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Regen On Purpose
Regen on Purpose is a podcast for leaders who sense that sustainability alone isn’t enough.
Hosted by Karen Gray, the podcast explores what it really takes to move from sustainability to regeneration designing and delivering systems that become healthier over time.
Drawing on three decades of experience in delivery leadership, people development, and transformation, each episode looks at why change often struggles to hold, and how leadership decisions, delivery choices, and learning environments shape long-term outcomes.
This is a space for thoughtful conversations about building what lasts for people, organisations, and the planet without hype, jargon, or quick fixes.
Regen On Purpose
Episode 10 -They Built a Business Around Giving 50% Away - And It Worked!
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They Built a Business Around Giving 50% Away - And It Worked
Most businesses treat giving as something you do after you succeed.
But what if it was the reason you succeeded in the first place?
This week, I came across a company called Elvis & Kresse—and it completely shifted how I think about business, risk, and generosity.
They take decommissioned fire hoses—materials that have been through decades of real emergencies—and transform them into luxury products.
But here’s what makes them different:
They committed to donating 50% of their profits to The Fire Fighters Charity…
from day one.
Before validation.
Before stability.
Before certainty.
And instead of holding them back—that decision became the foundation of everything they built.
This isn’t just a feel-good story.
It’s a blueprint.
A different way to think about value, impact, and what business can actually be.
Because the real question isn’t just how much we can take—
It’s what would happen if we built something designed to give more than it takes.
If this made you think differently, subscribe for more conversations on building what lasts.
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📧 hello@regenonpurpose.com
I want to tell you about something I came across this week that stopped me in my tracks. It's a company in the UK called Elvis and Crease. They take old decommissioned fire hoses, the ones that have been dragged into burning buildings for 25 years and turn them into luxury bags and accessories. And then they give 50% of their profits to the firefighters charity every year without fail. I sat with this for a while because on the surface it sounds like a nice story, a feel-good brand, good PR maybe. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized this isn't an hour story. This is a blueprint. Hello and welcome to Regen on Purpose, where we explore regenerative leadership, delivery, and systems that strengthened over time. I'm Karen Gray, let's begin. Here's what hit me first. They made the promise to donate half their profits before they knew if the business would survive, before they had proof of concept, before the market validated them. Most of the leadership conversations I have, and I have a lot of them, circle around risk, around protecting margins, around once we're stable, then we can think about giving back. Alvis and Creese flipped that entirely. They said, This is who we are from day one. Generosity isn't a reward for success, it's the architecture of the business. And what happened? That commitment created accountability. It forced them to innovate. It built a strong community of firefighters and supporters who became their most passionate advocates. Not because of marketing, but because of genuine reciprocity. That's not charity, that's regenerative design. The second thing that struck me was how far they took it. They didn't just fix a material problem, fire hose is going to landfill. They extended that thinking into how they operate more broadly, including investing in land and building more regenerative systems around their work. The same logic, rescue, transform, give back applied everywhere. Consistently, not as a campaign, as a way of operating. I find this genuinely rare and genuinely inspiring. What excites me about Elvis and Creese isn't that they have all the answers, it's that they kept asking the right questions. What would it look like if we gave more than we took? That question applied to materials, to profit, to people who produce something the world didn't have before. A business that's been around for nearly 20 years rescued over 300 tons of material from landfill, donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity, and it's still going. Not despite the generosity, but because of it. Sustainability is a starting point. Regeneration is the natural progression. Until next time, design for strength and start building what lasts.