Buy-in not buying. The marketing of 'good'
Sustainability is not a product feature. How we market "good" needs to be an appeal to values and identity.
Search
- Jan 6
- 6 min
Water - the future for 'proper' sustainability brands?
the task for brand in water is groundbreaking - get people to use less and pay more. Every sustainability brand will face the same challenge
0 views
- Nov 2, 2021
- 5 min
Keeping it Simple? Now that's Stupid
The pursuit of Silver Bullets and an obsession with standards are not helping with climate "What's the single most effective thing I can do to fight climate change?" This simple question was asked as we were planning, in our little village in Somerset, how we could collectively get together to make sure that the natural environment in this place was as enduringly healthy as possible, and that individually and together we were doing all we could to tread more lightly upon this
0 views
- Sep 3, 2021
- 3 min
Regenerative Fund for Nature supports Good Growth in Mongolia
A Good day for Good Growth We're thrilled that Kering and Conservation International's "Regenerative Fund for Nature" has chosen to support our model and our work in Mongolia. Today (3rd September 21) in Marseille, Kering announced the 7 projects the fund has chosen to support. It's a great honour for us especially as we know that in total the fund received 73 applications from 17 countries. It is also very pioneering for the Fund to support a new kind of enterprise such as G
0 views
- Jun 23, 2021
- 4 min
Work with nature, design for place
Regenerative businesses don't have 'supply chains' Not in the conventional sense at least. As we start making our first products through Good Growth we've come to focus on what we really mean by "ecosystem out". A conventional supply chain sees an ecosystem - a place - at best as a "source of raw material". The design process starts at the other end of the chain, say in a studio in Milan, where the decision is made to make a wonderful cashmere cardy in beautiful colours. Then
0 views
- Feb 22, 2021
- 5 min
How brands can restore nature
We forgot not just who we were, but where we were The past year or so has been like waking from a dream. Once we started building the Good Growth Company we began to realise that pretty much everything we'd been taught - about economics and brands - was wrong. Good Growth means human wellbeing integrated with the health of the planet. Living with nature, not from it. The Good Growth system requires a reordering of priorities - relegating pursuit of profit (and scale) to a sup
0 views
- Jan 26, 2021
- 9 min
How to reconnect humans to nature?
Humans have become disconnected from nature - if we're going to fix the planet we need to fix that.
0 views
- Sep 17, 2020
- 6 min
Place - not product - is at the heart of regenerative business
Product centric, industrialised businesses can never be regenerative. A regenerative business must subordinate product to place.
0 views
- Aug 28, 2020
- 5 min
Chigertei
A glimpse at our pilot ecosystem in western Mongolia About 36 very bumpy hours in a Land Cruiser from Ulaan Bataar will take you west to the valley of Chigertei in the very far west of Mongolia. Or you can fly if you have no sense of irony. This is a place which is extreme. It can be astonishingly cold. And breathtakingly beautiful. It's ethnic Kazakh, so the people who live here are not really Mongolian, they have their own sense of identity which is very connected to the pl
0 views
- Aug 27, 2020
- 5 min
Our bottom line: environment first
We became extractive and we did not notice. Time to to reset our notion of "what matters".
0 views
- Jun 2, 2020
- 7 min
Confessions - the customer is not King and other heresies
Most of what we've been taught about business, markets and economics is untrue. Time for the red pill.
0 views
- Apr 2, 2020
- 5 min
After the virus - one big change
"If there is a battle between the planet and mankind, the planet will win" "what's the exit strategy?" is a big question without any kind of answer right now. In a few short weeks the majority of the world's population have been forced into a different way of living. Will things ever "get back to normal"? Should they? I very much hope not. Right now all the rhetoric is about fighting the virus, conquering this thing, defeating it. Humans have for way too long seen themselves
0 views
- Mar 28, 2020
- 5 min
We have become slaves to consumption - it is destroying the world
From next week my partner and I can no longer live together. I am not a citizen in this bit of Asia and do not perform an "essential" job. I need to go back to where I came from. If I get sick here I will take a hospital bed away from a citizen. I was welcome to spend money to gawk at gardens in the sky or eat overpriced dressed up food. Not welcome to spend time with a loved one. Consumption and entertainment get into the GDP, money transactions count; relationships are usel
0 views
- Mar 12, 2020
- 3 min
Going Beyond Brand Bullshit
William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral is a great novel. In it a character from the past has to pretend to be, in the present, a "neoprimitivist curator", something that she could never even have comprehended - simply because of when she was from. So they implant into her present day avatar a cognitive bundle to enable her to sound something like a neoprimitivist curator. “You’ll spout a reasonably high grade of facile nonsense”, she is told. “Will I know what it means?”, she
0 views
- Mar 9, 2020
- 2 min
International Financial Institutions in Tomorrow’s Capitalism
For a while now, International Finance Institutions have been trying to integrate their activities better with the wider economic and financial system. Their efforts to better align social and environment objectives with private sector and non-government objectives mirror the principles of Triple Bottom Line (People, Planet, Profit) coined by Volans co-founder John Elkington in 1994 - TBL was intended to pull Planet and People into the Profit focus of businesses; IFIs have be
0 views
- Feb 28, 2020
- 5 min
Because we're big....the size delusion
Get married for love For much of my working life I've wrestled with the problems of partnership - or rather the wrong partners in business. I think collaboration is one of the most powerful forces in business but all too often I see businesses make terrible choices in which partners they collaborate with. One of my favourite brands was a little Norwegian electric car maker called Think who made ahead-of-their-time electric city cars. The Norwegians loved it - but as in many a
0 views
- Feb 28, 2020
- 3 min
Making buying stuff a political act
Can we politicise consumption - to distinguish between buying stuff that restores natural and human capital as opposed to depletes it?
0 views
- Feb 4, 2020
- 1 min
Artisan wine
This is the first of a handful of small batch artisan wines. It's a project with masses of potential. Georgia is a nation of winemakers and would be winemakers. Many thousands make wine as a hobby in the villages and mountains that are a long, long way from any kind of market. Commercialising this passion and making it possible for the makers to earn a living is the point of this project - and in the process a few lucky wine drinkers get to taste some extremely rare wines. Th
0 views
- Jan 12, 2020
- 2 min
Herds like locusts
There are far too many animals in Mongolia - it's turning into a desert And a system narrowly focused on "fair" pay for herders makes it worse On 10th January at the Volans "Tomorrow's Capitalism" event we referred to the damage caused by mass market knitwear and cashmere. Cheap cashmere mean that the only way herders can increase their income is by increasing the number of animals. This has led to a mass of livestock that is completely out of whack with the ecosystem. Paying
0 views
