Be More Pirate: Or How to Take on the World and Win by Sam Conniff Allende

Author:Sam Conniff Allende
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Pirates in a sea of waste

There’s no shortage of pirate-like social enterprises living out the ideals of redistributing power, making an enemy of exploitation and fighting for a fairer, more sustainable twenty-first century. A captain amongst such positive pirates is Kresse Wesling, CEO and founder of Elvis and Kresse.

Wesling says she’s always been fascinated by waste, even as a child; going to the dump with her dad she’d see beautiful old things in need of someone to repurpose them where other people simply saw rubbish.

In 2005, Wesling had been thinking about setting up a business in repurposing waste, but she wasn’t sure what type of waste she wanted to use or what her end product should be. Then she happened to meet some people from the London Fire Brigade on a course. From them she learned that damaged fire hose is thrown away as waste. Made of thick rubber, fire hose is pretty much the least recyclable thing known to humanity and was adding to the huge problem that is overspilling landfill sites. She realized that waste fire hose was the raw material of her dreams, and that this was a big problem that she was sure she could help solve.

Wesling scraped together some basic funding to get started and convinced the London Fire Brigade that it would be better to give her the decommissioned hose rather than pay to send it to landfill. She promised them that if her idea worked she’d give them 50 per cent of all her profits.

At first Wesling thought the hose might make good roof tiles for sheds. She was wrong. Research revealed that cut hose is no longer fireproof, and after ten years it would crack. Leaky flammable roofing was not a winner. But then she turned her eye to sustainable fashion and settled on bags. When she started to look for someone who could help her transform the waste hose, she realized the craftspeople with the necessary skills to work on such a tough material were diffuse, mostly in mainland Europe and not keen to work with what she had to offer. After a lengthy search, a partner with the requisite top-end craftsmanship pedigree was found. She finally persuaded this manufacturer to work with her, and together they produced a collection of beautiful handbags and wallets that combined ethics and aesthetics, waste and luxury. One of her early wins was persuading Apple to let her make a reclaimed fire hose iPhone case, that was stocked exclusively in their flagship London Apple Store. When a stylist picked one of her belts to use in a photo shoot with Cameron Diaz that ended up on the cover of Vogue, Elvis and Kresse found a new meaning of power for their products.

Once she had been recognized by one of the most powerful platforms in the hard-to-infiltrate world of high fashion, Wesling knew how to use that power and built her own brand whilst diversifying into new and more difficult waste products. Now, Elvis and Kresse

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.