The Importance of Human Touch in Business with Revi Schlesinger

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of the book Conscious Design. And I'm excited to have with me Rebi Schlesinger since she's a consultant advisor. She's been filling C-level roles, working at a high level to help businesses leverage their resources and actually create successful projects. And you have a passion for social environmental, you know, impact design, really making businesses as good as they possibly can be. So really excited to have you on and be able to talk about what you're doing.

Thanks. This is great. I'm so happy to be here. I really appreciate that you reached out to invite me to do this podcast with you.

Yeah. So one of the things that you, you've worked in, we talked about is you do corporate transformation. You help even really large companies look at things. And you're also really focused on design for impact and how thinking about this many-layered process we go through to create a brand or product or things like that, how not everyone just jumps into. Something like that. I don't really know anybody that starts off right out of college as doing that. So could you step back a little bit and share your journey on how did you get here and what really got you to get into this?

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Yes, this is not a field, especially transformation work, is not a field that you typically fall into out of college. So yeah, I'm in corporate transformation. Let me start by introducing what that is. I'm a corporate transformation consultant. So what that means is that I help usually very large companies. Corporate transformation is a field. It's like a discipline, a practice that involves helping very large, complex global organizations get from one business context, business state, way of operating to another. Generally, the big change is part of a global systems implementation, or it's That activity of helping big companies execute global systems implementations in order to optimize and improve their business processes requires a global transformation effort to be successful in achieving the goals, the end objectives. So the big consulting firms, especially the ones that have been dealing with the global systems implementations, technology implementations, have developed an expertise in how to do this. And it's multidisciplinary. That kind of work is generally a collaboration of many different experts in different aspects of what it takes who work together on a project in order to design how to get the company from point A to point B. And what it, you know, what you're going to do to make it happen and how it's going to work in the future and all the different tools and things and skills and everything that needs to be in place in order to make it real. So that's what corporate transformation consulting is. I'm a generalist. My expertise is typically strategy for operations, like, so how do we— what is the strategy? What is the strategy that makes sense given the operational context that we're working in as a company in our industry or in the world? And how— what does it make sense to design ourselves operationally as, you know, so that we can be effective in the world the way it's going and be on the cutting edge? Because typically the companies that I would work for, work with when I started my kind of real transformation, official transformation career, like for a big consulting firm, was PricewaterhouseCoopers. So they would work with companies who were typically in the top 1, 2, 3 position in their industry globally. So really like the leaders. So they wanted to stay on that leadership position and be growing, right? So we were looking at like, you know, how, you know, where is this industry going? What is happening in the marketplace? What are the trends in the consumer space or in the buyer space? You know, how is the whole ecosystem changing and how are we going to stay on the cutting edge? You know, how, you know, what's it going to take? And so designing for that. So yeah, so I actually— typically you do this kind of work after you've gone, gotten a few years of experience under your belt, you've gone back to MBA school, and you've from— you're typically coming from a top, top school and graduating top in your class. And someone who's been kind of playing with these kinds of concepts in college, because you have opportunities to do that, and who are now— or in university, even doing PhD as well, who are now coming into a leading industry-leading consulting firm and helping these big companies figure out how to make whatever they need to make happen happen. So I'm— yeah, that's typically how it works. I fell into it. I actually wanted to do exactly this kind of work, had particularly been inspired— I studied in Italy in college, and I was inspired by coursework that I extracurricular coursework that I had to do at the University of Bocconi in Milan, which is a very good business school in Europe. And they had visiting professors coming from all over the world who were talking about the cutting-edge business theory that they were working on at the school, and alumni and students could come and attend, or anyone who was in the area. It was very, very special. And so I had an opportunity to be in a course with Rita McGrath on core competencies, and it just really inspired me. Plus, even the professors that I had in the program that I was in in Italy they were also consultants. Many of them were consultants in the field who were coming back to the classes and talking about the work that they were doing. So it was a very, very interesting, stimulating context to think about how I could get creative with business as a creative medium. And I'm a bit of a creative, kind of chose business because I was— my mother was discouraging me from going down artistic paths. She said, you know, you need to make sure you have a career that makes money.

Right.

So, you know, Business seemed to be a good way to make money eventually through some kind of art. But what I would— what I found is that in the end, business itself ended up being my artistic medium, which is kind of a fun little aside. But that's how I feel in relation to it. But yeah, so I ended up wanting to— I wanted to be a transformation consultant. I wanted to be an operational designer, global business operations designer, from my experience in that university. And so I came back to the US, graduated in a year. I had really 2 years to go, but I was like, okay, let me just get this over with because I just need to go out, get those couple years of experience, and then I can go, you know, get my MBA and then I'll be able to get work in this field that I really want to work in. And then it ended up that I had had this experience during college. So this kind of like a step back into my work in apparel. So when I said I was a creative, who was discouraged from going down a creative path. The creative path that I was exploring at that point was fashion design. And so I thought, okay, maybe one day I can have my own fashion company. So I was telling this story. My parents didn't have a lot of money, so I paid my way through college. My first job right when I arrived at NYU, went to the Stern School of Business, was hostessing at a restaurant. And I was seating someone at a table and told them this story about how I was studying business because I liked fashion. to be that she worked for Liz Claiborne. And she said to me, you know, we're doing this, we have this intern program, why don't you come and work with us? It'd be really, you know, love to.

Oh, nice.

Kind of took me on as kind of a mentor. You know, I've had a lot of like interesting hires that way where I've been hired in a way into something that was maybe a stretch position. And someone just was like, you know what, this person is, there's something special here. I'm gonna like give a little opportunity and see what happens. And I've been really, really blessed with those kinds of opportunities. I've been— it's been fortunate. But yeah, so anyway, I did analytics, data analytics work for Liz Claiborne as an intern in my first year of college. And it was super cutting edge. It was before department stores had scanners. And Liz Claiborne was being very, very progressive. They were using category management techniques that had been— were like the cutting edge of— this is 1991. 1991 and '92. So this— they were using category management techniques, which were like the cutting edge of big box retail, where you had POS data and you could actually merchandise your store based on how things were selling, right? So just imagine that you didn't have that data, everything was manual before, and you didn't have like an— you know, it's like a whole other world back then, right? But, you know, so Liz Claiborne was bringing this kind of a technique into department store retail, and it was really interesting too, because they were using a very, you know, they were creating their own way of operating. They were being a disruptor.

Right.

They had created these relationships with the department stores where they pretty much were operating like a store within a store, and the buyers, you know, had pretty complex lives shopping for a department store. They had many, many different brands that they were shopping for. They— Liz Claiborne would say, you know, we'll help you run that business for you. We'll tell you what your customer is doing and how they're buying. And we'll help you buy the right product for that customer on a store level, so that you really get better sales performance. And you have— you're like on target.

Right? The early data days and all that stuff.

Yeah. And so it was, again, it was like Lotus 1-2-3. The salespeople would call the buyers, and it would be like the buyer assistant would read them the numbers, and they would write it down. And it was— I mean, we're talking about Bloomingdale's and Macy's, hundreds of stores. I mean, it was a lot of data. But yeah, so I was doing that analysis, and I thought, oh my God, this industry is so backward. I don't think this is the right industry for me. And so I had gone to Italy thinking, OK, I've got to figure out what I'm going to do now. I'm gonna have this. And, and I came into this topic of transformation. And that's how I connected that. So I'm sorry, I just backtracked. So the way I ended up falling into this is that I interviewed, I interviewed right out of college for a job with Gitano Fashions Limited to run the replenishment business. So at that time, Gitano was a really big brand. were a very well-known brand. It had been one of the brands that really got big in the jeans heyday, and it, it was like a really huge thing. I mean, it was way back, right? But this is like part of like the real kind of big shifts in the apparel industry that really professionalized it. These, you know, kind of companies growing to that size, like they weren't really companies that size until the late '80s.

Right, right.

When, when that started to happen. So yeah, so anyway, Gitano had been a really big company. They were a classic case of a family-run business that got totally out of control. They were delisted from the stock exchange when I joined them. And they were doing— they had an interesting business. They were, they were basically positioned as a fashion brand that was selling in Walmart or Kmart and you know, the, the chain shopper was like, yeah, I'm getting this great deal at this, in this high-end fashion brand, buying it at Walmart. So that was their strategy. So they, they had a replenishment business, and I interviewed for that. And like I said before, with my Liz Claiborne experience, the director of operations who interviewed me saw something in me and said, you can see, you seem like a person who could take a project and run with it? How would you like to be an internal consultant working on all our turnaround initiatives? So they had been delisted from the stock exchange. And now the C-level officers were running the business and had— they had sold the company already to Fruit of the Loom in like a last-ditch salvage effort, and had a year to bring the business back to profitability before Fruit of the Loom figured out how to integrate it into its operations. So it was a very interesting time. We— it was the consultants running the company. We could do pretty much anything that we couldn't convince our clients to do before, or, you know, in a consulting context, how it is, they could make happen. And they had nothing to lose because it was like, you know, do or die anyway, you know.

Right.

And so, so we did some really amazing, amazing work. And a lot of it was related to dealing one of the one of the biggest challenges with transformation work, which is the people. Because Deloitte had been at Gitano and had made a very beautiful end-to-end product-to-market transformation process that was super cutting edge and innovative, like so cutting edge and innovative that I've been working on the same exact stuff, like throughout my career into, you know, even most recently.

Oh, wow.

That they were, you know, trying to implement then philosophically, and now we have even technologies that enable it and all this stuff like that. But they were, you know, that was what it was. And I was— they— I— the work that I was doing, they left it as a view. You know, it was classic case. They left it as a beautiful set of binders on a shelf, and nothing got implemented. And the director of operations who hired me, she had been part of the transformation work. And she was like, we've got to get— this is great work that we did. We've got to make it happen. We've got to get the company to do it. So a lot of the work that I was doing was taking that vision and actually getting the business to operate in that new way. And then also, of course, doing all kinds of other special projects. And then Fruit of the Loom shut down New York. We were the only profitable business unit of their company that year. It's my understanding from our CEO, and that— but that they decided that they were going to shift on— they were going to focus on their core business, which wasn't in fashion. We were very fashion. We were kind of like a stretch acquisition for them because we were a fashion brand and they were more about—

Mm-hmm.

kind of basics. So they were like, okay, we just have to like let go. We're just going to bring the brand, we're going to keep the brand, we'll do the licensing, we're going to bring the operations, just the kind of more mechanical basics-oriented operations to their headquarters and shut down New York. And so at that point, Pricewaterhouse picked me up as an experienced hire. It's a very unusual way to enter consulting for transformation work, but that's how I did it. Yeah.

Very amazing. Well, and that gives you such an interesting view because rarely do you get the opportunity to work in a company where you have that kind of, hey, you have 12 months, figure it out, make it, make it, make it happen. And then give— be given the ability to actually go, hey, I have, I have an idea. I know how to fix this. Let's just do it. Rather than— we both work in consulting. It's Very rarely the case does somebody actually hand you the full reins and just go, yeah, please fix it for me. There's a lot of conversation and pushback or debating.

Right. Is navigating all that conversation and pushback. And also like there, there is method to it, right? Too, because we're, we have to approach when we, any kind of transformation work, any kind of change work, you have to kind of look at the psychology of the experience for the people who are engaged. You know, what, what is this for them? You know, how— why should they be here?

Well, I feel like you mentioned, you mentioned a little bit, like there's, there's a lot of tools, right? We have a lot of technologies and things like that that are useful for helping, but I feel like it's still the same thing is true. At the end of the day, it all comes down to people. It's the psychology side. Like we can, we can make an app, but it doesn't mean people are going to use it. Or like it or follow its instructions, you know, things like that. And it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, like your, your experience also reflects that, that the people, you know, there's— technology gets you so far, which is great. I mean, it's amazing. You know, I love technology. It's, it's great, but it is only so far that it gets you. And then it becomes, well, how do we, how do we get people to be good with this? How do we get— Get the buy-in, so to speak, of, yeah, we created something cool. Now we gotta, we gotta implement it and get it out there. This brings me to, you mentioned you have so much background in fashion and that side of things. You had mentioned before, there's, you worked with a company, a kids' organic clothing company.

Uh-huh.

With them, and I'd love for you to, because you have this you know, fashion but also systems background. I'd love for you to talk about them a little bit.

Yeah, so Kids Organic Clothing Company is my startup. It's a company that I founded, um, and it was, um, an experiment in design for impact. So it's really— it's perfect to talk about that. Design for impact is, um, kind of a concept or a way of thinking that I, I really feel passionate about and hope that everyone can orient around and embrace. And I think that as a transformation consultant, you always design for impact, actually, as well. I mean, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get the client the biggest bang for the buck out of the, you know, work that they're going to do and the consulting money they're going to spend on you to help their business.

Right.

So, you know, you want to— you're designing for impact, you know, the return on investment. But what I— when I say design for impact, I'm talking about, like, a you know, people, planet, profit impact, you know, 3 triple bottom line impact, a holistic impact.

Right.

So yeah, so Kids Organic Clothing Company is a company I designed in Bali and launched and ran in Bali. I was living there for 5 years. I had just arrived there with a young child, my 7-month-old, my first baby and was— had my partner in life was recovering from major illness. And we just really loved the way the Balinese were with children. They believe babies come from the god world. So you could walk into a cafe with a crying, screaming child and they'd be like, oh, it's a little god. Let me hold them for you. Let me feed them for you.

Amazing.

It was a really nice place to have little children and babies. So yeah, so I— we decided to stay in Bali and create, you know, create some businesses that would allow us to be more home-based with our, you know, new family.

Right.

And so I had a background in apparel and big corporate, and I had been working in impact since 2003, like kind of really immersing myself in the topic in 2006 and trying to really like make a living in the topic, at least on some level. I thought, okay, well, you know, we— and both my partner and I were both impact entrepreneurs. So we were, of course, going to be focused on impact businesses. I thought, here I'm in the production base, I should explore doing something in apparel. And of course, we had our, our child who we were— especially my partner, who was a very long-time health and wellness entrepreneur and, you know, health and wellness eco-entrepreneur going back many years from Europe as well, who definitely was opposed to wrapping our children in anything that had chemicals or was made of chemicals in any way. So we had to figure out how to get organic children's clothes. And so I thought, okay, this is, this is an interesting one to play with. Maybe I can put a business out that's in— that's providing organic children's clothes. But I need to— it was kind of in a time where the kind of trendy word in business was disruption. This is like 2009.

Right?

We need to just— everything had to be disruptive in order to be successful.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share.

Uh, I was, you know, I was thinking like, how, what's, what are the disruptions that are needed in, in this conversation? You know, how do we change, you know, how do we make this market, um, that's didn't really exist for organic children's clothes very much, or organics in general, organic textiles.

Right.

And what I thought is that organics or organic textiles are really interesting for the baby's market because I thought the baby market was where the buyer, the organic buyer, was coming into the market. What I was thinking is that, and I was seeing among my kind of more impact-oriented friends from back in San Francisco where I lived earlier, I was seeing them, you know, having new babies, having their baby showers, asking for everything to be organic. And then baby comes and time gets limited, more limited, and money is more tight. And it's too hard to find organics and the mama starts buying conventional. And I was hoping that I could fill in the gaps of what was available in the organic market. And so that we didn't lose the buyer at that point.

Right.

And that we also kind of dealt with their concerns, because one of the first concerns that I was hearing was, and I was calling, of course, calling all my friends and saying like, well, if you could buy, if I can get you organic children's clothes, would you want that right now? And trying to understand. One of the things that was coming up was that, how organic, how eco is organic? I mean, at that point, I think we were still in these kinds of questions. And, you know, is it worth doing the change? Is that change going to have enough of an impact to make it worth all the implications of making the change happen?

Right.

So we— one of the things, the first brand that I actually went to market with was a chemical-free natural dye that I was designing a retail process so that it was very cutting edge for, for small boutique retail, I was imagining that I would sell them in-store fixture and do vendor-managed inventory for them, you know, giving them, you know, a really good target return on investment that might be hard for them to achieve otherwise in their stores. But I think a lot of these small boutiques struggle quite a bit, and that I would design a fixture and, and a customer purchase relationship to optimize the product for this You know, for that retailer based on how the product is performing. But because I was managing inventory, I could manage the differences in shade of color that you have with natural dye, because now that's, that's the problem with natural dye is you don't have the same consistency of color that you have with the chemical dye where it's like—

Right, right. Yeah.

Yeah, so that was the, the first you know, that's kind of how I started Kids Organic. But you can see, like, I was designing the business in many ways based on trying to push boundaries in the market. And also another thing that I did— so the natural dye was very interesting too, working with natural dye, because part of why I felt like I could do that is because I found a natural dyer who was a partnership of 2 guys who had worked for the big industry, you know, the non-natural dye industry. Java, and who were coming back to Bali where they were from, and creating a community-based business in their town that would employ workers, and where they had the skills and expertise to actually scale that business at a level that it could produce the kind of volume that I would need to build like a mass market brand. I mean, it would be—

Right.

Just a stepping stone, but they, you know, they were the kind of team that I could build future factories with, you know, or stuff like that, you know what I mean? So it seemed like a really good, you know, way of trying to, again, make that market. I was trying to push the boundaries, but in the end, I ended up going to a GOTS-certified—

Oh, amazing.

Fabric for Kids Organic Clothing Company and launching a few additional brands to, again, fill in more gaps in what was missing in the organic market for children so I could keep the buyer in, keep my children clothed in organic all the time and not always look the same too. So I mean, I did a very robust assortment of product there because again, I wanted to enable the buyer to fully dress their child in organic nuts to bolts.

all the time.

Right. And have everything they need to be able to do that and make it affordable. And so I ended up building a big part of this business with Zulily as our main customer. And Zulily is a flash sale site. So what they do is they provide name brand clothing at a discount price. sometimes like 50% off, or oftentimes, on a 3-day sale. So the shopper has just a very short period where they have to buy as much as they want and as much as available, and then once it's gone, it's gone, and you don't necessarily have a chance to buy it again.

Right.

So I built our business around that relationship with Zulily. They found us really early. We had our kids' organic, the original natural dye product, and it sold really well. At that point, I had an inventory I needed to 2,000 units to do a first sale with them. They were a brand new company. They were 3 years old. Since then, they became, you know, while we were working with them, they became a public company and were bought by QVC. But at that time, they were just starting. And for us, it was great because we, you know, sold $4,000 on 3 days. And, you know, that was great. I mean, for a small, for a young brand, it's very hard to make sales, especially if they're doing consumer sales.

Right.

It is such a hard business. Just imagine how many You know, $20 items you have to sell, and you probably make $5 if you're lucky on one of those. You know, it's like—

Yeah, I feel like that's— 25% is pretty good, pretty good to walk away with.

So yeah, a very tough business. Um, so yeah, so we did great on Zulily. So, um, what ended up happening is that I actually designed the the business in order to serve that customer and realized at some point we realized that the algorithm that I could see, Zulily gave us real-time data. So I could see, you know, how the sales were performing on a, you know, 10-minute intervals. And I, what I would do is I would issue a production order every day to my team to make what had sold, and we would do a little smoothing to, you know, make sure that we were being as efficient as possible, but we could see like how things were trending. And we also had a retail store with a factory partner who did that business for Zulily. And what happened is the algorithm was designed so that you pretty much optimized— the sale optimized at like 25% of sales because you were, you know, you have to imagine this is a site with like 50 different sales going on at the same time and they're trying to, you know, just sell as much, you know, right?

Right, they're rotating through.

They're probably selling as much as the whole ecosystem, not necessarily your product. So yeah, so it was really, you know, at that point, you know, seeing that that was happening, even when we had like these bestsellers, I thought, okay, well, I was talking to my production team, and my production team was my personal assistant, who was a Balinese woman who I had hired. She was actually trained as an English teacher, but her English was very good, and she was kind of a go-getter, which is not necessarily the most typical in Bali. But yeah, so I trained her in the business working with me. But she was my Balinese counterpart, really working with me on the business and understanding all the nuances and the culture and what was happening with the people.

Right.

And so at that point, she said to me, you know, what if we only make what we sell? And I said, well, that would be great. That's, you know, that is an idealistic way of working. I, you know, being demand-based, it's like just-in-time production. It's one of the, you know, kind of hot buttons from the '90s.

Right. Yep.

But yeah, so I was like, yeah, sure. So what we did was we actually— I actually positioned her eventually to actually run a network of independent sewers that she was able to bring together. And some of these people, it was interesting too, because part of what happens in a place like Bali is you have people who are coming from more rural areas. This is in the apparel industry all over. People come from rural areas to work in the business center, in a factory where there's a job for, you know, 30 or 100 sewers or something like that, versus in their town where, you know, it's far away and it's hard for them to get sewing work. So they'll— so that's one of those challenges in general, I think, that you see in the apparel industry, because you have often people coming from poorer rural areas to get work in the city in a factory environment, right? So what this kind of model enabled is for these factory workers to actually create more home-based businesses or community-based businesses where they could pull together a small team. We would invest in them getting a set of machines. So they would have to have 4 machines. Some of them already had, you know, some people were already doing this stuff at the side and had already their machines. Sometimes they needed a new machine or they needed to kind of expand their team, or, you know, and we would help them with facilitating that and work with them to actually figure out what product we would make and how we would make it and how we would design the whole operation of the network so that we could actually make the product in real time at the prices that we needed to sell them to make the numbers on Zulily.

So, right.

Yeah.

So that's amazing. That's like a whole distributed manufacturing. Yeah, just not— you don't hear about that in the fashion industry.

It actually happens, but not— it's not necessarily managed top to bottom. I mean, that is the integrated management. And also, even with integrated management, a lot of times we don't We'll go to— well, we'll go to factory production. I mean, you will go to factory production, but it depends on if you have— sometimes you have an agent in between and you don't actually see the factory. I mean, it really depends on how the sourcing and production relationships are structured by the company. But increasingly, that is the way that people— that is the cutting edge of where you want to be. You want to be able to see what's happening all the way to your Right.

Supply chain transparency is important, especially if you're gonna certify something.

Well, that's a real impact too, because I mean, the re— you know, you've gotta know what's really happening, um, in all the different points in order to— right, if you're ha— you know, not having a bad impact, because there's a lot of places that you could potentially, you know, have some really bad Impacts along the way. We know that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and so you have this experience of working for other people, but also this company, which it sounds like you got quite a bit of experience in the whole multicultural, right, working with a culture. And I've, I've found that working with— we have team members in several countries, and it's always, you have to get used to and understand the cultural Norms so you make sure you're, you're understanding what's, what is good, good or bad for everyone. So it's, it's always eye-opening when you start to really, like you said, be able to feel the whole chain and understand like what, what the impacts are, right, of whatever you're doing, whether it's a service-based or product-based, it doesn't really matter. There's always an impact down to the, you know, whoever's out here coding or sewing, there's, there's an impact with it. And so it's, it's great, great to be able to understand all that impact.

Well, I think the idea of design for impact too is also about the framing that you're taking responsibility for the fact that as we operate in the world, there is a ripple effect. We're whether we're conscious of it or not.

Right.

And as a business, you know, all those externalities and risks, you know, and they can, you know, they have tentacles out there. And, you know, we do have to pay attention to them as business professionals. And what has come up in these more recent years as we're more aware of the environmental and social context that we live in, actually enabled by data, that we have to acknowledge our responsibility in addressing what's not working and do it differently. It's an ethical responsibility. So I believe that every company today should be designing for impact and looking at all the different aspects of impact.

Yeah, yeah. And that's a huge— That's basically the whole premise behind conscious design is if you're not conscious of all the impacts, then you can't, you can't make any changes. You can't make anything better if you're not aware of it first. Kind of looking, looking a little bit ahead, and this is a great segue to, to this, where do you see things going, like technology, whether it's behaviors, like How, how are you thinking about implementing, like you said, positive— we want to make positive change. We know, we know that we need to, we need to have better environmentally friendly products, more aware of our social impact and make it positive, not just social impact, should be positive social impact. Kind of, what are the things you're looking at or seeing or even just, you know, things you want to do yourself to move that forward?

Yeah, I mean, I believe that we have a kind of critical mass understanding and that we can effect the changes that are needed within the timeframes that we have available. Yeah, my focus is on that. I'm thinking about the next— this decade until 2030. My focus is really on doing whatever we can to get to— I think we need to get to carbon neutral. I think we need to be carbon neutral and focused on drawdown by 2030. And I think we should be orienting towards zero waste, total circularity, and zero harm. I don't think there's any excuse for harm, you know, that we're creating. We need to take responsibility for that and clean up. And the reality is that I know from doing corporate transformation work that you can pretty much accomplish almost anything in 3 to 5 years.

Right.

So it seems to me, with the amount of technological solutions that we have today, that we have— we can make this happen. I mean, we could also just offset everything. I mean, there are many different avenues. This, this is— this requires a multifaceted solution approach. Um, but I think that what we need to be doing is all strategizing how do we get to carbon neutral, zero waste, and, um, zero harm as fast as possible.

Yeah, yeah, we need to. We need to. And the technology is there. I, I had a great interview with, uh, research team out of the UK that, uh, they said it'll take about 10 years, but they can replace all, uh, airplanes' fuel with hydrogen if, if someone wants to put the money into making it happen. It's all, it's all sitting there validated. It works.

Shorter if the money is there. I mean, and, and the right buyers are there. It's always you know, you can make those— I mean, really 3 to 5 years, I mean, to put up an operation. I mean, like, if it's only like inventing new things that might take longer than that, but we've got the solutions now. For a long time, you know, when I was doing this in, you know, mid-2000s, that's what, you know, that would come up a lot. Oh, we don't have the solutions. We— the volume can't— like, we can't do organics because, you know, the volume can't be managed. Our volume can't be managed by the supply base that's available. We're not going to be able to get enough organic fabric. Then the pendulum totally went beyond that where there was more organics in the market and it wasn't even getting bought as organics. It was getting bought as conventional because there was too much in the market. Right now, the opportunity is there. The technologies are there. We can do solar. We can do alternative energies. We have options for drawdown. There's There's tons of deforestation we could stop right now and offset. I mean, there's a lot of different ways we could approach this. I think that the will needs to be clarified and focused on. I think we're at the point, given COVID, we've seen how much we can change in a short time span when there's a crisis that we need to take action.

Yeah, that's a great example.

We can, you know, my thought is that at this point, um, you know, we have what it takes to turn this around. We just need to really focus on that. And I, I believe it's gonna happen, or at least it's gonna happen to the level, you know, sufficiently that we're gonna be able to make it through. Right.

Yeah, I, I'm a more positive— we'll, we'll, we'll make it. It'll just be how painful it is. That's, that's our choice right now.

Yeah.

Um, well, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your, your time sharing what you've been doing and, and your own experiments, as you called it, running a, running a business and, and really paying attention to all those different impacts, which is— it's great to see that you have both this you know, yeah, I ran the mom-and-pop thing, but I also understand corporate. Uh, and it's great to hear from someone who does transformation that, yeah, 3 to 5 years is totally fine if, if you just put some weight behind it. It can, it can happen, which is always good to hear. Um, but yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to share all this, and, and hopefully you can help many more companies make, I don't know, make a pivot towards being more sustainable. It seems Very doable. We just have to help, help people pivot and, uh, actually do it.

Get on it. Yep, it's time.

It is. Thank you so much, Ian.

Really, really appreciate this.

Amazing. Thank you.