Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: The Financial Timees/Mark Cocksedge.
The castle sits on a hill above the Tamar estuary; the manor house dates to 1808. Owners House of Hackney are intentional about doing right by Mother Nature.

In 2010, our sorry high court confirmed the principle of corporate personhood in the US, leading to the injection of a flood of business money into our election system. One of the consequences has been the difficulty of electing candidates who care about climate change, conservation, or the environment. So I suppose that giving something like voting rights to Nature, the topic of today’s article, is only fair. I wish it were happening here, not just in the UK.

Tiffanie Darke at the Financial Times writes, ” ‘Nature has the best designs’ has long been the lodestar of interiors brand House of Hackney. And when co-founders Frieda Gormley and husband Javvy M Royle moved to the Castle of Trematon, Cornwall, in 2019, they set about papering, carpeting and upholstering in the joyous cacophony of botanical prints for which the brand is celebrated. …

“Letting nature in took a different approach outside: there was to be no digging, no glyphosate, no more foreign planting.  But with the move, their love of nature evolved into a more serious project. Fifteen years after they founded the brand with the purpose of championing craft, nature and community, they began ‘to hunger for meaningful change.’ … Which prompted the question: what if nature could redesign the business?

“The House of Hackney is now termed a ‘regenerative business’ — one that ‘puts in more than you take out,’ says Gormley, and that uses the systems of reciprocity on which nature thrives to construct its models, both internal and external.

“Its decision to appoint ‘Mother Nature and Future Generations’ to a board director role has become a case study at Harvard Business School. ‘Giving voice and decision rights to the environment and the future do not tend to be well represented in either business or government,’ says Harvard professor Peter Tufano.  Working with the True Price Foundation, a Dutch organization that has been providing sustainability-focused accounting services to companies, governments and institutions since 2012, House of Hackney assessed its impact through an Integrated Profit and Loss (IP & L) framework. This accounts for four types of capital : produced (the financial and physical assets), natural (the health of ecosystems and resources), human (the wellbeing of people) and social (the strength of communities and relationships). …

“While the company’s [negative] impact was laid bare, the path to reduce it was clear. And so House of Hackney set itself up as a live experiment, hoping to be a trailblazer that would prove business can actively regenerate a resource-depleted world, and act ethically in a corporate environment. How it has attempted this, through governance, culture and design, is the subject of a new book, In the Company of Nature, written by Gormley. …

In 2022, British beauty brand Faith in Nature became the first business to appoint a board position to nature.

” ‘For a product line that is of 99.5 per cent natural origin, it was initially “a creative act,’ ” says brand director Simeon Rose, and figuring out the legality took ‘a lot of bloody-mindedness.’ The work of the Rights of Nature movement, which had succeeded in securing rights for a river in New Zealand, offered a template, while the groundwork was executed by Brontie Ansell of Lawyers for Nature with the Earth Law Centre.

“Ansell became House of Hackney’s guide. Both companies were already B Corp, but neither felt that went far enough. ‘Consumers are sick to death of the sustainability narrative. People want to see more effort, more responsibility, more leadership,’ says Ansell. ‘Charities have to show public benefit and increased public wellbeing, but business just needs to make money. Why not eat away at the fringes of that divide? Let’s have businesses that have a greater purpose.’ …

“ ‘We don’t have ambition for non-purposeful growth, we are happy to stay as an incubator brand,’ says Gormley. … ‘We do the experimentation that other companies can use. And we enjoy the process: the day-to-day creativity of designing beautiful things, but also designing beautiful systems.’ ”

More at FT, here.