Reclaiming what it means to be a luxury brand
How UK-based Elvis & Kresse has spent almost 20 years crafting luxury goods out of waste leather, and building a unique business brand in the process.
If you haven’t heard of Elvis & Kresse, you’re in for a treat. Since 2005 they’ve been making beautifully designed bags and homeware from 15 different reclaimed materials including London’s decommissioned fire hoses. And the numbers show that circular economy works: they sell more than 10,000 items annually, donate 50% of profits to The Fire Fighters Charity, and picked up a CBE from Buckingham Palace in the process for their contributions to Enterprise.
“Something is only waste if you choose to see it that we. It usually costs around £410 to dispose of 1 tonne of leather, we can turn that into £100,000 of luxury products.”
Co-Founder Kresse Wesling gave her ‘10 hot takes’ on how creative industries can prove that business value and climate impact go hand-in-hand.
⚡ 1. Creative industries have so far had a hall pass on environmental action.
For the last few decades, we’ve said to creative industries like film, arts, music, fashion, that destruction in the pursuit of art is fine.
But the costs of the materials used, the people who have been exploited, the energy that has been used, it’s out of control.
Creative destruction is no longer an excuse.
💡 2. We have been asking creatives and designers the wrong questions, so we are getting them to solve the wrong problems.
Is it really that interesting to just expect a designer to be a great blue sky thinker? To come up with something new? Or worse, a rehash of something old (think the whole back and forth between flared and fitted or high and low waisted jeans… oh the agony).
What if we asked really creative questions, what if we asked them to design away, but with one rule, they had to consider every single impact of their decisions and aim for net regenerative outcomes for nature and humanity, leaving everything better than they found it.
An example: Don’t think about using less or less damaging materials, think instead about how what you use could be doing to help clean more water, generate more renewable energy, or create higher quality, fairly paid jobs? You don’t operate in isolation, you’re part of a system, and so your actions will have impact. It is up to you whether you choose to make it positive.
Elvis + Kresse started with sustainable design thinking to create a classic tote bag from recycled fire hoses
🗣️ 3. When you’re starting out, be good and you can be genuinely unique.
We’ve been doing this since 2005, way before environmental action got popular.
When we started upcycling fire-hoses, we decided to build a company at the heart of a community by donating 50% of our fire-hose profits to The Firefighters Charity. There are about 66,000 firefighters in the UK, and they have friends and networks. By genuinely serving this community we gained tens of thousands of brand ambassadors who wanted to buy goods, share the story, and support the cause.
Now our customer base is global and the rise of conscious consumers has helped us to grow even further.
If you are good, genuinely good, and you do something pretty spectacular this is all the USP you need. It turns out that you don’t need a marketing strategy if the truth is interesting and compelling enough. Imagine if the greenwashers put all their energy into just being green!
🌐 4. Capitalism disrupted ecosystem thinking, but we need to get back there
In an ecosystem there is no king but in capitalism, the shareholder is king and management teams are legally obliged to maximise profit for their king/shareholder. Ecosystems are underpinned by symbiosis, capitalism is underpinned by selfishness, no wonder we are where we are.
As a business, we’ve changed this on two levels: the ecosystem where we work and the commercial ecosystem we are trying to build.
Firstly we built a near passive workshop on a dilapidated farm where we could clean more water than we use, generate more energy than we need, and also run a regenerative agriculture project designed to turn grade 3 degraded pasture into a thriving, abundant, biodiverse ecosystem. We want to be net regenerative in our operations by 2030, and are figuring out what that means as we go.
And secondly, we deposed the king. The constitution of our business actually states that shareholders are not more important than people and planet. Also, as a founding UK BCorp (with one of the highest scores in the world) and proponent of the Better Business Act we are demanding that other companies be held to this same ‘ecosystem’ standard. Shareholder primacy just has to go.
♾️ 5. Something is only ‘waste’ if you choose to see it that way.
Our business is founded on taking materials which have reached the end of one lifespan, and turning them into beautiful goods which last decades. Every single piece we make is a one-of-a-kind.
We’re super proud to have been able to rescue all of London’s fire-hoses since 2005. These are incredibly durable but due to safety regulations need to be retired after 25 years or when they are too damaged to repair. Now are working with other waste products, including failed parachute panels, tea sacks, printing blankets and Burberry’s leather off-cuts. We recently hit the amazing milestone of 300 tonnes of material rescued.
And this saves money. Businesses have to pay to dispose of their waste products. The statistic I like to use is that it costs around £410 to dispose of 1 tonne of leather, we can turn that into £100,000 of luxury products.
There are over 35,000 tonnes of leather waste produced each year by the Western European luxury industry, just imagine the amount of new products and jobs we can create by rescuing and transforming these instead of sending them to landfill.
🔄 6. Speaking of Burberry, partnerships are key to rebuilding the ecosystem mentality.
Since 2017 we’ve been working with Burberry to rescue and transform waste leather into new goods like rugs or panels in bags. We now have a whole line - the Fire and Hide collection - which is crafted through the transformation of Burberry’s leather fragments (and sometimes with our fire hoses too).
We help to solve a problem they couldn’t tackle themselves, and in the process have had more than a hundred of their employees come through our workshop - engaging them in the ‘value from waste’ concept, and inspiring them to think differently about their role in the fashion ecosystem.
No-one can deliver the circular economy on their own. We need more bold partnerships like this.
Examples of the rugs and bags made with leather from Burberry offcuts
🧮 7. Success means finding new metrics to celebrate
In our business we don’t have control over the waste which comes in. We have to be creative with the materials at hand, which are constantly changing and never guaranteed.
This creates new and exciting metrics for success.
We find joy in running out of stock as we feel our job is done! It isn’t something to fear, it is something to celebrate!
Equally we have always focussed on impact - we celebrate how much we rescue and how much we donate, which is so much cooler than celebrating turnover.
🍂 8. If your brand is still doing seasons, you’re not actually encouraging consumers to change.
The luxury industry is in many ways running at ‘fast fashion’ pace.
Pace means volume, it drives overconsumption and waste, and ultimately that means destruction - of people’s energy and of environmental resources. Burnout in the fashion industry is huge, and that leads to a waste of talent in the long-run.
Seasons also ultimately devalue stock, and we don’t want to do that. A huge amount of care has gone into making every piece and we’re proud of it. We don’t do Black Friday, we have never produced dead stock, we want to grow steadily and not in the endless up and down way of many fashion companies.
🔎 9. In a time where transparency is key, tell the truth about everything.
No organisation is perfect especially when it comes to environmental impact. And it can be tempting to obscure something about your supply chain if you don’t have all the answers.
In the long run, that doesn’t work.
We have always been as transparent as possible. You can come visit the farm where we’re making products, you can see our raw materials and processes, see the solar panels, the heat pumps, even our glorious nature based sewage system if you’re curious.
The formerly dilapidated farm Elvis & Kresse are regenerating as part of their operations in Kent, England
⭐ 10. Crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin.
If your business doesn’t accept where the world is going when it comes to climate change, biodiversity loss, consumer preference, or pending regulations, you are in for a shock.
We have a simple rule for how we make decisions at Elvis & Kresse: If a business decision is bad for other people’s grandchildren, don’t make it.
It’s amazing how much simpler this makes things, in terms of people and planet it is the ultimate North Star.
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Further reading:
Learn about Barefoot College International where Elvis & Kresse donate part of their profits. BCI has spent 50 years helping rural women across 93 countries to learn trades and become economically empowered
Formed during the Second World War in 1943, this year marks the 80th anniversary of The Fire Fighters Charity
Stay tuned for more articles on how creative industries are proving out the economic opportunities from environmental actions.