Going Back To The Future Of Sustainable Sportswear

What is your vision for 10 years down the track?

I think the first thing that I want us to nail is to get what we’re doing right now to the best shape or place possible. Right now we’re focusing on producing good quality, sustainable sportswear, and we’ll continue to focus on that for the next couple of years until we’ve gained traction and momentum for us to then think about phase two and phase three.

Phase two and phase three would look at us essentially owning more of the whole supply chain. I want to be able to get into the R&D space, which I love, to look at other ways to take waste and turn it into value or that whole circular economy concept.

Right now, obviously I’m getting some help with that through partners, but I think equally this stuff is right for the New Zealand environment. We’re an agar plate for innovation, so I think we’ll be able to cut through a lot of that noise in terms of R&D and innovation within the textile space to come up with new and better ways to do things.

How would it work in an ideal world where you would partner with other companies that could potentially be competing in a different environment?

We’re not there yet, obviously, but I think the element of competition is real life and it’s something that we will stumble across. I like to talk about it in the same way as coding software, in that at some point in time, I want us to become open source.

Open source in terms of our business practices and whether we could help other people in terms of sharing some of our insights and learnings or the blueprint of how you can become sustainable. Or open source in terms of collaboration; come in and plug it into what we’re doing, so we can come up with a much better value proposition.

When we are looking at the whole R&D space, I will welcome collaboration, co-creation and partnership with others to make more meaning. I don’t feel like competition is a threat. You can have two companies that are running in parallel, doing similar things and not crossing paths. I think it’s a time for us to collaborate when it comes to it.

Do you imagine that if some cool designers wanted to fit in with that ethos that they could potentially come and do a JV with you or plug into it?

Absolutely, at any part of the value chain. It could be with the product development itself. We could have people who may want to work with us and co-create some new things because they have a vision that’s slightly different to ours. Or it could be more from a manufacturing perspective.

What we’re doing right now is MVP, the minimum viable product, but we’re already collaborating with the likes of r3pack, who offer recycled and compostable garment bags and courier bags. Eventually down the line, I want to collaborate and connect with courier companies that are running around delivering stuff in electric vehicles to reduce our carbon footprint.

When I first started Future Co within Auckland, I would deliver products on my electric skateboard, because I thought, what could be a better way to reduce my carbon footprint and the business’s carbon footprint than to deliver things in a neutral way. Rather than putting it into a diesel van so then when it rocks up, it’s a hundred percent sustainable and it’s packed beautifully, but unfortunately it’s come from a place that it shouldn’t have. There are elements across the entire process for Future Co to collaborate and for us to attract the right people and partners to make it a whole lot better.

Have you got ambitions to go into different markets in the future? What would that look like?

We’re aspiring to become the leading sustainable sportswear brand globally. I put ‘sustainable’ at the front of ‘sportswear’ because there’s already a number of really, really good sportswear brands that we all wear day in, day out, including myself. I think that’s a subcategory that will be emerging and I want us to absolutely dominate it.

Are you looking at categories outside of sportswear? Could I get a dad jumper from you potentially down the track?

Never say never. I think you might be able to get a dad jumper that’s like an off-court type of garment, that would still look good. In future releases, we will be getting into objects as well, so I’ll leave that to your imagination to what that could potentially entail.

There’ll be a number of work streams that we’re currently thinking about and designing that we’ll run in conjunction to clothing, objects and accessories, etc.

When you look at New Zealand, what do you get excited about in terms of areas of opportunities?

We can talk for hours. There’s a lot of topics that I get excited about. The things that have been of interest to me in the last three or four years are definitely around sustainability. I think New Zealand is ripe for renewables.

Even during my time at Mercury, I had a lot of exposure to renewable energy sources such as solar. When you’re talking about renewable energy, you can then start to paint a picture of your whole ecosystem. Your house and your transport, your car, or your bike, and creating a nice big circle for a self-sustaining life. I’m not saying we’re going to take it back to the dark ages where you’re completely off grid, but there is a lot of merits in this concept for us to research, develop and innovate ways in which we could live a much better lifestyle within our own circle or bubble;
From generating our own energy and everything within that. How do I go about my life? How do I transport myself to and from work? How do I live my life within the home? How I compost my own rubbish, how I can potentially convert my own rubbish into good. I just think that whole space is just ripe for innovation in New Zealand.

Is there a bit of a cop-out in things like carbon credit? Doesn’t it just come down to taking more personal responsibility and looking at things like consumerism and how much we’re buying and what sort of impact beyond the numbers we’re having?

Absolutely, there is that self-reflection in terms of how you’re living and the lifestyle choices that you’re making. Just because I’m backing a particular brand or working in a business context that is around sustainability may not truly mean that me as a person is living and breathing that.

I can’t comment about other others, but for me, growing up, I was a bit of a petrol head and it’s only in recent years where I’ve decided to make better choices, as an example, I flicked off my car. Now I walk everywhere. I use public transport, I’ve got a skateboard, I’ve got a scooter. I only borrow a car when I absolutely need to.

Would I love to be driving a V8? Yes. But again, I’ve had to reprogram what I value and what I think is good at the end of the day. I feel like it’s a journey for a whole lot of people. You really got to just sit down and think, ‘why would I do this and what does it mean for me?’ Because it’s a long-term goal and you won’t see the benefits and neither would my generation, to be honest with you, because it’s cumulative.

Me chasing the aspirations around Future Co, creating a sustainable business model, helping influence or impact people and other companies to do the same, is not going to solve climate change. But it will eventually if everybody jumps on board, because I feel like there is definitely that persona to it. It’s actually all about the people behind the curtains.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Future Co’s logo comes from a digital context. If you think about binary code, it’s all ones and zeros and it’s a very, very logical argument or expression. A one means yes, true. A zero means no, false. Basically everything that we do and experience comes from that.

I’ve taken it back to those nostalgic days where I want everybody to sit there and reflect on whether they want to join the movement. It’s either you’re going to do it or you’re not. It’s either a one or a zero. It’s either you want to sign up to this and start to look at better ways in which you can live your life, or no, this is not for me.

There is no right or wrong. This is not a right wing, left wing argument. Each person is entitled to their own agendas. So I totally agree with you, I think it actually just all boils down to who you are, why you’re doing it and the reasons behind it.

Learning another language sometimes extends your capability, even your internal vocabulary. Did you find that with coding as well, that it helped shape some of your thinking?

Yeah, probably actually. I think absolutely, it unlocks a certain part of your memory. You’re creating essentially another database and there’s probably complementary bits of information and data in that database that become useful at some point in time.

Coding is all about structure and that actually provides you with some sort of structure for life, in terms of how you go about doing something. It might be writing a business case, or it might be approaching a particular task in your day to day.

I think it’s become quite common for people to get into coding at a young age. I’ve heard of young kids at the age of five and six coming up with apps that are fascinating to use. Just with how the world’s turning these days and things like AI, as an example, you might not actually need to learn to code because you could have a machine do it for you.

Everything is object oriented nowadays, you can literally just drag and drop stuff. I think it’s about more understanding the logic behind coding. How code works? Not necessarily how to code, which I think could be quite helpful.

At a young age, we all dream of becoming Superman, a fireman, a doctor or something like that, but now the new breed is, ‘I want to become an entrepreneur. I want to become the next Elon Musk, I want to become Bill Gates.’ They all come from a coding background, so start early. Why not?

How do you instill this kind of capability around innovation and to look for those opportunities within that world?

It’s actually much simpler to think about face value because it’s more about a cycle of testing and learning, that whole experimentation mindset. Irrespective of whether you’re developing the next crypto currency or blockchain, or like what I’m doing right now, making actual, tangible products.

It’s about a test and learn mentality. You can put it on any platform and follow the same principles and hopefully you’ll be able to come across something really cool. Alternatively, you’ll know if something is not going to work really quickly. You often stumble across ideas by mistake when you’re experimenting and that’s true innovation in some aspect too.

Do you notice a fear of failure here in New Zealand?

I think there’s definitely an element of it. The floodlights get more intense when the work, business or brand setting is a lot bigger. There’s always that fear of failing because it’s going to make you look bad or put you in the spotlight to be judged.

But I think just recently, again in my line of work, there’s been a movement around, “it’s okay to fail”. There’s a lot of practices that have been coming about that are oriented around a fail fast mentality/test and learn behaviour. Especially in the digital and software space where you have things like agile, that’s all about getting stuff to market really, really quickly, testing, learning from customers and then re-evaluating and updating what you’re currently doing.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Eric Ries, but he came up with that whole concept a long time ago, the test and learn loop. It applies in any context of life. When you’re talking about a new brand such as Future Co.

You’re on a mission. You have a bit of a strategy and a road map on how to get there, but your road will always be unknown and there’ll be a lot of hurdles you have to face.

How do you keep yourself motivated?

I’ve trained myself to commit to things. I’m pretty persistent myself. It’s probably more good than not. Going back to my sport, I always find myself doing the odd, crazy run. Recently I completed the Waitomo Trail Run, which was 36km, before that I did Triple Peaks in Hawke’s Bay, which was 57km. A couple of years ago, I did Oxfam Trail Run, which was a hundred kilometers.

You can’t give up when you’re in the midst of those things. There’s only one way out and it’s the finish line. It might be a personal trait, but I’ve always just taught myself that you’ve got to see a task through, you’ve got to finish, but it doesn’t mean that the task has to be successful.

You might finish something and it doesn’t provide you with the result that you had hoped, it doesn’t give you the goal from the hypothesis that you had set. That’s perfectly okay, but the journey and the process of actually accomplishing the task should be rewarding in itself.

Think about the process, think about the learnings, think about the journey, the experience, because I think that’s a huge takeout from the actual thing that you were trying to achieve, in a way.

 

Check out the range of activewear on Future Co’s website.