!Krissie Leyland 48:44 One more thing, you're part of Ecology, are you?Tom Locke 48:48 Yes. So we partner with Ecology just as as a business. So we offset our own impact through supporting Ecology. Then as part of our approach to our Shopify projects, we do offer an optional tree planting scheme, as part of a project with Noughts and Ones.Krissie Leyland 49:15 Cool. And how many trees have you planted?Tom Locke 49:21 How many trees have been planted? I think we're about 1600.Krissie Leyland 49:27 And how long has that taken?Tom Locke 49:31 I think about six months and we've got other projects we're working on at the moment. Basically when we hit a milestone, we celebrate that by planting 100 trees. So it's growing... it's always growing.Krissie Leyland 49:49 That's cool. You even planted you planted me a tree for Christmas.Tom Locke 49:53 Yes, we planted a few trees for Christmas for our clients rather than sending out gifts or cards. Everyone got enough chocolate, I'm sure. So we just started planting trees and stuff.Krissie Leyland 50:09 Yay, love this. Thank you, I think that's it.Tom Locke 50:17 Anything else?Krissie Leyland 50:19 No, other than saying, "Bye!"Tom Locke 50:23 Yeah. Thanks a lot for taking the time speaking with me & for having me on.Krissie Leyland 50:29 It's good to reflect on everything, isn't it?Tom Locke 50:32 Yeah, certainly when you're in the weeds of a project in particular. We've obviously achieved some pretty cool stuff.Krissie Leyland 50:43 Thank you for listening to this episode. If you would like to contact Tom, please visit his website: noughtsandones.com. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Tom. We have loved working with him on the MindfulCommerce Directory. If you're interested in the MindfulCommerce Directory, framework or community, just visit mindfulcommerce.io and you'll find everything there. If you enjoyed this episode, you're bound to enjoy every other episodes that we do or that we have done already. So please hit subscribe. Every subscribe helps us to reach more people and spread the message about being mindful in the ecommerce world. Thank you! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioMindfulCommerce Sustainability FrameworkMindfulCommerce Directory (mindfulcommerce.io)Where to find Jessica and Naomi:TwelveLinks Mentioned in the Episode:Gerry McGovern Podcast with usPukka HerbsFinisterre - Leave No TraceBcorpShownotes: Rich Bunker 0:00 Hello, and welcome to The MindfulCommerce podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce experts and brands who care about protecting our planet.Krissie Leyland 0:07 Today we're talking to Jessica and Naomi from Twelve, a sustainability consultancy firm, helping businesses respond to the climate and ecological emergency and embed sustainability in the way they work. Happy New Year, everyone. This is our very first podcast of 2021. And we are very, very excited because we'll talk to Jessica and Naomi about our sustainability framework, which we built with them last year. It was a very interesting project. And it is, we think, is going to be very beneficial for the ecommerce industry, and also for the planet. All notes will be in the show notes. And if you have any questions or input, please feel free to email us at info@mindfulcommerce.io. Enjoy.Hello, and welcome Jessica and Naomi. Jessica, because you are the founder of Twelve, would you like to introduce yourself first? And tell us a little bit about your agency?Jessica Ferrow 1:23 Hi, you just did a great job of introducing me. Yeah, I am one of the two co founders of Twelve and we set up as a business in 2020. And yeah we're here to help businesses respond to the climate and ecological crisis. But yeah, I've been working in sustainability for about 10 years, working with businesses, mainly purpose driven businesses, to help them be better and have more positive impact in the world.Krissie Leyland 1:52 Cool. And what about you Naomi?Naomi Lawson 1:55 Hello. Um, so thanks very much for having us on the podcast. I'm a sustainability consultant and I've been working with Jessica over roughly the past year, which has been great. I kind of started out my career working for BCorps like Pukka herbs. And I've specialised in communications, marketing, and working on policies and campaigns that kind of focus on big impact to help tackle the climate and ecological crisis. That's me.Krissie Leyland 2:32 Perfect. And Jess, what brands have you worked with?Jessica Ferrow 2:35 Sure, yeah. So I spent some time... Well, a few years ago, I was kind of working with large businesses. So mainly, like on corporate responsibility, so I did a lot of work doing sustainability reporting for companies like IKEA, Vodafone, BT, those kinds of organisations. And then lately I've been working more with purpose driven founder led BCorps so I work with Pukka - been working with Pukka for the last three or four years. Worked with Ella's kitchen, Finisterre... I've done some work with Ecover. And yeah, so it's just Oh, and was really one of the companies I'm working with the moment is Edgard and Cooper who made pet food, and I think your doggy eats Edgard and Cooper!Krissie Leyland 3:22 Yes he does! We just transferred him over fully. And he loves it.Jessica Ferrow 3:29 Great. Yeah. Krissie Leyland 3:29 We love it too, not to eat, but you know, the brand, I look at the packaging, and I'm just like, this is amazing. I'd probably eat that.Jessica Ferrow 3:37 Yeah, I feel like the rule for us, like for the kinds of brands we like to work with my co founder, Ellie and I, we often say like, Is it the kind of brand that we like, and we want to use? And that we maybe probably have in our cupboards or on our shelves? And if the answer is yes, then yeah, we want to work with them for sure.Krissie Leyland 3:54 Perfect. Rich Bunker 3:54 Cool. Krissie Leyland 3:55 Um, so what are the kind of projects that you work on with these brands? And what does the process usually look like, working with you?Jessica Ferrow 4:05 Yeah, so basically, what we tend to find is most businesses in the world they want to make a positive impact. Or they want it you know, more and more these days, people are waking up to what's going on in the world with the climate and with nature. And, or if they haven't yet, they're kind of, they're going to wake up soon. But they it's been amazing the last few years, ever since Gretta, has become a big name and and extinction rebellion and the school strikes and all the things that are happening. And then of course, now with pandemic, David Attenborough and all these things, people are waking up and now most businesses are feeling the pressure from them. Their employees or their customers or even just their own consciousness of just being a better business and doing better things for the world and leaving the world a better place than they found it. So what we do is we help businesses to navigate those challenges, because it's all very well saying I want to be really sustainable business, but a lot of people just have no idea where to start. So, yeah, what we'll do at Twelve is we help guide businesses through that process. And we normally help them to create a strategy, a sustainability strategy, which would help them identify targets and set a roadmap for improvement. And then also, we'd help them to communicate that with their consumers. We also help businesses to become BCorps and so if you don't know what B Corp is, it's certification for ethical and sustainable businesses. So it's, if you don't know what it is, you should definitely check it out. Because it's an amazing movement that's sweeping the globe. I know you guys know what it is.Krissie Leyland 5:49 There's something else that might sweep the globe that we worked on together recently. So obviously, we recently worked with you on a very exciting project. So we built the MindfulCommerce Sustainability Framework together. And it sounds like this isn't normally your usual style of project. So what were your initial thoughts when you? Well, when we approached you with this idea for the framework?Jessica Ferrow 6:17 Yeah, great question. So yeah, we loved working on the MindfulCommerce Framework you guys, what we love about that project is that normally would be working with one business, on their own sustainability strategy, and how they're going to become a more sustainable business themselves. So it's kind of on a micro level, when you approached us and talked about your vision for the MindfulCommerce Framework... It just is basically the same thing but on a whole industry level, or even beyond an industry because ecommerce isn't exactly an industry is a kind of, it's a what a channel, it's a it's a way people are selling. So it encompasses so much more on a much more macro scale, but it's a similar process that we followed with you to get to the result that we we wanted, we essentially, well, should we talk about the the project and what, what, what we did?Krissie Leyland 7:10 Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, talk us through like, so I approached you. And I said, or we said, actually, originally, I think I wanted to make my business more sustainable, and then work with you to define a framework for Kollectify and then you were like, I think it's bigger than that. Because we would then use that framework to help other businesses in the ecommerce industry to kind of do the same thing. And then, yeah,I totally forgot about that. Rich Bunker 7:43 Yeah, yeah it was because I suggested it is like, for us to be on not authoritative but have experienced the process, then we could better understand it, to deliver it and help others get to that place. So I was like, let's put Kollectify through it. But then you guys like, it's too big for Kollectify, it doesn't work enough for Kollectify, we need to go bigger.Jessica Ferrow 8:08 Yeah, I think that that's right. I think what happened was, it was just, it was great to see that you, it was really obvious when you first approached us is that you really wants to make an impact. But you weren't quite sure how you had a huge amount of energy, that you wanted to channel somewhere. But you and you want to have this positive impact in the world, but you just were like, help us figure out what to do. So I think what we really noticed that your vision to bring everyone together in this MindfulCommerce Community was was going to be the key. And what we really needed is something to hold together that community. Yeah, we needed a focus. So it's like you bring all these people through the door and saying we want to make ecommerce more sustainable, and more mindful. But when there's no answer to the question of Okay, how do you do that, then it's a little bit up in the air. So what we really wanted to create was a kind of best practice framework for all of the things that anyone working in ecommerce, can look at in terms of steps to become more sustainable, more ethical, more mindful. And then provide that to them as something they can work through.Krissie Leyland 9:20 Yeah. And then the next step was, you went and did loads of research. So yeah, do you wanna talk us through that?Jessica Ferrow 9:29 Sure. Naomi, you want to talk us through that? Naomi Lawson 9:31 Yeah, sure. I was also just going to say, because I wasn't on the initial phone calls as well. So I remember when Jessica briefed me as well. It was obviously a really exciting project, because we were talking about the fact that it could have a really big impact. And that really came through when we did the initial research as well, because it was clear that this was like a big open space where not a lot of work had been done. And it was and it was definitely needed. So it was Yeah, it was a great project to work on from that perspective. For our stakeholder research, we had a couple different approaches. Firstly, we did a survey for the MindfulCommerce Community, and kind of identified what the main environmental challenges that are facing the ecommerce world. And as well as that, we also interviewed 10 key stakeholders from large merchants through to small ethical merchants, as well as tech developers and web experts to get a real range of perspectives and views on again, what the most kind of prominent environmental challenges there are facing ecommerce. And we used that information to develop an insights report and kind of gather our key recommendations for building the Framework.Jessica Ferrow 10:56 When when you approach us we realised that we needed to find out more about what was going on out there. So the best way to do that was to speak directly to people who are working in e commerce. So we ran some surveys, we did some interviews with some experts. And through that, we gathered a load of insights into what was happening out there, what was missing, what people needed. And the main things that we heard, were that people really wanted to be more sustainable in their ecommerce, but they just had no idea where to start. They wanted to be more sustainable businesses, but they weren't really sure where to go to find those materials. They really valued that idea of a community that they could be part of. And they also really, they there just wasn't much out there already. So we could really see an opportunity. And what this this told us is that the MindfulCommerce Framework could have a really massive potential impact. Because there's lots of people out there who are just poised to do something, but they don't know where to start.Krissie Leyland 12:04 Yeah. Why do you think these people didn't know where to start? Like, I guess because ecommerce is a specific world. And it's not just like your supply chains. And yeah, why do you think no one's done it before?Jessica Ferrow 12:21 Yeah, it's a great question. Because some of the brands that we spoke to, even if they have quite robust sustainability programmes in place, even some of the more kind of sustainable brands that you think of, they hadn't quite tied up their sustainability department with their ecommerce department. I think quite a lot of the time in the kind of medium to larger businesses, those two aren't necessarily crossing over. So you've got the ecommerce team who just focused on growth and sales. And they aren't necessarily embedding really sustainable practices. I just think it's not quite come on people's radars yet, I think a lot of people are thinking about packaging, that's the main thing that consumers will be noticing and flagging up. But I think beyond that, I think a lot of brands haven't quite thought beyond the packaging piece. Or we just saw, those are great opportunities for how, for example, there's so many tech tools on the Shopify App Store, where you can add carbon offsetting at checkout, you can add charitable donations, at checkout, you can there's even apps or kind of tools that you can add plug into your Shopify website where you can create a whole secondhand store on your on your site. And that is called ...Krissie Leyland 13:49 Recurate. Jessica Ferrow 13:50 Recurate! And they're part of the MindfulCommerce Community. Krissie Leyland 13:55 They are.Jessica Ferrow 13:55 But I think a lot of brands don't know about these opportunities. So what we really wanted the framework to do was to not just tell people what they could do, but actually link them up with the apps, people the organisations, the partners who can help them do those things.Krissie Leyland 14:13 Yes, that's my favourite. They're my favourite benefits, you just nailed them.Naomi Lawson 14:18 And I also think that when we spoke to ecommerce experts, and people who work for different for different brands, and spoke to them about the different challenges, I think it all seemed a bit overwhelming. So we needed to think of a way where we could kind of break it down and, and people who kind of work in ecommerce could type kind of, like take it step by step because they didn't know which challenge to prioritise. And that's kind of why we framed it and we took like a value chain approach. So first, so people who want to use the framework would start with sourcing and kind of end with like, product end of life. Yeah. But that's kind of going on and getting into the nitty gritty of the framework. Are we ready? Yeah,Jessica Ferrow 14:37 yeah, it's really important to say that like, there are lots of tools out there for businesses to use to become more sustainable. But I haven't seen that many that have been specifically cut for those working in ecommerce. So I think it's just, this is a specialist tool, that speaking the language of people who are working with ecommerce in e commerce, and it specifically identified all the issues that they are working on or that they need to prioritise. So we, you know, I talked before about how we work with businesses to help them become more sustainable, what we do we help them to, like set a strategy and to figure out what they need to do. We've done that, yeah, or a company that's got an ecommerce operation. So it's, it's specialised, Krissie Leyland 15:39 yeah and it can scale and that's why it could make a big impact.Rich Bunker 15:46 So that's great. So what is the framework? And sort of, can you give us an overview of it?Jessica Ferrow 15:53 Sure. So the framework is a best practice guide for any company who's working in the ecommerce world. And it's split into six categories, or pillars. So I'll just list them off. And then I'll go through them in more detail. So there's mindful business, mindful sourcing, mindful footprint, mindful deliveries, mindful products, and mindful communications. So mindful business is all about your business model. So it's, what kind of business are you? Do you have a strong mission? Do you have a mission for social impact? Are you doing anything to try and tackle the issues around for example, overconsumption and people buying too much? And I have you got any aspects of your business that, for example, are you working in the circular economy? Or are you doing something that's not just traditional types of business, but something that's inherently sustainable? So that's kind of what kind of business model are you. So the Framework contains loads of prompts, and questions to help people navigate some of those ideas. And it also provides links to case studies or examples of businesses that are doing these things, or it links to resources for them to learn more.Krissie Leyland 17:16 And to the MindfulCommerce Directory. If, for example, there is a tech company that is involved with the circular economy. So for example, Recurate who offers, like we mentioned before, a plugin for a brand to have a secondhand store, then they would be kind of listed as an example, for the brand to find on the directory to help them with that.Jessica Ferrow 17:46 Exactly. And that's one of the things I love about this tool is that it's linking back to the directory, and it's all the people within the community that can help each other out. So we tried wherever possible to link to people in the community, and we really hope that over time, the framework can evolve and grow. And more and more, we hope that we can add more links in to people within the community itself who can help each other.So yeah, the second one is mindful sourcing. So it's all about what kind of supply chain do you have? Where are you getting your products from? What are they made of that kind of thing. Then we have multiple footprints. So this is all thinking about your carbon footprint as a business. Even thinking about things like your website, and the data that you're using, and how much carbon emissions that's causing. And so it's really helping you think about - maybe things you haven't thought about before. And deliveries. So that's obviously a big one for ecommerce. So in here, we talk about packaging, of course, different types of delivery methods, and we so some people might not realise that if you choose next day delivery, on an online purchase, that that might mean that it has a much higher carbon emissions than if you chose a slower method of delivery. That's because often, especially in the United States, next day delivery means probably it's going to be popped on a plane overnight and flown to you. Whereas if you chose slow delivery, it might make its way to you by road or another way. So I think just a lot of people who are just buying something on a website might not think about that. But we're trying to encourage businesses to offer more awareness to their consumers about that and offer them different options.Naomi Lawson 19:37 Yeah, because I guess the thinking behind that as well as like, obviously, if consumers are aware, then they might choose a better delivery option and also are given an incentive to.Jessica Ferrow 19:48 Yeah, exactly. So that's deliveries and then products. So the products themselves, what we're really trying to think about is yeh, what is your product? How are you thinking about how you can make your product better how you think about how you can cut out waste ending up in landfill could it end up as something else, and designing it. So for example, Fairphone, design phones that can be their components can all be replaced easily. So instead of it becoming e waste, it would become something that could be used again. And then finally, mindful communications, because we think it's all very well doing all these things. But if you're not telling people what you're doing, then you don't, you're not unlocking that opportunity to lead change in the industry. So we really encourage that kind of to talk about what you're doing and sharing with others in your industry and leading that change.Krissie Leyland 20:45 Yeah, that one's a good one. Because it by doing that you're building awareness as well. And then giving the ideas to other people to do the same thing. And like influencing, because we buy from a really good coffee brand. And didn't know for a while that their packaging is actually like fully recyclable, which is really interesting for a coffee brand because it's difficult to normally how to have like the foil inside and stuff. But if he had said it on the packaging, then you know, yeah, we would know we could recycle it. and he is doing really cool things as well like making it will be like actually,Rich Bunker 21:28 home compostable Krissie Leyland 21:28 home compostable. Yeah. So he's like working with another organisation to create this home compostable packaging. And then I was like, oh, would you mind when you've done that, sharing that so then we could tell some other coffee brands. And yeah, it's like, innovation, spread the word, build awareness and a nice little circle. Rich Bunker 21:53 Exactly. Jessica Ferrow 21:55 Yeah, and a great example of a company that's doing that is Finisterre. So Finisterre, make ethical apparel. And they are they create, they've created what they call Leave No Trace bag, which is made out of water soluble material. And they are using that instead of kind of poly plastic to send out their clothes. And, and instead of keeping that innovation to themselves, and giving themselves the kind of competitive advantage for being a really sustainable company. They've just open sourced it. So they've just said anyone who wants to use this bag can just speak to us about it, so and they they've gone to other B corps and offered it to them. So that's a great example of communications and kind of advocating for change and, and sharing open source information.Rich Bunker 22:44 Super - thank you for going through that.Naomi Lawson 22:47 And I guess another thing to say about the framework as well is that it's all about asking questions, and prompting people to think about different, like different areas of sustainability, rather than telling them what to do.Krissie Leyland 23:04 Yes, yeah, definitely. Rich Bunker 23:05 Definitely. It's a good it's a, it's a helps them ask the questions about themselves. That's what I found sort of looking at it was definitely, you can gauge yourself by it, and really deeply get into almost sometimes too deeply, to where you can go and what you can do to make yourself your business more sustainable or better for the environment. And that's great. And I guess, a little bit - in reflection now that it's been out there and delivered. And we've had a few weeks to play with it and, and ask the community what they think about it, but like, what are your guys thoughts on it? Now that you know you're looking back at the project and where it is now? What do you think about it?Jessica Ferrow 23:54 Yeah, so I'm really excited about I think what we found in our research, or what we really felt with this project is that we didn't spend, you know, it was quite a quick project to just get started. And we didn't want to spend like a year perfecting it and getting it to like the perfect, perfect thing and test and tests and tests. We just wanted to get something out there that people can start using. And what I'm really excited about is seeing how it evolves. And we by no means think that it's perfect to begin with, even though we know it's really great start and I'm sure that anyone who goes in and starts playing around with it and finds it, they'll definitely find some really useful resources. And I'm sure they will find things in there that they've not heard of, or they've not come across before. So even if we can get someone to know about one app or one tech company that they've never heard of, then we've done some good, but I would expect that most people will find a lot more than that in there. And as time goes on, we can just keep tweaking it and keep improving it and keep adding more and more things, more resources to it. I very much see it as a work in progress that can grow and grow. And with feedback from the community with input, and as things improve, so I'm excited to see where it goes.Krissie Leyland 25:09 Yeah, definitely. I'm already like, constantly thinking of how we can improve it and add more solutions, more brands as examples. And yeah, it's great.Naomi Lawson 25:20 Yeah, definitely. And I think we also spoke about how we could kind of expand it and draw on your amazing community of experts that you've already got to do things like run kind of workshops and webinars on like specific areas of sustainable e commerce. So there's so much that you can do with it.Krissie Leyland 25:41 Yeah, that's a good idea.Rich Bunker 25:43 Jot that one down!Jessica Ferrow 25:48 And I'm just really just seeing it as something that can create so much impact because we are Twelve, as so we set up Twelve because it was all about - it is called Twelve because in 2018, there was a report by the IPCC released that said that we had less than 12 years to avert the climate and ecological crisis. So we've now got less than 12 years to go. So yeah, we only really want to work on projects that are game changing, and they're going to make a big impact. And that's why we love this project. Because the scalability of it, you know, there could be hundreds or 1000s of people using this framework and making positive impact to their business. And that really gives us a really good feeling. And we really hope that even if one business changes the way they source their materials, or reconsiders, the kind of packaging that they use or thinks about how they could be a more purpose driven business, then we've done our job. But I would just say that the the scope for scale is huge. So I really hope that lots of people do use it.Naomi Lawson 26:55 And the key thing as well, just in the framework that we spoke about a lot was needed to show users how to think beyond their own operations. So it's not just about reducing the negative impacts, but also about how they can increase their positive impact. So it's a bit of a mindset change for for some organisations.Krissie Leyland 27:13 Definitely. And even like, you know, the thing that I kept saying was, we need to talk about the websites and the impact of an e commerce website. Because not like I say this all the time, but not enough people realise that because it's just because it's not physical, it's still having an impact. And it's taking energy from the planet. And I think that's the biggest thing that people go, Oh, I never realised that. So just by, like you said, if one person takes one thing away from this framework, or being in the community, then we've done our job.Jessica Ferrow 27:51 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think what the the important thing that, that as sustainability consultants, we would try to get people to think about is how material those issues are. So if you are a huge company, like a huge, you know, clothing company, that selling fast fashion, and your website is probably not going to be your biggest impact. So it might not be the thing you focus on. First, you might want to think about the fact that you're flying clothes all around the world, and you've got a truck to transport going everywhere. If you're a small company like yourselves, and with a few a small team working remotely, then yeah, your digital footprint is likely to be one of your significant impacts. So you have to think about it like that, that different companies need to think about what their biggest impacts are, and they're not going to be able to do that until they start looking into it.Krissie Leyland 28:43 That's very true. Rich Bunker 28:44 I think that was one of the big Penny drop them for me was, you know, when we found out about listening to our friend Gerry about the digital impact of business businesses online. And that was just I was kinda like, we just have to tell people about this. How do we how do we let people know about this so they can make more informed better decisions? And that I think that was one of the biggest things that kicked off.Krissie Leyland 29:10 It was it was the rabbit hole. Rich Bunker 29:11 Yeah, the MindfulCommerce reconing.Jessica Ferrow 29:15 We're really lucky to speak to Gerry as part of our research for the Framework, we had a great conversation with him and he has some extraordinary facts around the amount of data storage and and how many trees you'd have to plant per year to just account for the returns. I think it's something like 2 billion trees per year.Krissie Leyland 29:36 He has some shocking stats that make you think. And and by the way, we did interview him on the podcast on episode three.Jessica Ferrow 29:47 Listen to that definitely. Yeah, no, it's really it's really great to have such a wide range of experts in the community, just who are all supportive of this and what we found when we did our research was there was appetite and support from all the people we spoke to for this. So it was really great to, to feel that love from the community and enthusiasm.Krissie Leyland 30:10 Just out of interest on that topic of, you know, digital impact. And did you ever think about that? Did you consider it before you met us? Or was like, was it already on your radar?Jessica Ferrow 30:26 It's definitely on my radar it's probably not something that I had, it's probably something that I had thought I need to act on it. Like, I've got some shocking amount of emails, you know, old emails that I probably need to delete are just like digital clutter. And it probably just gave me the kick to just tackle it a bit or think about it a bit more. But yeah, I think you guys have done a great job of raising awareness of that issue. So yeah, keep doing it. For sure.Naomi Lawson 30:56 Definitely. I too am just, I kind of, I knew it was a thing before, but I am so much more conscious of it now day to day, kind of things like thinking before sending an email and storing images and watching videos and things like that.Krissie Leyland 31:13 Yeah, definitely. I think in ecommerce, it's quite tricky, because, you know, it's quite image heavy. And videos and graphics and stuff. But yeah, hopefully we can help people to do better.Jessica Ferrow 31:31 Yeah, I don't, I also think that people need to think about the thing that is, like I said, the thing that's going to be the most material impact, you know, if you, if you if your house was burning down, you wouldn't go outside and like, put out the tiny fire in like, a tiny corner of the garden, you know, like, do you know, I mean, it's just you need to kind of focus on the areas that you are your biggest impact. And, and that's what as sustainability consultants, that's what we kind of help people to figure out. And there's lots of ways that you can do that you can do that through the carbon emissions that it creates the spend that you're spending on it, the amount of impact it has on your business, and how relevant it is to your business, that kind of thing. So, but you've got a lot of our thinking in the framework, you know, as sustainability consultants, we've put all that together, and we've literally externalised our brain into, into a resource that you can read and look at. So it's like, we think about it as like having a sustainability expert in your pocket? SoRich Bunker 32:33 It's a great way to you know, you can use the framework to sort of go Okay, maybe that is my big ticket item, that that's the biggest impact we have. But we can't afford to change that just yet. What else can we do? It gives us that, you know, because sometimes businesses get focused on Oh, we need to change this massive impact that our business has, but then can't see past it. Krissie Leyland 32:53 can't do it right now. So in the meantime, I'll look at this small thing that I can do, which has a big impact small but big change.Jessica Ferrow 33:02 Yeah, exactly.Rich Bunker 33:03 If you do several small things that are easy to change, you can have quite a big impact in your business, as opposed to just doing the one big thing that might take some time and have quite a lot of institutional changes that you need to do you know, soJessica Ferrow 33:16 yeah, that's totally right. And sometimes it can be cheaper things are easy things or behavioural changes. And I think the most important thing that I'd encourage people to look at is, is that kind of mindset, mind set shift. So actually getting them to think and ask questions of themselves that are a bit more like a business that takes sustainability seriously. And just, some people might have never asked themselves those questions before. I think when people are new to the idea of sustainability, they're always asking, what's the right thing? Should I do this? Or this? You know, should I use this type of packaging? Or this type of packaging? Which one's better? Which one's best? And what I often have to explain to people is, it depends. It depends, and it depends what best is. And what best is depends on what your priorities are. So what do your consumers care about? What do you care about? is plastic The worst thing for your consumers and they don't want to see any plastic? Or is it Do they want to have Do you have to also balance all these other things like durability, and it's no good if you have a really sustainable packaging, that means all the goods insides get damaged or it gets damaged 50% of time, so you have to send it back and that's going to create more carbon emissions. So it's all about as a sustainability consultant, what we're always trying to do is think holistically about all the different multifaceted issues that will add up to your environmental impact, and social impact and trying to balance all those challenges.Rich Bunker 34:47 you know, and tech can help with that. I think tech can be really helpful in leading that change. You know, there's lots of good calculators out and there's probably scope for more calculators out there that say like a business has got a product and they ship it in plastic packaging, or it's a plastic bottle and they're like, we want to be more sustainable or something that's more recyclable or something that can be reused, we're going to use glass. But then what is the upshot of using that glass, like the co2 footprint of transporting that glass product, as opposed to a plastic could be, you know, in tech can play a big part in in that where there's lots of online calculators that you can gauge your co2 footprint and you know, against the two, again, it's, it's what's best or better or the best. And there's there's definitely scope for tech, to help with that. And I guess what, what's your guy's views on tech in e commerce and its place in sustainability?Jessica Ferrow 35:48 Well, tech,Naomi Lawson 35:50 tech, I think with tech, there are already a lot of tech solutions out there for different sustainability challenges. I think one of the challenges perhaps for kind of tech developers and applications is kind of them getting the message out there and communicating and kind of promoting their own service potentially. And kind of seeing themselves as a sustainability solution. I guess an example of that would be, maybe it comes down to to the brand or merchant using them. But an example of that would be Okendo, which is an app that enables shoppers to review their purchase online. So I know that Finisterre for example, use Okendo so that people can purchase an item, once they have done they can leave a review, say if the sizing runs large or small, which obviously enables future shoppers to go look at the reviews and say, okay, that runs large, so perhaps I'll get some size down, which means that they are reducing the number of returns, which obviously lowers their carbon emissions. But so that's that's an amazing initiative. But I would say that a lot of a lot of organisations maybe don't see that as being an amazing initiative or being something that is an incredible sustainability solution.Krissie Leyland 37:23 I absolutely love that. it's true. They don't they don't recognise, in particular Okendo... so I've got a good relationship with Okendo, and they, I was like, have you worked with any, you know, sustainable ethical brands? Can you help with this and that and they're like, I haven't really thought about that. And yeah, they're in our report, they're in our framework and now on the directory, and all of a sudden, they're like, Oh, yeah, I can be a solution to help fight climate change. And, yeah, it's just, I liked your answer.Naomi Lawson 38:01 That's good.But actually, quite an interesting fact that Gerry McGovern gave us is that 1.5 billion trees would need to be planted to deal with annual ecommerce returns in the US alone. So yeah, reducing the number of returns is making ecommerce more sustainable.Krissie Leyland 38:20 Yeah. So Okendo, a customer review app are a solution a solution to lots of , well, the biggest ecommerce issue, which in my opinion, retruns like returns are the biggest issue in ecommerce, huge Like...Jessica Ferrow 38:39 yeah and we want to get more people realising how they can be an actor in that in that response, or into kind of fight one of those big challenges. So if we have the issue of returns, like how can we get more app developers to, to kind of step up and say we we've got solution to that. And there's some really cool as well, just thinking about other tech tools that are at play. And quite a few companies now like ASOS and Finisterre using AI, lead size fit guides. So you go online, helps you find the right fit. And so you click you know, or you average body shape, or you know, above or below and then what height you what weights, and it kind of figures out the best size for you and says you should by size 10 or size 12 or whatever. And then it's it's much more likely that you'll get the right fit first time. So again, reducing returns. So more and more that of companies that can do that. They're also going to save money, because often returns are free. So it's it's a win win for businesses to do this. Rich Bunker 39:41 Definitely.Krissie Leyland 39:43 Yeah.Naomi Lawson 39:43 I also think when it comes to returns, as well as it comes back to the communication piece up. It's most people I would say, think oh, I'll just order two sizes of that because they can easily send it back and they won't think about the impact that that has which is massive. But all it takes is is kind of raising awareness and people to think about it to just completely change their habits, which if you know, like the impact that that could have if there was sort of a big industry led campaign around, it would be huge again.Krissie Leyland 40:20 Yeah, I've actually recently come across an app that at checkout says, like, your impact or a comment what it was, but I was like, Oh, my God, that's a perfect app to say, like, prompt the shopper - Do you really need this, like, this is the impact that it's going to have, and make them just be more mindful about their purchases.Jessica Ferrow 40:49 I love that. I love that I'd love to see that. You know, why you got Three? Three have the same dress in your basket? Why don't you head over to our fitness system to find the right size? You know, like that. And if we had a industry wide example of best practice, if we have more and more people saying, well, we're doing this, we've got this tool, we've installed this plugin, we're using this. And then if we had an industry wide campaign, where we tried to get all the power companies to do something similar. I just think that's where we need to go, we need to get all the people have the solutions to start telling everyone Hey, this is the way to do it. We all need to do this. Come on, let's get on board. And I think you could see some really rapid change.Naomi Lawson 41:32 Exactly, yeah. And partnerships are important in e commerce, which is why the directory is needed. But yeah, another thing that I've seen recently, I can't remember where it was, was basic, I think it was a men's clothing website. And it basically told people, it would tell you, like how much water was used to make a T shirt, or you know how much energy was used. And that's just amazing. Just to get you to stop and think about whether you need something as well, and to realise, like the impact of your purchase. Yeah,Krissie Leyland 42:11 it's just cool. And definitely transparency. And yeah, communicate your impact.Rich Bunker 42:18 I think, I mean, there's, there's a lot of businesses and a lot of tech, and a lot of good solutions out there. And there's just not enough awareness about the solutions, I think is the biggest problem.Krissie Leyland 42:31 That's our goal to build awareness of them.Rich Bunker 42:35 And if there isn't, if there is a problem that a lot of brands and merchants are facing, and then they're asking about it, and there's a there's sometimes a gap in to be filled by some tech, possibly so that that'll be part of the framework, where there isn't a solution for merchants problems. So ...Krissie Leyland 42:57 We will be like, can you fill this with your current app or like add a feature to your current app or build an entirely different app for to fill that gap?Jessica Ferrow 43:10 Yeah, 100%. Like, I would love to see tech companies kind of doing massive hackathons to figure out the solution, you know, to these things, if we're like, we really need something that's going to help us track our carbon footprint from warehouse to end user. And we don't have a tool to do it. But we're pretty sure using mobile data, we can do it. And who can do it, as well as so many clever smart people out there. There's so many young graduates who are just absolute coding geniuses, who I'm sure if we gave them that challenge, they could meet it, I'm sure they could learn something amazing. So it's identifying the need, it's identifying the fact that we want to do this. There's a lot of people out there who who want to do it, and it could be a great opportunity.Krissie Leyland 43:58 So I'm very aware of your time. So I guess I might ask Naomi first. What's your number one tip or words of wisdom for any ecommerce business who wants to be more sustainable?Naomi Lawson 44:20 Phwor that's a good one. I'm just gonna go to my notes. might have to cut this out.Rich Bunker 44:31 How professional, you have notes. Krissie Leyland 44:33 Yeh, we didnt even share the talking points!Naomi Lawson 44:38 So I would like to encourage organisations to really reflect on their business model. I think a lot of businesses fall short when they're setting sustainability goals and targets because they're so focused on short term gains. And actually thinking long term is so critical to ongoing commercial success and to the protection of our planet. And if we're not thinking long term then there won't be a planet for us to make profit to run our business. Krissie Leyland 45:07 Ohhh...Rich Bunker 45:07 Very deep, I like itKrissie Leyland 45:10 I like that. I like that a lot. So over to you, Jessica.Jessica Ferrow 45:18 Yeah. So my top tip would be, just get started, it can feel really overwhelming when you just see this huge list of things, or you look at other businesses, and they seem so far ahead of you. But really, every journey starts with a single step. And it really is important just to start where you can start small, get the wins, celebrate the wins. And also just find the right people to work with. Just reach out to people who are doing it, find experts to work with find brilliant people on your team, quite often, if you have a team, you know, young people will be very interested in helping you with this. And you can delegate projects to interns, or, or, or senior managers, or anyone at most people will be really motivated by this kind of work. So just get everyone involved and just try and set a target to get something done by a certain date, and then keep going. And good luck. Krissie Leyland 46:20 Perfect.Rich Bunker 46:21 Great, great answer.Naomi Lawson 46:22 That's a great answer.Rich Bunker 46:24 I guess one final thing to touch on. You mentioned it early on in the podcast there was you help businesses with B Corp certification? And really, what are the big differences between B Corp and what you've created for us at MC?Jessica Ferrow 46:43 Great question, because I think that's a really, it's really good to to recognise that there are other frameworks out there. And the BIA, the B impact assessment, which is the one you do for the B Corp certification is also a big list of questions, which you tick. And the main difference I would say is that the MindfulCommerce Framework is first and foremost geared up for people who are working in e commerce in some way. So it's been tailor made for that kind of organisation. So it has more specific questions to that kind of business. However, it does also have some broader sustainability and business related questions and topics. So I would say the MindfulCommerce Framework is really great place to get started and to start your journey towards becoming a more sustainable business. And I think the BIA B Corp assessment, after you've done the MindfulCommerce Framework would be a lot less daunting and a lot that you find quite a lot of overlap. And you'd be on a great, you've done a great start to continue and do the B Corp as a next step. But I would say that when you first approached the BIA, it can be a bit overwhelming, because there's more than 200 questions, and some of them you're like, how does this even relate to my business and some of the way the languages can be quite difficult to navigate. So for a company that doesn't have a sustainability strategy in place, it can be quite difficult to know, where you should be focusing. So that's what that's why we find that often we work with businesses to help them identify what their priorities are, and help them set their own strategy before tackling the BIA because it helps them not just go down rabbit holes, focusing on how to measure water consumption in their suppliers, when actually they really should be focusing on the you know, environmental footprint of their offices, which are massive, whatever it is, it's just like, you've got to you've got to it was like I was talking about for you need to go where the big impacts are. And the people that are in your company and your stakeholders care about.Krissie Leyland 48:52 What about the other way around? So if you're if you're doing the B Corp assessment, so the BIA Jessica Ferrow 49:00 Yeah. Krissie Leyland 49:05 And and then you came across the MindfulCommerce Framework. So you're an e commerce business, obviously.Jessica Ferrow 49:09 Yeah, I still think you'd really find the MindfulCommerce Framework useful because as we talked about, there's loads of case studies, which you never even find that in the BIA. It's not like an informative thing. It's more like a questionnaire asking you about your performance. Whereas I feel like the MindfulCommerce Framework has got more focus on improvement, and also linking you up via the directory of people who can help you. So it's more like a one stop shop for thinking about your business but also improving rather than just assessing where you're at. So I think if you've done the BIA or you're already a certified B Corp, I really think you will still really find the MindfulCommerce Framework to be super useful in your journey.Krissie Leyland 49:46 Perfect. Wow. I love this.Why didn't we do this ages ago, I would have found it so much easier to write the website copyRich Bunker 50:01 The first iteration is out there.Jessica Ferrow 50:02 Well that's it it's an iteration. You just have to keep improving. And done is better than perfect, right? Rich Bunker 50:11 Like the framework is, it's a journey.Krissie Leyland 50:14 It's a journey for us as well. Um, thank you so much. It was lovely to chat to you both.Jessica Ferrow 50:24 Thank you. Great. Talk to you guys, too.Naomi Lawson 50:26 Yeah, it's lovely to catch up.Krissie Leyland 50:28 Thanks for winging it with us. Rich Bunker 50:30 Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for the catch. And really, thanks again for helping us get to where we needed to get to to help others. Krissie Leyland 50:39 Hmm, it's amazing, honestly.Jessica Ferrow 50:42 Aww it was great to work with you. And we really look forward to seeing all the impact that the framework and the directory will, will make, and we look forward to hearing what people think so do let us know.Krissie Leyland 50:51 Definitely. 100%Naomi Lawson 50:53 I can't wait to see how it develops as well. In months and years to come.Rich Bunker 50:59 It's very exciting, so excited.Krissie Leyland 51:03 Thank you so much. Um,Rich Bunker 51:06 And yeah, we'll speak again soon.Krissie Leyland 51:10 If you'd like to find out more about Twelve you can head over to their website twelvefutures.com. And I will leave the link in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this conversation today, you'll love the MindfulCommerce community, head over to mindfulcommerce.io and click on community and I'll see you there! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this episode of the Impact Exchange, we're excited to discuss a recent event that we hosted with Recurate— How Shopify Stores Can Embrace Sustainability. Our Founder and CEO, Ronny Sage, and Adam Siegel, CEO at Recurate, met with members from The Extra Smile, Darby Scott, and Shopify to discuss what works and what doesn't when integrating sustainability and social impact into a business strategy, and how to align with customers' values.
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