Sustainable Luxury and Social Entrepreneurship

Stories from the Pioneers

Miguel Angel Gardetti, María Eugenia Girón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351286220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Luxury products are now seen by a growing number of global consumers as an important and more widely available way of expressing personal aspirations and values. Most consumers of luxury products and services use them as status symbols and symbols of success. However, the definition of success – and the way it is perceived by others – is changing. Many of these successful consumers now want the brands they use to reflect their concerns and aspirations. Such products come with a heavy social and environmental cost. Sustainable luxury is about rediscovering the old meaning of luxury – a considered purchase of a beautifully crafted object with built-in social and environmental value.The social entrepreneurs documented in this book highlight the relationship between personal values and sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation in developing and marketing luxury products. The pioneers outline how they have developed inclusive supply chains with poor and vulnerable communities. Their stories prove that luxury need not be a destructive force. Instead, this book opens a window on a world where entrepreneurial pioneers can change the rules of the game.

1
Elvis & Kresse, UK

Kresse Wesling
Company founder and director

We can't beat nature. We can only try. We can cut old hoses until we can't unclench our gripping fingers, we can clean the hose until we can't stand up straight, we can skip every weekend and holiday for years but we won't beat nature. The harvest moon wins; the stillness and majesty of a quiet stand of old growth evergreens, the everyday differences of the sea, the gut flipping glimpse of a bear cub while hiking with friends, the hulking mass of the Rockies—they win.

The evolution of this particular entrepreneur starts with the eye-watering beauty of big nature. I knew very early on that I couldn't beat it; it just took me a while to work out how to join in.

An environmental entrepreneur

I had the great fortune to grow up in Western Canada at a time when kids could roam fairly freely, playing cops and robbers, making perfume from honeysuckles and lilacs. Everyone tells me about how precocious and dictatorial I was, two traits I have probably not lost, much to Elvis's dismay. Great family, great community, great state schooling, field trips to sewage treatment plants, skiing, skating, hockey, horse riding in the summers in the mountains. Running with my dad, going to the dump with my dad, picking berries with my grandmother and pickling, jamming and pieing with her, my mom, my sister. A lot of camping. A lot of lake swimming. I had no idea that Rundle Park, the big fields between my grandmother's and the North Saskatchewan River, were in fact a grassed over former landfill . . . maybe I got the waste bug from rolling down those hills?

I can safely skim through my teenage years; we moved a lot, I was over-stimulated and confused a lot of the time, but focused on school. I wanted to be everything from a Vet to the Prime Minister . . . so yeah, confused. More great schooling, at Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong and then back to Canada for a joint honours degree in East Asian Studies and Political Science . . . where I discovered that politics isn't really a science and definitely wasn't for me. But I learned how to digest a lot of information really quickly and this was the basis for a life-long study into everything that I find interesting, which mostly has to do with waste, nature and innovation.

I went back to Hong Kong after university, pretty much on a whim, and got my first proper job with a venture capital company. It was here, working for two years with an incredible woman, Amy Kong, that I got a taste for what I believe to be the few truly alluring and potentially redeeming features of business. If you can make some money from an idea, no one can tell you what to do, make you compromise or shut you down. This total freedom is why businesses have the potential to cut deep, scarring chasms or lift whole communities out of poverty and everything in between. Thank you, Amy!

Entrepreneurship is also the natural home for someone like me: excitable, ambitious, foolhardy, undauntable, conceptually creative—but I would be and have been unsuccessful in this space with the wrong partner. Elvis is my ideal match in every sense: focused, rational, relentless, funny and genuinely talented as a maker, a craftsperson. It is often said about our social enterprise that I am the social and he is the enterprise, but it isn't said enough that I have dreams that he is somehow able to realise. Thank you, Elvis!

I could give you a potted history of my other businesses but the reality is that they were either the right idea at the wrong time, the right idea but the wrong team or the wrong idea altogether. Moving on is always difficult but a stubborn entrepreneur will end up broke and alone so accepting and internalising a failure is an important skill. This becomes even more important in a succeeding business, where more is at stake. You have to continually assess progress and failures and change tack accordingly.

Once I had started down the business route, there really was no turning back and equally there was no way for me to think of business without thinking about it as a change agent. My personal goals are environmental, probably due to the sharp shock of moving back and forth between Canada and Hong Kong, Beijing and South China, so any business I have ever or would ever be associated with has the environment at its core. Money is the means; saving the planet is the end. And it is that clear cut; if you aren't fixing something, there is no point. If it's just about money then it's pointless. Some things are black and white.

Hose, beautiful hose

I moved to London in 2004. I followed Elvis; we'd met just over two years earlier in Hong Kong. It was a dream to be living in London, to run along the Thames and hear Big Ben chiming away, to be constantly, wonderfully lost. I saw as many waste transfer stations and industrial estates as I did museums and galleries, waste is always the best way to see what is wrong with a place. If I were a doctor I suppose I would focus on the intestines or the kidneys or the liver—the guts, the filters, the way we deal with inefficiencies, no matter how small. I never expected the UK to be as heavily reliant on landfill as it was; such a small space with so many people. There isn't land to spare. In the year I arrived over 100 million tonnes of waste was buried. And landfill is inexcusable, not just in a time of austerity; it is lazy, childish, uncivilised and disrespectful . . . The Earth hurtles through space, with no practical way of getting more of something or getting rid of anything else . . . this reality is so obvious, so undeniable, that the last 50+ years of forgetting to value raw materials really does mark out this era as being the least respectful of resources and the least aware of our utter dependence on this one Earth for all our lives.

But that is dark and deep and heavy, and not at all like our approach. We don't rail against the status quo and neither of us are stern campaigners. We aren't the only ones who feel that sometimes being green fails because it has mostly been marketed as worthy, and not fun. So it is not surprising that I first met the London Fire Brigade through a very worthy ISO14001 auditing course where I had a lot of fun chatting with firemen, particularly intrigued by one of their environmental issues. And what an issue it was: fire hoses, which can serve for up to 25 years, fighting fires and saving lives, must be decommissioned when they are too old or, more frequently, too damaged to repair. London has a whole team dedicated to patching and refurbishing but in the end some cuts are too deep, some holes are too large and shortening hoses to remove the damage isn't a solution when most hoses need to be over 20 metres long to do the job.

I didn't know what to do with the material, just that I would do something. Landfill was an indecent end for a heroic material. Although we didn't plan it, didn't know it at the time, the way we approached the hose has come to define our practice: tackling problems with solutions that deliver across many fronts.

Start with a problem. Fall in love with a problem. If you are fixing something there is a sense of purpose, which can push you through the difficult early days or years; there is also a greater potential for success. Solving something that no one else has been able to can make you unique, in demand. This works for the paradigms of both waste and luxury.

In our minds the solution then has to meet three criteria: it has to be sustainable, scalable and engaging.

Sustainability means both environmentally and socially sound and financially viable. If it is bad for the planet there is no point and if it is never going to be able to pay its own way then there is no future in it, no way to scale and no real chance to solve that particular problem. If we had to superheat the hose or dye it with toxic chemicals then it wouldn't be sustainable. If we had to sell our products below our cost prices then we would run out of steam. If we forced down the costs to a point where our craftspeople were tempted to lie about who makes the pieces or where they are made, then, again, it wouldn't be sustainable. You have to use your imagination and common sense; you have to value what you love. The planet isn't an added extra, it isn't a CSR programme, it is everything.

Scalability means that the solution in question has to be of equal magnitude to the problem. Tinkering is fine when you are trying to work out what to do; it's great for brainstorming and coming up with new concepts. But for us a solution is the goal, so we aren't prepared to tinker long term. We have to work out a way to deal with the whole thing, not the edges, not a portion, not some. All. Scalability also means that there has to be a way to grow without putting sustainability at risk.

Engageability⁵ means fun, innovative, aspirational, alluring, multi-dimensional, conversation worthy. An engaging product isn't suitable for a one-night-stand; it is marriage material. We are not talking about something you like, but something you love, something you are committed to. For Elvis and I the belts have to be designed to stay on your favourite jeans, outlast them, and then be transferred to a new pair when your jeans wear out. For too long the green movement has been a bit depressing. But the guilt has to go, we have to sell these ideas, they have to be better, more compelling, more wonderful than the less green, less ethical alternatives. Marketing is a positive, upbeat, affirmational pursuit, so why change it? Use it! Make something so outstanding, so awesome and so inspiring that it deserves the hype. This isn't a case of 'if you can't beat them, join them', it is definitely, absolutely and entirely a case of 'this is the absolute coolest thing we can do, we already beat them, they're just going to have to join us'. In this regard, engageability is entwined with scalability. If we want to foster system change—the complete realignment of consumption—then we aren't talking about our journey anymore; this is going to have to be one heck of a convoy.

From shed to factory, waste to luxury

So let's rewind, back to 'I didn't know what to do with the hose, just that I would do something'. How did we do it, how did we get here, how did a pile of hose become a brand, a business, a powerful way to prove the inherent value in a seemingly useless pile of rubbish? How did we go from decommissioned hoses to luxury handbags? The short answer is, 'not how we thought we would'. This is definitely a question we can only answer retrospectively. It is relatively easy to look back at the path we took, but when we were on it, when we were travelling, there was no path to follow.

Our first focus was the hose itself, its rich lustrous red, its strength, and its water resistance. We were sharing the house of a dear friend, Tom. Tom and Elvis were building a shed in the back garden for our bikes. Our first ever trial with the hose was as roof tiles for the shed, cut into flat rectangles and applied like clay tiles, slates or cedar shakes . . . This was before we knew how to edge the hose, so the tiles were flattened, but still round, still hose-like. It was pretty, but heavy. Ultimately, as appealing as roofing was as a solution, it didn't fit the problem. There isn't enough hose waste, globally, annually, to have a sustainable roofing company. And, as we discovered later, the hose doesn't love to live permanently in the sun; it browns, it ages and it weathers faster than a roof should. Back to the drawing board . . . and there were many drawing boards . . . We made many prototypes in those first years that would have taken us in completely different directions but none seemed to suit the hose, none would solve the problem. And then came the first belt.

Elvis had one belt, a classic he likely inherited from his father, thick brown leather with a brass West End buckle. Its long life and a few years in Hong Kong's humidity had taken their toll and cracks that had been growing finally led to a split. The belt was dead but the buckle was still alive and kicking. Elvis cut a length of hose to replace the leather last, and the timing could not have been better. While he was fixing it to the buckle I received a call from the team working on merchandise for London's Live Earth concert. They needed something green, apropos of the event, and in my own impulsive style I promised to deliver 1,000 belts. The trial by fire began, a night of furious hosecutting ensued and we woke with claw-like hands, ruined by the effort of cutting perfectly straight lengths with house scissors . . . 1,000 would be impossible. We called back and dropped the commitment to 500 and then went out to find a suitable cutting tool. Our first rotary cutter, at £39.99, constitutes the only capital investment we ever made that wasn't financed by sales. That month, when we developed our first technique for cleaning hose—moving quickly from the bathtub to scrubbing with an abrasive, industrial broom—was definitely do or die. We had to source and brand buckles, we had to work out how to edge and finish the hose, we had to beg and borrow space to work and clean (mostly from Elvis's now long-suffering family), and we did all of this while keeping existing jobs.

The belts sold well; we used the proceeds to buy a sewing machine. Elvis learned to sew. We started making more belts and set up a website, we also worked with the now extinct London Fire Brigade online store to sell belts branded for the LFB. We knew we couldn't live by belts alone and started thinking about how to expand the range—then I came across a key piece of research, one of the major leather luxury brands uses as much leather, annually, as there is hose . . . so we had an appropriate solution . . . we just needed (and still need) to become a major luxury brand . . .

Our first problem was manufacturing. We needed a partner with skilled craftspeople that could work with our material and our designs. Elvis started a sketchbook that we still have, where we focused on classic pieces, ones that sell and sell, which are part of the permanent collections you see in high-end department stores across the world. Totes, washbags, wallets, cardholders, messengers . . . Elvis re-imagined these classics with both the qualities and constraints of the hose foremost in his mind. Then we loaded ourselves up with hose and went to see the best manufacturers we could find in the UK. In most cases we didn't get further than a phone call:

'Hi, we are looking to order a small run of products made from redundant fire hose, which we will supply, cleaned and ready to go.'

'We only work with leather.'

'We only produce for our own brand.'

'We are a premium manufacturer.'

We couldn't find a British manufacturer that wanted our business; perhaps we were unlucky in that the recession hadn't taken hold, they didn't need us. So we started moving beyond the UK, into Spain, Italy, France, Portugal . . . the answers were the same.

We thought it might just be the hose, it looked too much like hose—it was still coiled up and carried in slung over one of our shoulders. Elvis went back to the sewing machine. We needed to prove our pieces could be made. So Elvis made them—but it would never do to make one bag a week, at that rate we would need to charge a small fortune for them. We went back to all the factories with our now finished, however rudimentary, pieces. This time some of them bit, but unused to the material as they were the results weren't great, the costs spiralled and in the end most still pulled out because 'it just isn't leather'.

Then Elvis went to Romania, and we met a small, family-run factory that was willing to take a chance. They had three crucial qualities: a gap in their production schedule, a serious pedigree of production for major luxury brands, and they believed like we did, that the hose deserved to be treasured, that it wasn't a leather substitute but a thing of beauty in its own right. We sampled four designs, and brought them back to the UK to work out a plan. The minimum order was for 800 pieces across the four styles. Our burgeoning belt business was doing well but we hadn't sold enough to finance this production run quite yet, so while we cleaned, prepared and shipped pallets of material to Romania, I went all over London, introducing our original Classic Tote to anyone and everyone and started selling them—pre-selling at a 30% discount—and promising delivery in a few months time. Those miraculous first customers, heaven-sent chance takers, were how we got that first run off the ground, almost a year after we made the Live Earth belts.

When we started collecting the hoses I made a promise to our contacts at the London Fire Brigade, that we would share 50% of the profits with the Fire Fighters Charity (FFC). I am sure they never thought a donation would ever materialise, but when we ran through our accounts at the end of that first year there was something left. We hadn't made a profit, not really, we hadn't paid ourselves, and our accountant later told us that we had actually made a loss, but a promise is a promise. Instead of dividing the meagre remains, we sent that full amount, 134 precious pounds, to the FFC. Thankfully, donations have been increasing year on year and have all gone out with our accountant's approval.

We get asked a lot about this commitment, why we do it, why we have extended it across all the materials we reclaim. It started as a gesture of goodwill; they were sharing their hose with us, we should share our proceeds back with them. But there are so many more reasons. We will always be asked this question, but we now find ourselves asking other companies why they don't share, why they aren't generous with their stakeholders. Collecting the hose saves the brigades money (no landfill charges); this saving and the donations have helped us to build and solidify strong relationships with our key raw material suppliers. Giving in this way helped us to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Sustainable luxury: Stories from the pioneers
• Stories from the social pioneers in the sustainable luxury sector: A conceptual vision
• 1 Elvis & Kresse, UK
• 2 The IOU Project, Spain
• 3 Aïny Savoirs des Peuples, France
• 4 Pachacuti, UK
• 5 We Are Knitters, Spain
• 6 Positive Luxury, UK
• 7 Bottletop, UK
• 8 Big Blue Bike, USA
• 9 Estancia Peuma Hue, Argentina
• About the editors