OUR TRUE COST
Redefining business success

At House of Hackney, we believe in a future that benefits all. We want to move away from the current model of business where only the few profit, at the exploitation of others, and to the detriment of our planet.
Creating and selling products comes with responsibility. Materials, factories, shipping and more rely on Nature’s resources and people’s time & skills. Global Footprint Network estimates that every year one and half planets worth of resources are used to sustain our current lifestyles globally. By 2050, that could increase to three planets worth.
Most businesses do not take this into account and define their success only by how much money they make.
We want to change this. We believe that understanding the ‘true cost’ of our impact on Climate, Nature and Inequality now and in the future is not only the right thing to do, it is smart business.
A Nature Account
In 2024, we began measuring our ability to support good social and environmental health through our business, alongside our financial health by developing a Nature Profit & Loss (P&L) Statement.
So what’s a Nature P&L? A traditional profit and loss statement is a financial report that sums up how much money a business has made and spent over a period of time. We are evolving ours so that it shows the cost our production has on Nature, including human wellbeing.
This way of accounting assigns a monetary value to a variety of social and environmental factors needed to run our business, for example soil health and living wages. It then looks at our positive or negative effects and gives a final figure for how truly profitable we can claim to be.
This is an important first step in overhauling our business ‘success’ metrics.

Our Product’s True Cost
We started our Nature P&L journey by analysing the amount our products should cost when their social and environmental expense is taken into account.
With support from True Price, we focused on our two best selling product categories, wallpaper and velvet fabric, gathering impact data and applying the True Price methodology. This helped us to quantify the price we should pay suppliers for our finished products, compared to what we currently pay.
For wallpaper, we discovered that we should pay 19 pence more for every square metre than we currently are. For velvet fabric, a true price would be two pounds seventy-six pence more for every square metre than we currently pay. Please see a summary of our True Price analysis results here:
What this means for us
The most notable outcome of the true price analysis was discovering we should be investing between 3 - 5% of our sales revenue into reducing the impact of our products if we want a negative true price. Currently, we invest 1% of sales revenue.
As a small to medium sized business (SME), 3 - 5% of our sales is significant. However, we owe the success of our business to Mother Nature and trust that investing in ways of working that restore and regenerate her is an investment in our collective future.
Our aim is to reduce our products' true price over time, moving from being degenerative, where any additional price is calculated to one of where our true price switches to a negative figure and our products start becoming regenerative to Nature. We will repeat our true price analysis in 2026.
Our call to action
Our hope is that this way of looking at financial success can be applied to other SME’s and together, we can shift the perception of business success to thriving for all.
We are early days in these developments and although they are not perfect solutions, we are committed to improving their accuracy over time, and sharing our findings in 2025.
For other SME’s we ask, have you considered what the true cost of running your business is? Read our full True Price report here.


Our Activism
Our purpose at House of Hackney is to advocate for Nature by informing and activating people to protect and restore all that she does for life on Earth.

Our Community
From forest protection, to regenerative agriculture and supporting a new generation of diverse talent, we are proud to work hands-on with leading global and local leaders in this space.