Judging the Sustainable Lifestyle Awards

Recently, I was given the honour of joining the judging panel for the inaugural year of the Sustainable Lifestyle Awards. It is the first awards of its kind to celebrate brands that hold style and substance in equal measure, rather than the many established awards that are purely skin-deep.

In my role as Creative Director at Echo, working with the likes of Unilever, Nestlé and Danone, I’ve developed real passion and expertise for how to help consumer brands behave more sustainably, whilst ensuring those brands and products have a compelling offer. There’s only a win for the environment and the brand if consumers want to make better choices.

So it was incredibly heartening to see so many exciting new brands and products across such a broad spectrum of categories (that we all interact with on a daily basis); that baked-in sustainability in all its forms from the off, whilst delivering fantastic brand and product experiences.

In the ‘Launch Category’ Springbond was the winning entrant. Springbond is an innovative carpet underlay made from recycled ocean plastic. Each roll takes 180 plastic bottles out of circulation, and with the average home needing 5 rolls, the benefit is plain to see. But what particularly impressed (in a category where what happens to materials at end of life is not often considered), was that it could be pulled up and recycled again.

In the ‘Skincare’ category, Beauty Kitchen have reimagined the supply chain from a consumable one to a durable refill one, making it affordable. Their ‘return, refill, repeat’ initiative is fantastic, making it easy for customers to reduce their waste.

If we keep losing resources and materials to landfill and incineration, we face the law of diminishing resources and diminishing returns. So for me, what made these two entrants’ winners was their drive to create total circularity in their product and supply chains, which is the ambition every brand and product ought to strive for.