Today’s episode is about business goals of growth and sustainability. Arguably growth has to come first in order to establish a long term presence that can have a significant impact on sustainability yet companies like TALA and Patagonia have achieved massive success putting sustainability as a priority from day one.

There’s also a paradigm related to how companies market themselves, and the consequent scrutiny and microscope they’re put under to do everything right. For example, companies, especially B2Cs, who market themselves as ‘green’ attract stakeholders who hold them to that standard whilst companies avoiding labelling themselves ‘green’ avoid the scrutiny of their potentially worse environment impact.

Gymshark is a company that chases growth and in 9 years this has worked for them, allowing them to now prioritise sustainability; however, it’s interesting some of their goals (recyclable packaging by 2021) are reached by startups from the beginning so this raises a question about the barriers to entry for startups who are held to high standards in order to stand out, whilst big companies succeed despite not being held to those standards.

Interestingly, the impact consumers make depends - voting with your money is powerful and signals demand to companies but then the impact of companies manufacturing + transporting goods can limit how big of an impact buying a ‘plastic free + recyclable’ good is when the backend is the opposite of recycle + plastic free…

(Music by Wataboi: U Said It - https://soundcloud.com/wataboi/u-said-it-soundcloud)