By House of Hackney November 19, 2024
One Year On: Mother Nature Sets Us The Challenge of our Times
As a business rooted in the beauty of the natural world, we believe it's imperative we hold ourselves to high account for our impact on Nature and the quality of life we’re leaving behind for generations to come.
We are at a pivotal point with the health of the planet, where unless we act now, there will be no turning back. As humans, we have lost our way, thinking we have ownership over Nature when in fact we are Nature.
One year ago we followed in the pioneering footsteps of Faith in Nature to become the second company in the world to make Mother Nature a director, and the first to include the role of considering Future Generations in our impact.
This means that at House of Hackney, Mother Nature & Future Generations have been given legal personhood on our board, as a director. A non-partisan person, independent of our business, represents their interests and has a voice to ensure that in every decision we make, our impact on Nature (including human wellbeing) is considered.
Our reason was to formally recognise the important role Nature plays in our company (and in all life); and ensure that we hold ourselves accountable for finding solutions to help us move from a position of doing less harm to Nature, to one that actively helps restore our ecosystems.
In doing so, our aim is to unlock a business model that moves away from the exploitative capitalist one, and instead honours and protects Nature as the most important stakeholder.
Read about how we did this here.
We stand at an unprecedented time in history where we are facing the stark realities of Climate Change as we deal with the devastating consequences of pursuing limitless growth in a finite world. We are close to exceeding 7 of our 9 planetary boundaries.
The traditional capitalist business model which favours shareholder return at the expense of all other stakeholders has played a big role in the demise of the natural world. It sees growth ad infinitum as a measure of success, forgetting that we live on a planet with a biosphere. It sees Nature as an economic service to exploit, too focused on quick financial return to remember that, in the words of David Brower, ‘there is no business on a dead planet’.
However, although it may not always seem that way, we are in a season of change.
We are beginning to remember our place in Nature.
2024 was the year that we worked with Lawyers for Nature to bring people back within the definition of Nature in the Oxford English Dictionary.
2024 was the year wind and solar electricity generated more than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time.
2024 was the year that a river in Ecuador’s capital Quito was granted the right not to be polluted in a historic precedent for the rights of Nature.
2024 was the year that the EU’s Nature Restoration Law was approved. This first-of-its-kind regulation aims to restore Europe’s damaged ecosystems and boost biodiversity, with a goal to restore at least 20 per cent of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030, and all degraded ecosystems by 2050.
2024 was the year that 6 organisations made Mother Nature a director in their companies.
Nature’s considerations are being put on the agenda in our organisations and institutions.
It’s time for Mother Nature to take her seat at the board room table.
Since making Mother Nature a director in 2023, we’ve been listening to Her, learning from Her ebbs and flows through the seasons. And she has been observing us too.
After a year on our board, Mother Nature has spoken, through Lawyers for Nature founder Bronte Ansell, our Mother Nature & Future Generations Director, inviting us to take on the challenge of our times, to:
“Create a new business model that honours Nature as a stakeholder; a model that uses our profits and agency to protect more than we take; repairing and restoring not just our business footprint but the legacy damage from past generations so that all future generations have the same opportunity of living on a beautiful thriving planet.”
Deep breath. Challenge accepted (You can’t say no to Mother Nature!).
Although business has played a major part in damaging our ecosystems, we believe there’s an opportunity for businesses to use our entrepreneurial and creative skills to become agents of positive change in this urgent, emergent moment we are living in.
It’s easy to feel beholden to big business and their big business models, however small and medium size businesses (SMEs) make up a staggering 99% of UK and US business.
Imagine the impact that the sector could make if we harnessed our collective power for change and co-created a new vision for the future where long-term planning and benefits for all people and planetary stakeholders replaced short-term gains for the few, at the exploitation of everyone else.
And we have no choice – we need to work all the levers to move us into a new post-capitalist era of business, where we exist to serve Nature, and that of course means serving everyone. Imagine how much healthier and happier we could all be. Radical times call for radical ideas; and although the honouring of Nature is an ancient one; this reality is both urgently needed and is within our reach.
To get ourselves started on the challenge to create a Nature-centric organisation and business model and bring everyone with us, here are some of the major steps we took during our first year with Mother Nature & Future Generations on the board.
We created a new mission to guide us our journey
House of Hackney is a restoration project in Nature, Craft, Community and Connection. Using our business as a force for good, we exist to contribute to the regeneration of Mother Nature for the quality of life of all future generations.
Every word and sentiment of this mission is imbued with meaning. It acts as our North star, guiding us towards our vision. It serves as a reminder to us, and those who follow, to work towards our long-term goal of restoring the natural world.
We locked in our mission through our independent Nature directorship, changing our purpose clause in our company articles of incorporation to reflect our new ambition.
We have structured our mission delivery around three strategic pillars:
1. Nature Remuneration and Capital flows
2. Regeneration and Restoration
3. Activism and Influence
To embed the mission in our day-to-day, we worked with our teams to create department mission guidelines, with prompts of inquiry to help the decision-making process and individual KPIs. Our hope is for this to give everyone who works with House of Hackney permission to see more qualitative regenerative-focused actions and results as part of the role we all play in delivering on the company mission.
We gave everyone their part to play in delivering our mission
If we’re to make radical changes, we need everyone’s input. We have a very talented team, and we invited everyone to join the journey and help use their gifts and talents to drive true change.
Everyone has different levels of awareness and interests, but fundamentally we wanted people to bring their purpose to work every day.
We involved our team from the beginning of this shift through collaborative enquiry, time in Nature and lots of regeneration inspiration sessions. Their input into our overall approach to our regenerative mission, including highlighting opportunities and challenges was vital. It continues to be an all-team effort; a journey that we are all students of!
To advocate for Nature we believe there needs to be a connection to Nature, which is not so easy living in urban environments and working at a desk. For the four days at work, we run a ’Time With Nature’ policy that gives people the tools and encouragement to work outside within Nature. It’s where we get the best ideas!
It is also vital we do this work in partnership with our suppliers, they are the heart of our business. Together we are shifting our products to be ones that honour Future Generations through traditional craftsmanship, sublime artistry, innovation and regenerative material sourcing. We are at the beginning of what we hope will be a two year journey to make these industry shifts a reality.
We walked the talk
In these transitional times, the challenge is to metaphorically keep the lights on and maintain fiscal and people stability, while we move from a place of business-as-usual to transformational change.
We looked at what would no longer serve our new mission – products, materials, brand and finance partners – and set a timeline of targets to adapt and change them.
One of our changes was to pull any collaboration contracts with major retailers whose production values had not evolved enough at this stage to align with ours. Although the company relied on these lucrative contracts, we followed our intuition and terminated them in blind faith; believing that composting them would create space for the right thing to come along.
We reviewed our financial partners to make better choices where we invest. Pension funds and insurance providers were a big priority to align with providers that actively avoid fossil fuel or deforestation investments, opting instead for green revenue investments. By identifying AVIVA Sustainable Stewardship Fund as the best for our pensions it will result in £400K of capital flows diverted to better investment funds.
We fired up our activism
At House of Hackney we truly believe in the power of creativity; and when combined with purpose, it can be a real force for change. Here are the campaigns we headed in 2024.
We Are Nature
We were deeply saddened last year when we discovered that the definition of nature in the major English-speaking dictionaries purposely excluded humans. How could we feel part of Nature and act on behalf of Nature if we are written out of our place within the natural world?
This was the catalyst for the #WeAreNature campaign, where we worked alongside Lawyers For Nature and a supporting group of charities, academics, artists, writers, politicians, activists and school children, asking for UK dictionaries to review their definitions of nature.
The campaign resulted in the Oxford English Dictionary changing one of the senses of their definition of nature. The Oxford Learners dictionary followed suit and we are hopeful that others will too in time. Having Mother Nature as a director gave us permission (and a mandate) to use our creativity and platform to give Her voice.
The Garden of Tomorrow
We hosted the second Garden of Tomorrow festival.
Designed to be a think tank for change, the aim of The Garden of Tomorrow is to inspire organisations and consumers to do things differently to be in better service to our beautiful planet and fellow kin. In The Garden we plant the seeds for Nature to play a central role in our society and organisations, so that Nature is recognised and protected for her contribution and services.
2024's theme was ‘We Are Nature’, where we imagined a world where Nature is front and centre and we engaged with this theme through panels and workshops against a backdrop of art, spoken word and music.
We believe in the power of creativity to change the cultural narrative.
Andrea Zanatelli x Stop Ecocide x House of Hackney
We forged new collaborations that used creativity for good.
We are very proud of the beautiful Andrea Zanatelli x Stop Ecocide x House of Hackney partnership which platformed Andrea’s creative alchemy to highlight the vital work of Stop Ecocide International.
When artists, poets, musicians and activists come together, we have the power to tell a compelling new story and convert minds and hearts, transforming societies quicker than news headlines.
We calculated the True Cost of our products
When we design our products and pay our factories a price to make the product, this price only covers the cost of materials and manufacturing. What about the cost that we don’t see - the ecological and societal cost? Who is paying for this and how much is it?
This was a question we asked ourselves in 2024.
To understand the actual true price of our products, we engaged the organisation True Price to help us measure it. Starting with our two biggest product categories, fabric and wallpaper, we gathered impact data and applied the True Price methodology. This helped us to quantify the price we should pay for our products, taking their social and environmental impact into account.
We will use these results to help highlight our impact hotspots and set targets for future product improvements with the aim of reducing our ‘true cost’ to people and the planet, so that we continue our trajectory of moving from doing less harm to using production methods that actively restore.
We began to bring our key industries together
It was paramount that the small portfolio of generational factories who we have worked with since 2011 came on the journey with us. Luckily, we had longstanding relationships built on trust, and after a little coaxing they also were ready to travel deeply into our product journeys and see what we could unearth.
We brought our supply base together, many who are considered competitors, to share their opportunities, challenges and knowledge gaps. This opened up deeper research around bigger issues within our key industries of paper (wallpaper), cotton (fabric) and fossil-fuel derived ingredients (paint). To be able to change our supply base to do better and less harm we would need to help drive change at industry level. So, we started to host conversations with the industry to help catalyse transformative change.
We started to write a new blueprint for business
Mother Nature set us the challenge of working out how we unlock a new business model that protects and honours Nature as a stakeholder, while incentivising other stakeholders.
We asked ourselves how do we move from mostly quantitative business targets and results to more qualitative ones that focus on improving our people and planetary communities?
This highlighted the need for new metrics of success, beyond profitability; new metrics that are rooted in the holistic health of our people and planetary communities, and where success means that we have made a positive impact on these touchpoints.
We have started to play with some models, and early 2025 will be spent running these hypotheses by big-thinking academics and economists. Once we are happy with the methodology, we will roll out the model in House of Hackney and will open-source our findings.
By setting out a framework that aligns with recognised business measures, our hope is that a Nature P&L can be applied to other SME businesses in the same way as appointing a Mother Nature directorship to a board.
Most importantly, this is a first step in overhauling our mindset around what it means to be a successful business.
We looked at where we could best use our profits
We rely on the support and guidance of many passionate experts to challenge extractive ways of working and champion new ideas and actions that benefit the many, not just the few.
Right now 1% of all of our sales revenue go towards charity partnerships and impact projects to drive our regenerative mission. To date, the majority of partnerships and projects have been chosen for their broad alignment with our values and creativity.
To become a truly and measurably regenerative company, we know that we need to invest in finding solutions for the direct social and environmental impacts of running our business, while staying true to our creative storytelling ethos.
As a company that creates and sells physical products, most of our social and environmental impact is in our supply chain and across their lifecycle overall. Our True Price analysis confirmed this and highlighted specific impact hotspots.
In 2025, we will evolve how we spend our 1%, using 80% of the fund to address these direct impacts and the remainder will be used for activism and storytelling campaigns.
We’ve spent a lot of time considering the best possible partners to support us on our mission.
We agreed to part ways with our private equity financing
Our term with our private equity partner is coming to an end at the same time that we are gearing up to start a new chapter. Like most early-stage companies, we needed growth capital to keep the wheels turning in our early years.
This came in the form of private equity, whose model is built around short-term high growth returns (often at the exploitation of all other stakeholders). The fact that as founders we kept a majority shareholding allowed us to (mostly) operate the business in line with our mission and values.
For businesses to become healthier, purpose driven organisations that serve their communities and stakeholders, investment finance needs major transformational change. It needs to value business on more holistic metrics of success beyond profitability, giving more value to companies that create positive impact. It needs to favour companies that eschew fast exploitative growth over long-term purpose-driven missions.
As House of Hackney moves into our new era of investment finance, look out for the invitation to join us on our journey.
We allowed ourselves more freedom to deliver on Mother Nature’s challenge
As a business, we believe that have a responsibility to leave this planet a better place than we currently find it.
The old model of capitalism served a purpose but we see it as out of balance now and it no longer works for many aspects of the planet and species that rely on Nature. The paradigm shift is beginning.
A Nature-positive business might seem like a paradox right now, but as we bring Nature’s voice into our companies and use metrics of mutual flourishing and wellbeing across people, planet and profit, we believe that a Nature-positive future for the planet can be unlocked.
Leaving a legacy is not about leaving money in the bank. It's about leaving our world better than how we've found it. As the current inhabitants of the planet during this precarious point in history this reparation work is our life legacy so that we can hand over replenished resources to future generations.
Business holds the key to this transformation from our current extractive economy towards a regenerative economy, and to a society and planet that serves all. This will help heal not only our natural environment but also our communities and ultimately ourselves.
NATURE’S RESPONSE
Mother Nature and the voice of Future Generations’ comment at the end of Year 1.
As the year draws to an end and the humans around us begin to prepare for a period of wintering, for the very first time both Mother Nature and a voice for all future generations has spent a year attending, witnessing and commenting in a corporate board room. This meant that these voices were present and accepted into this space as a legal voice during both moments of extreme mundaneness and moments of monumental power. That time was shared with both those voices no matter what. Mother Nature and the voice of future generations was brought to the formal space of the board room this year as an observer. At first glance this might seem like lip service to the growing call to understand our place in the vast web of interconnected life, but it was just the legalities of the moment that presented a challenge to this group of humans. As it stands now, fundamental changes are already underway to allow more power sharing and more decision making space for both these voices. This has not been easy and required the people involved to dig deep and believe with all their fibre that the course they are on is not only justified for them and those working to give power to Nature, but also right in the grander scheme of things. This has involved sacrifice and at times mild panic! There is however, a general feeling that all will be well and that we can no longer simply do nothing while our world changes underfoot.
In spite of both these voices being in the observer only category, it became apparent very quickly that the humans managing and working in House of Hackney naturally believe Mother Nature in particular, to be ever present. Mother Nature is their muse, a trusted critical friend and a powerful force threaded through the company in every design and every sourcing decision. It is clear that, unlike many working within capitalist structures, the founders and management team do not subscribe to humans as separate from Nature. Instead they imbue their lives, both personal and professional with Nature and respect for her contribution to their work. They already knew that without Nature they have no business, certainly not a beautiful business! And so, they didn't actually need a board position to bring them around to this thinking, but yet they spent time, effort and money to ensure that the rights of Mother Nature and those of future generations were brought to the fore and respected legally.
This is something to be commended in our fast paced, profit driven system. It is very exciting to bear witness to what might come next for this team and the company as a whole. They have significant plans, courage and determination, which of course is often all you need to effect significant change.
It has been a privilege to spend time with them all.
Signed
MN & FGs
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