'What Makes a Good Idea a Good Idea?’ First findings from Season One.

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Last August I set out to talk to founders of companies and other ideas on a mission to do good for our home planet.

I've since spoken to more than a dozen of these legends and learned a lot. The idea is to assemble their collective wisdom into some sort of simple playbook that makes it easy for more people to have a go—and succeed.

I've got a page of thoughts, but three stand out so far as a good place to start, so here they are for everyone who's interested.

They tend to 'do good' at the ends of the value chain

Take Who Gives A Crap. It creates impact by donating money from sales. That changes how the value created (profit) is distributed at the end of the value chain. Thankyou, GreenPay and Hawke's Brewing Co. work similarly. So does Newman's Own, Inc. which has been doing it since the 80's.

On the flipside, Tony's Chocolonely, Alt.Leather, Good Citizens and WAW Handplanes change the start of the value chain, by innovating how the product is made. In the 70's, The Body Shop did the same starting with the words Against Animal Testing.

Of course there is also the middle of the supply chain—manufacturing with renewables and so on. It just rarely seems to be a differentiator big enough to build a brand from.

There's something for we and something for me

Let's take Good Citizens as an example. Their frames are made from 100% recycled plastic from rivers and waterways, which is good for the planet. At the same time, each pair is made from just 5 pieces, so if you break an arm, you can replace it - which is good for me as a buyer. Plus they look cool. As Nik Robinson says, 'they've got to have street appeal'.

Sustainability creates a reason to look, but being better for the use I need it for creates the reason to buy.

Everything can be rethought

When you’re doing something new, it’s hard to see past the ‘rules’ of your category.

Take Talk Club for example, a charity supporting men's mental health. If you were working out how to fund such a thing, you’d naturally think about grants and donations. Ben Akers and team thought differently, creating Clear Head, a zero alcohol beer that has delivered them over 100K pounds to date. It's a completely different business model.

But here's the biggest discovery of all

Almost no-one I've spoken to had experience in the thing they created.

Nik and Joss, the founders of Good Citizens, had never worked in eyewear or fashion.

Maddi and Glenn, the founders of GreenPay, had no previous experience in digital payment systems.

Lucy and Rikki from WAW Handplanes had never worked in the surf industry before.

Maria Baker, who created Nobody’s Princess, had never worked in snowwear. 

Alt.Leather’s Tina Funder had never run a deep tech company before. 

Now best-selling author Natalie Kyriacou had never written a book before. 

What this tells me is that it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do to make the world a better place. If you’ve got a good idea and you’re prepared to put in the time, learn along the way and bring people to your cause, you can do it. 

It’s not easy but it’s proven to be possible time and time again.

And I think that’s the biggest lesson of all.    

Full Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to the season one wrap where I try to summarise a dozen hours of interviews into three things that I think are the most interesting findings or little lessons, as I’ll call them. 

But before I get to them, here’s a few thoughts on why these good ideas are so important. 

I’ll tell you a story. About this brand, Tony’s Chocolonely. 

It was a Monday morning when I got a call from a global snackfood company. One with lots of brands that you see on the shelves everyday. 

Hello Ben speaking. 

Hi.

We’d like you to help us run a workshop. 

What on?

Building social and environmental impact into the core of our products.

OK. Think big, I like it. 

When would you like to run this workshop?

Wednesday. 

I was expecting them to say in 3 months. That’s the speed big companies work at. They’re saying three days. 

Did you have someone drop out?

No, we want you to run it. 

Great, when did you start planning this? 

Last Friday. 

Well, that’s urgency. 

So the team and I scrambled together a workshop, and Wednesday came. We showed up and in the room were around 30 people - every brand, marketing and innovation lead for every snack food brand this global company owns. 

I’m thinking wow, a lot of diaries got rearranged to make this happen so fast.

Like all workshops the client did the intros and the first slide she showed is why we’re gathered here today…Tony’s Chocolonely. 

In case you don’t know Tony’s, it looks like this. Bright colourful packaging, tasty flavours all built around the mission of ending slavery in the chocolate supply chain. They put this mission front and centre of what they do and they have been hugely successful in doing so. 

Founded in the Netherlands in 2005, Tony’s now has almost a quarter of the Dutch market, selling more than Nestle and Mars. And its doing almost as well in the UK, USA and other places. 

So now it was coming to Australia. 

For me, this was a memorable moment. 

I’d been trying to create this sort of urgency in companies for years, and here it was. An upstart startup showing big business how it's done and getting attention. 

You see as individuals we all know the world needs to change. 

 When we hear that we’ve lost 80% of our home planet’s forests we know that’s not good.

When we see 100 year storms start to happen every couple of years - or a couple of times a year - we know we probably can’t keep running our cars and economies on dinosaur juice for much longer. 

And when we know that 26 people in the world own more than the poorest half, we know that’s not really fair. The benefits of this environmental destruction are going to a few, while the consequences are paid by all.

As individuals, we know this and we support change. No one wants to think their favourite snack helped kill an orang utan or that a child slave made our shirt. 

But when we’re in a business setting, these things are hard to champion.

For most companies, selling more, faster and beating the competition is priority #1. 

Sustainability can be hard to align with that. It’s possible, but it’s a lot of work and that means it happens slowly, through a bunch of small changes, or not at all. 

And that slow change isn’t enough. It’s evolutionary and we need a revolution in how business is done. In how our industries and economies are powered, what we buy, where the waste goes and how the money gets shared around. 

Upstart startups like Tony’s are the revolutionaries of the business world. 

Let’s say you worked at a big chocolate company and came up with the idea for Tony’s.

Of course this slave-free supply chain does not exist. So you have to find one, or make it. 

Even if you get past all the hurdles that takes, you’ll likely find that this new supply chain costs more than the old one. Since no one is prepared to take the risk that people will pay for this, or mess with the supply chain of what is currently a successful, profitable business, your good idea goes in the too hard basket and nothing changes. 

I’m not saying big business doesn’t care, or want to, it’s just a lot of work for an uncertain reward, and that’s risky. And risk is something to minimise, often rightly so. 

Sure you’re risking sales and profits, but you're also risking people's jobs and livelihoods, not just your company’s but others in your supply chain too. 

So who steps into this gap?

For innovators and startups, the difficulty and the risk is the point. By venturing into the unknown they create themselves the opportunity to break into a market. So they’re motivated by totally different things than established companies. 

It is their role to pioneer big leaps and bounds. To start small but think big. To take risks that established businesses can be shy to. 

Now that Tony’s has done it, they’ve created a supply chain others can follow. Now for a big chocolate brand it becomes less risky to start to improve its supply chain. It’s easier because hey, ‘if Tony’s  can do it, why can’t we?’. 

In fact, once something like this has been done it can be more risky not to follow, otherwise what are you saying? What, it’s ok to have slaves in the supply chain?

And what you start to see is the ripple effect. One successful upstart startup shifting an entire industry.   

Another example of this is Patagonia (yes, I had to mention them). 

For all its awesomeness, Patagonia is only around a 1 billion US$ company. Yes, that’s a fat pile of money, but when you consider that Unilever is a 106 billion dollar company, Netflix is worth almost 400 billion and Apple is valued at over 3.6 trillion (3,600x bigger than Patagonia), you see the challenge. 

If the biggest success story in sustainable innovation is fundamentally a rounding error in the bigger scheme of global business then are these companies really that important?

Yes, they are. 

Thanks to Patagonia, pretty much every outdoor apparel brand now has a social and environmental impact story to tell. And to tell a story you have do something worth talking about. 

Whether North Face, Arc'teryx, Columbia, Salomon, Helly Hansen or almost any other brand you care to name, social and environmental impact is now core to category. And it doesn’t stop there. 

Retail apparel more broadly (that’s ‘clothes and shoes’ in everyday language) is one of the most watched and considered categories when it comes to sustainability. You can even look up a brand before you buy it thanks to directories like Good on You. 

Would all this have happened without Patagonia? Maybe. Have their efforts to bring issues and answers to the spotlight sped things up? Undoubtedly. So now we’re not just talking about the impact of a 1 billion$ company, we’re talking about the flow on effect on a 2 trillion$ industry, and the bigger world beyond that. And that’s a whole lot of ripple effect. 

But here’s the biggest ripple of all. 

‘Good’ products like these give everyday people like you and me a chance to show that if companies make them, we’ll buy them. 

Chances are you’ve seen the circular argument. Business says ‘if you buy them, we’ll make them.’

Customers say, ‘if you make them we’ll buy them’. And nothing happens. 

Ideas like Tony’s give us everyday people a chance to put our money where our mouth is and help break the cycle. They create a ripple effect that shows the world the way. 

So that explains why these companies are so important. But it doesn’t answer the question of why do some succeed and others fail. 

Of course, there’s no single answer to that, but after speaking to a dozen founders, I have a few first thoughts, or ‘little lessons’ that I’ve learned to share with you.

The first is that it matters how you change the value chain. 

On the off chance you don’t know, the value chain is the series of steps that go into the creation of a finished product. So if you create breakfast cereal, it’s the growing of the ingredients, the transport to your processing plant, making it into cereal, boxing that cereal, distributing it to shops, the shop selling it, and more.  

‘Good’ companies seem to do their good at one end or the other of the value chain. 

Let’s take Who Gives a Crap as an example. They make toilet paper, you buy toilet paper, they donate 50% of profits to water and sanitation projects. Everyone feels good. And it works. They’ve donated over AU$18 million to date.

And there are plenty more examples in this space. Thank You, Hawkes Brewing and GreenPay come to mind. So too does Paul Newman’s Own (once again proving that this stuff has been going on since the 80s).

For these companies, the impact is right at the end of the value chain. Once a product’s materials are sourced, the product is produced, distributed and sold, the value created (profits) are distributed differently to how an everyday company does it. 

I think the reason these ideas work is because they are so simple for the customer to understand. I buy the product, some of my money does good so I am a good person. 

For other companies, the change in the value chain happens right at the start. 

Tony’s Chocolonely is again a good example here. The impact is created where the cocoa is grown. Other examples include Tina Funder’s Alt.Leather which is well down the path to creating fully functional leather from plant materials, as well as WAW Handplanes and Good Citizens Eyewear who have innovated a whole new supply chain to get degraded plastics out of waterways and remanufacture them into bodysurfing handplanes and ever-so-cool sunglasses respectively.

I think these ideas work because they spark the imagination of the customer - by changing how a whole category is done. 

Of course there is also the middle of the supply chain - manufacturing with renewables, reducing or removing waste from the production process, distributing with EVs, employing marginalised people in the workforce and so on. All these are valuable impacts worth applauding, but in my experience they are rarely the differentiator that makes a ‘good’ idea succeed. 

The ones that get noticed and make an impact are the ones that innovate at the ends of the value chain. 

So, starting with how you make an impact is the first step to success. Now let’s move along to how you get customers interested in the good new thing you’ve created. 

The second little lesson is that there’s got to be something for me and something for we

Let’s take Who Gives a Crap again. If you look at them one way, they make toilet paper out of 100% recycled and sustainable materials, then donate 50% of profits to sanitation projects. 

That’s innovative. 

If you look at them another way, they make it convenient to buy toilet paper in bulk - and be proud of your purchase. 

It’s home delivered, so you don’t have to lug it on the train or bus. It’s bright and colourful so you can store it in the open instead of stuffing it into a bathroom cabinet. And that pretty packaging says, ‘look at me, I’m a good person.’

It’s good for we, but it’s also good for me. 

Another example is Good Citizens sunglasses. They’re 100% made from plastic reclaimed from rivers and waterways. They’re also 100% recyclable which is good for the planet. 

At the same time, each pair is made from just 5 pieces, so if you break an arm, you can replace it - which is good for me as a buyer. Plus they look cool. And that’s the most important thing of all when you're talking sunnies, right? 

Would Good Citizens be successful if they didn’t look good? I doubt it. As co-founder Nik Robinson says, ‘they’ve got to have street appeal’. 

Would Tony’s have been so successful if it hadn’t innovated both supply chain and flavours and packaging? Probably not.

It’s this duet between innovation that is good for me and good for we that makes them work. 

But here’s the really interesting part. When you talk to founders they say the same thing time and time again: the good for the world story gets the brand and product noticed. But when it comes to making a sale, it’s more about what’s in it for me. Then, when the customer takes the selfie for social media, they tell the story of how the product is good for the planet again. Their friends see it and the cycle repeats. 

As Rikki from WAW Handplanes says in Episode 1: the good for we story ‘increases our sales exponentially because our customers want to tell that story and that story sells it to other people and they market it on our behalf, which is, I think, the true power of having a story behind your product.’

It’s ridiculously simple but it works. 

You cannot just make a sustainable product, you have to make a better product and do it more sustainably. It’s hard, but the rewards are worth it.

Number three is everything can be rethought

When you’re doing something new, I think it’s always hard to see past the perceived ‘rules’ of your category or business. 

Take Talk Club for example. It’s a charity getting men together to talk about how they’re going - and work on their mental fitness.

If you were co-founder Ben Akers and you were working out how to fund such a thing, you’d naturally think about government grants, philanthropic grants, getting out on the street to find regular donors. All the things everyday charities do. 

Ben and his team thought a bit differently. They developed a concept for a zero alcohol beer and pitched it to their local brewery. After a bit of nudging, the brewery took it on and so far its generated over 100,000 pounds to help Talk Club span out across the UK and help prevent male suicide. 

It’s not their only funding but it’s a nice chunk that doesn’t require putting in another grant application every year. 

I’ll give you another example. I love this one, Hawkes Brewing. To cut a long story short, co-founders Dave Gibson and Nathan Lennon approach Aussie ex-prime minister and beer drinking legend Bob Hawke to be the face of their beer. 

Bob said yes, on one proviso: in order to lend his name and face to the beer, he would earn a royalty from sales forever - and that royalty would go to Landcare, which he had helped establish way back in the 80s.

So here you have a famous person who values legacy over money helping create a new business model where Hawkes Brewing can donate a good chunk of its income to doing good, without it costing a cent that it wouldn’t have had to spend anyway to put Bob’s name on the brand and the beer. 

I’ve never seen that business model before and it could be easily replicated across other categories and products where you can find a famous person who wants legacy over money to help support it. 

So that’s my three little learnings from Season One. There are plenty more but hey, three is the magic number, right. 

But before I go, I want to give you a bonus one…one more. 

One of the things that has amazed me about talking to these founders of ‘good ideas’ is how few of them had experience in the thing they were going into.

Nik and Joss, the founders of Good Citizens had never worked in eyewear or fashion.

Maddi and Glenn, the founders of GreenPay had no previous experience in digital payment systems.

Lucy and Rikki from WAW Handplanes had never worked in the surf industry before. 

Maria Baker, who created Nobody’s Princess had never worked in snowwear. 

Alt.Leather’s Tina Funder had never run a deep tech company before. 

David Gibson and Nathan Lennon from Hawkes had never brewed a beer before.  

Ben Akers from Talk Club had never worked in a charity. 

Now best-selling author Natalie Kyriacou had never written a book before. 

What this tells me is that it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do to make the world a better place. If you’ve got a good idea and you’re prepared to put in the time, learn along the way and bring people to your cause, you can do it. 

It’s not easy but it’s proven to be possible time and time again

And I think that’s the biggest lesson of all.    

Thanks for listening.