The Entrepreneurs

Adam Lewenhaupt is the CEO, creative director and founder of CQP, a Stockholm-based footwear brand. Though Adam worked in finance for the first decade of his career, he grew up with a passion for design. Realising that banking wasn’t for him, he designed his first trainer, launching the product in 2014. CQP, or Conversations & Quintessential Products, is a marriage of fine craftsmanship and design.

What Milan is to fashion, Vancouver is to technical apparel and athletic-wear. While the city is home to Arc’teryx and Lululemon, it’s also home to Respect Your Universe. The athletic-apparel brand has grown steadily since 2014 and now has retail outposts in Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York. We meet CEO Marello Leone.

Christian Meier is a Canadian former professional cyclist, who retired at the peak of his career to focus on his passion for coffee. Meier and his wife Amber own and operate three businesses in Girona, Spain: La Fábrica Girona, Espresso Mafia and The Service Course. The couple decided to follow their dream to open a café after Christian competed in his first Tour de France.

Gauthier Van Malderen is the CEO and founder of Perlego, a digital streaming platform for textbooks. Around the world, the cost of textbooks is one of the greatest pain points for college and university students, who often only need to read small sections of increasingly expensive books. Van Malderen launched the business in 2016 to help not only students, but also publishers in their fight against illegal content-sharing. Perlego now has 250,000 titles from 2,300 publishers.

Anya Hindmarch is a name synonymous with creativity and handbags. Her label was launched in 1987; in the ensuing years, Princess Diana became a loyal customer. With shops around the world, the brand is also known for the Chubby Hearts Over London design project and an ‘I'm not a plastic bag’ environmental campaign.

Gabriel Waterhouse is the founder and chef behind The Water House Project. After years of cooking in London’s Michelin-starred kitchens he yearned for a less structured environment – what he calls ‘social fine dining’. The result is an eight-course dinner served three times a week in a warehouse space on London’s Regent’s Canal.

Matt Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Tracksmith, the New England-based premium running label that celebrates the style, heritage and culture of the sport. Taylor started designing his own line after leaving sportswear giant Puma. Since launching in 2014, Tracksmith has been growing steadily and recently opened a flagship shop near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Kresse Wesling is the co-founder of Elvis & Kresse, a company that’s creating a blueprint for sustainable luxury fashion. She launched the brand in 2005 with her husband James ‘Elvis’ Henrit and the Certified B Corporation turns discarded items into handmade accessories and homewares. The couple donate 50 per cent of their profits to charity and recently partnered with the Burberry Foundation to tackle the problem of leather waste.

Alan Mahon is the founder of Brewgooder, a Scottish craft-beer company that donates all its profits to clean-water projects. Launched in 2016, the Certified B company has to date helped fund more than 130 such projects from sales of its Clean Water Lager, brewed in partnership with Brewdog, with the overall aim to improve the lives of more than one million people by 2025.

Chris Young and Jina Kim are the husband-and-wife team behind Circumference, a line of natural skincare products aimed at changing the way we think about the beauty industry and how we treat the environment. Growing up in a traditional Korean household, Kim was taught to take care of her skin and even watched her family members make their own skin-care remedies – a far cry from the toxin-filled products she saw on the market.