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Healthy sustainable furniture by Benchmark
93 Plays4 years ago
GUESTS / SEAN & LAERKE SUTCLIFFE / BENCHMARK FURNITURE
- https://benchmarkfurniture.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/madebybenchmark/
- Made WELL Sustainability Report
HOST / MATT MORLEY / WELLBEING CHAMPION
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 34
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 34 of the Green and Healthy Places Podcast, in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and Biofit Wellness Concepts.
Interview with Shaun and Lekker Sutcliffe
00:00:29
Speaker
This week I am in Berkshire in the English countryside, talking to Shaun and Lekker Sutcliffe of Benchmark Furniture.
00:00:37
Speaker
set up by Sean with his then business partner, the late Sir Terrence Conrad, back in 1984. Benchmark are an artisanal workshop of 70 plus people, but they've also been trailblazers in pushing the themes of green and healthy furniture in recent decades.
00:00:54
Speaker
They've worked with the likes of Foster and Partners for Westminster Abbey, Oxford Colleges, museums and public buildings all over the world. Our conversation touches on how their interpretation of sustainability has evolved over the past almost 40 years, the history of VOCs and formaldehyde in wood workshops, vertical integration as a way to control the provenance of their work, how hiring apprentices locally ensures long-term staff retention,
00:01:20
Speaker
their recent brand extension into healthy upholstery, lifestyle assessments and their thoughts on biophilic furniture via the medium of wood. If you like this type of content, why not hit subscribe? You can find benchmark at benchmarkfurniture.com and my contact details are in the show notes for any feedback or comments.
Craftsmanship and Sustainability at Benchmark
00:01:45
Speaker
I would love to start with a question around the positioning of
00:01:50
Speaker
of the business itself. So you seem to have this wonderful combination of craftsmanship, sustainability and responsible business practices. And it feels so now, it seems so current and yet you've been around for a little while now. So I just wonder if you could place that in the context. Did you set out with that initial vision and the world has aligned or has it been more of an evolutionary process over the last 30 years or more?
00:02:18
Speaker
So we set out 39 years ago when we started the workshop.
00:02:25
Speaker
with a highly unusual stance in the furniture making community. I took a rather stubborn stance that I won't use any tropical timbers and people were quite dismissive and some people were quite offended. But I'd been learning as a young man about deforestation, particularly of prime forest. And so my stance then was,
00:02:54
Speaker
We like to use wood, but we won't use any tropical timbers because that way we are not deforesting and we're not using any endangered species. And that was our stance for many years. But what's happened over the intervening nearly 40 years now is that the argument has moved. And so our stance is now not so much we won't use tropical timbers, although we prefer not to.
00:03:21
Speaker
but it now embraces so many other things that we've learned over the last 40 years. But yeah, we were the first
00:03:31
Speaker
workshop in the UK to adopt as Rosira formaldehyde. We were the first workshop in the UK with FSC chain of custody certification. So we've always tried to look ahead at the way that the sustainability arguments and the health and wellbeing arguments have gone. And people tend to think that the health and wellbeing argument is pretty new.
00:03:58
Speaker
But actually, 25 years ago, the formaldehyde became the hot topic. And so that VOCs were being looked at then. But it's not a linear process. And what we're saying today will change tomorrow because the situation on the ground will change, science will change, imperatives and priorities will change. Now everyone's very focused on carbon.
00:04:26
Speaker
Some while ago, everyone was very focused on acid rain, say, or eutrophication. But I think it's also interesting to sort of look at it from both the planet and the people. And that has become quite important for us within the last sort of six years to have a position where we both consider the carbon footprint and the transparency in the materials that we are using.
00:04:53
Speaker
So being that workshop or that destination where you as a customer can come and buy your product and combine the carbon footprint and the non-toxic material is essential for us. You mentioned the word transparency and clearly a responsible business in a way needs to take ownership for presumably a bit more than just that final piece of the puzzle where your
00:05:23
Speaker
place in the wood together, the craft piece comes in. How have you adopted this process of vertical integration and what role has that played in helping you get to where you are today?
Material Choices and Sustainable Practices
00:05:33
Speaker
Because not everyone can start and certainly have that as an aspiration, but you've done it. So how important has that been for you?
00:05:40
Speaker
We've done it over a long period of time, but in truth, most of our vertical integration came about through a simple desire to have more control over the quality of our work and the provenance of our work. What nowadays vertical integration also gives us is more control over the
00:06:06
Speaker
with the wider aspects of employment practices, diversity practices and so forth that play into the sort of supply chain argument nowadays. So we nowadays happily frequently get asked quite deep and complex questions about our supply chain. The more that we can supply from under our own control, the simpler that process is. Of course, we've still got our material supply chain.
00:06:37
Speaker
But in terms of subcontract supply chain, we use very, very few subcontractors. You also mentioned the idea of employment practices, and it's something that really comes across in terms of your communication online, the idea of
00:06:52
Speaker
adopting responsible work practices that really seem to be a part of your DNA as a business. Was that an instinctual process? Was it just something you felt you needed to do? Did you follow guidelines? Was there a plan from the beginning or did it again evolve quite organically? Yeah, I think I wish I could say there was some greater and higher good about it. But actually, it was a very simple
00:07:18
Speaker
realisation some years into running the business and training people that if you employ locally, your retention is much better. So we know we started off employing graduates and students or craftsmen from from far fields, you know, other parts of the UK or overseas, and they come into a few years and then they revert back to normally back to their places of origin. And and so we thought, well, this is mad.
00:07:46
Speaker
And so we started employing and training apprentices only from our local area. And it may sound a bit mean, but when apprentices apply to aspiring apprentices apply for training here, if they haven't got our local postcode or a pretty local postcode, they're not in the running. That's a self-interest thing about retaining staff.
00:08:15
Speaker
But of course, what it also plays into is our journey to work miles are very low. We do care, it's sort of dreadful cliches and it say that we treat everyone like a family, but we do have very long employment profile here. And so we really do care very deeply. And we're, you know, we've got second generation staff here.
00:08:44
Speaker
which is very gratifying. So it started out purely as a way of keeping staff, but that has evolved into a very good employment practice in terms of local employment. And artisanship in the countryside, I mean, I think that, goodness knows, the countryside has lost most of its skilled jobs. And here we are on a redundant farm.
00:09:12
Speaker
employing more people than the farm ever did in agriculture in high quality artisanal jobs. There is then also that connection in terms of the materials as well, so employing and working locally and then as you mentioned not using tropical woods. So could you talk to your vision of
00:09:31
Speaker
of Cradle to Grave life cycle in terms of the materials that you're using for your products and perhaps place that in the context of the wider industry because it's not necessarily an industry that's known for getting everything right in that sense but you've really taken a stance on it. Yes and we have the great advantage that
00:09:52
Speaker
Our principle material is wood. I mean, 99% of everything we make originates as a tree. So we have a fantastic advantage in terms of sustainability, providing that we're making sure we're buying our wood entirely from sustainably forested sources. And that's an absolute for us. We will only do that. But then the materials
00:10:20
Speaker
that do extend beyond wood into maybe upholstery. We've changed radically our approach to upholstery because that's the sort of use of petrochemical foams, which is almost ubiquitous in the upholstery world. They're very nasty business. And so we've
00:10:40
Speaker
changed what we do in line with, you know, we're not the only people have done that. There are two or three others that are following suit or, or even led, led the way for us. But we I'm trying to, I mean, okay, sorry, on the on the life cycle assessment, we were really lucky that some 10 years ago, we started working with
00:11:09
Speaker
Imperial College London and PE Associates of Stuttgart on lifecycle assessments. And we did this as some projects that we did with the Royal College and the American Hardwoods Export Council, looking at measuring the real proper metrics of cradle to grave lifecycle assessments.
Lifecycle Assessments and Environmental Impact
00:11:30
Speaker
And we produced the first furniture, I think, in the world at that point, the first wooden furniture in the world that had fully verified lifecycle assessments.
00:11:39
Speaker
And we've continued to do that and we've continued to, it's an evolving science and it's an imperfect science still, but we now on all our core ranges do environmental product declarations, which include life cycle assessments. And we're able to give not just the carbon content or the carbon store of the pieces of furniture, but also all the other measures, the other sort of seven measures of environmental impact
00:12:08
Speaker
that are embodied within the work we do. It's a really fascinating thing and in order to be really transparent and protect against a world that is flooded with greenwash, we really need metrics and it's only through life cycle assessment and independent verification that we can get reliable and proper metrics and people can
00:12:33
Speaker
can see and trust the knowledge they've been given about the impact of what they're buying. I think we also decided about, I think it's five years ago, that we wanted to take it to the next level, as Sean was saying, the fact that all products today are declaring themselves sustainable.
00:12:54
Speaker
So where does that, for a firm like us who truly has been sustainable from the very beginning before it was something cool? Where if we wanted to keep leading the way in terms of taking it to the next levels,
00:13:16
Speaker
How did we best interact with the movement? So we decided to have third party verification. So basically be able to put the hard facts on the table. So in that process, we had to go back and analyze a little bit the materials that we were using.
00:13:41
Speaker
So, glues, oils and upholstery was our biggest challenge. We then went into a process of putting quite a bit of pressure on our supply chain, which I think is needed. People like ourselves and our friends in the industry,
00:14:05
Speaker
sits with quite a lot of responsibility in terms of choosing the materials that we put out in the world. So if we can put that pressure on the supply chain saying, guys, unless you can meet those criteria, so those transparency, in our case, we wanted to have a declare label on the products. So unless the products
00:14:36
Speaker
that our supply chain provider could meet the low VOC basically. We couldn't deal with it, we couldn't deal with them. So we had to sort of have some quite sort of upfront meetings about either we work on this together and we get to where we need to be at or we have to go and look for other places to source our core materials.
00:15:03
Speaker
So I think that was a really interesting process. And as Shaun said, we obviously come from a very good starting point because we work mainly in timber. But we still did have to look at our glues and our oils and really engage with the upholstery. And
00:15:24
Speaker
don't know if it's worth it going into sort of like a deeper sort of description of how we did. Yeah, I think, you know, we've also started introducing some terms that perhaps aren't so familiar for everyone. I think it's even worth taking a step back. So even the idea that
00:15:39
Speaker
your furniture could be unhealthy that a flame retardant a chemical process is gonna off gas into your home or your office over the first six to twelve months the idea that the adhesives might do the same and lower the quality of the indoor air in your space and also you mentioned the filler but i saw that you found a genius solution by working with a
00:16:02
Speaker
a UK company that I know from Devon, right, who do the wonderful maths. So you went to a natural mattress company to find a solution to fix the issue around nasty foam filler
Innovative Upholstery and Cross-industry Partnerships
00:16:14
Speaker
as your upholstery essentially, right? That's right.
00:16:17
Speaker
And I think, as I said, we did start it out by putting pressure on the existing supply chain and didn't actually get anywhere. So we then quite at some point in the research process, because also we have decided to take on this whole process ourselves. Quite a lot of people would outsource the process of meeting all of those different standards in the industry.
00:16:46
Speaker
by you know like an agency but for us it was quite important to actually do the heavy work ourselves because you get so much more into the grid of what it actually really takes to not just tick the box but actually do the right things so we in the research process it became quite clear for us we had to be thinking
00:17:13
Speaker
innovative and alternative and natural met has been quite revolutionary in the way that they have provided.
00:17:24
Speaker
their different materials that builds up their mattresses. So we reached out to them and said, you know, this is what we are trying to achieve. And actually today, if we really want to do some massive changes, we believe we have to collaborate across industries and be and think a little bit above just sort of like the day to day, you know, and what we set out to do gold wise, our missions and missions and so on.
00:17:53
Speaker
And we actually became really good friends with the guys running natural madras.
00:18:02
Speaker
We had to persuade them that, you know, guys, come on, let's club together and let's try to do things in a way that is not necessarily the conventional way of doing things. Anyway, so here we are. We have this really nice collaboration. We were just together in London doing the first sustainable exhibition last month.
00:18:26
Speaker
and be standing there shoulder by shoulder and have become friends and can sort of feel proud about what we have managed to do to make change. I do think that we're all going to make a lot more difference if we collaborate more and if we
00:18:46
Speaker
have as much openness and transparency about what we're doing. So we have a rule here. Anybody can come and visit our workshops, industry, competitors, whatever. They can come and see what we do and how we do it because
00:19:00
Speaker
on our own, we're going to make very little change. But if we can help lead away and larger and perhaps more influential businesses, financially influential businesses can see that there's a way forward and follow suit, then we're going to be very happy to have shared that knowledge.
00:19:21
Speaker
We do also on our website, we actually share our composition of how we managed to put together our upholstery at the end because that was also quite a process of finding both comfort and sort of
00:19:36
Speaker
actually meeting the natural fire retardant within the build-up of the structure. So we did put quite a lot of sort of testing and effort into getting there. And as Sean's saying, instead of putting a copyright and sort of being proud about it, we actually say, guys, give us a call. This is how you do it. We show it on the website. And yeah, very open to share. And I think it's also important to mention that we have
00:20:05
Speaker
walked and come a long way. We still have a lot to do and we will keep walking, but we are never trying to look or come across as the expert in the industry, but more the sharing people that we hope you will follow.
00:20:32
Speaker
if that makes sense. It does, absolutely. And as you say, I mean, who is the expert in this who's actually delivering on the promises? It's a fast-moving business and we're all trying to sort of stay on top of it. But you have made the commitment with your latest collection, the OVO collection around
00:20:50
Speaker
EPD, so environmental product declarations, and that connects with that theme around transparency and again being very open and honest about exactly
The OVO Collection and Benchmark's Values
00:20:59
Speaker
what's gone into it. In fact, then getting a third party certification around it, they're carbon neutral. Can you talk to us a bit about that latest collection? Because from outside, it looks like it's almost sort of real encompassing a lot of your values and the principles behind the business in one. Is it sort of the furthest you've gone so far in terms of delivering on that?
00:21:20
Speaker
Yes, the over-range was the first of our core ranges that we did full environmental product declarations on. For me, it embodies the very best of design. I think the design is
00:21:41
Speaker
the best of modern design. It's simple, it's tactile, it's biophilic. You just feel good in its presence. You want to stroke it. It's non-toxic.
00:21:54
Speaker
in its constituency, in its materials. It has a measured embodied carbon declared on it, and in almost all cases, other than the leather upholstery pieces, it gives us a sort of net carbon store, or people, you can call it carbon negative, but we call it a net carbon store value. And I think it does embody
00:22:22
Speaker
the best of what we do. But we've extended the environmental product declarations now to many more products. And we've had some external consultants write us algorithms that enable us to do this in a simpler way. We still have to have it, have the figures verified by a third party peer reviewed. But it does enable it to be more streamlined. And it is a bit burdensome. And a lot of businesses just cannot see how they would ever do it.
00:22:53
Speaker
but the processes are becoming simpler and models are being built that will enable makers of anything really to do this. And it's just gonna be very valuable. I think that a time, I hope a time will come when we will base taxation of product, not on a sort of arbitrary figure of the pecuniary value, the value in pounds.
00:23:21
Speaker
but the taxation of products will be based on that carbon cost being a much more real cost as we face the climate situation we face. So I think that it's really important, the sharing of knowledge and making it easier for businesses to produce life cycle assessments or environmental product declarations.
00:23:50
Speaker
We can also place that within the context of, although there may not be government level legislation yet around targets for the carbon impact of furniture in a new workplace, let's say. If that workplace or the owner, the real estate developer signs up for a lead process and indeed the well process there, then
00:24:16
Speaker
in a sense that provides that structure that then gives additional credits and effectively encourages the industry and someone like myself who's specifying which furniture should be put into these 12 floors of offices. We're then out looking for brands, businesses, products such as the Over Collection that have that EPD behind them and they're then rewarded with credits on the
00:24:37
Speaker
on the overall project score. So I think there is a commercial angle too, if anyone's not convinced by just purely it's the right thing to do. When one is aligned with LEED or BRIAM or one of these systems, there are literally points scored for purchasing products that have these EPDs. And that at the moment seems to be the best we have in terms of nudging the industry in the right direction.
00:25:04
Speaker
You mentioned biophilic design and it's typically referenced for entire spaces and a lot of people think of effectively plants, but I'm a big advocate for biophilic design being much more about things like texture and natural fabrics. You mentioned it in the context of your furniture. So from where you sit, how does this trend, if we can call it that, or a shift towards a more natural approach to interiors?
00:25:31
Speaker
How are your pieces talking that language of nature? So our pieces of furniture do speak as a very natural piece because principally they're made of wood and as human beings our sort of oldest and most trusted relationship with any material is with wood. It is the most in any survey done anywhere in the world at any time
00:25:59
Speaker
Wood is the material that gets the greatest amount of trust and credibility from the buying public. I just believe, I know that we react very well when we can see that something's made of wood and preferably of solid wood. The fact that we can touch it, the fact that we can feel the grain, we can see the grain, it just takes us into a natural world.
00:26:25
Speaker
There are all sorts of measures that are starting to be done on the brain's reaction in our relation to nature.
00:26:43
Speaker
There is some science, we're starting to get some science that is actually able to pinpoint specifically which parts of our brain react well. But I'm also a great believer in instinct. And I regard instinct as being little more than the sort of distillation of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of experience in existence of the race.
00:27:08
Speaker
If our instinct is to accept and trust and feel good in the presence of a material, then you're probably right. And we don't give enough credit to instinct. We tend to look for scientific explanations for everything, and yet we accept that instinct exists in the way a whale migrates or a swallow returns to its nesting site. We accept that instinct exists, but in everything except human beings.
00:27:36
Speaker
And so I think we should listen a little more to our instinct and everybody feels better, closer to nature. And if that closer to nature means sitting at a wooden table and feeling a piece of wood or sleeping in a wooden bed or having a wooden floor, a wooden wall, then that's also beneficial. I think also more indirect, for instance, our new collection, our new fabric collection,
00:28:04
Speaker
has aspects of biophilic by the fact that it's created in natural materials and without the need of any fire retardant treatment. So aspects like that, if you're building up products or spaces with only materials that's either natural or not
00:28:33
Speaker
in need of any toxicity, any treatment, that layers up, in my opinion, the biophilic design.
00:28:47
Speaker
I think, as you say, Matt, biophilic design is quite often misunderstood by, you know, just at the very end of the project, you're putting a few sort of plants in plastic pots around the office. Or a green wall. A green wall, you know, it sticks much deeper than that, than in how you are creating a space in layers.
00:29:11
Speaker
I noticed one of your previous projects was the Maggie Centre in Manchester. I had the opportunity to collaborate with Lily, the daughter of the late Maggie, on one of my early projects and Lily, a landscape architect, created a wonderful green gym space for us. When I saw that you'd also been involved on a Maggie Centre in Manchester, I just thought, what a great
00:29:33
Speaker
What an obvious connection and so fitting. So perhaps you could just describe a little bit the involvement there, because again, I think there's a real connection with biophilic design and creating a nurturing space. And it's essentially a cancer care center, right? So a place where its real mission, its purpose is to nourish and calm and relieve anxiety. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the Maggie's charity and Charles Jenks' vision.
00:30:03
Speaker
after Maggie's well it was Maggie's vision in her own lifetime having suffered that sort of shock of being diagnosed with cancer and you walk out of the oncology department in some big hospital and where'd you go where'd you take that shock and their vision was that you take it into a Maggie center and that these centers should
00:30:26
Speaker
seek in every way to sort of calm and reassure and comfort you and nature is
00:30:35
Speaker
in their view, and I would share it entirely, the greatest comfort at that moment. And so all Maggi centers are built as much as possible in natural materials. They have gardens. They have a big kitchen table where you can give away, which encourages a sense of community and sharing of your, that moment and of your diagnosis or treatment afterwards.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so we've actually been involved in a lot of Maggie's projects. Manchester was one of them, which was a Foster and Partners project. But we've done a lot of the Maggie centres. And I think that, sadly, Charles Denks has died now, but the charity continues and gone as a lot of goodwill for very good work. But it is the essential thing of putting nature at the heart of a building.
00:31:32
Speaker
whether it be through gardens, planting, natural materials, tactility, shape, form.
Biophilic Design in Cancer Care
00:31:40
Speaker
And undoubtedly, every Maggie's that I've ever been into does give a feeling of wellness, sort of ironic when actually they tend to be rather full of people who are unwell with cancer. But the physical environment is a very well environment.
Durability and Circular Economy Commitment
00:32:02
Speaker
There's then also the topic of circularity and circular economy and durability and something that one can really sense with your work is that, I think, no doubt, due to impart to the vertical integration, to the level of craftsmanship, to the quality of the products and materials, it's something that's going to last. And you've really committed to that with this idea of almost sort of a take-back scheme at the end, which
00:32:30
Speaker
connects with the idea of circular economy. And I'm a big fan of this. I think pretty much everyone needs to get on board, but it seems to be a slow takeoff. How have you adopted that approach and what have you learned so far from that? Yeah, so I think our stance on this started with the concept of lifetime repair. I mean, what we make is inherently durable because we operate with high levels of craftsmanship and hopefully good design.
00:32:59
Speaker
where durability is built in and designed in. But the concept of lifetime repair, I think it was probably Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard and my awareness of the work that he'd done on it. And I thought, well, that's obvious. Of course, we should offer lifetime repair. It's an easy thing to do. So that was the starting point. And then the circularity argument, as it's gained momentum over the last 10 years or so,
00:33:28
Speaker
really took us beyond that to what is a relatively new initiative for us of a take-back scheme where anybody who owns our furniture and we do have geographic limitations which are just for the purpose of the practicality of recovering and bringing it back but essentially within at this moment we operate it within the UK
00:33:55
Speaker
If it's no longer required, if it's no longer relevant, useful, or the circumstances of the owner have just changed, we can take it back. We can give it a value depending on the condition of it, which is then issued as a credit against more furniture that we can supply.
00:34:15
Speaker
But then what we take back, we seek to either repair, refurbish, repurpose, reuse, or at worst, recycle. And because it's all natural materials, they're recyclable. And so in order to
00:34:32
Speaker
To offer that and do that, you have to think at the design stage and the making stage about, well, how easy is it to repair? How easy is it to take it apart? When this comes back to us, are we going to be able to take it apart? And so you start to think, even when you're making it for the first time, about how you're going to remake it or repurpose it or refurbish it.
00:34:55
Speaker
There's nothing new. It's centuries old, the concept that furniture should be able to be reused and repurposed. Furniture used to be one of the very high value items that any household owned. And so it had to be transportable, it had to be repairable.
00:35:14
Speaker
And somehow we lost sight of that. So we're only really seeking to reintroduce something that has been around. But yet it's an exciting new avenue for us. And it also hopefully will bring a new audience to us because there will be this body of furniture that's available for resale.
00:35:41
Speaker
refurbished furniture for resale and that hopefully will bring us new customers as well. So I hope it's good business as well as good for the world.
00:35:51
Speaker
But also, as you say, it sort of starts already from the product development point of view. So when we start new projects, we're just about to go into a new product development process this month. And when we start out a collaboration like that, we have a wheel that we are sort of measuring all the
00:36:18
Speaker
or the starting processor and all the way through really up against this wheel. And one of those is, but if it's gonna last a lifetime, how do we then, you know, how, where do we start? So I think it's, yeah, it's definitely starting from the very beginning that we are considering all of those different aspects, which is ending up being the sort of finished product.
00:36:48
Speaker
You're effectively shouldering the responsibility for waste creation upfront in the production process, in the design process, because you know you're taking ownership of that rather than designing and saying, well, someone else can worry about what happens when it's finished, when it's no longer needed.
00:37:07
Speaker
Yes, but I'd also say we don't look upon it as perhaps waste creation because what we take back is never waste. I mean, what we take back has opportunity, it has repurposing, it has a resale, it has a lot of inherent embodied value still in it, more than just the materials for recycling, because I'm the very, very last resort.
00:37:35
Speaker
would be conversion into biomass fuel. But that would be the absolute last resource. So I really try to think that I would like to think that nothing we make ever ends up as waste. It just ends up as another kind of resource.
00:37:53
Speaker
which takes us back to the wonderful circle rather than a linear. Hopefully. Hopefully. Well, it's admirable work. It's really great stuff. So you've obviously got retail collections. You're also working with interior designers and architects. How are people connecting with you? Where are you present in the world? People connect with us. I mean, I suppose our primary link is through the architectural community. We've worked with
00:38:21
Speaker
We're lucky enough to work with many of the world's biggest, best and most forward thinking architects. And so that is one of the major connections with the world. We also deal with the furniture dealerships who have historically not been at the forefront of
00:38:43
Speaker
either sustainable practice, you know, they'd be more interested in flogging a lot of furniture than what happens to it. It's lifestyle, it's lifetime use. But actually that is changing and pretty much all the dealerships are now having to engage in the argument and they have this whole sustainable and circularity and health and wellbeing aspects now figure much higher in their customers
00:39:13
Speaker
buying profile. And so the dealerships are having to take that on board as well. That's another network that we operate through. And then I think just through the world of
00:39:25
Speaker
of people who are interested in sustainability, people like yourself, people like the planted cities group that are looking at how we improve circularity, the way we view the products we consume. The good part there is that there's very little, I imagine, sales process because the work speaks for itself and there's a shared value system
00:39:52
Speaker
that one can just tap into and connect with, because it's, in one sense, universal, although we wish it was slightly wider spread, of course. But for those of us who have bought into it and who have adopted it as our worldview, and we connect with and see what you do, there is no conversion process required. It's just completely smooth. Well, that completely connects with how I see the world. And that's, I think, where the real value is. So I'm going to be conscious of your time. Thank you so much. It's been a really meaningful conversation.
00:40:21
Speaker
website links, et cetera, in the show notes. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting us.