A Letter from Andre: Intention.

I remember when I first read the Patagonia book "Let my people go surfing". It must have been almost 10 years ago. I was at the beginnings of my start-up journey. It was... awakening. To read the story of another startup that grew to be such a success, where the aim was not success.

Where they seemed to succeed by doing the best they could for their people. And for the planet. They just continued making the right and moral choices each time, and kept faith.

A particular facet of their style, encapsulated in the title was that when the surf was good, they let their staff go surfing. Allowing them the freedom to make the most of the conditions, make the most of their lives, trusting that the work would get done later. They understood that keeping peoples cups full was incredibly important.

That approach helped to reinforce my own beliefs at the time, and I leaned into a "trust first" approach, much to the chagrin of my co-founders and investors, who were entrenched in the prevelant "I'll sleep when I'm dead" attitude that permeated start-up culture at the time (and still does mostly).

Another trick that was highlighted to me in the book was the MBA. This stood for Management By Absence. And essentially it meant, when your team were ready, get the hell out of the way and let them do their jobs. At Patagonia, that often meant go and climb a mountain and leave your team to it. I wasn't quite that extreme, but there's nothing quite like seeing your team thrive and expand without your interference. Micro-management and perfectionism stifles growth IMHO. When left to bloom, it's amazing what people can do.

As time went on, business grew, more investors came on board, and it became harder and harder to maintain my approach, my way of being. And when we were eventually bought over, it became a daily battle. of people versus the P+L. I learned the hard way that culture really does come from the top. It trickles down into everything. But I never forgot those 2 lessons. My people always went surfing, and I stuck to my MBA.

Now it is many years later. I've been through burnout, walked the wilderness and found myself involved in starting a new project, a new business, building new teams. And I've recently picked up Patagonia's new book - The Future of the Responsible Company. What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s first 50 years. It is again refreshing and inspirational. Doing the right thing works. It is possible to build a sustainable and successful enterprise in the modern late-capitalist world whilst maintaining your values and ethical principles.

Don't get me wrong. Patagonia isn't perfect (something they point out continuously), but they do the best they can. They pay attention, and bit by bit change the way they do things. They are intentional about their practices. and their impact on people and planet. And that's how we want to be too.

We already let our people go surfing, closing when we need a break, not dictated by holiday traffic. We embrace the MBA, and train our teams to do so too. But this time we get to go further. We get to be more intentional.

We want to be intentional about our suppliers. We've tried hard and failed in the last year to go all organic. Fresh organic produce is difficult to find up here, and the volumes that we needed to order from our organic wholesaler to meet the minimum order size meant that we were wasting about 50% of our fresh produce every week, which was heartbreaking. We ended up switching our fresh produce to local non-organic suppliers to minimise our waste, and focused on keeping our dried and preserved ingredients to organic suppliers-something that I'm glad to say that we managed.

At the start of last year, as we were getting the kitchen set up, we were very reliant on a well-known large wholesaler. They were good quality, reasonably priced and made life easy for us. But it was hard for us to figure out where items were sourced from. Bit by bit we've chipped away at that shopping list, researching ingredient by ingredient for a suitable alternative. Local where possible, UK based at the least. Often more expensive, but worthwhile to us. We're proud to say that our original shopping list from that wholesaler is about ⅓ the size that it used to be. Lots of progress, but still a way to go.

A year in and our kitchen service is a lot more stable (as you may have noticed). Traffic is more predictable. So we're going to re-look at that organic route again for fresh produce. Lets see what we can do.

Waste is another area we are looking at. It's amazing how much waste we can create in a small kitchen. Whereas in the past everything used to get thrown in black bags to go to landfill, (the easiest and cheapest option) we now have a new food waste and recycling supplier, and are working on our internal processes to sort our waste appropriately. More work for the team, but something we do gladly. We're currently looking at a way to compost our food waste.

Energy is a tough one. We've switched our supplier to one that claims to be all renewable, and as far as our research can tell us, seems to be reputable. We insulated as much as possible during renovation, and are looking at best practices to conserve energy on a day to day basis.

In a world that is becoming increasingly un-intentional, where what you watch and listen to is chosen for you by algorithms, where what your mind consumes is determined by media corporations and tech giants, I think it's important to remain intentional where we can. Our choices matter. To do the best we can matters. Not claiming to be perfect, but slowly, piece by piece trying to create who we want to be in the world. If Patagonia can do it, why can't we?