Impact Strategist Amirah Jiwa on Why There's No Such Thing as a Truly Sustainable Business

Robyn McLean is the co-founder of Hello Cup, a company that creates high-quality menstrual cups that last for at least 5 years, saving the user the equivalent of over 2000 single-use tampons. But Hello Cup is not only saving waste – it’s changing the way people talk about periods. Their taglines include ‘bloody brilliant’, ‘no strings attached’ and they even have a feature on their website where you can swap the word vagina out for a fun nickname of your choice, if vagina sounds a bit too serious.The brand’s cups are designed by Robyn’s co-founder Mary Bond, who’s a registered nurse, and they recently won a Good Design Award for, in the judge’s words, ‘turning a functional product into something fashionable and joyful’. In this episode, you’ll learn how to turn a side passion into a full-time gig, just how long pesky pads and tampons take to break down in landfill and how to stand out from your competitors and make your customers giggle through clever branding.To learn more about Hello Cup, check out their website.Read the full transcript of this interview and show notes here.Watch Conscious Commerce interviews in full on noissue's YouTube channel. 

Cally Russell is the co-founder of This Is Unfolded, a company that creates made-to-order clothes, and then reinvests the money back into the communities who are creating them.  When the pandemic hit in 2020, brands cancelled over $2 billion dollars worth of clothes orders with factories that were mainly in developing countries. This left workers without jobs or livelihoods and an estimated hundreds of millions of pieces of clothing destined for landfill.To solve this problem, Cally created Lost Stock, which sold mystery boxes of clothing to people around the world to save them from being wasted and support factory and garment workers. The goal was to sell 10,000 boxes, but the team ended up selling 125,000.  This Is Unfolded continues this new way of shopping by taking excess stock out of the equation.In this episode, you’ll learn Cally’s top tips on how to rethink the status quo in your industry, just how much clothing is sent to landfill in a normal retail model, and how to find purpose-led shoppers and build a community around them. To learn more about This Is Unfolded, check out the website.Read the full transcript of this interview and show notes here.Watch the full interview on noissue's YouTube channel.

Amirah Jiwa is a social impact and sustainability strategist who helps brands define what sustainability means to them and meaningfully act on it by creating and communicating impact. She has worked on impact strategy with brands such as  Sephora and Mailchimp. She says there’s no such thing as a truly sustainable business, because where brands go wrong is thinking sustainability is something that you are when it’s actually something that you do – which means there is constant room for improvement. In this episode, you’ll learn how to communicate impact instead of buzzwords as a brand, Amirah’s top tips for being a savvy shopper and spotting greenwashing and why you should take comfort in the fact that when it comes to sustainability, there’s no such thing as perfection, there’s only progress. To read the interview transcript and learn more about Amirah Jiwa, check out the show notes here.Watch the full interview on noissue's YouTube channel.

Flora Davidson is the co-founder and head of product at SupplyCompass, an online platform that helps fashion brands and manufacturers work better together to sustainably source, design and deliver clothing collections.In the future, Flora would like for people to not have to mention the word sustainable ever again because it has become the norm in the fashion industry. To help make this world a reality, SupplyCompass is using technology to streamline old ways of working and reduce unnecessary waste in areas like clothing samples. Its platform also helps brands consider their impact on people and the planet through the sourcing, supply chains, and production of clothing. The goal is to create a new way of working throughout the entire supply chain in fashion, with sustainability at the heart of it all.In this episode, you’ll learn what it’s like to found a start-up on the ground in Mumbai, India, the digitization journey many fashion brands have been on to design out waste and the new materials and innovations that have Flora excited about the future of this industry.  To read the interview transcript and learn more about SupplyCompass, check out the show notes here.Watch more Conscious Commerce interviews on noissue's YouTube channel. 

Kate Hamilton is the co-founder of Sonder & Tell, a business that helps brands find their voice and express themselves through storytelling, tone of voice and creative copywriting. Kate wants to build a world where words are considered as early as possible, with brands looking to words, language and stories as the starting point of brand building, and not a last minute addition. Sonder & Tell has worked with brands such as Airbnb, Bumble and Lick Home on content strategy and tone of voice. In this episode, you’ll learn why businesses don’t have to use a serious tone of voice to talk about topics like sustainability and social impact, the most common storytelling mistakes Kate sees brands make and how to use the power of language to be remembered and recognized for what you're doing in your industry.  To read the interview transcript and learn more about Sonder & Tell, check out the show notes here.Watch the full interview on noissue's YouTube channel. 

Conscious Commerce is a podcast by noissue that shows you that sustainability doesn't have to be a scary word in business. Have you reimagined a better way of doing things in your industry, but don't know where to start? Are you wondering what sustainability should look like for your brand? Do you want to build a community of people who are invested in your impact? Then you've come to the right place! Join us as host Elly Strang puts these questions to entrepreneurs, executives and experts from around the world who are building successful modern brands that consider their impact on the planet, and on people. You'll learn sustainability doesn't have to be intimidating or boring to tackle as a business. It's absolutely what you make it, and the best brands are growing their communities by talking about their impact in a fun and refreshing way. Every fortnight, we'll release an episode interviewing someone who is reimagining what business and impact can look like. Our guests share unfiltered and often entertaining advice, while pulling back the curtain on their own experiences to share what got them to where they are today. No matter what size your business is, you'll be left feeling inspired and ready to take the next step in your sustainability journey.  Happy listening!