circle of influence
Tell us a bit about what led you to create the first iteration of your business…
Ash and I are about 13 months apart. And she’s always been one of the most ambitious and bold people I know. She had this kind of rough education – she dropped out of formal schooling at 14 to do a chef’s apprenticeship – and actually had some pretty big battles with mental health during her teenage years. During those experiences she realised she needed her life to have purpose. She went from having her last formal year of school in grade eight, to being the highest awarded student in her year at university – she went back to study environmental science – and that’s down to sheer determination and hard work, tutoring, ambition and just a desire to do things differently. Ash then moved to Indonesia to work for an organisation called The Forest Trust – and organisation that would hold global brands, such as Nestle, to the commitments they’d made around sustainable palm oil consumption: no deforestation and no peat use. But Ash was also becoming increasingly aware she was only ever working on the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself, which is our linear economy: take, make, waste.
It was about this
