S6E4 'Fire Hoses & Handbags!' with Kresse Wesling CBE 🚒

"Money at the expense of People and Planet is a structural failure."

We were really honoured to welcome a very special guest for Episode 4 of our Sixth Season of the EcoSend Podcast.

Running a successful business as an entrepreneur is hard, even in the best times.

But not only has our latest guest done that, but all the while creating innovative products which stop thousands of tons of material heading to landfill.

And as it that wasn't enough, also concurrently raising thousands of pounds for charity!

Kresse Wesling CBE is an outstanding example of the power of innovation, creativity, and a determination to provide a better example of business for good. We were delighted to welcome Kresse for a one of a kind episode, where every couple of minutes felt like stand-out clips in their own right!

So please do tune in and join us as James chatted to Kresse all about:

🦈 Why Hong Kong has no sharks(!)
💪 Why Kresse chose Business over Politics to be a force for good.
👜 The story of the first Fire Hose handbag.
🚒 Donating thousands to the London Fire Brigade
💀 Why Fast fashion is "killing" us!
🎓 Why we need to focus on inspiration, not shame.
... and much more! ✨

We really can't say it enough - this was one of our favourite episodes of all time. We hope you draw as much inspiration from it as we did 💚

About Kresse Wesling CBE:
Kresse Wesling, CBE, is a multi-award winning environmental entrepreneur. After first meeting the London Fire Brigade in 2005, Kresse launched Elvis & Kresse, which rescues and transforms decommissioned fire hose into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50% of profits to the Fire Fighters Charity. The company now collects 12 different waste streams and has several charitable partnerships and collaborations across industries. In 2021 Elvis & Kresse also took on a farm in order to establish a regenerative agriculture project, generate their own renewables and implement a host of environmental initiatives.

Further Resources from the episode:
Elvis & Kresse: Sustainable & Ethical Luxury: Elvis & Kresse - Designer Accessories
Kresse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kresse-wesling-cbe-0933646/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elvisandkresse/?hl=en
The Farm: We are not a 'Maison', we are a FARM. - Elvis & Kresse
Circular Economy: Elvis & Kresse on The Circular Economy - Circular Fashion

Music credit: bensound.com

https://ecosend.io

Creators & Guests

Host

James Gill

CEO of GoSquared

Guest

Kresse Wesling CBE

Co-Founder, Elvis & Kresse and Co-Farmer.

What is The EcoSend Podcast?

Our journey into the world of being a truly climate conscious business. Join us as we talk to fellow entrepreneurs, founders, marketing folks, and campaigners to help us build our new product, EcoSend: the climate conscious email marketing tool.

S6E4audio
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[00:00:00] Chris W: Welcome to the EcoSend podcast. Be inspired, educated, and entertained by the world's most ambitious leaders putting climate at the top of their agenda. Another

[00:00:17] James Gill: episode of the EcoSend podcast. I'm James, your host, and I'm thrilled to bring you another wonderful show today. In fact, a very special show today.

[00:00:27] Today I am joined by Kresse Wesling, CBE. Hey. She's a multi award winning environmental entrepreneur. You may have come across Kresse's work, but after first meeting the London fiber grade in 2005, Kresse launched Elvis and Kresse, which rescues and transforms commissioned fire hoses into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50 percent of the profits to the firefighters charity.

[00:00:51] There's a lot more we can talk about this. Kresse, I'm keen to, for you to do the talking as much as possible, but I'm sure many people are already excited to hear your story and hear more. So welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

[00:01:04] Kresse Wesling CBE: I'm doing great, James. It's lovely to be here. I'm really looking forward to our chat.

[00:01:08] James Gill: Awesome. Awesome. So, Kresse, I, I, well, already, I think I've got questions about your background and not just your, your background on this call, because that as well is very, very interesting. I, there's a lot of stuff going on behind you on, for those listening, Kresse's in a, what looks like a very cool, like, warehouse full of interesting products.

[00:01:29] But also your background and what's led you to this. So. Yeah. It'd be great to hear more about what you're doing, what your business does and hear about your story. It would be wonderful to hear in your own words.

[00:01:41] Kresse Wesling CBE: Yeah, sure. I think with a question like that, there's always this sort of the, the long, the long story and then this sort of shorter story.

[00:01:48] I, I was born in Western Canada. I spent a lot of time as a young kid camping in wilderness and then when I was 16 years old I got a scholarship to. To finish high school in Hong Kong, and I went from kind of a very Canadian existence to this hyper city state. And it was a big shock to the system because there was.

[00:02:11] There's actually a lot of nature in Hong Kong, but there's also half of the city's untreated sewage going directly into the sea. There's, you know, lots of consumption, there's lots of packaging. Everything was at a pace. And I remeCBEr we had a speaker come to the school who was explaining that there should be lots of sharks there, but there aren't because of the, the smell in the water from all of the ships that are basically just floating around.

[00:02:35] Emptying out their tanks and all the fuel and all the sewage and everything. And you just think, Oh, okay. So, so this pristine wilderness that I grew up being very accustomed to and thinking that was the way the world was, it certainly isn't here. And we did quite a few trips into Southern China, which was, It's a lot like Dickensian England, really, you know, the sky was, it was black and the factories were churning out lots of smoke and yeah, and it, it was almost sort of, for me, I guess, dystopian because I'm a nature lover and that was, yeah.

[00:03:08] That's probably what tipped the scale for me in turning me into an environmentalist because there was what I loved and then there was what I saw. And, you know, I first went to university, I studied politics thinking that maybe politics was the way to solve that problem.

[00:03:21] James Gill: Sure.

[00:03:22] Kresse Wesling CBE: And, and actually discovered that politics might be one way to solve that problem, but it wouldn't A good match for my skill set.

[00:03:29] So after university, I went back to Hong Kong and actually got my first job working for a venture, small venture capital company. And what I learned there Was that if, if you're an entrepreneur with an idea, you, you pretty much have permission to do whatever you want. If, if, if your business works and you're making some money, all bets are off.

[00:03:49] And I kind of liked that because in politics and in life up until that point, you were asking permission for everything, right? You, you had to get into university. You had to ask your parents if you could do something you know, in a political system, you have to get buy in and build collaborations. But as an entrepreneur, you can just try it and, you know, fail, succeed, go again, iterate again.

[00:04:09] And it just seems suddenly you don't have to

[00:04:12] James Gill: ask anyone other than customers for permission.

[00:04:16] Kresse Wesling CBE: Exactly. And, and, and customers are really responsive. So you get instant feedback. So there isn't this whole delay. Sure. And when we. My, my first ever business was a biodegradable packaging business and that I set up in Hong Kong in the early 2000s.

[00:04:33] So 20 well, well over 20 years ago. And that was. A limited success but, but ultimately a failure. The first shipment of biodegradable packaging that I brought to the UK biodegraded on the way to the UK.

[00:04:49] James Gill: Oh no!

[00:04:50] Kresse Wesling CBE: So, of the two things it was supposed to be, it was definitely biodegradable, but that meant that it was no longer packaging, right?

[00:04:56] The

[00:04:56] James Gill: difficult, a difficult timescale for packaging, isn't it? Either forever, or Not long enough

[00:05:03] Kresse Wesling CBE: or not long enough and I and it was just it was the concept was correct It was just too far ahead of its time, you know, technologically We weren't we weren't there and then I came to the you know I was living in the UK at that point and I had this and this is sort of where the story really narrows down you know, for the first time in my life, I had some free time to just follow my nose and just be curious and go and explore things.

[00:05:27] And what I, where I found myself was in landfill sites and in waste transfer stations and in material recovery facilities, because that's what I was interested in.

[00:05:36] James Gill: Not where everyone would choose to go in their free time, but I'm glad you did. Exactly. I mean,

[00:05:40] Kresse Wesling CBE: the National Gallery is great, but. You should see a, you should see a good waste transfer station.

[00:05:45] So I

[00:05:46] James Gill: went, I've always been actually, I know I might be too close in your niche bubble here, but like, I've always been fascinated by that too. So it's not super weird.

[00:05:56] Kresse Wesling CBE: I don't think it is. And I also think a lot of people want to understand how things work. I I'm, I'm fascinated. I've always been fascinated by sewage treatment, you know, since, since I was, you know, much, much younger and why we fail to treat something that is effectively a resource.

[00:06:12] And why we don't see, why we see things as problems when, when actually they're resources. And that's where I was in my early days in London, really getting to grips with we're on a tiny, tiny island. We don't have a national waste strategy. We don't have an effective plan. And yet this is the perfect.

[00:06:33] Place to have a plan because there's 66, 000, 000 people living in a very, very small place. If we had 1 single waste strategy, which we don't because it's council by council. And if we said, look, we're only allowed three polymers, those three polymers aren't allowed any of these plasticizers, which mean they're non recyclable.

[00:06:51] Or maybe we're not allowed polymers at all. I'm kind of now getting to the phase where I would say we shouldn't be allowed polymers at all. Because we've, we've proven that we simply can't be responsible with them.

[00:07:03] James Gill: You know, if you,

[00:07:04] Kresse Wesling CBE: I think to a certain extent, people say they hate the nanny state, but when you need a nanny, you need a nanny.

[00:07:10] When you are misbehaving, we have, we have a justice system to deal with that. And the entire plastics industry and all of consumers have been misbehaving with plastic for way too long and not doing anything about it. Yeah, so maybe not plastics, but we could have this strategy and it could be wonderful and we could say, look, these are the materials we're going to use.

[00:07:28] Those are all going to be recyclable in the UK. We could have delivered a circular economy 20 years ago, if somebody had had some guts. And unfortunately, that was sadly lacking. Maybe, maybe we'll see that start to emerge. But Elvis and Kresse was a response to that, you know, I, I found a fire hose in a landfill site and then went to meet London Fire Brigade and the rest is history.

[00:07:49] I fell in love with this sorry, there is a lovely little puppy in the room. We're going to

[00:07:53] James Gill: need to see the dog at some point. Yeah, I'll definitely try and get

[00:07:56] Kresse Wesling CBE: her on camera at some point. We, that was the start of it. Just seeing this beautiful material that certainly, Had had one heroic life,

[00:08:07] James Gill: but

[00:08:07] Kresse Wesling CBE: had so much potential for a second life.

[00:08:09] Seeing that going to go to landfill to me felt really undignified, uncivilized, disrespectful. And, and it's a beautiful material. So that was it really. It was like, right, we're going to rescue the hose and that's going to be Elvis and Pressy. But at the point of saying that and making that promise and also saying to the London fire brigade, no matter what happens, we're going to give you 50 percent of the profits, which we've done, you know, for the last 19, almost 20 years.

[00:08:35] We still didn't know what we were going to do with it. We just, you know, we knew that it wasn't going to go landfill anymore. We were going to come up with a plan and, and the company really is us coming up with a plan, executing that plan and then expanding that plan over time.

[00:08:50] James Gill: That's incredible. So, so you stumbled upon the fact that these hoses, which are not like a garden hose, they're quite a different thing, right?

[00:09:00] And they were just being chucked away, chucked in, in the, in the ground basically, and you were like, Hey, London Fibregrade, you know, Give it to us instead, and we don't know what we're going to do with it yet, but we'll give you 50 percent of the profits of whatever we figure out. Is that how it went?

[00:09:19] Kresse Wesling CBE: That's effectively how it works. And, and, and, and, and, and it, and it has worked. I think it's been, we've had an incredible, You know, we, we effectively do three things. We, we rescue materials, we transform them into beautiful things, and then we donate 50 percent of the profits to charity. In the case of the fire, fire hose, it's the firefighters charity and, and, and that is, so we're circular with respect to materials, but also with respect to the, to the flow of capital.

[00:09:46] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:09:47] Kresse Wesling CBE: And, and that's been a model that's worked incredibly well. It's a simple message. It's a, it's a, it's a wonderful idea and lots of people like to tell the story and retell the story. We have lots of supporters within the fire service because effectively, we, we built a business that serves that community and it's just grown slowly and organically ever since.

[00:10:10] Oh yeah, there she went. You gotta drive by there.

[00:10:16] James Gill: Incredible. I, so, I mean, I don't know if you're happy to share this, Kresse, but do you know roughly how much you've raised then for the Firefighter Charity? Like, is there a ballpark figure? We

[00:10:25] Kresse Wesling CBE: actually looked at this a little while ago. We have saved well over 300 tons of material from landfill.

[00:10:31] And this is actually, let's, let's, let's, before we give these figures, I get asked a lot about turnover, right? Companies do. It's an irrelevant figure. It is deeply uninteresting. I'm interested in the impact that companies have. I'm interested in the damage that they do. I'm interested in the good that they can do.

[00:10:51] So if a company wants to publish its, how many apprenticeships they created, how many people that it has brought out of poverty, how many, you know, if it's a company that produces a healthcare product, how many people it's vaccinated.

[00:11:05] James Gill: Great.

[00:11:06] Kresse Wesling CBE: I'm not interested in turnover. So for us, turnover is, you know, over 300 tons of material and we're, we're over 430, 000 pounds of donations.

[00:11:17] James Gill: That's incredible. That's it. And, and from nothing from otherwise would have. would have just been in the ground, never to be spoken of again. I, I, I know there's a lot more we can talk about, but I'm also, I'm keen to just dig in a little bit more because I'm fascinated. Tell me more about these hoses. Like what the, how are you, what are they made of?

[00:11:40] What do you, like, how do you actually go about getting these hoses? And what have you turned them into? Like, it would be great to understand. Well,

[00:11:48] Kresse Wesling CBE: I'll ask my colleague Como, do you want to grab me that fire hose? So I can just show you but the, so fire hose is, and this is also a quite like an, an interesting story.

[00:11:58] This kind of fire hose, which is the most common type of fire hose.

[00:12:02] James Gill: Look at that. What a beauty. That's firehose.

[00:12:04] Kresse Wesling CBE: What a beauty. This is, this kind of firehose was invented in Yorkshire and that's where it's made. So

[00:12:11] James Gill: this type

[00:12:13] Kresse Wesling CBE: of hose is a double wall of nitrile rubber that's extruded around and through a nylon woven core.

[00:12:21] So because you've got these two materials that are effectively married.

[00:12:25] James Gill: You,

[00:12:25] Kresse Wesling CBE: you cannot shred it, melt it and start again. So it doesn't work like aluminium or like polymer, you, you effectively have a frankenfiber, right? Now, I can't change what that about the history of the material, I can only change its future.

[00:12:41] So, it's really strong, it's really tough, it's really durable, it's red, most of it, although London is changing to yellow. So over time, we have historically been a red brand and now we will become more of a yellow brand.

[00:12:54] James Gill: I see. Imagine

[00:12:56] Kresse Wesling CBE: if Ferrari was dictated to by someone else, no, no, no, no more red paint, you got to go yellow.

[00:13:00] But that's, that's the nature of what we do. And each hose has on it the, the date of extrusion, the British standard mark the brand name, which is Angus Duraline. And I think another interesting thing about hoses is your average hose of this type, which is now the world's, the global standard and is produced in the UK, in New Jersey, a few other places.

[00:13:22] The, the the length of a hose to the standard is between 22 and 23 meters. And people think, oh, well, that's because of the ladders or the height of how much a person can carry, but actually it's because The guys who invented it had a shed that was 23 meters long and they were, these hoses have to be cured.

[00:13:41] So they were extruding them and then curing them. I

[00:13:43] James Gill: love that. That's brilliant. Instead

[00:13:45] Kresse Wesling CBE: of making a longer shed or whatever, that, that's, that's, that's a story. That's a

[00:13:50] James Gill: brilliant story.

[00:13:52] Kresse Wesling CBE: And these, we rarely get these, these, these ends, the couplings, we don't get those very often because these can be taken off and put on a new hose.

[00:14:00] But we do get them when they've been cracked or deformed and they no longer slot together. And in that case, we polish them up and turn them into candle holders.

[00:14:11] James Gill: Oh, brilliant.

[00:14:14] Kresse Wesling CBE: So nothing is wasted.

[00:14:15] James Gill: Starting a new fire. Maybe the circular economy there too.

[00:14:18] Kresse Wesling CBE: Yeah, exactly. Nothing is

[00:14:19] James Gill: wasted. That's that's incredible.

[00:14:22] And so like, when did the, do they use the hoses for a fixed amount of time? Do they, is it just, they get damaged or how does that work? And then it's

[00:14:31] Kresse Wesling CBE: both of those things. So they have a 25 year health and safety life and that is the longest that they can be in active service. But a lot of them don't last that long.

[00:14:41] So if you have a big, massive, hot, destructive fire, and the hose has been dragged through glass, etc. Sure, sure. You might get a puncture, let's say, in a 23 meter hose, you might get a puncture at meter 11. And then that hose is, you know, they can cut it down and have one short hose on a fire truck, but they don't have lots of short hoses.

[00:15:02] That's obviously quite useless. So. So yeah, it's some of them can die on their first day.

[00:15:08] James Gill: Yeah. Yeah. I, I just, I love it. So, so Kresse, what have you, I mean, we could see some of the products behind you. Tell us about what you're turning these hoses into that there's a lot of options.

[00:15:21] Kresse Wesling CBE: Right. I'm going to again, ask my colleague to bring it.

[00:15:24] Here's one we made earlier, right? But your notebook, can I show them your this is, this is a, My, my lovely colleague, who's handing me these things. So this is a, this is a notebook cover and it's refillable. So this is a four and you can see you've got the fire hose there and you can open it and it's got a parachute lining.

[00:15:48] And this is a, this is just an A4 bunch of pages that's refilled. So once you're finished with this, this set of pages, you can just refill another set of pages. That's one kind of thing. And I think, oh yes, a weekend bag is coming. This is one of our best A weekend bag.

[00:16:04] James Gill: I could do with one of them right now.

[00:16:06] Yeah. So

[00:16:06] Kresse Wesling CBE: this is a Oh, and this is in

[00:16:08] James Gill: the new yellow color. Yes. This is, this is the new autumn winter line, right?

[00:16:14] Kresse Wesling CBE: Yes. So that's made of a hundred, like a hundred percent yellow hoses, Scotland detachable shoulder strap, that kind of thing.

[00:16:20] James Gill: You know what, that

[00:16:22] Kresse Wesling CBE: looks,

[00:16:23] James Gill: that looks indestructible, like that looks like you could take that around the world many times and many, many weekends out of that.

[00:16:32] Kresse Wesling CBE: I've just set it down next to a puppy, so let's see, but actually they are, they are very, it is a very durable material for sure, but you know, I wouldn't we, we have definitely had people who've, who've dragged them behind a car and. Or been mugged and then they've sat outside in a park for a while and they've come back to us.

[00:16:49] And actually the one where the, the person was mugged, that bag lived outside for a whole winter and it came back to us for repair. And actually the only thing we repaired was that the rivets on it had rusted, so we had to take the hardware out and replace the hardware and then the lining had molded. So yeah, I guess the other thing that we do is we repair and we repair that cost over the lifetime of a piece, just so that people know that they can.

[00:17:14] You know, definitely have something that, that, that, that will be around for longer because it doesn't make sense to do all of this wonderful environmental work and then not, and then not offer repairs. Yeah.

[00:17:24] James Gill: You're just determined to not see that, that rubber go into the ground, right? Absolutely.

[00:17:30] Absolutely. That is That is incredible. I, I kind of want to, oh, look at this,

[00:17:37] Kresse Wesling CBE: you know, just the, just sort of the classic pieces. I think that's the biggest thing for us is that, is that we, you know, a lot of designers, they want to design something that, that no one's ever seen before. And actually, that's not what we're interested in.

[00:17:50] We don't do seasons, which is, seasons are killing us. Hmm, the, the, the fact that somebody wants to make a brand new product every two days, you know, in the case of a sheen, they've got algorithms churning out new designs all the time. And actually, what's the point? Yeah, we don't need 58 new items of clothing a year.

[00:18:07] We, we really don't. We need a small capsule collection of things that fit us well in sdu well that we enjoy wearing, and then you need your staples when it comes to accessories. The research that we did in the beginning was that people needed a travel bag, a wash bag, a wallet, a belt. And those were the pieces that we focused on.

[00:18:26] So we, we actually don't have a huge collection and we don't add to it very often. We only have, we only typically add to it. She's right here. So I thought, Oh, here we go.

[00:18:35] James Gill: There we go. This is the time for

[00:18:37] Kresse Wesling CBE: Joni to make her camera debut. We interrupt

[00:18:39] James Gill: this episode for a puppy break.

[00:18:42] Kresse Wesling CBE: A little tiny puppy break.

[00:18:44] How are you doing? Hello.

[00:18:47] James Gill: Does, is it a he or she? Joni. She's a girl. Joanie, does she have any accessories of her own?

[00:18:55] Kresse Wesling CBE: She does have a collar, but when we're on the farm she doesn't wear it. She's only 14 weeks old, so we're trying not to we're trying not to, we're trying not to bling her up to her.

[00:19:07] James Gill: Give it a year and she is going to be kitted out. Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:12] Kresse Wesling CBE: Exactly. Exactly. Amazing.

[00:19:15] James Gill: Amazing. I I, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's incredible to, to hear. And I, I guess you know, also you keeping the nuCBEr of items you sell small means you get wonderful efficiency there as well. And it, it, it's a simpler proposition for a consumer to see what you're offering.

[00:19:31] And I, I think I love that. I, I was gonna say, I read some research recently, just a few weeks ago around it. The sort of the consumption we're doing around clothing these days. And he was saying that as a percentage of our income, we spend less now than we basically have ever done, but we, yet we buy more, have more items than ever before.

[00:19:53] And it was just interesting to see those two lines sort of change so much over the course of several decades that, that the want for more and the willingness to The same goes

[00:20:06] Kresse Wesling CBE: for food. And these are, these are signs of broken systems. So whenever you see, you know, food, food and fashion have never been as cheap as they are, but they've also never been as destructive as they are.

[00:20:17] James Gill: And

[00:20:18] Kresse Wesling CBE: that's in terms of the cost of the planet, the cost of people, in the case of food, it's to the cost of our own health and to the cost of, you know, the, the sort of wider ecosystem. And, and that to me is a sign of a failed system. So it was fascinating about. When we started, you know, we got the firehose and we thought, well, what are we going to do with it?

[00:20:35] We did a bunch of research into the material and what it could do.

[00:20:38] James Gill: Mm.

[00:20:39] Kresse Wesling CBE: And You know, initially we thought of making roof tiles, but fire hose, if you leave it outside for 10 years, the UV light will crack it. So we would have, we would have made some leaky roofs, but there also isn't enough fire hose to have a sustainable roofing business.

[00:20:53] It's quite a niche amount. And then we discovered that Louis Vuitton and some other French brands have been using a very similar material in their collection for a long time. And that's what led us to luxury. And then we started researching luxury and fashion. That's when we realized how broken that system was, was that it was not treating people well, was not treating the planet with any degree of respect, and yet it was making all of this money.

[00:21:15] And for me, money at the expense of people and planet is a structural failure.

[00:21:20] James Gill: And we

[00:21:21] Kresse Wesling CBE: thought if we create a business to an A standard, then it puts us in the position where we can call that out, not as campaigners, but just as. Well, you say this is impossible, does this look impossible or does this look like a wallet that's actually being held in my actual little hand?

[00:21:39] And that's, that's very powerful. It's been a very powerful let's say weapon of change.

[00:21:45] James Gill: Absolutely. Yeah. You're not shouting from the sidelines saying change things without the experience of having done it. And you can point to yourselves as that success story.

[00:21:56] Kresse Wesling CBE: Yeah, we can, we can use pretty much everything that we do is designed with the idea in mind that we have to make the world better for other people's grandchildren.

[00:22:07] That's a goal, right? If we want to have a regenerative future, that's the goal. But also in the back of my mind, I'm thinking how provocative can this be?

[00:22:18] James Gill: How can

[00:22:18] Kresse Wesling CBE: we use this as a way to communicate? How can we use this story to really give people the idea that change can happen? Things can be different.

[00:22:27] And we found that to be pretty, pretty effective, especially here where we are at the new workshop. So, You know, the business grew slowly over the years. We started in a shed at Elvis's parents house. Then we were in a a conservatory.

[00:22:43] James Gill: Did you have a long enough shed for the hoses? No, it was a

[00:22:47] Kresse Wesling CBE: tiny little, it's the shed still exists.

[00:22:49] It's basically falling to pieces now. And then there was a a conservatory in a house share that we were living in in Bournemouth. Then we rented our first ever workshop, which Was a garage. Then we rented a slightly bigger garage, then we rented our first workshop, and then we bought our first building probably back in 2013.

[00:23:10] James Gill: And

[00:23:10] Kresse Wesling CBE: we thought, to be honest, that that place we'd be in forever, but we outgrew it. And, and also our ambition outgrew it. So in about, let's say 2018, 2019, we were thinking, how do we actually There's a lot of businesses, even in the, just the act of running your business, maybe you do a great thing, but there's all these other things that you do as a business, which aren't great.

[00:23:32] And it became a real mission for us to redesign how the business operated so that the business itself could be regenerative. So that we could treat more water than we use. We could generate more energy than we required in a renewable way. We could, we could be in a more sustainable building and we could also do fun things like sequester carbon.

[00:23:51] So we were thinking, how do we do this? And the only solution we could come up with was, was to buy a farm and we found one in 2020. We bought it in 2020. We bought the, we bought the worst farm we could find. Seven buildings that were falling apart, a failed septic system. Grade 3 degraded pasture, the people, not the previous owners, but the owners before that had run a turf cutting business, which means they sold the top soil.

[00:24:18] So really, really, really poor quality soil. And then we've gone on this mission of of, you know, creating abundance here. So we have been, we've built a wetland based sewage treatment system. We've brought water back to the site. We've done new counts, bird counts. There was no newts before we came and now there's newts.

[00:24:38] So we've, we've created an infinite increase in newts. And, and we've also planted a vineyard, but in a chemical free regenerative way. So everything that we're doing is to build soil health, sequester carbon. And create biodiversity and, and a, and a wonderful habitat and all of that we can do just by running our business and we built this building.

[00:25:02] So the building that I'm in to give you a bit more of an idea, a bit of a look around is a straw bale building. So the walls are kind of wow.

[00:25:10] James Gill: Really?

[00:25:11] Kresse Wesling CBE: And then it's got a tiCBEr frame and because of the heavy insulation and because the natural materials we use were a carbon lock, we've and we've got solar on the roof and a backup battery system.

[00:25:23] We actually just don't use the heat we used to use.

[00:25:26] James Gill: Sure, sure. Because of the

[00:25:27] Kresse Wesling CBE: insulation, and we don't use the power we used to use because we've got really efficient LED lighting and things like that. By coming to the farm, we've reduced our power consumption by 94. 7 percent while tripling our, more than tripling our footprint.

[00:25:40] James Gill: I, I just, I, I, I'm, I'm a bit speechless, Chrissie. Like, I, most people find it quite hard to just start a business, but you're just putting everyone to shame here.

[00:25:49] Kresse Wesling CBE: Well, we're 20 years in, like if you, if you want to stay interested in it, you have to keep doing interesting things. But also, I mean, I mean, maybe shame is a good, maybe shame isn't bad, but shame hasn't worked when it comes to the environment.

[00:26:05] We've been, the environmentalists have been shaming people for years and we're still in a position right now where the just stop oil protesters. been given five year prison sentences instead of being asked to spend the next five years of their lives insulating buildings, which would be a much better use of the time and energy of those people rather than them being housed in the prison.

[00:26:27] criminal justice system, you know, we, we, shame has failed. So I, I don't want to shame people. I just, actually we want to do the opposite. We want to inspire people. And I think the farm has worked in that regard because from the, from the moment we came here and we started putting in, let's say the wetland system, we had neighbors that were, Because it was COVID, right?

[00:26:49] So nobody, everyone was afraid to come in, but we had neighbors that were peeking through the hedgerow going, what are they doing in there? What is that? What are those weird long ponds for? We started a dialogue with the local community. We've had lots of events. Companies from all over the world come and have board meetings here.

[00:27:07] We've had university students from all over the world come and have away days here. We've had all kinds of groups that, that, that come for workshop and farm tours, groups from like the Bairstead Environmental Action Network to the local chapter of the WI to, you know, you name it. And they're coming here not to be.

[00:27:28] Not to be shamed, but actually to see an example of how if you decide not just to design a product, like this has to be well designed and this is well designed. And this maybe takes me back to an earlier point that you made. Because we've been making a billfold wallet for almost 20 years, every time we found a slight flaw in the design, we have, instead of making a new product every year where you're getting new flaws every year,

[00:27:52] James Gill: this is

[00:27:52] Kresse Wesling CBE: 20 years of engineering going into

[00:27:55] James Gill: this.

[00:27:55] You've honed that over time to be as perfect as it could be, yeah.

[00:28:00] Kresse Wesling CBE: Exactly. And, and, but so it's important to design this well, but it's also important to design the business itself. And how that sits within a community and how that sits within the world. And you could call that a donut economics model.

[00:28:14] You could call it a circular model. You could call it just being an honest to goodness, decent human being and thinking about future generations. You know, I'm always trying to call it lots of different things because I know that one of those things. Will appeal to someone, you know,

[00:28:30] James Gill: maybe it is,

[00:28:32] Kresse Wesling CBE: maybe it's inspiration, maybe it's shame, but somewhere on that spectrum We're gonna, we're gonna be able to find a route deep into people's hearts and hopefully bring people to the point of change.

[00:28:44] James Gill: I absolutely love that. I, I I know we're almost at half an hour, Kresse, which it feels like it's flown by and I want to talk to you all day about what you're doing, but I'm sure you've got better things to do. What, what does the future look like for you? For, do you have any thoughts on the future?

[00:29:01] I mean, you've already shared a lot, but. I guess there's partly one of the questions I have in my mind about your own future. It's like, it sounds like you're doing everything great. Like, what's on your to do list still? Is there anything you're looking over the next few years? That's like, we've got to change this.

[00:29:16] We've got to do this. This is something we're not doing as well as we want to on.

[00:29:20] Kresse Wesling CBE: Yeah, I'd love to, yeah, both of those things. So we've always got a list of, of the things that we want to improve. You know, like we don't have any plastic in our packaging. That was, we had. We, we came down to one courier envelope that the courier was demanding.

[00:29:35] We put everything in these bags and we had a big fight with them about seven years ago and we won. So, you know, those kinds of things, we always have a hit list of those things and we're getting rid of them one by one but those are reductive. You know, those are things, any business can do that. You know, there's businesses, all businesses in the world are thinking, how can we use less water, less, this, less, this, those are sort of reductive.

[00:29:53] But actually what I'm more excited is, is on the innovation side. So we've got, I mean, we rescue fire hose, but we also rescue 15 other different raw materials. So this, this bag is made with yes, fire hose on the edge, but this is rescued leather from Burberry and they, you know, they produce a lot of leather offcuts.

[00:30:12] It globally, if you look at the leather industry, it produces 800, 000 tons of offcuts a year and we've come up with a circular system. That allows people to reuse those. So for me, there's also this innovation list, which is all the raw materials that don't live in a circular system right now and what kind of innovation could be applied to them to bring them back into use.

[00:30:32] James Gill: And

[00:30:32] Kresse Wesling CBE: if I think about like the two big missions for the future, there's sort of twofold. One is yes, we could just Kresse, but from an impact perspective, the, the, the broader impact we can have is taking our solutions to bigger companies. So we've got a lot of collaborations that are planned because, you know, the, we, we, the partnership we have with Burberry, the reason we started working with their foundation is because 000 times bigger than we are.

[00:30:56] James Gill: We can

[00:30:57] Kresse Wesling CBE: instantly have a much bigger impact by focusing on a collaboration like that. So that's one way that we're really sort of imagining the future. And then, and then obviously we're on a farm and we're knee deep in regenerative agriculture and we're looking at. The food system that's failed and why it's failed and why we're not sequestering more carbon into our soil and having more nutrient dense food as a by product and all these other wonderful things.

[00:31:24] And we can, we feel like we can have a unique voice in that space too. People will come for the handbags and stay for the, stay for the wine and the farming, and you can get people into a much deeper conversation about, about the agricultural system too. So I think we're kind of in a lot of different spaces.

[00:31:42] Which any business advisor would tell you is disastrous because you're supposed to focus and you're supposed to do one thing well, but I would immediately counter that and say, no, maybe in 1980 you were supposed to do one thing well, but now we don't have time for that. Everybody has to be doing something for biodiversity.

[00:31:59] Everybody has to be doing something for climate and they need to be brave enough to talk about it. This green hushing that started is to me, really dangerous.

[00:32:08] James Gill: Companies

[00:32:09] Kresse Wesling CBE: need to make bold decisions. Some of them aren't gonna work out. Some companies aren't gonna last, some companies are gonna thrive. But if we don't make bold decisions with respect to climate and biodiversity at this particular moment in time, it's over.

[00:32:25] James Gill: Yeah. When, what is it? 20%,

[00:32:28] Kresse Wesling CBE: if we, if we cruise past two degrees of, of warming, we're gonna lose 20% of global GDP by 2040.

[00:32:36] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Kresse Wesling CBE: So, you know, so for me it's like, move it or lose it.

[00:32:39] James Gill: Yeah,

[00:32:40] Kresse Wesling CBE: either change the way you do things now or, or it's over anyway. So there's no real, there's no real risk.

[00:32:48] James Gill: Yeah. There's

[00:32:49] Kresse Wesling CBE: only up, there's only real upside if you decide to have some courage, some courage now, which maybe that's what this place is going to be for.

[00:32:56] It's a place for people to come and work.

[00:32:59] James Gill: Oh, Kresse, what a way to wrap this episode. I feel like it's my duty now, and our duty to make sure as many people as possible listen and watch this show, because this has been just such a, a wonderfully inspiring talk, and I know a lot of people listen to this show who run their own businesses, I'm sure will be Just wanting to hear a lot more from you.

[00:33:19] So where can people find, find you, Kresse? Where can people go to learn more if they've been, if they heard anything, whether they've been inspired, shamed, inspired some more, want to do some donut economics or some being generally just good human beings, where, where can they go find out more?

[00:33:38] Kresse Wesling CBE: Well, if you come to Elvis and Kresse dot com or follow us on Instagram, it's all Elvis Elvis and Kresse Elvis, A N D K R E S S E.

[00:33:46] There's, you know, certainly in our blog area, there's all the details about how we built the workshop, why we're at the farm, how we make the products, every everything. But also, you know, we, we run workshop and farm tours. So, you know, we're, we're an hour from London by train. And if anyone wants to really see it firsthand, then they're, they're more than welcome.

[00:34:04] We're not one of these brands that has all these secrets, you know, there's no skeletons in the cupboard here. It's all, it's all happening in real time.

[00:34:11] James Gill: It's not like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It's a, we can all go, we can all go check out the wonderful, the wonderful how it's made. Kresse, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:34:21] It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope we can speak again soon. Thank you so much.