Intersections Day One: Business Case Studies from Dott Cornwall on Vimeo.
Jeremy Myerson
I’d like myself to introduce Bonnie Dean. She’s Chief Executive of the Bristol and Bath Science Park. She, like me is a member of the Design Council so let me hand over straight away to Bonnie for this business panel.
Bonnie Dean
Thank you very much Jeremy. We’ll be carrying on the themes from the last session and also the theme of Dott and it’s a real opportunity for us to explore what’s happening here in Cornwall through four small businesses that are creating their own sustainable future, while at the same time making a very inspirational impact on their stakeholders and on their communities. So I’m going to ask the panel to bring their stories to life and then we’ll dedicate the rest of the session to Q&A from the audience. Lucy, if I can ask you to begin please.
Lucy Jewson
Hi, my name’s Lucy Jewson. I am the co-founder of Frugie. We used to be called Cut For Cloth – people might have heard of us through that. We re-branded about three years ago. And the company started in 2004 after I had my first baby and used cloth nappies for him, er…which were great for the environment, not so great for a silhouette so he had a really, really big bottom and I couldn’t find any clothes to go over them. So I haven’t got any background in design, I can’t draw, I’m really, really rubbish at all those sorts of things really. Not particularly creative person but I could see that there was a gap in the market and thought that I could import all these things. You know, somebody else somewhere, cloth nappies are about 20% of the population now, doing this and servicing this need. Maybe it’s in America and I could bring it in.
It wasn’t, it wasn’t available anywhere so that’s why we started Cut For Cloth, Cut For Cloth nappies. Within three years though, my children had grown and I realised that there was a need for older kids’ clothes that were organic. It made sense for everything that we did to be organic, to be fair trade, to be as sustainable as possible, because obviously that’s what drew us to cloth nappies in the first place.
I probably approached every organic manufacturer in the world and…to try and find one that would work with me because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was literally sending off hand-drawn designs that were…on a fax, I’d get a reply back saying, can you get us a grading sheet for that? And I was like, I don’t know what that is! So they’d have to send me one from India across. And that’s how we started.
But we quickly realised that the market was much bigger for organic clothing and that our name, Cut For Cloth, was not going to help us. It was too much what it said on the tin. And so we employed Absolute Design down in Falmouth to come and get to know us and to draw out of us the brand that we wanted to be. And that became Frugi, which is Latin for fruits of the earth. We wanted a name that would not restrict us so we’ve got Frugi Baby, Frugi Mother and Frugi Kids now. We may well be looking at Frugi Home, Frugi Man, Frugi Woman in the future.
We try and do things very differently at Frugi. We’ve, sort of invented this concept of Planet Frugi, where our customers are very, very…er, we call it two-way design. Very involved in the design process of our clothing. So we’re constantly going out to them through Facebook, through Twitter. We have crusaders, we’ve got…Denise Van Outen is a famous crusader or ours, who do clothing reviews of our products, who we give all of our designs to, to peer review first.
You know, the two way…the two…we have to know who our customers are and then really communicate with them and use every resource. I mean Web 2 is fantastic for that. We’ve had huge, huge response. I said this morning actually to them – and I apologise for repeating myself to those who heard me speaking at the breakfast session – that last week we put out a question about dungaree fastenings. We got 180 responses of whether people should use buttons or clasps for dungaree fastenings. But those 180 people now will be looking out for those now in the catalogues and telling their friends that they’ve had a influence on how we’ve designed our dungarees.
This is where is all really, really comes to the fore. We also put all our ethical dilemmas…because every single business has a foot print, you can’t get away from it, but it’s very important to bring those arguments and those dilemmas that we face out into the public so that people, our customers have a decision over which ethical choices we take, down to the fact that we belong to 1% of the planet, which charities we support within that and how we support them.
And that’s really who we are and what we do. We’re becoming relatively successful. We’re still tiny, based in Helston in Cornwall but we are winning national awards. Last month we were voted as toddler fashion brand…well we were silver in toddler fashion brand of the year and we were beaten by Asda, which was horrible, George at Asda. But we did beat, you know Marks and Spencers and Mothercare and brands like that so…the beauty of design now and of being able to have that one-on-one contact with your customers means that a tiny, tiny little brand like us is able to compete with all these big giants who are not necessarily as in touch with their customer base. They’re sort-of much more traditional and getting those concepts and things to change with their customer bases is much harder for the big companies than it is for little agile ones like us, doing something a little bit quirky.
So that’s who we are. Is that OK?
Alan Lethbridge
Good afternoon, my name is Alan Lethbridge, I’m operations manager for a company called ReZolve. We are a ten year-old Cornish social enterprise – make no apology for being a Cornish social enterprise as opposed to just a social enterprise. We have a range of businesses. Today I want to mainly…you’ll see some of them in the background here as we go along.
I wanted to talk mainly about one called Fresk but before I get to that, what ReZolve is really about really is trying to do two things. One, make a useful impact on the community, and we work with work to help disadvantaged people, socially excluded people, we’re a Matrix accredited training organisation so we train the long-term unemployed. We also work through the probation service, training offenders and we work with prisoners as well.
We have one unit in Bodmin, which we call Re:Source, where we sell second-hand furniture and white goods, um…those are some of the pictures that you have there. It’s populated by a handful of staff and a great number of volunteers, all of whom will be on various training programmes.
We earn our income from getting those volunteers through those programmes and into employment. We also have an external training team, which goes out as part of the environmental skills network to talk to people who might want to develop their own skills and start their own business up, something to do with the environment. For example a plumber who wants to suddenly wants to be become an expert on photo-voltaic cells, we would facilitate that. And over the last year, we’ve assisted in the start up of 150 environmental businesses, small self-employed businesses in Cornwall. Tiny one-man businesses but who’s to say where they will go.
So we were working at Re:Source with furniture and white goods. That needed a bigger back-up facility so we took on Re:Store and Re:Store is also in Bodmin. It acts as our warehouse and it’s also our wood workshop. That’s populated by again a handful of staff, not even one handful and it is there primarily to work with offenders. So it’s where, in conjunction with probation, we deliver the community pay-back facility for the East of Cornwall and we also have people there that are on parole, and we’re also working in partnership with HMP Dartmoor and so we get prisoners.
Now, one of the things that was coming through consistently with Re:Source was that people were coming to us with social needs and we understood that and we helped, last year something like 300 families throughout Cornwall with starter kits, which were funded. These were things that essentially people needed when they were formerly homeless and being re-housed, things that they all need like a washing machine, a cooker, a bed and all the things you can imagine.
So we were pleased to do that but there were a range of customers coming in and amongst them were quite a lot of people from the Cornish tourism and leisure industry who decided that we would be a cheap option to refurbish their lets, social landlords, that sort of thing and one of the things that came across very clearly was that in their preoccupation with saving money, they were not really considering a) truly sustainability as an issue and b) they had very little comprehension of how design could benefit them. And we were already working in partnership with the public sector and as Re:Store for example, our partners on site there are the police, the probation service, the drug and alcohol team, the criminal justice intervention team, Cornwall Council, Coastline Housing…you get the picture. Because all of these support systems are needed for offenders. So we’re already working with them, so we already had a pool if you like of unpaid labour. And it occurred to us that, working together with the prisoners as well, there was an opportunity for us to offer people in the Cornish tourism and leisure sector and also those in the third sector who suffered the same problem, an opportunity to access design.
So Fresk is what I’m here to talk about. My contract says I’m not allowed to give a plug for Fresk but Fresk stands for fresh or new in Cornish. And I’m very pleased to see that our partners are here today. You heard from one of them earlier, that’s Matt Hocking from Leap Media and Sam Boex is here tday from Boex 3D Design Solutions. And what we aim to do is talk to a customer, talk to a client, find out what their needs are and then between us all come up with the proposal. And some of the elements of the design will incorporate us taking the stuff back to Re:Store and we might re-finish it there, we might up-cycle it there, we might change it a bit rather than then throw it all away. And people quite like that concept.
And there are also whole areas within Cornwall where people want to set up things like community hubs. We’re involved with one at the moment where somebody wants to set up a launderette for young mums who can’t afford a proper launderette. So we’re going to design that. There isn’t anything that you designers can’t design I’m discovering. It’s really exciting for us to be working with design organisations on an equal partnership basis.
I think that the message that I’d like to try and get across is that…Tom covered it brilliantly this morning as well… that we really need to take the limits off and go to really where all the edges of possibility and collaboration exist. It’s all very well to say small is beautiful, but when you join lots of smalls up, and there are lots of smalls in Cornwall, you can achieve so much more. That’s our experience, that’s the direction we want to follow and we’re hoping that we can make more and more of these combinations.
We’re looking at the moment to set up another project, where we will work with a particular group of young offenders, setting up a repair facility for BMX bikes and skateboards and stuff like that.
What we’re trying to do is to look at all these things holistically and say, OK how can we make them profitable ventures? Because they have to be self-sustaining, there is no celestial central funding any more. You have to make it viable. And we try and set all these projects us to ensure that they are sustainable and they meet a public need and in the process they benefit the individuals who are directly involved.
So Fresk, just to come back to that, is about offering design solutions to anyone who wants it but might think they can’t afford the best of what you guys have to offer. With Fresk, they certainly can. Thank you.
David Meneer
Good afternoon everybody. I can’t tell you how proud I am to be in the middle of the balding, grey-haired, old geezers section of the day…excusing the two ladies blushes. There is life after fifty!
We’re all social enterprises. A lot of bollocks talked about social enterprises these days, typically that they are something new and of course they’re not, the Victorians were quite good at them. And that they…that they’re small, almost that they kind of have to be small, some sort of hippy ideal of a business plan that doesn’t quite stack up and two people.
We are, at fifteen Cornwall, we employ 100 people, we turn over three million quid, and we have just in our fifth year, fed 82,000 people last year – we’re open every day of the year.
So it’s quite a big business and we’re quite proud of that because if we’re not big business, we won’t be here tomorrow. So in terms of social enterprise taking commercial nous, making money – and we’re very proud of that, we check it every day – having an aim, and the first speaker today said ‘know your purpose’, we’re very simply there to take disadvantaged kids, 16 – 24, living in Cornwall and turn them into the chefs of the future. That’s all we do. That’s all that posh restaurant on top of beaches is all about really.
And we deliberately go up the tricky end of that spectrum. So sometimes, when we interview them it can be a bit like anti-interviewing, you know: ‘How hard did you hit him?’ Um you know, ‘you’ve really been on the piss for a fortnight?’ ‘Is a gram of coke only 55 quid in Newquay now?’ So that’s the kind of area we operate in and that’s our comfort zone.
So if you take that…that’s a social enterprise. Knowing the social purpose, making the money to make sure you’re doing it next year, and treading lightly on the planet if you can. We spend 80% of our money spent on ingredients stays in Cornwall, why wouldn’t it? And in passing that brings us quite a small carbon footprint as well. So we’re very proud of that side of it. And I think if you are a social enterprise, you’ve got to tick all three of those boxes. No point being really good at one and no good at the other two, or really good at two…you really need to tick them all and I hope and think that we do.
Why has it worked? Just six little things I’ve got here: An idea, I think we all need an idea and that is simply what we do. I’ll explain what we do. It’s an old fashioned…er and old-fashioned apprentice scheme with a bit of Jamie Oliver stardust sprinkled on it. And that’s how it works. We have those kids for 18 months so it’s not a quick fix. We couldn’t have done it without Jamie, I pay the Jamie Oliver foundation a small…a small franchise fee to use the logo and so on.
So I forgot these pictures were coming up randomly so this is typical of a Dave Meneer presentation. They’re coming up showing you what the old place looks like and where it is. Um, we have…it’ll come up in a minute…a location, which is second to none, people would kill for the world-class location we have. We have food talent – there they are. We’re very good at er…we’re very good at cooking. We have all round talent within that staff of 100, which I talked about. Which includes currently 22 trainees, which are just going on placement. We have a tough attitude. It is tough love. We’re not actually quite good at the kind of social work thing. We’re quite tough with this lot because they’ll be quite tough back to us but in the end we tend to drag them over the finishing line making food like that.
And I think in finishing…we…we do a report and the first one was called The First Thousand Days because it looked at the first thousand days and there’s two lines in it I’d like to read to you, which sort of sums up what we do. The first one…we’re tarts for publicity…er the first one was from The Times and it said ‘Fifteen has energy, style, self-confidence, great food, wine, cocktails and coffee. Every staff member and student I met, sparkled with pride. The place is irresistible.’ So that’s what The Times said and The Times is always right.
And we also get about 300 feedbacks every week, from people who’ve eaten there – typically very good, occasionally not so good but we like to get that feedback and with a bit of luck, we act on it most of the time. And here’s that came in a couple of years ago, and I’ll finish on it. It says: ‘The meal was beautiful, but the Italian apricots dessert was like nothing I’ve had before. Absolutely awe-inspiring, with all the flavours complimenting each other perfectly. Even though my girlfriend of the time and myself split up over this meal, I still went away feeling like a million bucks.’
Tom Henderson
Well I don’t know how I can follow that. Here is the last of the balding middle-aged old men. How many in this room have not heard of ShelterBox? Anybody not heard of ShelterBox? OK, thank you.
OK, no, seriously for those who don’t know I’m going to talk about sustainability and I’m going to talk about design. I’m in the business of sustaining life. That’s what ShelterBox does. Stand up anybody in this room who is part of an organisation, or has got a product or something that they have been involved with that saved a life today. Stand up. OK? Good. That’s three of us, four of us, OK? Because every single day, ShelterBox saves someone’s life. Sustainability. ShelterBox is in the business of sustaining life.
The clue’s in the name. It’s a box with some stuff in it. But that stuff is quite unique. That’s where the design comes in. It’s really life-saving equipment that we deliver around the world. It’s a tent, it’s a sleeping bag, it’s some water purification, it’s some blankets and some stuff for the children, it’s a wood-burning stove.
You’ll see some of these things flick through in the background. I haven’t seen these before. If it’s not out there we design and we build it – we make it in-house if nobody else will do that for us. I’m actually a designer interestingly enough. I joined the navy when I was 15, I went on to have a career in the diving business and I actually invented some stuff that was actually in the Haymarket in the Design Centre about 15, 20 years ago, it was on tomorrow’s world. So I come from a problem-solving background. That’s where my innovation comes…that’s where my design comes from. It’s design for a purpose to satisfy a need at that particular time.
So I’m in…sustainability is saving lives. Let me tell you two years ago when we were working in Afghanistan, 40 children every night dying in the snow. Just imagine that: 40 children every night dying in the snow. So if you’re going to send them a tent, send them the best damn tent that you can. And we’ve designed this tent, we’ve modified it over ten years and it’s now the best disaster aid tent in the world.
Wood-burning stove: same thing, there wasn’t one out there so we designed it. We work with the designers and manufacturers in all the stuff that we do. We’re in the business of sustaining lives. The design process that I went through was a process. It wasn’t designing a better widget, it was designing the process of helping people in need.
When you’re the founder of an organisation, you can be quite selfish. You get a piece of paper, you go back to your study and you write down what you want to do. You can be quite selfish being the founder of an organisation. Sounds really grand. And I wrote down what would I need in a disaster if you’d lost everything. Think about Haiti for a second. I was in Haiti a few months after the disaster. A city of two million people destroyed in 90 seconds, 250,000 people killed within those 90 seconds, 300,000 people badly injured. Destroyed in 90 seconds. Imagine Manchester disappearing off the map almost in 90 seconds. That’s what actually happened. So we turned up. ShelterBox is the…almost the SAS of the disaster aid world.
And by design what I mean was if it was my intent, if we were going to be involved and we were going to deliver some humanitarian aid, let’s make it the best aid in the world. Let’s make it the best tent in the world, let’s make it the best package in the world. Let’s deliver it in the shortest possible time. Let’s deliver it with the best teams that we can. If you’re taking notes, write down these six words: Keep it simple and do it now. That’s the design process that I bring to everything that I do. Keep it simple and do it now.
We’re almost irreverent in what we do. We don’t take any prisoners because people are dying. That’s what we do. As a young man I used to fly search and rescue out of Culdrose. That’s why I live in Cornwall, I love the place and I won’t go anywhere else. So when you’re in the search and rescue role, that’s what you do. You’ve got to get out there immediately and get on with the job. The design process is really simple. The best kit in the world, with the best people in the world, delivered as fast as possible but importantly, help the most needy in that particular situation. In Haiti, two million people homeless – we’re not going to be able to help two million people. So working with the local community, we help them to sustain themselves. Give them the equipment, give them what they need – the most needy people in that community.
From my perspective design is very simple. Find need – deliver a solution. I always say to people, it’s only a box with some stuff in it. That’s all it is. But it’s more than that. It’s the combined will, and a lot of speakers this morning have talked about that combined will, that community, that coming together of people, that collaboration. That’s what we do at ShelterBox. We take that enthusiasm, we take the goodwill of the donor and we deliver it to the end user.
How do we do that? Ever single box is numbered. I can tell you from day one, when I started ShelterBox in my garage with one green box, every single box, who paid for it and where it went. It’s not difficult. So that’s my design plea and whatever area of business and design that you’re involved in, please think about the humanitarian world. That’s the world that I now live in. Thank you.
Bonnie Dean
I want to thank the panel for bringing their stories to life and we’ve heard many of the themes and the words that we’ve been talking about today, inclusion, sustainability, design, connectivity. But I think the three words that came to mind the most when I was listening to these stories was ‘inspiration from Cornwall’. And I think that’s part of what we’re celebrating today. So I’d like to open it up now for the audience for any questions that you might like to ask the panel…any questions? Yes, in the back…
Audience member
Hello, thank you for those presentations. This might be a little naïve…my question might be a little naïve but I’m just wondering what advice the panel would give to established companies with established procedures that don’t really get the sustainable thing? Somebody was talking this morning about, you know to create change you have to find a champion in the company that gets it. Well I’m just wondering, if you were like a swat team going into a company to help that company change its point of view about sustainability, what would be the appropriate first steps?
Tom Henderson
Well, for me I could only comment, I would need to know more about that company, what it does, what it’s aspirations were, what it’s team is made up of, what’s its product, what is it’s destination? So it’s quite a difficult question to answer.
Dave Meneer
It is and I guess it comes back to simplicity, which we were talking about a moment ago. Any big company I’ve worked for has had…just endless stuff that shouldn’t be there. I mean, it’s endless personal agendas…stuff going on. What I’m…I can only think now about…what delights me about where I am now and what actually troubled me in my nine years here was that I’m now in charge of a…it’s quite a big, little organisation but it knows precisely what it’s for and precisely where it’s going and anything that doesn’t fit that, gets thrown by the wayside. And it’s nice being the chief because you can say that. So if I can bring that to any company, that’s what I’d try to do. There’s nothing now there, you’d hear that from any business consultant I guess.
Tom Henderson
I can just comment…and I don’t want to take up too much time but…we work alongside the Red Cross, the UN, Care, World Vision, all these wonderful organisations that do fantastic work. We’re focussing on that sharp end of disaster. These people do great work, child protection, water, sanitation, all that sort of stuff…absolutely fantastic. But when the UN guy mobilises to a job, he takes 27 bits of paperwork with him and one of those bits of paperwork is request for more paperwork and that’s the reality of it. So they are hidebound by their own procedures and protocol. That’s why I said that, certainly in my experience, and I’ve worked in huge multi-nationals and running ShelterBox, and when I say keep it simple and do it now that’s…for me that’s a cornerstone of everything that we do so it’s hard to answer your question without knowing a little bit more about the organisation.
Alan Lethbridge
Yeah, I think it’s a…it’s a good question because, certainly for a large part of my life before I retired back home to Cornwall and then fell into working for Re:Zolve, I worked for a company who certainly didn’t get sustainability…certainly didn’t. And all I can say really is, I wouldn’t presume to give you advice Sir, but the world is a changing place. Even companies that are preoccupied solely with a single bottom line are beginning to realise that they have impacts around them and that other businesses have impacts on them. And if they want to make the most of their opportunities going forward, they may have to partner or collaborate with other companies, who may expect different standards from them. And one of the things that inspired me quite a lot recently was when I heard that the…that the chief executive of Unilever said to his chaps at a managers meeting – can you imagine what that was like – he said, um in the next ten years I want us to double our income, without increasing our global footprint.
I think the very biggest companies are getting it. I think those that don’t are likely to be left behind a little bit and so the way I would just presume to give you a little advice is to say, it may be in that company’s interest to try and catch up, get the drift of what sustainability’s all about, because certainly, in certain areas there are some serious savings to be made. And I can think of one, when we spoke to one holiday company, who were talking to us about beds. Now the beds that they bought, they changed every year. We found them a bed that was made of, you know properly sourced timber, that was made of a construction type that had longevity built into it and it cost twice the price but they only have to change it every four years. So any accountant in any company can get that. Sustainability can have real immediate effects on the bottom line. But I think all the forward-looking companies have woken up to the fact that you have to look at a triple bottom line. I can’t add to that.
Lucy Jewson
I’d just completely agree with what you’ve just said. I think, if somebody was a bit of a stick in the mud, I would bombard them with facts and figures and case studies of people that are doing it really well and put them in…suggest to them that possibly they’re not that in touch with their customers potentially and try and open that conduit with their customer base and their internal customers, their staff themselves as well. Because I think if anybody is standing…um saying sustainability doesn’t affect me, as you said, will be left behind and is standing with their fingers in their ears. So I think it’s just removing those fingers and getting them to hear.
Tom Henderson
A lot of stuff’s lost in translation as well. I say that…this morning I’ve been on my dreaded Blackberry talking to people in China about blankets and bits and pieces for our ShelterBox and they’re translating Chinese into English and we’re talking about prices and I simply sent back three words: price, cost and value. And they’re not always the same.
Bonnie Dean
Other questions…can I ask you just to say who you are and where you’re from?
Audience member
Lucy Robinson from [...] I was just wondering, since a lot of you [...] is how is the oil situation going to affect your business and I mean changing the way you’re doing your business to affect the…well they say we’ve reached a peak and we’re into a trough. So I was just wondering, how are you reacting to that? Because obviously ShelterBox is moving goods across the world and how is that affecting you?
Tom Henderson
Well, amazingly, those Blackberry transmission that I had are blankets that have just gone up 19.7% in cost since yesterday. Um, that’s a direct result of the oil price. So not only do we wrestle with the vagaries of international monetary exchange rates, we wrestle with that on a daily basis – best value – but again, as I was saying: price, cost and value and not the same.
The value of that tent and that blanket to somebody dying in the snow in Afghanistan is immeasurable. So we’ve got to look at the risk against reward. The risk, we pay more, the reward is we do more. It’s something we balance every day. ShelterBox is a charity, we run it very much like a business, you have to, whatever charity you run, you have to get best value for your stakeholders or your donors. But right now, as we sit here I can tell you, steel prices are going through the roof, any oil based products are going through the roof, it affects ShelterBox on a daily basis and any sort of business that you’re involved with.
Um… I have to say I’ve probably got the worst carbon footprint in the world, because at the end of the day, we’re in the business of saving lives. Nobody asks the price of a rescue helicopter and nobody asks the price of a lifeboat when it puts to sea. So I’m in that glorious position where price, sometimes is almost a secondary issue. And we look at it at the end of the year and we say, what have we done? And what have we got for that money?
And to put it in perspective, and I’m not here to give you the ShelterBox sales pitch, we’ve got some very eminent people on the stage here, in ten short years we’ve worked in 57 countries around the world, put a million people in our tents and always got best value for money. Every three weeks we’re responding to a disaster somewhere in the world and as we speak, we’re operating in Haiti, Bolivia and Madagascar, and I’m of to Pakistan in about a week’s time to help the people affected by the earthquake. So cost is an issue and we all live a die by it but we’re in that strange business at ShelterBox it’s reward against cost. A long answer to a short question but thank you for that.
Bonnie Dean
But it’s an interesting question also to businesses who want to scale because you want to counter that. Lucy, you might want to comment.
Lucy Jewson
Yeah, um it is something that affects us massively. Cotton prices over the last 12 months have gone up by 140%. It’s absolutely shocking. The end is nigh for Primark 2 quid t-shirts. It’s a really difficult balance for us.
In terms of shipping, we ship – we don’t air freight. Um…so that…you know and we do it in as big blocks as we can, as cash flow will allow. So we sort of bring things in a half a million pounds worth of clothing at a time. Um… the problem that we’ve got is how we…um…the general population doesn’t necessarily know what pressures we’re under, with oil and the direct problem that we have with cotton prices there. So it’s an education of the public point of view in that clothing over the last 50 years…we used to have three outfits in a wardrobe 50 years ago and now we’ve got, almost disposable clothing. That’s wrong and that’s not sustainable.
So we will have to increase our prices dramatically, you’ll see it across the market over the next 24 months, the scary thing is who does it first and how much but at the moment our margin’s taking an absolute hammering but I think, from a sustainable point of view it’s a very good thing because clothing shouldn’t be as cheap as it is, as…the same with food etc. I think. But it’s a really, really tricky line to tread.
I mean, something that we’re looking at, at the moment is a…one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that our clothing is really, really robust. Children’s clothing is probably the lease sustainable of all because it gets moved on every six months because children grow. So we want to start a FrugiBay…got a few technical issues on how we’re going to do that but…have some sort of exchange clothes loop solution for people being able to swap their…their clothing and stuff. Um…from…to lower age groups. So those are the things that we’re doing to sort of make us more affordable to parents that are going to really struggle with these price increases.
Tom Henderson
I think the other thing, I would comment is just as designers and a lot of you are, the mechanical gadgets and I only speak from our probably slightly an extreme case, but how many can you get in a 40 foot container? How heavy are they? It’s only, in a disaster it can cost you anything from £2.50 a kilo to £15 a kilo to fly stuff around the world in a disaster. So if you can get 10,000 widgets in a container instead of 8,000, you’re making…you’re making a huge difference on the world stage. So all you designers out there just think about shape, size and weight please.
Dave Meneer
I don’t have much to say because we’re very simple and very new and I said we deliberately source 80% of what we do from Cornwall. That isn’t going to change. So in a way we can’t shop around too much because we’re completely committed to seasonality and local sourcing. On the basis of that, we change the menu twice a day, um…which is kind of unusual. It’s bit like Ready Steady Cook. It depends on what comes in from the local suppliers in the morning, is what goes on the menu at lunchtime. So I don’t have any of the problems that these good people have.
Alan Lethbridge
Just a quick comment: Yes we are delivering obviously lots of furniture and heavy white goods and that causes us problems. What we are looking to do obviously is make sure the routes are as well worked out as possible but also we’re incentivising our customers to bring more stuff to us, because most people can get quite a fair bit of what they want to donate to us when they want to donate it and bring it in. So we’re looking at every aspect of that as anybody managing their businesses will be. It is a problem.
Bonnie Dean
I think we have time for…possibly one, possibly two quesions…there’s one here…I think this will be our final question.
Audience member
I guess I’d just like to ask the panel members to kind of cast back maybe five, 10, 15 years, um to whether there was a turning point for your enterprise and how you knew which decision to make at that time. I think, as a designer…as a design educator I have had some experience and it’s tough to make a go of social enterprise even if you have the passion and energy and creative industry to do it. And I see that same desire in my students and I would love to know what advice to pass onto them as to how to have the best chance of success.
So again, just what the turning point was for you and how you knew which direction to go in.
Dave Meneer
I can do that very quickly because we’re only five years old and we haven’t had one yet. But what we do is, almost every day particularly the way we run the kids, not necessarily with the way we run the restaurant, um we make little adjustments as we go along so we’re constantly changing things and sometimes at their suggestion. We used to pay them fortnightly on a Friday night – not too good when they all lived in Newquay – so now we pay them weekly on a Tuesday night. Little changes like that can make differences to the way the business runs.
Tom Henderson
In my case, ShelterBox – I didn’t plan ShelterBox, I didn’t have a wish to change the world. It actually started in front of the TV one evening watching the news. And it was as simple as that. I saw a news programme and a truck…you’ve all seen it, the ubiquitous truck arrives and people started throwing loaves of bread on the floor. And that really pissed me off. I turned to my wife and I said, why are those idiots doing that? These people have lost everything. Why should they loose their dignity? And that’s how ShelterBox started. I finished my meal, went to my study and wrote down: shelter, warmth, comfort, dignity. Dignity is something you cannot buy so for me it was done in a heartbeat and if you want one word from me, it’s ‘persistence’. Decide what you’re going to do, set off, keep it simple, good natured belligerence, make it happen, persistence.
Alan Lethbridge
Yeah, I felt that we had a kind of cathartic moment a year of two back when the whole team took a day out to…to just discuss where we wanted to go for the future and re-define our vision. And we realised that we couldn’t achieve all the ambitions that we wanted to set for ourselves within our own company but that there were lots of other agencies and other companies in the public and the private sector with whom, if we approached them we could do great things together.
That was a major turning point for us, just actually saying, OK we’ll get out of the little Cornish social enterprise ghetto and we’ll look at all things as the guys have said before. Take the limits off and say, who can you…who can you connect up with? Tom said this morning about…um…about looking at the edges. You know talk to people right on the edges of where possible combinations and collaborations can occur and see where the commonality is. Be bold enough to just go and talk to them and have a go. Made a big difference for us.
Lucy Jewson
We have crises and turning points pretty much every week I would say. But I think probably start…starting off…and if you wanted something to take back to students and things, I…the reason that we set up the business I suppose was I didn’t want to get to sixty having always worked for somebody else on somebody else’s agenda, um not making much of a difference. I felt that I wanted to prove that you could run a sustainable, green, ethical business, doing good, still be profitable and provide financial security for my family…still working on that one…er and it’s just that fear of wasting…wasting my life I suppose. Doing all of that, or not as much of that, for other people.
So I think, the thought process was, what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll just go and get another job. We’ll rent a house when the bank takes ours. We will survive. We’re not in the position of ShelterBox people who have been…lost everything. It’s just doing it because you only get one chance really, I suppose.
Bonnie Dean
Just one final question, the question needs to be brief and the answers need to be very brief.
Audience member
OK, um…Mark Smith. All four businesses rely on people, how has design effected – in a single sentence – how you’ve dealt with your people? Design principals, how they effect how you’ve dealt with your people.
Alan Lethbridge
OK, essential to us. We take a process management approach to everything. Everything that involves people we look at very carefully. We do the kind of Japanese yellow box trick where we’ve got workshops, and I’m sure most of you know what that means. We evaluate everything we do and design standard operating procedures wherever we can. We try to make everything as foolproof, idiot-proof as possible using good design techniques. That’s it.
Lucy Jewson
I think we try and embrace the quirky, mad set of people that we’ve got working for us really. We’re heavily design focussed. We’ve got a set of four designers on the clothing side and another two on the graphics side, all the people on the digital media side, it’s just…allow them to breath and allow them to be quirky I guess.
Dave Meneer
It’s hasn’t really, other than I’m delighted that I’m in a very old fashioned business, which is all about craft skills. And I think today, often we don’t talk about the craft skills. Here, you know my chefs do it every day. And no machine or new media could do that.
Tom Henderson
Yeah for us it’s got to be fit for purpose. When we’re working in Sudan it has to be fit for purpose. The design we find is not out there in short term so we bring it in-house and do what a design team would do in three years, we’d do in three months. Because it has to be instant – it’s life saving stuff.
Bonnie Dean
Will you join me in thanking our panel for four very inspiring stories?