.svg)
The world needs businesses to be circular. Producing endless waste is no longer viable or desirable. But the problem is far from simple. Claire Rampen created Reath to solve a circularity problem through data. And her young startup already counts Google, Unilever and M&S as clients. How did she do it? And how can businesses embrace circularity? Join host and Cofruition founder Sam Floy for a deep dive into the world of circular packaging and seed-stage success.
If you've listened to the episode and are keen to find out more about Reath, you can visit their website reath.id or connect with Claire on LinkedIn.
Claire's essential resource for anyone interested in circularity is Planet Reuse, a platform and network for reusable packaging.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Sam Floy
The world has known for a while now that single use plastics aren't sustainable. Yet, year after year, more and more shampoo bottles and other plastic packaging is piling up in our oceans and on our shores. At least in my social bubble, there's certainly the goodwill to solve this, to build a more circular economy. Yet the problem persists to the detriment of all our futures. This is why I was interested to discover a new B2B company who has taken a systematic approach to addressing this problem and despite only being a few years old, already has several large corporates, including Marks and Spencers, Google and Unilever, on their client roster. I was therefore curious to learn more. This is Better Business Radar, a practical and dare we say, inspiring podcast about smart ways to grow better businesses. And I'm Sam Floy, a B2B entrepreneur and founder of Cofruition, the company behind this podcast, bringing you weekly insights from interesting thinkers, doers leaders and experts.
Sam Floy
Today's guest is co founder and CEO of Reath, Claire Rampen. Claire is an expert at using data and design thinking to overcome operational and commercial hurdles to launching circular systems. Reef helps clients such as MNS, Google and Unilever stay compliant with important health and safety and waste legislation, gather data on their environmental impact, and ultimately lead the way on the reuse revolution. Claire kicks off the conversation by exploring in a bit more detail the problem that Reef is solving.
Claire Rampen
If you look at the problem from a macro level, we're really trying to solve the issue of our linear economy. By that I mean the fact that businesses, they source virgin materials, they use them once and they expect them to be then thrown away. Away doesn't always mean recycled or upcycled. In fact, actually it rarely means that. Usually it means incineration or landfill. Those two options for the end of life of materials just they simply aren't sustainable. We cannot infinitely go on extracting, using and then disposing of materials in that way. There is a real impetus and need to move to a more circular one. Really, when you get under the surface of it, for businesses to do that and to shift from this linear way of doing things to a more circular one, there's a lot of little challenges that come up because we haven't designed business or our legislation or anything in our society, really, around the idea of a circular economy.
Claire Rampen
We as a business really set out to solve some of those challenges that we could see arising when businesses started to make that shift. Okay.
Sam Floy
Was this really a whiteboard situation of we want to do something in the circular economy and let's go and try and find something? Or was there an insight that came before then?
Claire Rampen
Prior to starting Reed, I was working in Bike Share and one of the things that surprised me the most in that industry was the amount of waste that was created. I was seeing all these scooter and bike share companies were coming into cities, they were dumping bikes and scooters everywhere and there wasn't really any care about where those ended up. Oftentimes they were ending up in canals or green spaces and they weren't being recovered. I was very interested in the problem of reducing this type of waste. I guess if I'm honest, I was also really concerned about my own plastic footprint and the amount of packaging that was coming into my home just from trying to go about my daily life, eat my food, shower in the morning, keep my hair clean, that kind of thing. It felt like there was clearly an opportunity to look at more circular options.
Claire Rampen
There must have been something that was blocking these companies from adopting those solutions. My co founder Emily and I, we really took a very, I guess, question based approach, which is where went and spoke to as many companies as we could. We wrote to their customer service teams, we turned up at some manufacturing plants and just knocked on the door and asked to chat to people on the shop floor and on the manufacturing plant floor to understand what they were doing and how their businesses were working that would have prevented them from really adopting circularity. It was those conversations that started to unearth some of these challenges that companies were facing, specifically around things like legislation and consumer safety laws and the fact that there's all of these requirements that make massive assumptions about the fact that packaging is only going to be used once.
Claire Rampen
For example.
Sam Floy
How do you mean the assumptions in the legislation?
Claire Rampen
So, for example, this is getting really deep into packaging legislation. When you put a product onto the market kit, you have to have certain information printed on that package, on the primary package. Like you have to have a batch code stamped onto that and that's typically done with a laser print ink. If you've put a batch code onto a piece of packaging and then you're trying to refill it with another batch, then what do you do? Do you cross that batch out? I'm laboring the point and trying to make to it, yeah.
Sam Floy
I certainly get how there's I find these system design things so fascinating because you have this one decision that probably would have been relatively arbitrary, arbitrarily thought about 20 years ago and it's having these huge knock on effects down the line. I find it weirdly fascinating.
Claire Rampen
No, absolutely. I think that was like our curiosity led us to those kinds of questions. What it really painted a picture for me was of these companies who are trying to do the right thing. They're being told that they need to switch to more sustainable solutions. Maybe they're even being told that Reuse is the more sustainable option. They then have all of these hurdles that they have to overcome in order to actually adopt that. Which company, big or small, really has the power to do that and completely change their operations? It was like, okay, well, if we can solve this part of the puzzle, then we can actually start to unlock a lot of other things because I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't have those kinds of consumer safety laws in there. They're very important. It's really important to know if something's had allergens in it but they just aren't designed, as they stand for a reasonable circular economy.
Claire Rampen
So that was the very first insight. We've come a long way from there because you can't build a product that's just solving a problem. I don't want to minimize it, but as small as batch coding problem, and we can get onto that about how there's different ways that people were already dealing with this, because there were people reusing packaging at the time. How we used those examples to try and get some more insight so that we could successfully build and then deploy a product in the market.
Sam Floy
What were some of the other ways that people were doing and what was not quite so good about it?
Claire Rampen
What we found was that there were some companies who were just using very basic systems like pen and paper, almost like a library book situation and that was working for pilots where they were just trying to prove out the concept or understand more about the other logistics that were required. They knew that they needed to have some kind of traceability.
Sam Floy
What was the packaging that was being returned?
Claire Rampen
Food packaging.
Sam Floy
Food packaging, okay, so is that like an example of a food packaging thing that gets returned?
Claire Rampen
Great question. The world of packaging can be divided typically into transit packaging, tertiary packaging. Those are things like pallets and crates. You get into secondary packaging which doesn't touch the product itself. It's like your Hello Fresh box, for example, or the box that is on the outside of your bottle that's inside that's actually touching the shampoo, for example. Your primary packaging is the one that's actually touching the product. Were looking at across all of those types of packaging but the real problem that were trying to solve was around the primary packaging because that felt like the hardest problem to solve.
Sam Floy
Got you. Within this world of tertiary, secondary and primary packaging there are various organizations that are basically inventing their own system and their own logbook of stuff being sent in, stuff being sent back, et cetera. I assume the main issues that these companies were facing when they had these pen and paper systems where they weren't getting the benefits of information being digital.
Claire Rampen
So yes, exactly. That what were seeing was the lack of that information being digitized and therefore it couldn't be shared with many stakeholders and certainly not across multiple physical locations easily, was really causing problems for the scalability of these systems. They were having to look at how they could scale and this was really a blocker in allowing that.
Sam Floy
To happen and they didn't think to invent their own digital solution. I don't know, maybe that's a bit simplistic, but I get that most people think that pen and paper is a bit outdated with these things. Have they just not tried to do it themselves?
Claire Rampen
I think that's an interesting dynamic of the market, which is that a lot of people are still at pilot stage with circularity initiatives and oftentimes circular initiatives are being owned by teams that aren't it focused or interfacing with it. So sustainability teams or commercial teams. If you're trying to prove something out, also gather all the learnings around doing something new for the first time, which there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of things to consider. Also designing building a system that captures all of your requirements and helps you meet all the data compliance requirements that you might have that are different from a linear system. It's just not something that people really have the budget to do or the time or the headspace or the skills. That was actually really fundamental in our understanding of the product opportunity because we realized that we needed to have essentially like a no code interface that would let anyone come in with no coding or development experience and design their own circular system and then capture information and share information within the system easily.
Claire Rampen
We need that data capture to be easy for people to do with limited training. Someone on a shop floor who's literally just been given the scanning device that they use on the shop floor and told can you follow the standard operating procedure and gather this data for us, make sure that we have it. It needed to be as easy for them to pick it up and just step through it and not need specific training. We needed that data to be able to be exported and used by teams that were overseeing the success of these initiatives.
Sam Floy
What actually is the Reath solution? I realized we danced around it but actually just said digital and.
Claire Rampen
We'ee like, oh, it must be great question. Our software help business to manage those circular systems. We give every item, every reusable item, a digital passport and we then capture information about that item as it travel around a system. Think of that like stamps in your passport when you visit different countries. The key thing is that every business can configure their own route so they can decide what information they want to capture in the journey of that reusable item. It could be that they're only capturing two data points, or it could be that they're capturing seven. It can be as complex or as light touch as you want, and then that data is all pulled into a database and can be captured and then organized, queried and used for all kinds of business activities, as well as things like investor and consumer reporting around the lifecycle and the performance of that reusable system.
Sam Floy
What are the typical reusable items that are being passed along this chain?
Claire Rampen
Yeah, so like I mentioned, we started from a place of knowing that this needed to be a very flexible solution and that actually led us to look at different industries. We got some innovate UK funding to look at electronics, for example, and the waste electronics space, but we found that the packaging space was moving the fastest. That's why we focus on that as a business. Packaging can be anything from primary packaging, where you need to understand what that reusable packaging asset has actually interacted with. So, like, what batch of product or what allergens did that product have in it, all the way through to secondary packaging, which is more about just the movements of that reusable packaging and where it is at any one particular time, how long it took to get there, that kind of thing.
Sam Floy
Okay. With the customers you've had so far, are you still in the phase of, let's just try it with basically anyone and then see which use cases work best? Or have you already begun to find that within packaging there's a particular type of thing that seems to work best?
Claire Rampen
Without giving away our strategic knowledge no, we've been very specific about figuring out what we think is scalable in terms of what kind of reusable packaging is most likely to scale quickest, how we can add the most value, where the data can be most valuable. Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of moving parts and we are an enabling technology, but we aren't a full stack solution and there's a lot of reasons for that. We decided we wanted to be that enabling technology because we felt like it gave us a broader and bigger growth opportunity longer term, but it means that you're sometimes beholden to the company and what their decisions are around their circular initiatives. We can't come in and offer them a solution that's just end to end. Our system is plug and play, but they have other logistic considerations.
Sam Floy
I'm curious, are there other, let's say, tech entrepreneurs? What are the businesses that are also trying to solve this problem? Partly why I'm thinking this as well is like, if I'm a big company and I receive a message from Claire saying, we can solve your circular packaging problem, how do they get to the point of, actually we want to work with you? The industry at a stage where they're like, oh, there's actually tons of these I get ten of these emails a week, kind of thing. Or is it still nascent enough that it is in itself an interesting proposition?
Claire Rampen
So, I mean, you asked how we got big names on our client list. I mean, they sought us out because were doing unique and groundbreaking work in this space. I would say this space is relatively yeah, it is nascent in its early stage. We've been really pivotal in building the path for companies as they've started to explore this space. That was because we did a lot of upfront research. We worked with the university, we published a data standard around, which was capturing all of our research and sharing it in a way that was trying to create a system that lots of different companies could benefit from. Because in the circular economy, you can't think as a single product company, like, you have to think about the ecosystem because no company can become circular on their own. It's impossible. You really have to take like an ecosystem mindset.
Claire Rampen
From the beginning.
Sam Floy
You published the data standard, so this is is it like open source code principle?
Claire Rampen
Yeah.
Sam Floy
Interesting. That how the companies heard about you? You said they sort you out.
Claire Rampen
Yes. In most of the cases, it was because of our work on the open data standard, which is called Reuse ID. It was trying to capture all of the data fields that you would be required to capture and hold information on. If you were going to reuse primary packaging, it was because of that work. This was all during COVID And so we'd been knocking a lot of doors, virtual doors, obviously, trying to speak to people about this problem, about their initiatives in the reuse space. It was from there that we started to meet people in the industry. We became a relatively well known name. We were asked to speak on different panels and ultimately were introduced to Marks and Spencers. That was relatively quick, less than a year between us properly beginning this work and meeting them. That was a really important hypothesis for us because both from an impact and a financial perspective, we needed to see this work at scale with people like corporates.
Claire Rampen
I wish I could say that then the opportunities just flowed endlessly from there, but there's no silver bullet. I think that was when the work really began for us in terms of understanding, okay, were able to solve a problem and we've got really good product user fit, and we know that, but how can we replicate that and scale that? What specifics do you answer your question? Who do we have to specifically go after? Who's actually the decision maker in this space? Because these people aren't it's hard to know from a LinkedIn profile if someone is having this problem or not?
Sam Floy
Yeah, because with the MLS person, were they more on the It side or the sustainability side?
Claire Rampen
Actually, the commercial side.
Sam Floy
Okay. They were viewing this as good business. They were saying, we need to have this initiative to do this or how.
Claire Rampen
Did it yeah, so they launched an initiative around reusable packaging, and they realized that they needed a system like ours that could support them to do that at scale. It was interesting because everything that we'd researched and presented to them, they were able to tell us directly that those were the problems that they had encountered. It was kind of a great perfect match. Perfect first client, to be honest.
Sam Floy
Dream first client?
Claire Rampen
Pretty much, yeah.
Sam Floy
Oh, my gosh, that was Dream.
Claire Rampen
We had some other smaller businesses using the software, but they were our first main client.
Sam Floy
Exciting. I'm curious, like yeah, I imagine you have this initial meeting, they talk about the problems that they're facing. You talk about how you view the world, and you're like, this is a great match. How many meetings was it before you signed something to work together?
Claire Rampen
That was relatively quick. Were fortunate that our lead in the commercial team really wanted to get us deployed as soon as possible. We've had other gosh. We've had a real range. We've had people who and that's been part of the business development process. The strategic understanding is really figuring out you can solve a pain point for a lot of people, but you've got to find the people who are in the most pain or flip it and say, who can I help the most? Who's got the most to gain from this? We've had some exciting new customers that we've brought on recently who are actually restructuring their business around circularity, and they think that they can make more profit that way. That's a really exciting position to be in because suddenly you're talking about how do you help someone achieve their revenue goals rather than reduce their costs internally?
Sam Floy
Is your team able to do that? Because I feel that almost is going into like not quite strategic consultancy, but I can imagine that's quite a skill set to do that. Or is that actually something that you can because of the stuff that you guys know, you can actually do it quite competently?
Claire Rampen
Great question. I mean, the team is phenomenal, so I think they could competently solve any problem that got sent their way. No, in terms of I'd say we're learning. We're very fortunate to have a front row seat to a lot of companies who are trying to figure this out. Our software solves some of the operational challenges, in fact, a lot of the operational challenges for those companies. We get to be present for those discussions and see how that plays out. For me, I think we don't position ourselves as a consultancy, but we have a lot of embedded knowledge and I'm very grateful for the opportunity. It's rare that you get the opportunity to work with these kinds of names that I see as one of our big competitive advantages is that we're then able to funnel that all into the best product that we can possibly build.
Sam Floy
Yeah. What's the business model, what's the revenue model?
Claire Rampen
We position ourselves as a SaaS product so we have a license fee for usage of the software. We've looked at various other different ways of monetizing and I think there's a lot of options. As with all of these things, we're a seed staged company, right? We're still testing and learning a lot and we're still trying to figure out what makes the most sense for the value that we're creating, the customers type that we have, and then us as a business in terms of keeping the lights on.
Sam Floy
That makes sense. I think what I really like is everything you've spoken about has just been like Led with Curiosity and everything is just like we're going to go into this with basically no expectations and just talk to people and see what they say. I think that's quite a good obviously, assuming that you can continue to keep the lights on, it just seems like quite a good approach rather than coming into other SaaS products. Might do it on a per user basis or a per usage basis. Yeah, there's probably some particularities about particular packaging which might not necessarily fit with that.
Claire Rampen
Firstly, I'll say you're absolutely right, we're Curiosity Led, but that's not without structures. Like, I did a master's in design thinking and we're very focused about the questions and hypotheses that we create and then go out and answer with our interviews. We have a huge database where we map everything, categorize everything and so everything is really structured towards answering those hypotheses and de risking as we go. I've seen a lot of companies start and fail, right? We're still here and that's because I think we're so structured about that learning. The second point is that we didn't walk into a really clearly defined product space and that is both a wonderful opportunity. It's meant that we've been contacted by some of the world's biggest companies and as a small business, we've been added to their procurement roster to do something which very few people get that opportunity and I'm really fortunate for that, really grateful for that.
Claire Rampen
However, the flip side of creating a space as you go is that you have to do a lot of the kind of the figuring out what is the value we're creating? What words do we use to describe that, how do we then charge for that? It's not like there's a market and we can go out there and say, okay, other companies doing this or charging this, great. We really don't have that luxury and that is one of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities that I think a lot of people face, particularly in the climate space, because so many of these value propositions are new.
Sam Floy
Are there any companies organizations that you seek inspiration from when it comes to some of these ideas?
Claire Rampen
Yeah, I get all the CrunchBase alerts. I'm constantly looking at this space to see who's raising money, who's succeeding, who seems to be faltering, what seems to be growing fastest. There's a lot of analysis to be done because there are some phenomenal entrepreneurs out there just trying new things and not being scared to re envision the world from how it is today. I love learning from them from afar as well as directly. Huge amount of respect and time for the people who are knee deep in this space try to do things differently.
Sam Floy
There like, a company that's perhaps maybe in a slightly different space, which is two or three years ahead of you, that you can see? These guys are taking a similar path with the company I've got. There are some analogous companies that are doing, for example, video production or something, where I can see, oh, they're two or three years ahead. They setting things up in this particular way. That's, like, quite an interesting it's quite interesting to get a bit of inspiration from how people are doing it. Do you have any of those or is it all fairly broad themes that you can get?
Claire Rampen
I'd say that the space that's most adjacent to us is the recycling space because we're talking about circularity and movement of product and materials, but it's not for reuse. They're more established processes in terms of breaking things down and then churning them out and reselling them on a market. Lots of fantastic companies there, companies like circular, they are doing traceability in the recycling space. There's a lot of work going on in the batteries space. Yeah, I think you absolutely do have to look at adjacent markets. I also had some one of the best pieces of advice I think I've ever heard is you don't build a great product only looking at competitors. I think that there's a certain amount of at some point, and it's very much a gut feel thing rather than a scientific thing, but I think you have to realize what time, at what point do you have to look internally and really focus on the insights that you have rather than constantly looking externally and trying to copycat or follow.
Sam Floy
I think based on this rich data set of insights that you've got, you really got a well informed gut, I think, when it comes to making these sorts of things better.
Sam Floy
Better Business Radar is a podcast made by us, the team at Cofruition. We offer an all in one solution for high value service companies looking for a simple and effective way to grow. A lot of businesses don't need Facebook ads or Drip funnel campaigns. They need to have a systematic way to demonstrate full leadership, expand their network and have the consistent, high quality content to stay on people's radar. This is what we offer with our fully managed company podcasts. If you're interested in hiring us for your business, then head Ezd Cofruition.com Bbr, where you can learn more and get 10% off the setup of your show. The link is also in the episode description. Now, back to the episode.
Sam Floy
This predominantly a UK problem or are there other countries that have different legislations or anything around that?
Claire Rampen
No, the EU is really pressing head. I'd say they're probably the furthest ahead. They have a concept called extended producer responsibility, which basically means that when a company puts something into the market that creates waste, so packaging waste is one of the most obvious. They have to pay a tax to offset the recovery and the processing of that waste. The idea there is to try and start to finance and better build infrastructure that can deal with the amount of waste that we're generating as a society. A lot of countries within Europe have started to implement laws that are trying to build that better world that we're seeing. Things like reusable takeaway packaging is mandatory for all restaurants in Germany. France has got some pretty impressive targets around reducing and packaging as well. In the UK, we have extended producer responsibility coming in, but it's still quite vague as to what it might be.
Claire Rampen
In the US. There's. Certain states have got extended producer responsibility laws coming into, like, Maine and California, the big ones. So, yeah, there's lots of legislative change. I say that the UK sits in the middle. Europe is probably the fastest moving in this space.
Sam Floy
Okay. Because in supermarkets in Germany and Denmark and a few other places, when you get a can, you have to pay extra and then when you take it back to this machine, you don't get your money back. The idea being that it's the onus is a bit on the customer.
Claire Rampen
Yeah. Opening up a can of worms there. Because that's the Deposit Return scheme, which is a recycling based initiative and it's actually happening in the UK. It's just it's happening country by country. Scotland is going this year, then England and Wales are following suit. There's a lot of debate about the nitty gritty details of the scheme. So prepare yourself. Yeah, okay.
Sam Floy
Well, maybe with the case of MNS, I think the one that I'm perhaps just slightly missing in this mental picture of it is the idea that me as a customer goes and buys a bottle of shampoo from Marks and Spencers, and then Marks and Spencers gets that empty shampoo bottle back. To them at some point and you've got a way of tracing it or is it actually happening further up in the production?
Claire Rampen
The initiative that we're working on is what MNS calls Fill Your Own. They have big bulk containers that are only and they're the ones that are being reused. It's a consumer can choose what packaging they want to bring and sell from. That's the use case that we're working on with them. But there's lots of different models. You've touched on another one which is called like, the prefill model or the return to store model. We've been working with a company in the States that does deliver to home, for example. They basically keep your pantry stocked with all of the staples that you need and they do that in reusable containers so you never have to think about the packaging. It does massively reduce your recycling burden as well, which is a nice afterthought.
Sam Floy
Okay, so they'll bring you a new bottle of milk and they'll take away your empty one and they'll go back to their place and repeal it.
Claire Rampen
Exactly. They actually focus more on dried goods. When you're in the world of reuse, you start to realize that certain there's a real trade off between products that are quick use and then products that are slower usage, but also the ones that have different viscosities and different types of liquids. It gets quite complex because all of them have their own challenges in terms of sales cadence and or ease of cleaning the viscosity.
Sam Floy
Yes. A honey is a no go.
Claire Rampen
Well, exactly. If you can imagine, I don't say no go because I'm sure there's someone out there doing it, but it's definitely certain products have more challenge than others.
Sam Floy
This is just like so many secondary markets are going to come up about like, we've got this particular way to get honey out of a glass jar so that all these companies that are doing this recycling can do it. What I'm curious about, Claire, is I really enjoy this systematic approach you've taken looking at this big problem of there's the climate change, the climate crisis, there's circular packaging, there's specifically tertiary, secondary, primary. You've constantly just been going through and basically finding your way through this. Think about some principles that you've got. I'm trying to think for people listening who are perhaps in a different industry, but I still want to basically have this quite design led approach to solving the problem. What would be some of the principles that you'd adopt?
Claire Rampen
Great question. I'd say always start with Hypotheses and they can be sourced from desk based research or they can be sourced from individual conversations. It's a very fine balance between qualitative and quantitative research in terms of you want to take every single interview and try and mine it for the insights that it could bring you. You also don't want to then extrapolate based on those quotes because that could just be one person's perspective, but you also want to try and let that perspective influence your solution if it's got something valuable that you think it could add. It's a really fine balance and honestly, we got really schooled in it when were working with Dr. Ellsworth Krebs, who was our academic partner for the academic paper that we wrote. She has a background in this kind of social science social practice theory, I think it's called.
Claire Rampen
It was fascinating to work with her and take large numbers of qualitative interviews, pull out themes that we could see systematically coming across in all the research, and then also apply a quantitative lens through something like a discourse analysis where you try and figure out how many times certain words appear in those transcriptions and you can start to start. It's not at all a hard science, but it was just a fascinating way to kind of process the same interview maybe four or five times to try and understand, like really fully get everything you could from it. So, yeah, I started there by saying take a hypothesis driven approach, then go out and source those interviews. Do an ecosystem map would be another suggestion, particularly if you're going after a space that you don't fully know or understand. I'd say sketch out all the players, think through who's giving money to whom and what data is emerging from all those different players and how that interacts and who's sharing that data.
Claire Rampen
Try to populate your understanding of that space by literally having interviews with people who fit those roles. Do that kind of processing where you process it maybe three or four times to really extract everything you can from those conversations because you can just make it an endless pursuit of conversations. If you're not actually getting anything from those in terms of insights, then you're just wasting your time and you're probably wasting your interviewees time as well.
Sam Floy
Would you just call these people an email and start doing some research? Or was this part of when you were doing your innovate UK funded research? There's a bit of credibility behind it.
Claire Rampen
Yeah, so it started with the innovate UK research and that was really key for us. I'd say that's probably if you want a calling card as a no name business that no one's ever heard of, that you only just started like last week. Trying to figure out if you can get a grant of some kind is one of the best ways to give yourself some purpose is a great way to knock on someone's door. We were unlucky in that the pandemic happened right after we started Reath, but it was also maybe lucky because a lot of people were at home and a bit bored and wanted something to talk about and so were able to make the most of that. Great.
Sam Floy
So we should probably start wrapping up. Claire, so a couple of final questions for you. First of all is who inspires you in your industry?
Claire Rampen
Honestly, not one person. I'd say it's all the founders I see who are doing this against all odds. Many of them are minority founders. They've got significant obstacles in their way because of that. And I became a mother last year. I also have immense respect for all those who are doing jobs like this with additional responsibilities, like children outside of work. So that's what inspires me every day.
Sam Floy
For people who might want to interested to learn more about circular packaging or the circular economy in general, is there an invaluable resource book, podcast, articles, et cetera, that you think is worth going to?
Claire Rampen
Yeah, I'd say the best resource I've found has been a really grassroots organization and initiative called Planet Reuse. It's a platform community place, essentially closed door community that you can apply to join. And it's everything reuse. We discuss everything from the nitty gritty legislation through to opportunities and competitions and grants. So I really recommend that resource.
Sam Floy
Claire, where can people learn more about you and Reef?
Claire Rampen
Yes. Feel free to follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Claire rampant in the world, apparently. Reath is Reath at ID R-E-A-T-H ID. We're also at Reath on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Sam Floy
Well, Claire, this has been really interesting. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Claire Rampen
Thanks for taking a journey into the world of reusable packaging with me.
Sam FloyThank you for joining me for this episode of Better Business Radar. It's been a pleasure speaking with Claire and to learn more about not just circularity, but also an approach to building a business in a seemingly intractable space. Thanks to you too for listening. If you'd like to find out more about Reath, visit reath. ID or reach out to Claire on LinkedIn. That's a mouthful. Her name is Claire Rampen and the links are in the episode description. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like more insights from leading thinkers and doers who can help you be smart in growing your business, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sam Floy.
.png)