Business impact vs business growth – with Kresse Wesling – Elvis & Kresse

Welcome to the Bring Your Product Ideas to Life podcast, practical advice

and inspiration to help you create and sell your own physical products.

Here's your host, Vicki Weinberg.

Today, I am so excited to have Kresse Wesling,

CBE join me on the podcast.

Kresse is a multi-award winning environmental entrepreneur.

Elvis and Kresse which rescued and transformed decommissioned fire hoses

into intuitive energy, lifestyle, products, and returns 50% of

profits to the firefighters charity.

The company now collects 12 different RightWay streams and has

several charitable partnerships and collaborations across industries.

agriculture project, generate their own renewables and implement a

host of environmental initiatives.

I first heard about Kresse after reading an interview with her and I am so happy

that she agreed to join me on the podcast.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it.

So, hi, thank you so much for being here.

Hi Vicki!

So can we start with you?

Please give an introduction to yourself, your business, and what you sell.

Sure.

My name is Kresse Wesling.

I'm the co-founder of Elvis and Kresse our business essentially does three things.

We rescue materials that would otherwise go to landfill.

We transform them into beautiful things, and then we donate

50% of the profits to charity.

So the line we're most known for is decommissioned fire hoses.

We collect the fire hoses that are too damaged to repair or have reached the

end of their health and safety life.

We make those into luggage, wallets, belt and accessories, and then 50% of the

profits goes to the firefighter's charity.

Amazing.

Thank you.

Now, I've heard your story about your inspiration for setting up Elvis

and Kresse, but for anyone listening who, who doesn't know, would you

mind taking us through that please?

Yeah, absolutely.

of tourist because the things that I wanted to see and learn about were what

people ate and what people threw away.

So I wanted to, you know, have mushy peas and I wanted to have chips and gravy.

I wanted to go to landfill sites and waste transfer stations and material

recovery facilities, and um, sewage treatment systems because I, I, I think

maybe if I'd been a doctor, I'd want to be a gastroenterologist, right?

I, I, I like the guts of things.

I'm fascinated by how, well, I guess really how we fail as a society.

And interestingly, right now in Britain, there's two things that we're really

failing at, um, very publicly yesterday, a huge sewage slick skirted across St.

Agnes Beach in Cornwall.

And that's because we don't treat our sewage properly and, and we're just so

inherently wasteful when it comes to food and textiles and, and everything else, and

it, it just, it just needs action taken.

Thank you.

And can I just ask, what were you, what were you doing at that time?

Um, professionally at the time when, when this was your interest?

Was it in that field or was this more of a personal interest that you had?

So I, my career, you know, has taken I guess a

lot of really interesting, um, turns and twists and turns.

I did a politics degree and then my first job quite randomly was at a venture

capital firm and there was nothing particularly eco or ethical about it.

Well, in fact, the opposite and, and when I left after two years, I

set up my first business, which was a biodegradable packaging business.

So what I learned when working in a, in a, in a VC was that business had the power

to make change and make change quickly.

But, uh, you know, my first business wasn't a a, a wild success.

So when I came to the UK I was really looking at, I was basically

trying to find a problem to solve.

So when I was going to all these landfill sites and, and treatment systems,

et cetera, I was looking to see if there was anything that I could do.

And when I first saw a fire hose in a landfill and then I went to

meet with London Fire Brigade, I really felt like, like that was my

calling and I didn't necessarily, I don't have any fashion background.

I didn't know in the beginning that that's what we would make, and I just

knew that I was going to rescue the hoses.

That was the, that was the reason to set up the business.

That was the reason to begin.

Thank you.

And what was it that you found out?

Um, did you have any numbers of how many fire hoses rendered

up in landfill at the time?

Yes.

So from London, which is by far the biggest brigade, uh, you have

three, between three and 10 tons a year that are going to to landfill.

And London also collects a lot of the hoses from the greater Southeast.

And the reason for that is because in London they have a hose in line

shop, which means hoses, which look damaged, can be sent there

to be repaired or decommissioned.

A lot of brigades, brigades don't have that, so they rely on London.

So I thought three to 10 tons, you know, given that each hose is about 18

kilos, I can, I can lift those, I can carry those, I can move those around.

I can, I can cut them, I can shape them.

So that's why I got excited about it because it was a,

it was in very niche waste.

It, there was no way to recycle it and I felt like it was a manageable amount and I

always had, when we started, I always had the idea that if we managed to solve that

problem for London, that would give us the license to solve other waste problems.

That would effectively be all the permission we needed to become,

um, I suppose more entrenched in, in the waste management sector.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Because I guess you have to start somewhere and get established

and, and prove that you can do what you're setting out to do.

Yes, yes, exactly.

So I'm really fascinated as, as the process of turning

decommissioned fire hoses into your products, which by the way look beautiful

and I think you've probably heard this before that I'm sure if people don't know.

About the material they come from that's not necessarily, wouldn't

necessarily be their first thought.

Um, how did you get from, from one to the other?

And I appreciate, that's a big question.

So we can take this in stages.

No, I mean, it's a, it's a brilliant question.

At first, we genuinely, I mean, fashion wasn't the first thing that we thought of.

I first thought of making roof tiles.

We, we, we went on a huge R and D extravaganza trying to understand

what fire hose is and what it's capable of and at the end of that, you

know, reading every research report we could find on nature of rubber.

Reading everything about where an industry was used and by whom and

for what and what its melting point was and what its heating point was.

That's when we discovered that, you know, other luxury companies have

been using a very similar material, uh, for quite some time now.

They're causing it to be made, so they're having it made in exactly the

thickness they want and in exactly the properties that they want.

Whereas fire hose has its own constraints.

So when we, when, when we first made a piece, uh, it was a belt and because

fire hoses long and straight and belts are long and straight, that was

actually relatively straightforward.

You know, the, the process that to make a belt means that

the fire hose has to be cut.

The fibre has to be cleaned and it has to be edged.

Now, that required some research, but it was relatively straightforward.

We could buy a rivet press for I think 164 pounds.

We could buy a rotary cutting tool for 49 pounds.

So people think you need a lot of money to start a company.

Um, you know, we, we often say that our, our only, our capital investment was

really 39 pounds for the cutting tool.

Um, but, but belts wasn't enough and, and certainly when we started cleaning the

fire hose, we were cleaning it by hand.

So that was never going to be sustainable long term if you're

talking about three to ten tons a year.

And that just propelled us on, uh, a wider research journey.

We investigated every potential method for cleaning the hose and it

actually took us seven years to get to the method that we're using now.

That process, uh, uh, that's that journey of seven years involved Elvis building a

machine involved us using a sort of, still a manual process, but one that allowed

us to clean five hoses at a time and finally doing a project with Electrolux to

design a machine specifically for cleaning fire hose, which is what we use now.

So that's just the cleaning.

We also had to work out how to take the edges off the hose because there's this

curved edge which is baked into the hose.

That took some, that took some discovery.

Um, and again, that resulted in building a machine.

Um, we had to learn how to thin the hose that didn't require us building a

machine, but it certainly discover led us to, you know, try lots of different

machines and then adapt one for our use.

Normal sewing machines don't work.

Um, so I, I mean, just at every turn we experience some sort of issue, but we

were so stubborn about the, the project.

You know, I'd made a commitment that we were going to rescue the hose, so no

matter what, we were going to rescue them.

And that just meant we kept going and kept trying.

And I suppose that's why 17 years later we're still around and

it's because it required a lot of upfront commitment and still does.

Still does to this day.

It is a huge commitment because I'm assuming

that you are taking sort of fairly big quantities of hoses in one go.

Yeah.

And actually something I haven't asked, um, which is I think

is a valid question is, so why are the hoses ended up in landfill anyway?

Is there nothing else that can, I mean, I know there's nothing else that can be

done of them, hence you taken this on.

But why do they end up in landfill?

So you've got two reasons why a hose gets decommissioned.

The first is, it reaches the end of its 25 year health and safety life.

That doesn't mean that the material is bad, that just means that they

no longer deem it to be safe for the fire industry to use as a fire hose.

The other reason it gets decommissioned is if you get a catastrophic tear somewhere

in the hose that they can't patch.

Kind of like a bike tire, some, some punctures you can

patch, some, you just can't.

So those are the two reasons why it gets decommissioned and the reason you

can't recycle it by traditional means, like you would glass or aluminium

is because you've got two layers of nitrile rubber that are extruded

around and through a nylon woven core.

The rubber and the nylon are married.

There is no way to separate them, so you can't shred the hoses and melt the hoses.

And start again.

These two materials are inextricably linked, and that means that all

forms of traditional recycling would fail the material.

And because there's only three to ten tons a year, nobody had decided

that they needed to develop a specific technology just for hoses.

That's that's why it was going to learn, basically because it was

one of these materials that we've designed in our linear society.

That's just a no hope.

Well, thank you.

I think this is, that's just really useful for us to understand.

Thank you so much for that.

So I'm interested as well, as well as the practical elements of sort of turning the

fire hoses into, into products to sell on.

What about the sort of the aesthetic and the design side.

How did you get there?

Because your bags do look really beautiful, really premium.

Um, did you have to work with somebody to, to come up with that?

I guess I asked these questions because I'm genuinely fascinated because I'm

not a person that can see one thing and imagine it as something else.

Something else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm really fascinated by that.

I think that's definitely the skill that Elvis has.

Um, Elvis always can see a destination, whether with any of the projects that we

take on, and, and we've been together.

Um, I don't know, since we were 25.

So we've been together for 20 years now, and he, he is very good at working out how

to translate an idea into an actual thing.

That's something that he's always been able to do, but I think something else

that's unique about our process is that we didn't ever want to design an IT bag.

We didn't want to design something that was trendy.

We wanted to make sure that we made utilitarian goods that were

well made and, and beautiful.

And that meant, again, a lot of research.

We spent time in some of the, um, you know, I suppose the, the high

end department stores in London, you know, Harvey Nichols and

Selfridges and Harrods, et cetera.

And we were asking the, the, the, the sales teams the same question everywhere

we went, we weren't saying, oh, what's, what's new right now and what's popular?

We were saying, What is perennial?

What do people actually need?

And after a lot of research, we discovered that there was about 11 to 16 pieces,

like a, a bucket tote for example, or wash bag or a billfold wallet.

And, and these were fairly universal shapes.

And the reason why they're universal in their perennial is because they're useful

and they fit with our lives and they fit with our bodies, and they fit with the

kinds of things we wanted to carry around.

So we had a, a list of items that we wanted to interpret with

hose, and then Elvis started tackling those things one by one.

And, and that's really made still our design process.

Now it's utilitarian.

And then we work on, um, then we work on forms.

So function comes first and then we work on form.

But even before form and function, the raw material is

why we do everything that we do.

Absolutely.

And it sounds like research is a huge, huge part of everything that you do.

Yes.

Um, because I think, I'm sure I'm right in saying you're

the first company to actually do this, so there's not like you're

following someone else's footsteps.

You are paving the way.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think, and in everything that we do, sometimes I wish we would just do

something slightly normal, but we never, we never seem to be able to do that.

We're never following a roadmap.

Um, you know, in any of the raw materials that we've chosen, in

any of the ways that we work.

And, um, yeah, we, we, we like to basically question,

we like to question systems.

The fashion system is one that needs questioning.

It's failed.

You know, when I first started looking at luxury, I, I wasn't

thinking, this is a great, wonderful, exciting industry to join.

I, I was thinking this is an industry that's a structural failure.

It makes money, but it makes money at the expense of the environment and it's

people, it, it, it isn't sustainable in any way, shape or form, despite the

claims of a lot of the companies that are involved in it even now, um, you know,

the greenwashing is just breathtaking in its audacity and just shows a

complete lack of understanding of what the word sustainability truly means.

So, So, yeah, I think we like to break new ground because it needs to be broken.

Following a path to destruction was never a path we wanted to follow.

And are you finding that other businesses

are following in your footsteps?

I mean, you, you may or may not be aware of that, but I, has anyone

come onto your radar that's kind of following in, in what you're doing?

Loads.

And, and certainly we even, um, we even know, so we've done some

work, uh, promoting what we did in promoting our approach to waste with

the British Council, and that there was a video that was made that was

shared all, all around the world.

And, and we, we had this report come back to us that our video had inspired the

launch of 40 new businesses, and that's just one, that's just one of the videos.

And I, I know personally that, you know, we do a lot of lectures at

business schools and things like that, and I've had students come back to me

years later saying, this led me to, to experiment with that and to try that.

And I'm not saying it's led lots of people to go into fashion, but it

certainly led a lot of people to go into waste and waste recovery and reuse

and, and yeah, certainly our language.

You know, we, we were the first people to use the word rescue instead of reclaim.

And now you see that word used everywhere by a lot of up and coming brands.

And it's wonderful because it's an emotive.

Um, but yeah, I guess it's, it's lovely to see that there are a lot of

businesses that are taking, um, more responsibility, but it's also, it's

also devastating to see that the fastest growing companies we have in fashion

or largely conscious free, you know, perfectly prepared to pay people wages

that we could only classify as modern slavery and, and churn out, you know,

new goods at a rate that is only possible if you're destroying the environment.

So yes, we've come a long way, but, there's still such a long way to go.

There is um, but I do think it must be really hard because

obviously as you said, you are paving the way, you're doing a lot of this

first, which is hard and timely.

Um, but it must be really satisfying to know that you've helped other people come

after you and that you've inspired that.

I think that's amazing.

Yeah, because someone has to be first because otherwise, you know,

lots of us feel like, oh, that's impossible or that can't be done.

But when you see somebody actually go ahead, go and do it, I think that

just opens up lots of possibilities.

Yeah.

If nobody ever changes anything, then nothing ever changes

Absolutely.

So let's actually, this is probably a good time actually to talk about the three

pillars of your business, if that's okay, and talk about those in a bit more detail.

Yeah.

So I guess.

We were always doing these three things, but probably about 10 years ago we got

down to this very distinct terminology because really it is what we do.

We rescue materials, so rescue, we transform them.

The goal for us is, is, you know, I'm not going to flip a fire hose on its side

and put a piece of glass on it and call it a coffee table, because that's not

transformation and maybe that will work for some people, but it's a bit gimmicky.

And it won't solve the fire hose problem.

So for us, transformation is quite important.

And then donation, which, which is, you know, our commitment to donate

50% of our profits to charity.

That's fundamental.

And that's fundamental at a human level.

You know, we are a living wage employer.

We manufacture all our goods ourselves to, to ensure that everybody who's

involved in the making of an Elvis and Kresse product is paid well.

Um, and also our communities are rewarded.

You know, we don't have a supply chain.

We have stakeholders.

We put our company at the service of the community in the beginning,

which was the fire service community, and it made sense for half of our

profits to go back to that community.

We've been questioned a lot about why we do that.

And, you know, I, I give lots of different answers.

Sometimes I'm very flippant and I say, look, you know, when we were

in kindergarten, we are taught to.

And then for some bizarre reason, the rest of our education teaches

us to be selfish and greedy.

I think we were all happier when we were in kindergarten.

If we were, we were honest, right?

Um, so sometimes I would answer like that.

Sometimes I would say that if you want to actually have a successful relationship

or a successful supply chain, then every part of it has to be valued.

So, so why not value the community that's at the heart of our business?

Um, other times, you know, when, when people are questioning it from

a marketing and a budget perspective and a reinvestment perspective,

I say, look, you know, there's 66,000 fire service personnel.

What other brand in its launch year would have 66,000 brand ambassadors?

Just doesn't, just doesn't happen.

So there's a, so the, the DNA for us works, and we won't take on a

new material unless we can duplicate that same DNA because it, it's just

a, it's a lovely, simple code that means everyone understands what we're

doing and we can be very transparent.

And it also ensures that impact is built into our model.

So if we grow, we can only grow by having more impact.

We can only grow if we're rescuing more materials and if

we're making increased donations.

And if we're creating more jobs that are living wage jobs and better.

So growth for us is, is only allowed by increasing our impact, and that's

because the DNA of the business and the three pillars have structured us.

And have given us that, that guiding, that basically that business

model, that sort of win, win, win.

Thank you.

And I really liked what you said about business impact.

I watched a video where you were talking about that and that really stuck with me

that it's not growth for growth's sake.

Mm.

Yeah.

I mean, we have, we are always obsessed with how companies can grow.

And actually even in, in the economy, they're always talking,

oh my gosh, we're going to we're going to only grow at 1% this year.

Why is, why is that a problem?

You know, if we are, if we are structured so much on consumption, that's

actually a flawed economic structure.

If we can't, if a, if a family can't survive.

You know, let's say a family of four can't survive.

If they, they only increase their income by 1% every year, then

we've got, we've got real problems.

So I think this obsession with growth is, it's not very helpful

and I know where it comes from.

It comes from shareholder capitalism.

It becomes, it comes from a place where lots of people put money into

businesses and then just expected that money to grow without their own

labor, without their own intervention.

They just expected money to make more money and that, that's kind

of where we went completely off the rails as a civilization.

Thank you.

I, I really, I was really inspired by hearing you talk about business impact.

Um, because I just think that flips it completely on its head

and just, it's just so much more human than them focusing on growth.

Um, so while we're while we talking about the impact of your business,

do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things, you

know, how your range has grown?

For example, some of the new materials you are using and some of the impacts

that you've been able to have?

Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, with the fire hose range, when we started, we never thought we'd be

able to rescue all of London's fire hoses.

After five years we were doing that.

We've increased our annual donations to the firefighters charity from, I think

134 pounds in our first year to over, over 60,000 pounds a year in, in recent years.

We also, when we got to, um, that stage where we were rescuing all

abandoned hoses, we were able to start looking at other materials.

So we rescued parachute, so, and tea sacks and um, probably

most famously leather waste.

And we have a partnership with the Burberry Foundation, um,

because we, we came up with the solution to leather scrap.

This is industrial off cut leather as opposed to, um, secondhand leather.

And when we were promoting this, we were talking about

it at a sustainability event.

We were approached by Burberry and they were really excited about

it and wanted to work with us.

So it took us ages to get that partnership off the ground.

But then, you know, once we, we finally got all the paperwork

signed, we were able to take responsibility for their leather scrap.

Um, but also they were sponsoring us to have a whole program of apprenticeships

and, and teaching and work experience opportunities so that we could

effectively train young people in the realities of the circular economy.

It was just really a wonderful partnership.

So we, we, we, through our leather work, we, we've now been expanding that and our

charity partner there is Barefoot College.

Um, so 50% of the profits from the leather project are go to create scholarships

for women to train as solar engineers.

Fire hose, firefighters, charity makes sense to a lot of people.

But you know what, why, why solar engineers?

And we just thought because cows are inextricably linked with climate change.

It's something that everybody talks about in meat consumption and cutting

down the Amazon to grow more grain, to feed more cows, et cetera, et cetera.

And we knew that the renewables, uh, revolution is the only thing that

you can really do to target that, and Barefoot allows you to target that

while also educating women who wouldn't have had any educational opportunities

before that, transforming communities, getting them off kerosene, getting

them off, burning wood in the home.

Um, and it is, it's just an incredibly transformative charity and, and we're

so proud to, to be working with them now and I think our seventh year.

Um, so yeah, there's impacts everywhere.

And then we've got a new project to rescue aluminium waste.

So this is littered aluminium cans.

We've designed with Queen Mary University, a micro solar forge for transforming this

littered aluminium into a usable metal.

And we've open sourced that technology so it can be used

all over the world by anyone.

They don't have to pay me, they just have to build it themselves.

And just, we just love to do exciting and wonderful things.

And I suppose we're now in that phase as a business where, where we can do

maybe be a bit more adventurous and, and that's why we just, before the

pandemic, we moved to a farm, we decided that being sustainable wasn't enough.

We had to be net regenerative.

Um, and for us that meant taking charge of an ecosystem that was damaged.

And what we've been able to do here is, is so far really amazing.

Um, we're, we're practicing regenerative agriculture, which focuses on

rebuilding soil health, sequestering carbon into the soil, making it, uh,

more, uh, water, you know, making it able to hold more water and be more

resilient in a drought situation.

So I think there's kind of, we do a lot of things.

We're in some ways spread quite thin at the moment, but, um, that's because

we've got 10 years to save the planet.

And Elvis and I are very aware that if, if we're not having, if we're not

making a conscious effort to have a big impact on biodiversity, loss of

climate change, then, then we are wasting our time and we're wasting whatever

talent we have because if we're not addressing the two big problems of

the day, then what's the point of us?

What's the point of the business?

Yeah, thank you.

And um I'm, because you mentioned it, spreading yourself quite thin.

One thing I'm curious about is, are you actively, because I guess there's

a bit of a balance is that, are you actively seeking opportunities to

rescue products or materials that say and turn them into products?

Or are these things coming to you?

Because when I look at all that you're doing, it's a, it's a lot.

It is a lot.

I think what, what we would like to do now, because I think we've

taken for the, at the moment, we've probably, our stable is full.

So I have a huge list of materials that I'd like to go after.

Once we are sustainably rescuing all of the materials we've, we've currently

taken responsibility for, um, but that still e, so even though we can't

process, ourselves, necessarily more material, what we do find ourselves

doing more and more is working collaboratively with other companies

and helping them with their problems.

And we never thought we would do that.

So 15, 16 years ago, we never thought we would do any kind of

consulting, but we are doing those kinds of projects, uh, more and more.

Because there's a lot of companies that will have a very specific niche problem

and they just need someone a little bit crazy to think about the problem

for them and come up with some off the wall ideas that that can help them.

I, I, if I think about the kind of impact we need to have in a very short period

of time, it doesn't make sense for the world's waste to come to our site in Kent.

What does make sense is for our way of thinking to spread because thoughts

can certainly spread much faster than, you know, raw materials can be

aggregated and transformed, and so on.

Absolutely.

And you mentioned you're doing everything in house on your workshop on your farm.

So you, there must be a capacity, there must be only

a certain amount that you can.

Yes.

And also, yes.

And, and you know, we haven't ever taken external funding or financing.

So our, and that is specifically because we wanted to stay independent.

We wanted to be able to do the mad things of the important work and,

and, and really think of growth of impact before growth of profit.

Um, so that does mean that, that any growth that we do achieve

is completely organic and, and, and actually relatively slow.

Which, which is fine with me, but that's also in, in a time when

change needs to happen quickly.

That's why we, we think that the, one of the most important things

that we can do is collaborate and, and share our ideas more widely.

Thank you.

And so my final question is for anyone who's listening, who's perhaps inspired,

um, by your story and would like to build a sustainable business or perhaps

has a business but wants to perhaps flip it and make it more sustainable,

what advice would you have please?

So there's one rule of thumb that we use all the time,

and you know, it's going to sound perhaps oversimplified because

sustainability is complicated and supply chains are complicated, and

carbon accounting is complicated.

But you have to ask yourself a key, fundamental question, is what you're

doing going to make the world better for other people's grandchildren or not?

So there's two things.

Other people means that what you're doing has to inherently be unselfish.

It can't just be about increasing wealth for you and your family and

grandchildren implies long-term thinking.

You know, we can't, we, the whole shareholder thing where you have to

do quarterly reports is ridiculous.

You know, we've set up a farm.

Imagine if we had to do quarterly reports on a farm, especially given the

It wouldn't have been pretty reading.

You have to plan for the long term and you have to plan things in everyone's benefit.

And if, if you look at something that you're doing and go, yep, this is

going to make the world better for other people's grandchildren, and

if you can be certain about that, then I can pretty much guarantee

you it's going to be sustainable.

And it means that you won't be able to make landmines.

It means you won't be able to frack.

It means you won't be able to design a business model

around a single use plastic.

It means you wouldn't be able to run a water company, which relied

on the sea to be your overflow for a sewage because you hadn't bothered

to invest in the infrastructure.

So we have to ask ourselves these questions, and I think actually

it's time for hard questions.

And if your business model doesn't meet that one basic question, if it

can't live up to the standard of other people's grandchildren, then you've got

to shift and you've got to shift now.

Thank you so much.

And thank you for everything that you shared with us today.

No problem.

I've really enjoyed it.

Me too.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode and do

remember that you can get the full back catalogues and lots of free resources

on my website, vicki weinberg.com.

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