Goodtrepreneur
Goodtrepreneur is the podcast about good people with good ideas for a better world. In it we explore the world of 'good ideas' and why some succeed, and some do not. Guests include the creators of brands, nonprofits, communities and more whose core purpose is to help solve an environmental or social problem.
Goodtrepreneur is a must-listen for anyone thinking of starting a purpose-led organisation or simply wanting to enjoy some good news in the world of world-changing ideas.
Goodtrepreneur
Ocean Plastics into Ocean Toys. How Rikki Gilbey and Lucy Jackson built a successful brand by pioneering a new way of turning plastics into products. Episode 1.
Plastic is a global problem.
Since 1950 it’s estimated that together we humans have produced over 9 billion tonnes of the stuff - and half of that in the last 13 years alone.
Every piece ever made still exists and much of it makes its way into our oceans, breaking down into microplastics that end up in our food chain and, eventually, us.
Lucy Jackson and Ricky Gilbey have made it their mission to help solve the problem by creating ocean toys out of ocean plastics.
In this episode you'll hear the story of how they've made it happen, and it's a story that has it all.
❤️ Love. It starts with them meeting over a shared passion for the ocean and explores how their relationship has evolved alongside the challenge of being entrepreneurs while still having time for partner and family.
👊 Determination. It's all too easy in this world to take no for an answer, but in this story determination makes the impossible possible.
⚡️ Ingenuity. We all build skills throughout our lives but the way Lucy and Rikki put their collective skills and resources together, from woodwork to marketing, is deft.
🥾 Adventure. The most fulfilling journey's aren't always the easiest, and you don't always end up where you thought you would, but Lucy and Rikki show the importance of an adventure mindset that embraces the unknown.
🌊 Community. If determination is what makes the WAW Badfish possible, it is the ability to bring the bodysurfing community together that ultimately makes it a success.
Want to know more? Here's what AI had to say after we gave it a listen:
When Rikki Gilbey discovered body surfing hand planes while working at Patagonia, he was instantly hooked by both the experience and the sustainable ethos behind them. Starting with handcrafted wooden versions made from reclaimed timber, he quickly identified both a market opportunity and a production ceiling—he could only make about 60 per week by hand. The solution? Create hand planes from recycled ocean plastic.
This seemingly simple idea launched Rikki and his partner, Lucy into a three-year journey filled with rejections, challenges, and unwavering persistence. Manufacturers repeatedly told them it was impossible, but Rikki's self-described "naivety" kept them pushing forward. By partnering with beach cleanup organisations and connecting with the right manufacturer, they eventually created the "Bad Fish"—hand planes made from plastic collected from the Great Barrier Reef.
Their dedication earned them National Geographic's Defy Plastics award and sparked media attention that propelled their business forward. Today, they've expanded into sustainable golf gear with Wild Golf while maintaining a flexible lifestyle that allows them to prioritise family alongside entrepreneurship.
What makes their story remarkable isn't just the products they've created, but how they've demonstrated that seemingly impossible sustainability challenges can be overcome with passion, community support, and persistent problem-solving.
Ready to ride the wave of positive change? Check out their products at wawhandplanes.com.au or wearewildgolf.com and see how you can join their mission to clean our oceans, one hand plane at a time.
Goodtrepreneur is the podcast about good people with good ideas for a better world.
Please 👀 follow, 👂listen, 🌟 rate and share 📢 to help spread the word and deliver on our mission to inspire and enable more people to create more world changing ideas - and succeed - more often.
Learn more at goodtrepreneur.co
I'm gonna change this world today, make those bad things go away, hey.
Ben Peacock:Okay, one more time. Hello, Hello.
Rikki Gilbey:Hello, hello.
Ben Peacock:We're on. Okay. Plastic is a global problem. Since 1950, it's estimated that together, we humans have produced over 9 billion tonnes of the stuff, and half of that in the last 13 years alone. We add another 460 million tonnes of bottles, caps, cigarettes, shopping bags and straws to this every year, and about 5% of this ends up in the environment, where much of it makes its way down rivers and streams into our oceans, breaking into tiny nano particles that become part of the food system and eventually part of us. In fact, according to a study by WWF and the University of Newcastle, we could be eating up to a credit card of plastic a week.
Ben Peacock:This is not good for us or our home planet, so someone needs to do something about it, and that's where Lucy Jackson and Rikki Gilbey step in. This husband and wife powerhouse have created not one, but two companies finding new ways to get plastic out of our oceans and remake it into new things that people like you and me want to buy. They're with me today to tell the of Wave After Wave hand planes and their most recent venture, wild Golf. Welcome, Lucy and Rikki. Hello Ben.
Lucy Jackson:Hi, thanks for having us.
Ben Peacock:Thanks for coming. So you've done amazing things together and your story starts with a shared love of the ocean. Can you tell me how you met?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, sure, I'll kick off. So both of us came from very different fields. I'm a kind of creative world. I did communications and film at uni and Rikki did marine geography. But we met working for a marine conservation NGO in Greece.
Rikki Gilbey:The NGO was Archipelagos and their main mission was the island we worked on the island of Samos they wanted to make it a marine reserve and in order to do that they needed to map the biodiversity of that island and then communicate that information to local authorities to try to get it into a marine protected area. I was told to just go to different dive sites each day and snorkel and run transects and map and monitor the level of biodiversity in the area.
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, and I was filming and writing media articles and doing government sort of engagement around the issues creating little school materials for the local school about the work the rest of the team were doing
Rikki Gilbey:I think for both of us it was a perfect kind of post-university thing to do. And then I met Lucy there and Lucy lived in Australia and I lived in England. But, yeah, we connected and then I decided to make the move and give it a go in Australia and I lived in England, but, yeah, we connected and then I decided to make the move and give it a go in Australia.
Ben Peacock:So you finished up there and came to Australia together.
Rikki Gilbey:I knew Lucy for five weeks.
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, not quite actually.
Lucy Jackson:I was at the end of my placement and Rikki was at the beginning of his, so we actually only crossed over for a couple of weeks and I came home determined to start an impactful career of my own. He went and said goodbye to his mum and then hops on a plane over.
Rikki Gilbey:Told my Mum I was going on holiday. Turned out to be quite a long one.
Ben Peacock:How long's the holiday so far?
Rikki Gilbey:15 years.
Lucy Jackson:15 years yeah, it's actually funny, of that group who were there that year, there are three married couples.
Ben Peacock:Wow, from that program. That's a good NGO.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, it's island life. We all lived and worked from the same hotel.
Lucy Jackson:And everyone was very passionate about the same stuff.
Ben Peacock:And each other, clearly.
Ben Peacock:So this love of the ocean led you to Australia, where the girl you'd only known for a few weeks. How did that work out for you?
Rikki Gilbey:I think I was just in that phase of life where nothing really, I didn't really have any ties. You know, I'd just finished uni, I was doing a volunteer position in Greece. I didn't have any roots laid yet. So for me I was very happy-go-lucky at that point. I was just like Australia's not going to be a bad place to be if it doesn't work out, so let's just give it a go. And I moved here.
Rikki Gilbey:I moved in with Lucy as soon as I landed. I lived with her and her brother and I got a job with her dad and it was great for a very long time. You know, I was earning more money than I'd ever earned before working in construction in Australia. I loved the life that I had here. I remember stealing Lucy's bike that she had from when she was 14 years old, was 14 years old and I just cycled to a new beach, dived it, swam it like, snorkeled it and fished it and just explored all of Sydney's coastline on this old bike and did it every day. And we lived in Petersham and anyone who knows Sydney that's probably like an hour plus cycle ride from the beach, but I did it any day that I wasn't working. I was down there exploring and loved it.
Rikki Gilbey:But then, yeah, about probably two years in to my time here, I kind of had this identity crisis because my life was absorbed so much in the world of Lucy, living with her brother, working for her dad, hanging out with Lucy's friends and so I needed to kind of just branch out a little bit and create some of my own people and build my own network, and in that time I had tried to get jobs in the space of marine conservation, marine research, which was my background.
Rikki Gilbey:I just struggled with it. I didn't really have the relevant experience that a lot of these places were asking for. I volunteered with the local fisheries department, but the only real job that I could land in any kind of connection to sustainability and marine conservation was Patagonia. It's a brand that I had followed and loved their ethos and their kind of brand stuff, and it was new to me. I was definitely out of my comfort zone. You know I'm used to working on a construction site where it was just me, I had my job to do, to working in a retail store and trying to sell stuff to people, which was entirely new to me and put me incredibly out of my comfort zone, but it was integral to the whole story of war and where I am now,
Ben Peacock:How did that ethos kind of inspire you to start a company? Did you want to be like them? How does that suddenly lead you to start a company making hand planes for body surfing?
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, it inspired me in many ways the fact that they consider and think about the entire supply chain and materials they use in every single product and every single step along that supply chain, how things are made and how sustainable they can be. Even just as the retail clerk they teach you all of that can be like, even just as the retail clerk they teach you all of that. And that made it very easy and fun to sell those products to people, because you genuinely believed in the product and you knew that it came from a good place, and so from that I not only learned how to sell things to people, but I learned the value of like a genuine, real story and belief in the product. That made it so easy to sell because you were just talking passionately about it, and passion sells things. If it's genuine passion, you know you can, you feel like you could sell anything when you're talking about something that you genuinely love.
Rikki Gilbey:But the real kind of changer for me was yeah, we had these hand planes come in from the US. I'd never seen a hand plane before. I didn't know what it was, but they came in. They were made from recycled surfboards and they had Patagonia old clothing inlaid into them and I was like this is the coolest thing ever, so cool. But what's a hand plane? What do you do with it? Just a mini decorative surfboard. It looked like One of the guys who worked there, ben, said, oh, let's go for a body surf. I've got a couple of hand planes. And we actually went down to the iconic Bondi Beach and I went for a body surf and you know, the first wave I got, I swam into a wave, felt the lift of the hand plane, I trimmed across the wave, I just held my line, snuck all the way into the beach and got wrapped up into a tiny little two foot barrel. But it just felt like the world, like it felt unbelievable. A tiny little two-foot barrel, but it just felt like the world, like it felt unbelievable and I just loved it. From that moment on. It was just just changed me.
Rikki Gilbey:And when I went back home and tried to research hand planes I wanted to buy, there were the ones from the US. They came in and there were 250 Australian dollars. This is a lot of money for a little hand plane. So I was like, oh, I kind of want to make one or find one locally that has been made and there just wasn't anything. In Australia. No one was making them, bar a couple of people that were turning them out of their garage, and so I just saw the opportunity. I was like this is something that I genuinely love. Nobody's really doing it and I thought I reckon I can make them and I can make them good, and that that's kind of where it all started.
Rikki Gilbey:So I was working construction. I started making hand planes out of old reclaimed timber from job sites. I used cut up doors, I used flooring, I used beams old oregon beams from the 80s, beautiful, like grainy, beautiful timber. And the clincher was, I remember I made 18 hand planes and we went down to the markets in Manly. I had no means of selling anything. I didn't have any sort of payment facility. I just had a trestle table and 18 hand planes. I laid them out. I had no business cards, I just had a big smile on my face and I'll never forget it.
Rikki Gilbey:There's a guy he came and bought one and I'd inlaid kind of like the bottom of a door into the middle of this hand plane like a cool stringer. And this guy came down and was like that's really cool, what do you use it for and I was like it's a body surfing hand plane. And he was like I body surf every day but I've never used a hand plane. Anyway, he bought one and he went down to the beach. About four hours later he came back and he said I'm 45 years old, I've been surfing all my life and that's the most fun I've ever had in the ocean and that, for me, was just like embedded it in me forever. You know, he he genuinely loved it and that day I sold every single hand plane I had. I say I could only take cash. So I left with a water cash, a massive smile on my face and the fire had been been lit and that was it. That's all I needed to keep going.
Ben Peacock:That's just amazing. You've brought together your love of the ocean with your carpentry skills, with what you've learned from Patagonia, and it sounds like a dream come true. But, Lucy, I want to look at it from your point of view for a second. Suddenly, your boyfriend, who was working construction and had a good job at Patagonia, suddenly starts rolling up with old doors and bits of houses and stacking them in, no doubt, a garage you possibly didn't even have and starts building things. Did you think he was crazy?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, look, it was definitely a bit of an intense time. We were actually living in a share house at the time, so you're absolutely right, we had no garage and we lived in a house. There were five of us in this tiny, semi-derelict old terrace in lycra at the time, and my brother this was, you know, over a decade ago still likes to throw a jib every now and again about the stains that he left when he was sealing hand planes in the the backyard or occasionally lent up against a wall where he sprayed them. Um, it definitely tested some relationships.
Lucy Jackson:He was literally sanding things in the backyard and and I had my own full-time job and would stay up late every night we had a market on to hand sew handles for them out of recycled wetsuits from Patagonia, so that we would have a completely circular story and also sew like little gift bags and just doing random things all hours of the day and night to try and support this passion he had, you know, and I didn't know where it would go. To be honest, I do remember the first couple of markets we he had, you know, and I didn't know where it would go. To be honest, I do remember the first couple of markets we did so you know I'd always go along and help set the stand and I remember one of them we were sold out so we were like, well, we're going to leave and one of my dearest friends, monica, who I used to work with him. I was frustrated at times because I never asked to be an entrepreneur's wife, necessarily, but I definitely was excited as well.
Rikki Gilbey:If we're being honest, Lucy never really wanted it. It was just my pure passion. That kind of got it through.
Rikki Gilbey:She saw how happy it made me and she just made it work, bless her. But yeah, then we had a really hot start and then we'd already had it all booked in. But then the following year, me and Lucy decided to take off around the world. We'd been saving some money for a while and so it was probably about a year into everything, everything started to snowball from what it felt like for me, just like the idea was coming to life, the business, the brand was coming to life, and then we jetted off around the world and then a real critical moment came for us at the end.
Rikki Gilbey:So before I left, circling back to Patagonia, before I left, I made a hand plane for my manager and I gave it to him just as a present to say thank you, look, I've loved working at Patagonia. I'll probably work when I come back, but I just wanted to say thanks. And here's a hand plane. Then we set off around the world.
Rikki Gilbey:I think nine months, and right towards the end of it, I remember being in Venice and I got a message from my manager at Patagonia and he said hey, Rikki, you know those hand planes that you make, do you fancy making a few more of them? I was like, what do you mean, he said well, that hand plane you sent me. I sent it to the Patagonia buyer and they want to stock them for the summer, and so for me they put a purchase order in at that time to cover all their stores in Australia and that gave me the funds to come home straight from traveling, straight into a workshop that I rented and I built up that entire purchase order for them and that just kicked things off as soon as I got back. They really are a fantastic brand, aren't they? They've been my number one stockist since the beginning. They've supported me and they're still a stockist today and generally the business wouldn't be here without the Patagonia kind of origin story for sure.
Ben Peacock:And you still make the wooden hand planes to this date. Right, that's your kind of premium product.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, I do. I can't claim that I make them by hand, um personally anymore. We did have to outsource the manufacturer of the timber hand planes um along the line. You just can't make enough yourself not of hands well, correct.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, so we got. We got to a point where I was in the workshop five days a week, eight hours a day, manufacturing hand planes, and I loved it, to be honest. I'd put on a podcast, I'd put on some music, I'd dance around the workshop, I had all my jigsaw set up so I could just go through the motions and just turn out hand planes. But I could only make like 50 or 60 hand planes a week.
Ben Peacock:That sounds like quite a lot from someone who's never made a hand plane before.
Rikki Gilbey:It was, yeah, I mean, I had a full system going, but it just wasn't enough and I was selling those hand planes, you know. So there was a roof to how much I could make and how much I could sell, and so that's when we needed to scale up, and then that's when the whole concept of the recycled plastic hand planes came about.
Ben Peacock:Well, let's move on to to that, because that's in a lot of ways, that's where the ocean really starts to come into the story in an even bigger way.
Ben Peacock:So the Badfish is your hand plane made of recycled plastic and, from the website: Our mission is more waves, less plastic. Every bad fish hand plane is made using plastic waste collected directly from Australian beaches, so you can body surf better and clean the ocean at the same time. As you said, there was a business need to make a more scalable, mass-produced product, but you chose to add this environmental benefit, too, of using plastic collected from the ocean. What made you decide to do that?
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, look, I felt like after my time at Patagonia it became like a moral obligation, like if I was going to scale up the business and I was going to manufacture hand planes en masse, I needed to do it in a way that didn't damage and, if not, and ideally protected the world in some way. And so I was just trying to rack my brains like how can I scale up and have a genuinely good impact at the same time? Plastics was an obvious choice for scaling up. You know, injection molding is extremely fast and cheap to create products and, to be honest, I was just incredibly naive at that time and I just thought, well, I just won't use virgin plastics, I'll just buy some ocean plastics that have, you know, and just put them in a machine and mold them right. That should work, because then then I win both ways.
Rikki Gilbey:You know, I get to have genuine impact, which I always wanted to do, but I also get to have a business that is scalable. But as soon as I started going down that route of trying to create recycled plastic hand planes, we just hit hurdle after hurdle after hurdle, and now I'm a big believer that my naivety got me through, because I didn't understand the industry because I hadn't made anything out of plastics before. I just had a lot of questions and a lot of people said to me just don't bother, it's not going to work, it'll be too expensive, no one will make it for you, the material won't be good enough Like constantly.
Ben Peacock:So when you say everyone, who are these people? Where do you begin when you have an idea like this?
Rikki Gilbey:So my first step was to just contact beach cleanup groups, groups who were combing the beaches and they've been doing it for a very long time and they have all this material. And I was like, where does it go? Can I buy it? And they were like, well, it's not really in a way, in a form that you can use. It's kind of just a degraded, contaminated plastic that's got loads of sand and shells and all this stuff in it. Like you probably really don't want to buy it. And they said, well, once we've sorted it and counted it, we just put it in the bin.
Ben Peacock:T he recycling bin I hope.
Rikki Gilbey:Well, there's no way of getting it recycled, so a lot of these places would just get it industrially removed and take it to the landfill. And so then that kind of like added another nail in the coffin for me, that like something needs to be done about this, like these people doing a great job cleaning up all these beaches, but essentially they're just moving it from one place to another. So I ended up connecting up with a group up in the Whitsundays called Ecob arge Cleanseas and I said to them I really want to buy the material that you're collecting and the hurdle that I found. The first hurdle I found there was there was so much plastic to use, but it was processing that plastic that was the problem. There was no infrastructure in Australia for processing ocean or beach collected plastic waste. There's commercial infrastructure set up for dealing with kerbside collected material low contaminated material where it's put through machines, cleaned, washed, shredded and ultimately recycled. But the stuff collected from beaches was just deemed too contaminated. It had sand, it had shells, it had all this extra stuff in it that just added too much risk to their machinery. So that was the next step that we had to solve finding a way of processing this plastic into something usable. So that's when we partnered with the Plastic Collective and we worked together with them and Eco Barge Clean Seas to develop a system whereby they collected this material, they washed it, they sorted it, they processed it and ultimately shredded it into a flake and the flake that we could then potentially send to a manufacturer to turn it into an end product.
Rikki Gilbey:So then, once we worked out this processing side of things, then we faced the next and possibly the biggest hurdle in the whole problem, which was trying to find a manufacturer who would use this highly contaminated, potentially mixed material and put it through their very expensive injection molding machinery. It had a lot of risk involved with it and manufacturers just simply said it's not possible. I just remember sitting at home one day and I probably called 50 manufacturers around australia. Just I just got so over being told by local manufacturers that it wasn't possible and I was like I just want to see if this is the general kind of like consensus around australia. So I just called manufacturers.
Rikki Gilbey:I'd get through the front desk and I'll be like look, I've got this idea, I've got this material we've collected from the Great Barrier Reef. I want to make a product that can be used back in the ocean and try to explain the circular story. Would you be willing to work with us to help experiment and get this thing to market? And most of them would go. Oh, that's lovely, we'll speak to the team and we'll get back to you. And just had no's across the board like continuously.
Ben Peacock:What was the reason for saying no?
Rikki Gilbey:Well, this was the thing. No one actually explained to me why it was impossible. And this is where my naivety came in, because I was like, well, if no one's explaining why, they're just saying it's too hard, like if it's too hard, then it's possible. It's just hard or not what they're used to. And I didn't know about plastics manufacturer, I didn't know about melt flow index and all this other stuff that comes into it when you're using mixed polymer, contaminated materials, and this is all stuff that I would learn down the line. But at that time I was like, well, if it's hard, it's just hard like, but it can be done. And I knew that other products in the world had been made out of similar materials, which also helped.
Rikki Gilbey:So I did a lot of research on manufacturers. In Australia. I found the top manufacturer that was working in recycled plastics at that time Replas. They were recycling plastics and making them into things like bollards, benches, that kind of stuff. They work closely with Coles and Woolworths and I just started going to events where they were presenting and it was a time when recycled plastics was a really hot topic. And I went to a lot of these sustainability events and I remember going to one in particular, where the director of the company did a whole presentation on what we really need is end products. We need a pull-through effect. We need to have products that want to use this recycled material to create incentive to process it in the first place, and I was like they're talking about me, like they're talking about the thing that I'm trying to do.
Rikki Gilbey:I c learly remember I was in this thing. I was pretty much the only person there not in a suit. I'm in my Patagonia flannel, I've got a cap on. This guy comes down off stage and this isn't stuff that I would normally do, but I so passionate about it, I got up out of my seat, I walked straight over to him. When I cornered him the moment he got off stage and I said I've called your office, I've sent you emails.
Rikki Gilbey:This is the product that I want to make and I want to make it out of additional material. We've got feedstock, We've got a supply. What I really need is a manufacturer who's willing to work with us. And his eyes lit up. He was like this sounds amazing, Like this is such a cool product. And I was like I know I've been trying to convince manufacturers for a very long time and he was like let's do it.
Rikki Gilbey:So the problem was like the message never got to him. I'd always just hit the front desk because I never had connections to with inside these manufacturers. So I went straight to the top, found this guy. He loved it, worked closely with him on this experimental phase and we kind of nutted out the recipe that we needed in terms of the type of plastics that we needed, what we needed to do, what form they needed to be in, and it was at that point that I needed to make the commitment to buy a mold. So when you inject from mold products, you have to buy this giant block of stainless steel and have it CNC'd into a mold for your product, For the people at home.
Ben Peacock:CNC means?
Rikki Gilbey:I don't actually know. Like a computerised laser cutting stuff, but it's an expensive process and this is an expensive bit of kit to make and at that time, you know, the business was going okay. But because we was growing so rapidly all of the money that the business made went into its further growth. You know, we'd buy or create a certain amount of hand planes, we'd sell those and we'd make double the hand planes and sell those and then make double. so we didn't really have money in the bank business-wise to make it, so we had to take it out of personal savings.
Ben Peacock:So much are we talking?
Rikki Gilbey:It was about $25,000. So at that time I was young. It was a significant amount of money for us. It was our savings and so we made that commitment and we got the mold made. I could have made it cheaper going overseas, getting it made over in China, but again, I didn't know anything about manufacturing. There was a language barrier with a lot of the Chinese manufacturers I was trying to deal with, so I wanted to spend more money and have it made in Australia and have someone explain it to me along the process of what they were doing and why it cost this and where it was going to be, and I could go there and pick it up if I needed to.
Rikki Gilbey:So we committed to that. We dived in. We bought the mold, we sent it to the replast manufacturers because up until this point we were using temporary molds, like silicon molds, to create like weird versions of the hand plane and they're, he'd said, prototypes. But he would send me samples of it and they'd be all lumpy and wavy and non-uniform and we didn't actually really know if we could create a product out of this stuff until we had the genuine mold. So we committed to it. We got the mold made, we spent the money, we sent it to the manufacturer and then, I think, two weeks afterwards, I was in a bit of a panic because I didn't hear from him. And when you're working with these people and these great people who are doing stuff for you pro bono, there's a fine line between inspiring them to to work on it but not pestering them too much.
Ben Peacock:Tell me when you find it.
Rikki Gilbey:I know... s So I sent the mold to him and I didn't hear from him for two weeks and I was beginning to get a bit panicked and it hasn't worked or this whole project may come crumbling down. But then in the post, a box of 60 recycled plastic hand planes that had been perfectly molded just turned up on my doorstep and I opened it up in the lounge, pulled them out and it was just like eureka, like we've created something out of this material and it's awesome, like it was just such a moment, it was so good. And it was at that moment where I felt like I'd completed my mission, I'd created this product. That was impossible, that everyone told me for so long, you can't do it, it's too hard, it won't happen. And yet I had it in my hand, the finished product, 60 of them. And so it was then that I was like, oh okay, how do I sell these? And then that's where Lucy kind of came into the picture.
Ben Peacock:So that must have been an amazing moment. How long was it between okay, I've got this idea and then this box rolls up?
Rikki Gilbey:That's a really good question. Three years.
Ben Peacock:Three years, and where were you in all this, Lucy?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, so I I had my own full-time role in an amazing creative agency focused on sustainability, Republic of Everyone, and I think that's one of the things that really helped grow and also nourish this passion in both of us that we were surrounded by a community of friends and colleagues who had the same values and passions as us. So I was very much immersed in the space as well, but working incredibly hard to try and deliver. You know, very busy, and so we had a very full life because obviously I was trying to support Ricky around that evenings and weekends, and we were still doing, you know, a lot of events and marketing and things like that through the face-to-face channels. But it was a. It was a very busy time, you know, and Ricky was going through some, as you put it, some big ups and downs and we were very much in that together, you know, supporting him, um while he worked through the journey.
Rikki Gilbey:Just to be clear here so in that three-year phase the the hand plane stuff was in somewhat of a growing phase, but that meant that all the money that the business was making was going back into the business to help it grow, to fund its growth, and so at that point I wasn't really pulling any money out of the business whatsoever.
Ben Peacock:So, Lucy, you're funding the whole operation and, in a sense, your life?
Lucy Jackson:Y eah we were really relying as a couple on my income and it was the first time we're going back a little way, but that was the first time we'd lived just the two of us, so we'd been share houses all through the beginning of our relationship and the first sort of part of this story. We're very lucky that we're very values aligned people. You know we're frugal headness, if you know that book, we love experiences and opportunities over stuff. So we didn't really we got by with very little. You know we put everything. I don't look back and see that as a time of being without, but yeah, we were living off of a single income while we tried to invest in this project and it was just something that we did without thinking, in a way, because it was something that was so worth it to us both and we were putting everything that we could into the success of this project.
Ben Peacock:When you look back on things it can all be somewhat romanticized. Tell me, how did it feel when, say, you got a no along the way? I mean, obviously you place hope in these things. You've said I got no from 50 people, but each of those is a little moment of hope that you think you might get a yes. Then you get a no. There's a huge disappointment in that. How did you deal with that constant? I guess not rejection, but brick wall of impossibility.
Rikki Gilbey:For me it was just like an unwavering faith that it could be done. And I'm not going to lie. I had to convince Lucy a lot along the way as to why it was worth it, and you know I didn't always have the answers and I didn't always have proof that it was going to work out. I just had this faith that this thing could be done and that we were going to be the ones to do it.
Ben Peacock:And were you thinking, Lucy, maybe you should, maybe you should...
Lucy Jackson:... get a job!
Lucy Jackson:Look, I played part therapist, you know, definitely. I think we've listened to a lot of other founder stories over the last couple of years and there's threads of commonality in that, you know, it can be isolating as well. It can be lonely work trying to carve a new path, and you know so much of what's fun about work, especially in your twenties which is where we were at this point is the camaraderie, the team, the Friday night drinks. Like Ricky didn't have that. He was trying to solve this problem, he was trying to do this work and he had some great friends around him in the body surfing community, but it wasn't a day in, day out thing.
Lucy Jackson:So you know, it could be difficult, I'm not going to lie. It could be emotionally straining, you know, and in a relationship that can put pressure on. You know, because I had a very busy, a big empath, and taking people's feelings on is something that I do by accident at the best of times. So that was tricky and I think we had to build some scaffolds into our relationship at that point to say, you know, we can't talk about this tonight or we can't brainstorm every night after dinner until 11pm, like we have to just also like go on a date, watch a movie, have a glass of wine and not talk about hand planes. That was a critical time for us to somewhat decouple this project from the rest of our lives, a little bit like, yes, ricky stayed focused and I was always very supportive. But you know, that balance establishing at that time, before things took off more, I think, was really important because otherwise we both would have burnt out in a number of different ways.
Ben Peacock:So, having gone through the ups and downs with Ricky, how did you feel when 60 perfectly made hand planes arrived in the mail?
Lucy Jackson:Oh my gosh, it was probably a mix of relief, you know, like so excited, like just to see, and they look awesome. Like the way that they're made means they have this beautiful sort of kind of organic swirl in them, with the different colors and textures mixing and they just yeah. It was a very exciting time when we realized like wow, you know, rick has actually been able to do this and they're here and we can do something with this after all this time. So very excited, very relieved, you know, I think the relief was equal to the risk that we had taken
Ben Peacock:So there you go, mission accomplished, right? You got a box of handplanes. Absolutely not... a At this point, you've made them, but now you've got to sell them. So how does one begin that? Obviously, you're in Patagonia with the wooden ones. Did they help you with the plastic or did you take a different path to market?
Rikki Gilbey:Absolutely, look. So Lucy definitely played a big part in that. The agency that she worked for. They had a lot of creative genius around the branding side of things and you know, up until that point my marketing strategy had been to build a community of people body surfing by its nature. A lot of people body surf by themselves and it's a very individual sport and a lot of body surfers didn't know that other body surfers existed. They all thought that they were the only ones.
Ben Peacock:They obviously don't bodysurf at Bondi then, those ones.
Rikki Gilbey:So at this point we was six years into the brand starting. So for the last six years I had built a community of people. It started online through social media, just sharing some of the photos and videos of us body surfing, and then we took that online community in person.
Lucy Jackson:Can I just add something there, though? One of the funniest things about that is for a long time, Rikki and all his body surfing friends only knew each other by their Instagram handles, and it wasn't until they met in real life, and he'd be like there's Barrel Pig, and I'm like what are you actually talking about?
Rikki Gilbey:It's Captain Kookman and Belly Slater.
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, these characters that I now know well after years of events. But actually he brought together a physical community that didn't even know each other's names but talked all the time, and that's something that, to this day, that that whole group of people is also very grateful for,
Ben Peacock:Sounds like a fun group. Belly Slater's about as good a handle as I've ever heard. What's your handle, Ricky?
Rikki Gilbey:It was just WAW Handplanes. It's really boring.
Ben Peacock:We're gonna have to workshop that.
Rikki Gilbey:Y eah but yeah. So I had built this community of people and we brought it in person. We did. We did a big camping experience where we had 60 plus body surfers come and we camped for the weekend and that's still a tradition today. It's done every single year.
Rikki Gilbey:I started the Australian body surfing, classic um, otherwise known as Wompoff, which was like a team focused body surfing event, so otherwise known as Wampoff, which was like a team-focused body surfing event. So it brought regional teams from all around Australia together to compete in a one-off, one-day surfing event and it just humanised this community that we had online and off the back of that that created kind of a bit of a global wave, global network of body surfers which amassed to be quite a large sum of people. When it came to the point where we had created the bad fish, I already knew I had a market of body surfers to put it to, but I was already selling to these people. It was already kind of a capped market. It's a niche market and we knew for it to succeed it needed to go beyond the body surfing market.
Rikki Gilbey:The body surfing market because the timber hand planes for those that are interested they sell for about 150, which is a large sum of money for a small item. It's a handcrafted item and so it was always. You have to try to justify the price. When you make something out of recycled plastics the production cost comes down. So I mentioned before I was making around 50 to 60 hand planes a week when I was hand making them out of timber. The moment that we could produce them industrially out of recycled plastics we could make one every two minutes and the machine could run 24 hours a day.
Ben Peacock:Wait how many?
Rikki Gilbey:It's a lot. We could make about two and a half thousand a week.
Ben Peacock:From a business point of view, that's great, but from an impact point of view, that's an awful lot of plastic right?
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, it works out to be a lot of plastic in the end, which is really exciting. But yeah, we just knew that the next stage of selling these things was to sell it to the gift market, which is kind of where we wanted to be at. It's a unique gift. It's got a great story and this story came about from talking with Lucy and her agency and we nutted it all out together and I don't know if you want to talk about that with your time at Republic, Lucy?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, for me, I've got had a pretty single-minded passion for sustainability communication since I began my career and this was a chance to practice it on my own project, which was awesome. We workshopped, you know, the brand, the narrative, the name, the design, but also like the copy about Ricky, and I used that to start to draft some press material, which you know. Again, I had support with that, but also award submissions, different things like actually getting to write about it and talk about it and share.
Lucy Jackson:It was where I felt like I could probably help in an even more meaningful way than sewing handles at one o'clock in the morning when we were having a big market and I think helping Ricky in that initial early stage to really articulate the story of what had happened and what he was trying to do. That actually took so much time to just come up with. You know, to bring it back to something really simple, because it had been such a complex process and we wanted to tell everybody every single thing that had happened. You know you kind of just need to give people the hero points and so working that through together to a really tight little pitch to tell people when you saw them at markets or when you were introducing it to a new brand channel or a sales channel was really fun and rewarding.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, like when I received those first recycled plastic hand planes, we didn't even have the name. For me they were just the recycled plastic hand planes. So like, even that stuff we needed to work it out. And so to come up with the Badfish was was really instrumental because it really summarised the whole thing. You know, making really good hand planes out of really bad fish, so just things like that just made it just so much more marketable to the masses. But what really come about it? Because the branding and the messaging was done so well. Six months after launching the product, we entered into the National Geographic's Defy Plastics award program.
Ben Peacock:Did you write the entry, Lucy?
Lucy Jackson:I did.
Lucy Jackson:We got in, which basically ended up being like a three-day intensive run-through of the project, the product, where we were going in the future, and it was ultimately a competition. There was going to be one ultimate winner.
Ben Peacock:Three days. So this is like Shark Tank but three days not three minutes?
Rikki Gilbey:Three days and all the different brands I think there was seven or eight brands there all pitching their stories and all great stories, all great products, all great backgrounds, and I'm sat there like thinking you know, I'm inspired by all these other people and ultimately pitching to a global network of people in Tokyo, Singapore, new York, pitching my story, which was just. I could never imagine being in that scenario, but we went through this whole process. We talked about what we'd done, what we'd achieved and where we wanted to go and three days after the event finished, got the email saying congratulations, we've chosen war hand planes as the winner of the national geographics to fire plastics program for 2019 and that's a global program.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, a global program and that, for us, gave us like an incredible boost into the market. All of a sudden we were on the front page of newspapers, we were on major websites all talking about recycled plastics but then being like turned into body surfing hand planes and that was a real key part. But because of the branding we had behind it, we had a really good story already laid out through the work with the agency. When that came to be and came to light, we were kind of ready. You know, we had a really good story to tell and so that real big boost just led to a whole string of probably two years of some solid media exposure that just kept coming. In the following year we won an innovation award with Amazon. They were just launching in Australia and they were looking for like the most exciting innovative products going and you know, like it kind of snowboard from there.
Ben Peacock:So, Lucy, a question for you. You've said your whole world is sustainability communications and we've spoken about the importance of the story, but there's a lot going on in the story. There's the made-of-recycled ocean plastic story. There's the first supply chain in Australia story, creating this pull-through for ocean plastics that we heard so important. There's the it makes body surfing more fun story. And there's the gift story. It looks good and giving it as a gift will make you look good. So which part of the story do you think has made the product so successful, and to what extent does the sustainability story drive people to buy it versus simply driving the media?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, it's such a good question and I think up until fairly, you know, recently, because we've got young kids now I've always been at markets and events with Rikki and helping to sell them and talking to people who you know. It's a slog doing that brand journey, doing the face-to-face events, but it really helps you learn about your market and your consumer in a way that is so hard once you're digital only. I think the sustainability piece is a clincher, like people love it, no doubt about it. They love it, but they've already walked over and gone. These look cool, what are they? And they started talking to you or you get people coming over thinking it's an amazing gift for the difficult to buy for dad or or husband. Very, you know a lot of that and they love the look of them. They think they're really interesting, they think it's an interesting idea to buy.
Lucy Jackson:And then when we tell them you know what we've done and what it's made of, they're like oh my gosh, great, yes.
Lucy Jackson:But I think that kind of reflects something that I see more broadly working in corporate comms and when you're launching sustainable products is that consumers love this stuff but there is almost an increasing expectation which leads to maybe less awareness of the challenges, that this work will just be done by brands and organisations and brought to market at the same price and, you know, not necessarily appreciated the complexity that's behind some of this project work or the increased costs you might be facing into. So I think because we're small and we're niche and when people realise we're married and that Rikki's the face behind the brand, there is more connection there. But I do think it's actually a supporting message now more. It's definitely something people like, but they wouldn't buy it just for that. It's because it looks cool and it's unique and it's something that will make them an interesting gift giver or person to be around.
Rikki Gilbey:I think Lucy's right. Yeah, it's not the the draw factor for a lot of people. They are first drawn into the body surfing hand plane as an interesting, unique product, but ultimately the story package is what makes it sell. So if they're thinking as a gift for somebody, they think it's a unique item, something they probably wouldn't have. They love surfing, they love the ocean, think it's a unique item, something they probably wouldn't have. They love surfing, they love the ocean. So it's to do with their interests. But also it does have a really good story involved in it. So when I picture people gifting to it, I imagine people being like I got you this, it's a body surfing hand plane and it's made from recycled ocean plastics from the Great Barrier Reef so you can go and have fun. You've got a whole bag of plastic in that one whole thing in that one hand plane. And for me I think what it does is it markets the product in the long term. So your customers market it for you because it's got the story wrapped up in it.
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, it's like it gives them an extra confidence to buy it because they know that even if they don't necessarily use it every day, they'll still think it's a cool thing to have in their house because of what it is and what it's done.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, the story convinces them to buy it in the store or online. But versus other products, if it was laid next to it, you know, price point might come into it or looks might come into it but what ultimately the story does is increases your sales exponentially because the moment they've got it, they want to tell that story and that story sells it to other people and they market it on your behalf, which is, I think, the true power of having a story behind your product.
Ben Peacock:So even with all these sales in the big wide world, you're still a fairly small company. But if your sort of thinking can be adopted by bigger companies, that's when we see real scale kind of change. So, Lucy, you've said a couple of times you work for a global company and sustainability is part of your job. So in your job do you try to bring this can-do thinking to your fellow workers and tell them hey, if two people can do this, we'll imagine what a big company and all its resources can do. And if you do, what sort of response do you get?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, On the one hand, yes, I was probably a lot more bolshy when I first started in my current organisation and had that sort of like, why isn't everybody single-handedly trying to save the world and do nothing else? And was frustrated maybe a sign of my, you know, some level of immaturity in me that I had less, I guess, respect for different perspectives. I didn't understand some of the complexities. I think what I've learned is that a lot more people are passionate even if that's quietly passionate about this work than I expected. You know, I thought that only the people who are really loudly obsessing about sustainability, talking about all the time, were the ones and actually there's been some really unexpected champions that I've gotten to know.
Lucy Jackson:It is a priority, but it is something that has to be top and bottom led, and what I mean by that is driven by leadership with accountability built in KPIs structure.
Lucy Jackson:You know that means that people who are busy can spend time on the projects you know in their day-to-day job, because people are ultimately being judged for their performance at work, but also with people at the bottom who want to run the work and keep it going.
Lucy Jackson:Both sides are important. I think the other thing is, in a way, while everything we've talked about is overcoming challenges and all of that is absolutely true, I think one of the exciting things for anybody considering this is it's almost easier when you're smaller because you don't need as much material, you don't need to shift a whole board's way of thinking, you don't need to necessarily do some of the things that a large multinational or even just a bigger corporate has to. No-transcript of that and appreciation for, in the reverse, how our naivety almost is what allowed us to do this, because we weren't talking. You know, we were talking starting small scale and testing ideas and then growing them from there. So I guess that's a long way of saying I think there's different challenges, I think there's a lot of appetite but a lot of complexity, and I think that it's really important the right structures are in place to make sure it continues to be a priority.
Ben Peacock:So, speaking of priorities, one of the things you've prioritised is a supply chain that's both more sustainable but also local. Is that something big companies are interested in replicating?
Lucy Jackson:Yeah, so we're in a challenging time at the moment. Economies of scale and global relationships play a big part of all this mix, and very few supply chains are just in Australia. So it's a great time to try something small and local, in a sense, and to try and learn something and to connect with people, because there's a lot of appetite to do things locally, you know, and to try and close loops here and invest in circular solutions here, because there is so much more that's uncertain than maybe even there was a couple of years ago.
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, I think that was also a big knock-on effect from COVID. Covid actually, business-wise, did us a real favour because it really highlighted the positive side of having a domestic supply chain In the surf industry, especially in Australia. Nothing is made in Australia unless it's made by local craftsmen and it's just like one-off bespoke pieces. Most stuff that you find in a surf shop is imported. So during COVID, surfing as an industry exploded and people were selling out of stock during the winter, which they would never normally do, but we were one of the only products that could actually just keep the manufacturing going. We had a full domestic supply chain so we could just keep creating, keep making, keep the stocks filled with hand planes. It was an incredible time for us, which was just crazy. When the world was going nuts, we were going along for the ride.
Lucy Jackson:Now I'm going to jump to a totally new topic. The door is opening and small children are coming in. You guys have done all this and raised a family at the same time. How do you manage that?
Rikki Gilbey:I think setting boundaries Lucy mentioned it before when we was in the startup phase of the bad fish, those first three years where all I wanted to do all day, every day, was just talk about hand planes and the problems that I was facing. But Lucy would be out working all day, coming home and the last thing she wanted to do was be bombarded with more problems and more things to solve and work through. So from that moment we had to start setting boundaries, you know, to define time that we would talk about this stuff and make it something that was carved out. You know it wasn't just blurted out when one was tired and one was ready to talk. It was let's have breakfast on Friday and we're going to go through this stuff and get it all out. So we set those boundaries early, like before kids came along.
Rikki Gilbey:But the beauty of working for yourself once we did have kids was that we were adaptable. You know, I was flexible, I could work from home, I could manage the kids when Lucy needed to work. Actually, it was something that I was definitely conscious of when we were starting the business, and one of the main reasons why we pursued it so hard is because I could see this down the line. I knew that me and Lucy really wanted to have kids in the future and I knew what kind of dad I wanted to be. I wanted that flexibility when kids come along because I wanted to be able to say I'm spending time with the kids, I'm not going to work. That was something that kind of pushed the whole process. I really have to get this done.
Lucy Jackson:I think it's important. To be honest, it can be tiring, like we're doing a lot. You know we're trying to do a lot of things and I was just going on mat leave, I think, with our son when things really kicked off with the bad fish. So there are photo shoots of me with this. You know, nat Geo work. I was heavily pregnant and we were doing this work and I was on mat leave and I had Atlas in the sling, you know, but we had energy for it.
Lucy Jackson:And I think now, like to Rikki's point, some of those things that we got through that were so difficult around the balance, you know, of having the businesses, the evenings, the weekends, you know, the kids, the kinds of parents we want to be and how we show up for our kids, have meant that we actually have one of the most flexible lifestyles of most people we know, because most people I know have two people working kind of full time or, if not, close to and in and out of the office all the time and in a way I can't imagine going back to a more sort of traditional setup where two people have to kind of be in the same situation at all times, like the difference in our work and our approaches has actually blossomed into a really, really positive thing for our family and our kids. Both have heaps of access to us and I think staying focused on the positives of all of that rather than getting stressed about the things you could Any self-employed person has stresses around cashflow and time of year and holidays and how to manage things. When it's a one, you know, a small team. Not everything is everybody's expertise, you know. You're trying to learn things and do things that you're not comfortable in all the time, and I think that's one of the things I'm proud of.
Lucy Jackson:Rikki is now an e-commerce specialist and a finance specialist and he does his best and he does his this and he does his that. You know I don't have to think about every element of my company when I'm at work. I just focus on my tasks, you know. So I think that the diversity in our day-to-day life and the way that we support each other and that we are 50-50 parents Like there's no, you know that's been the way since the beginning. It actually ends up being a play that makes us both more grateful, sometimes tired, but you know what parent of young children is not a bit tired, like you know.
Lucy Jackson:I don't think we're any more tired than any other parents of toddlers.
Ben Peacock:I mean, I'm tired listening to everything you guys have been through. But um, the story doesn't stop there. Having created all this, you decided to go and create another company called Wild Golf. How did this happen and why?
Rikki Gilbey:Yeah, so the kids played a really integral part of that. So when Ivy was born, I said Lucy took six months with her and then I took the next six months up until she was one with her. And, as we've discussed, you know I'm a body surfer. I loved fishing and I had every day with my daughter and I couldn't do any of those things. I went to the park like quite a few times and got pretty over the park. You know it's it's the park, and so I was trying to work out what I could do with Ivy. That was enjoyable for both of us and there was a golf driving range down the road from my place and I thought one day let's just go down there and hit some golf balls and see how she likes it and see how I like it. And I loved it. And she seemed to love the chaos as well. She'd sit there in her pram and she'd watch everyone hitting balls and the big smile on her face and just sit there and watch. And so we started doing that a bit more and then we progressed to going out on the golf course. I'd go out on a quiet afternoon when there was no one out and I'd push around the golf course for a couple of hours and she'd sit there happily in her pram absorbing the nature watching me play terrible golf. And we just did it more and more and more and we started playing golf every single week and when the time came that Ivy started daycare at one, I had worked really hard to carve out time to have with her and I was still working. But I'll be working in the evenings and answering emails and phone calls during the day if I had to. But my workload was probably realistically down to two and a half days a week during that time. When Ivy started back at daycare, I still had those two and a half days extra up my sleeve in my work week and at that point I was 10 years into the body surfing brand and, if I was being honest, I didn't really want to put those extra two and a half days back into the body surfing stuff. It was going well, it was growing, it was doing its own thing. As I mentioned before, the product and the story kind of seems to market itself. So now we have enough of them out there. It's kind of doing it's growing itself, which is so nice to be in that position and I'm totally grateful for that.
Rikki Gilbey:But I wanted to do something different. You know I wanted to put my passion into something new and have that really exciting thing because, speaking honestly, there was a little bit of a letdown period after working so hard to achieve something like producing the bad fish. When you work so hard on one thing and then you do it, obviously it's great, but then in the time after that you're like, what do I do now? You know it's great, but then in the time after that you're like, what do I do now? You know, it's that kind of lost feeling because you're not working towards anything anymore, you're just kind of helping push and grow this thing. So I wanted that feeling back again and with this new passion for golf, I needed to justify the amount of golf that I was playing in those two and a half days a week.
Rikki Gilbey:I'd started to go down the route of creating some fun golf accessories. So golf is a very traditional sport. It's steeped in tradition, even down to the types of clothes that you would wear. And you know I was used to disrupting certain industries and I wanted to do a similar thing in golf and I love wearing bright, beautiful, colored patterns in a lot of stuff that I do and I wanted to do that in golf and it wasn't something that was done. So I decided to create Wild Golf, which is on a mission to brighten up the world of golf accessories. So we make hats, gloves, towels any golf accessory you can think of. We try to create them in beautiful, fun, matching patterns, but also and obviously, out of sustainable and recycled materials.
Rikki Gilbey:It was a very different industry for me to work in because, as I mentioned before, with the hand planes we have a domestic supply chain and that's a really nice thing to have.
Rikki Gilbey:You're in control of of everything and I was in control of the entire supply chain, from sourcing the materials to the end product. But I couldn't do that with apparel and golf accessories. I had to rely on overseas manufacturers and overseas supply chains, which is another world entirely. But I've learned a lot around, kind of gaining global recycling standard certifications and getting certificates and proving that manufacturers are using the materials that they're stating that they're using, because there's so many, there's so much corruption in that. So just navigating that whole world has been another whole kettle of fish. But I'm on a mission again to to change a few things within the world of golf. It's not the most sustainable or sustainably focused industry and I'm really enjoying it. It's. It's. It's not quite as as change making as the bad fish, but it's given me some extra passion, some extra juice to do something new in a different space, and I'm learning again, which is something that I really value.
Ben Peacock:Fantastic... and Lucy, you're loving this?
Rikki Gilbey:All new ride all over again oh, my God, I mean I I don't know how much more I can talk about golf either. To be honest, you know I'm not a golfer, let's put it that way I have learnt a lot as well, but I think, look, yeah, it's been really fun and I love to get on. You know, muck in and help with some of the design and the storytelling as well. Again, and it's um something that you know it is always fun to support him with.
Rikki Gilbey:I think the creative element of this gives a bit more scope to play.
Rikki Gilbey:You know, we've got some different prints and Rikki's sitting here for the listener you can't hear, but he's wearing one of the wild golf black cockatoo hats which was actually um a hand-drawn design by a good friend of ours, Hamish, who I used to work with um, and so you know, if we can get more into that and supporting, you know, with anything, starting small, you know you've got to grow, but that's where I think it's really interesting to take this is to doing, obviously, all the really amazing stuff with recycled plastics, but I, you know, in time, doing some cool artist collabs and different things like that, that would take it to another place. That's that's really interesting as well. So I think apparel, um, you know what hooks me in more um than the golf because I'm not a golfer is the scalability is there in a way that maybe is a bit different to the hand planes, because they are more of an investment, single-time purchase, whereas with apparel, you know, you open up an opportunity to, to take on different. You know colours, patterns, etc. You know and do um more different stuff all the time there's a whole.
Ben Peacock:It sounds like there's a whole story in Wild Golf and I would like to hear that, but it's a whole different podcast. Um, in the meantime, the world really does need more people like you. So if I'm a person or the next power couple out there thinking of having a go, how do I begin to follow in your footsteps? Where do I begin?
Rikki Gilbey:I think there's three main things that I would say got us to where we've got to. I think the first and foremost one is passion. Having a passion in what I was doing just got us through all of those really tough times. Like if I had just started the body surfing business purely with a desire to make money and money was the focus when times got really tough it probably wouldn't have been enough. The genuine passion for body surfing and recycling ocean plastics like that's what got me through, and so without the passion, like there isn't. So choose something that you're genuinely passionate in having.
Rikki Gilbey:Um and this is what I got from Patagonia having a genuine faith and belief in your product, knowing that your product is true to its word, knowing that your product works, knowing that your product is made to the best of its ability, just gives you all of that power to sell it, because you can be nothing but honest and if you're trying to bullshit your way through it and make up stories and label it with things that it's not quite and try to like greenwash or something like that, like you're not really truly believing in your product and it just creates this kind of negativity around you and your work and again it just becomes more about money.
Rikki Gilbey:But also, I think one thing that our story shows is that we really truly are a product of the people that we're surrounded by. You know, a product of the people that we're surrounded by. You know, so without me going to Patagonia and meeting those people, without Lucy working at a creative agency, without us kind of going there and surrounding myself at these networking events with manufacturers and things like, it's only because we're out there in amongst the people, building a network of people, that we could do something like this. So surrounding yourself with people that inspire you, encourage, you have skills that you would like to acquire, and just kind of befriending them or being in that space, is truly, truly powerful.
Ben Peacock:Lucy, anything to add?
Lucy Jackson:So well said. That's very nice. Thanks, babe. Yeah, I agree with all of those three.
Lucy Jackson:I think there's a certain fearlessness in the approach that we took which becomes even harder to. It does become harder to maintain as you get older and have more at stake. You know, like whether we would launch into something like this now with two kids and a mortgage, versus when we're in our 20s. You know it is a question, but I I'd like to think we would. What the next thing will be, I don't know, but I guess, just to add to your point, the thing that was swirling in my mind was the community around you.
Lucy Jackson:Like it's not, it's not just about people that you can learn from, but people who are you know, you're aligned in their energy.
Lucy Jackson:Like we were both really very strongly engaged in a strong community of people who had the same passions as us and saw sustainability and this sort of like purpose-based business approach as something that was not only possible but was the way that we should all be thinking, and it was something that really informed both of us very early in our careers, you know, and really shaped not only how we thought about work and why people should work and what you should be doing if you're building a business, but what kind of people we wanted to be, and that translates into how we show up as parents and it still carries through and resonates today. That translates into how we show up as parents and it still carries through and resonates today. So I think you know, whatever it is, it doesn't have to be a physical product. It can be a service, but surrounding yourself with people in your life that bring a great energy, that inspire you, that help you feel like your purpose is meaningful, can give you the energy, when things are unclear, to keep trying to find a way forward.
Ben Peacock:You two are giving me goosebumps, and look good on you two for being those people, because no doubt you are. That to other people, good grows good. Thank you, ben. So if I'm listening and I suddenly have an urgent need for a recycled plastic hand plane or some very attractive and colourful golf gear, where do I go to buy it?
Rikki Gilbey:You can find all our body surfing stuff on our website, wwwhandplanescom. au If you're in the US, it's just waw handplanes. com
Rikki Gilbey:And for the Wild Golf stuff, it's we aregolf are wild golf. com
Ben Peacock:Fantastic. Thank you for your time.
Rikki Gilbey:Thank you so much, Ben.
Lucy Jackson:Thanks Ben.
