Pinksheep takeslong-term view

Surrey-based merchandise business

Pinksheep has amission to source at least 50%ofits merchandise sustainably by 2025

Keytothis and to delivering a sustainable proposition to customers is thebusiness’s Orasystem which provides sustainable buying choices for customers and allows them to collect eco tokensthat can be spent on avariety of environmental and social causes.

The system wasdeveloped in-house threeyears ago and is nowonits second version withthe thirditeration being developed.

Customers gave great feedback on Ora but wanted more, says Phil Law, sales director.“Manysustainable campaigns focus on tree planting, and Oraprovides this toobut customers wanted to be able to choose arange of outcomes so Ora has also linked withEcologi and Plastic Bank to let customers choose howthey ‘spend’ thetokens that they accumulate by purchasing sustainable merchandise.”

Asmart dashboardalso lets customers drill down intotheir purchases to see howsustainable they arebeing in their merchandise purchases and plan forthe future.

All of this is based on Pinksheep’s own assessment of howsustainable individual products areusing aprocess that Law describes as thorough.

He adds: “Creating Orawas challenging as it required asignificant amount of development work to integrateitintoour custom management system. Grading everyproduct based on nine metrics of sustainabilitywas also time-consuming. We believethat we have gone further than other businesses in our approach, whichinvolvesmorethanjust planting trees.”

The programme also needed to include theright partners who could back up their sustainabilityclaims forblue chip clients. Forinstance, Ecologi and Plastic Bank use blockchain.

Orahas giventhe companya differentiator overits competitors, says Law.

“Our experience has taught us that clients aremoreeducated than we initially thought,” he says. “Jumping on thesustainabilitybandwagon to tickabox without acomprehensive understanding of what sustainability entails will not work.Sustainabilityis not aquick fix and requires significant investment and effort overmanyyears.” coming out of lockdown, says Law. It

The companyalso talks thetalk in its ownprocesses withsustainable energy use and predominantly electric company cars.

It also took arecycling approach to its move to new offices. Opsdirector Billy Gubbydid most of therenovation of theold print workshop they movedinto himself,using recycled materials where possible and installing energy efficient LEDlighting.

As well as officesfor nearly 20 staff, thebusiness nowhas its ownwarehouse space and industrial space forbranding and printing.

The companyhas hadagreat year coming out of lockdown, says Law. It movedtonew offices and has doubled turnoverthanks mainly to afocus on international business.

“Post Covid, anumber of clients were looking to runinternational events but found that alot of suppliers were pulling out of doing it because of Brexit redtape, reliabilityissues and cost. It’s difficult to do but we pursued it and developed anew speciality.”