All That I Have Met
Conversations with people changing the world. Not the usual suspects. Not the usual questions. New episodes drop the first and third Tuesday of the month. Hosted by award-winning journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson.
All That I Have Met
Brand Builder
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In conversation with Bob Sheard.
He asked a room full of LVMH executives to raise their hands if they were wearing a watch. Then to put them down if it wasn't a Rolex. Half the hands stayed up.
"That's the hole in your soul," he said. "That's what the watch is telling everybody."
As co-founder of FreshBritain, Bob Sheard has spent thirty years building the tools that taught companies to behave like people — from Levi's and Burberry to Converse and Arc'teryx. He was headhunted onto the Karrimor board in his twenties by the Benetton family and called in to advise the Gandhi family during the world's largest general election.
Then those same tools escaped the boardroom and were absorbed by...people.
I called him to find out what that's costing us — and whether there's a way back. His answer involves an ice axe company, a jacket that will eventually become a carrot, and a four-week programme designed to reach every kid at the exact moment their identity is most formative.
Have something to say? I'm all ears.
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Credits:
Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson
Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs
Music: Ilya Kuznetsov
There's a gap there between the reality and the lifestyle that the brand creates. And that gap is the distance between who we are and who we want to be. When we're designing a brand, we're doing it in the context that a brand is used. Sometimes for consumers, it's there to fill a hole in their soul. It's there to fill a space that they wish didn't exist.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to All That I've Met. I'm Meredith. My guest today is Bob Sheard. Bob grew up in West Yorkshire in the 1980s and has said the most important thing that happened to him was buying a pair of Adidas Lendell quartz at the age of 14. He went from picked on kid to cool kid overnight, and that it was like a reverse invisibility cloak. What followed has been a remarkable career in global brand strategy. Bob was one of the youngest ever creative leads at Converse, was headhunted onto the board of Caramor in his 20s by the Benetton family, and was named one of the 50 most influential figures in fashion. He's run ultra marathons across the North Pole and through the desert, not for sport, but as a kind of method acting to get under the skin of the outdoor brands he was working with. He's advised private equity firms on how to drive value through brand, and several years ago found himself working with the Gandhi family in India during what was then the largest general election ever, applying brand thinking to one of the world's most consequential political contests. I called Bob recently because I've been thinking a lot about how branding has bled into our personal lives, how we've spent a decade or maybe longer learning to live as brands, to have a personal brand. We curate and perform, and the cost has been real. So I thought, who better to speak with than somebody who's built some of the world's most iconic brands? Bob, welcome.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Thank you, Meredith. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01So take me back to the beginning. You were at Converse and Levi's, and you were part of a generation of people who essentially invented the idea of giving a brand a personality, not just a logo, but a belief system. How did that all start?
SPEAKER_00For me, it started uh when I was at school and I used to buy and sell vintage denim, so vintage Levi's. I had a store that I ran with my then girlfriend in Camden, and we used to sell the good stuff back to Levi's, and then they had then paid for my education because they liked what I had to say about their vintage, and so I did a degree in product design. And that was really where you I first start to think about the importance of how you communicate a brand, and in that situation, you're communicating a brand through the medium of clothing design. I was then hired from Levi's. I went to Converse, and then my job there was clothing and footwear, but also the brand. And so, really, you're just becoming a storyteller and you're telling the story through the medium of the choices that you make in clothing design or footwear design or brand design. I came to realise is that people don't buy brands rationally, they buy them emotionally. So when you're actually designing a brand that's got to resonate with people emotionally, it's got to be a story that resonates in their subconscious. And it's got to be a story they want to be part of because economically 85% of human decision making is subconscious, so therefore 85% of consumption is subconscious. So we think seven times slower than we feel. So we'll be going into a store and we're feeling that we want the thing a lot quicker than we can work out, whether we need it or not, or whether we can afford it. And so you start to build a whole system of storytelling that operates in the subconscious, and to do that, it's got to be a story that's already there. So, how do you do that? It sounds like it's kind of snake oil, but you have to design a story that already exists in your consumer's subconscious. So, what we developed, not just me and my own, but lots of people have contributed to this, is going back into history and working out what are the stories that existed that still exist today, and we still consume today in culture. One of the brands that many of your listeners will know would be Bear Grills, the adventurer. And what we did is we worked out the story for him was by saying, right, in green mythology, there was a character called Chiron, and Chiron was half man, half-horse, and because he was half man, half-horse, and he had to survive with the intellect of a human but the intuition of an animal, and learnt to live in balance with the wilderness, in balance with nature, and learnt to become a great survivalist. And it resonates because that's Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, and it's Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and so it's a story of being a guide and empowering and equipping people that we know because we've all been read bedtime stories, we've all consumed films, we've all read books, we've all gone to the theatre. So you can be an arch rationalist, but no one can deny they've consumed stories and storytelling. And so we've built brand systems based on that, and that really works because it does absolutely connect with people on an emotional level that they experience but probably don't quite understand why.
SPEAKER_01You've said that the brand created the space and the consumer followed. In previous conversations, you've talked to me about the Calvin Klein Marky Mark campaign and the Levi Scrunch work. Can you talk a bit about in the early days when you were using these stories with brands?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's the first now in 2026, it's the first time in my four-decade career that consumers have been ahead of brands. When I started in the 90s, brands were ahead of consumers. Brands used to create the aspirational space for consumers to follow. A classic example of that would be the Calvin Klein Marky Mark Kate Moss campaign where it created space for a product, a white cotton trunk, and it created an aspirational space. We all wanted to have the body of Marky Mark and go out with a girl that looked like Kate Moss. So we all fell for it, and it doesn't work, folks. I still haven't got the six pack, and Kate Moss has rejected me ever since there's a gap there between the reality and the lifestyle that the brand creates, and that gap is the distance between who we are and who we want to be. When we're designing a brand, we're doing it in the context that a brand is used. Sometimes for consumers, it's there to fill a hole in their soul, it's there to fill a space that they wish didn't exist. And I did this thing once at LVMH where I did a talk to the leadership team at LVMH, and there was about 30 people in the room, and I said, put your hands up if you're wearing a watch. And all the hands went up, and I said, put your other hand up if you've got a smartphone, and all the other hands went up, and I said, Why do you need the watch? So your phone tells the time. All the watch is doing is it's telling everybody that you're not going to talk to that day. You know, it's articulating the hole in your soul, it's articulating the aspirational you that you want people to think you are. So put your hands down if you're not wearing a Rolex. And still half the hands were up, and just saying to them, all of you with your hands still in the air, you're dreaming of being the hero in your own story and other people's stories. And that's what the Rolex is telling everybody. And it's also, you know, clearly got a price tag attached to it, so it's telling everybody you're that you need them to know how much you've spent on your watch. So it is revealing quite a few insecurities about you.
SPEAKER_01Right. That's a really striking thing to say. There's a distinction you've drawn in some of our previous conversations that I want to ask about. It's this idea of storytelling versus story doing, and you've just started to touch on it. Can you explain the difference and why it matters?
SPEAKER_00Well, it matters because we live on one planet, and that planet has finite resources. And we at the beginning of this century are at we're at 7 billion people, and conservative estimates suggest that by the end of this century we'll be at 12 billion people. So within that large sort of demographic context, storytelling versus story doing really matters because if you think of a goods company, uh 20% of the value of that company can usually be attributed to the brand, the value of the brand. Sometimes for service companies, it's up to 40%. So when you aggregate that to a gross domestic product or a gross national product, it's basically the value of a nation's economy, is the value, in to some extent, of its aggregated brands. And each of those brands will spend somewhere between 5 and 10% on marketing and branding and communication. So it's a huge part of our national spend. And such a lot of that goes on storytelling. And so you have a huge amount of financial resources spent on photo shoots and filmmaking that create an aspirational reflection that the consumer wants to be part of. And if you consider the huge waste that there is, you know, if you walk down Madison Avenue or Bond Street or Regent Street, all the shop windows are filled with storytelling. And we know, as consumers, we realize truth and authenticity when we see it, and we know what is an aspirational image. And the money could be spent on something more powerful to create the meaning of the brand. So on the one side, you've got storytelling, which is being, you know, we've been doing it since the 1950s and the Mad Men at Madison Avenue, creating these lifestyles that we're buying into. But as we're maturing, we're realizing, and we can see the synthetic nature of that, and we're starting to ask of our brands questions like aren't there other ways that you can create meaning around your brand, that you can create desire around your products, other than just creating a fake photograph with a model with a great stylist and a photographer in a great location with your product prop, other more meaningful ways you can spend your money so that the footprint of that spend has an impact that means we can consume with a clearer conscience. And so what we're trying to encourage our brands to do is to make a shift from storytelling towards story doing. So that as consumers, the impact of your dollars spent on a product can have a more positive footprint than just populating the glossy magazines and ad hoardings.
SPEAKER_01I want to shift a bit to talk about personal brand, because that's something I've been thinking a lot about. This idea of a person as a brand. I don't remember anyone talking about themselves as a brand when I was growing up, but at some point this has emerged. And I'm curious what you see, and if you can track when this started happening, when it stopped being about companies and organizations or even political families and started being about people, individuals.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think it's worth contextualizing that journey. So my generation, which is Gen X, we consumed for status, broadly speaking. We would go out and we would buy the Range Rover because the Range Rover expressed a certain kind of status. In really crude terms, it said, I'm a good hunter, procreate with me, your children won't go hungry. It's pure, you know, pure status. As Gen X evolved into Gen Y, that was the generation that was consumed by social media and the start of social media. And rather than status seekers and accumulators of things, they were became accumulators of content. That was when we saw the emergence of the brand itself and the the ability to be able to talk about yourself across channels that just simply didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago. If I wanted to talk about myself to a million people, I'd have had to take a poster site out on Times Square and it was never going to happen. So you had the shift from accumulating things to accumulating content, and that's where we start to see the branded self. And it's just storytelling. You're telling stories about yourself in the same way brands told stories about themselves. Where I think the dangers of that are that social media rewards speed and it rewards the highlights, it doesn't really reward the journey and the length of time. So if you get stuck on social media, very quickly you can start to feel anxious about the fact that you don't have the life like the people on social media, or your three-month-old company isn't doing a billion, and you're not some 28-year-old CEO. And it's, you know, by and large, most CEOs are in their 50s. Most big companies took decades to create. Yet if you're stuck on social media, you don't get that impression. Where I see this evolving is uh a bending towards truth and authenticity because I think Gen Z, who will come after Gen Y will be more consumers of purpose. They will be the consumers in the future that will start to redefine the rules we live by, redesign the purpose we live by, redefine notions of how we experience time, and will be much more defined by what they do and much less defined by what they own. And I think we'll start to see a more positive shift from storytelling.
SPEAKER_01So before we get into what's likely to happen, whatever the shift with the advent of social media, we've all been infected by it. We've gotten used to these images, perfect food and perfect locations. As you said, it's not really about the journey, it's perfect teeth, perfect skin. You told me that you lobbied for legislation many years ago that would have required disclosure of retouched advertising, making the argument that a heavily airbrushed image is essentially a cartoon, not a photograph. You lost that fight at the time. Looking back, do you think the bigger battle was always going to be about people? Could you have seen that coming? And is that what we're experiencing now? The sort of essentially the equivalent of the airbrush?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, on social media, you're seeing the metaphorically airbrushed versions of people's lives. And it's not authentic and it's fake. We recognize that. And I think what people need to understand in the same way brands need to understand it, especially fashion brands, is that we respect perfection, but we don't love it. So we've used this analogy many times. Djokovic has won, you know, uh over 20 grand slams, and every time he wins one, he sits in his chair and looks up at the crowd, and they're all clapping politely. But he and they both recognize an immutable truth is that he's respected, but he's not really loved, and he's not really loved because he's just a metronome of physical tennis perfection. And so he's too far away, he's too perfect for us to connect with. Whereas McEnroe walks on court and he's only got a handful of grand slams, and we love him, and we love him because of his imperfections, because we see our own frailties and vulnerabilities in him, which we don't in Djokovic. And so fashion brands need to understand that more because they are purveyors of perfection, and their objectives are to create much-loved brands. But I think when they come to terms with the fact that we actually will fall in love with imperfections, which is how we build the Levi's brand, based on you know the character of the denim being revealed, the more you wear the product, and therefore it revealing more of the character of the user. So you become a designer of patterner and you become a designer of elegant decay, and you become a designer of imperfection, and you may wear fashion brands jeans, but you actually live in Levi's, then that's how you can start to create an economic benefit for a company of around imperfection. But also when it comes to our personal brands, realize that it's a lot more interesting to be vulnerable, it's a lot more interesting to talk about your failures, it's a lot more interesting to share your challenges and for everything not to be just perfect all the time. There is a really interesting analysis of a village where in the 60s the men were living to deep into their 90s at a time in America when most men, there was an epidemic of heart disease, and most men were dying in their early 60s. And they did a study of why the men were living so much longer in this town, and it revealed that the town was a quarrying town, and many of the people that lived there were descended from the migrants of an Italian quarrying town just outside Rome. So they immediately led to the assumption it must be because of the olive oil or it must be because they're eating a Mediterranean diet. And these guys weren't, they were all at Wendy's and Dunkin' Donuts, just like every other American, but they were living 30 years longer. And one of the reasons they were living 30 years longer was they were multi-generationally living in the same house with kids and grandparents. But the most potent reason was because, irrespective of the relative wealth of the people in that village, nobody displayed it. So there were no conspicuous displays of wealth, which happens in Italy a lot. You don't see guys driving around in big cars and things like that. So, you know, whilst driving around in a big car and having a big house makes you feel good, it makes other people feel bad and feel anxious. And that's one of the problems with social media and our habit of presenting the highlights of our life that are perfection versus the reality. And we're therefore feeding this spiral of insecurity and anxiety. I mean, it doesn't need to be there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, absolutely. So a friend of mine who works at a consulting firm super long hours and demanding clients, he was recently told by the partners that he needed to cultivate a personal brand within the company. And his response to me was I just want a few hours more sleep before the client call. The gap between I am and I do, is that where the damage is happening? I mean, just to kind of touch on what you were just saying about I'm a storyteller, I'm a writer, and I know the pieces I write that are more vulnerable and exposing tend to be really responded to. And other others not so much. I believe you when you say that. And yet I'm not sure you know, we're still rewarding people for the perfection and their perfect kitchens and their perfect meals and their perfect children and their perfect looks. So when it happens to somebody at a consulting firm and they're told you need to cultivate your personal brand, I can only think that's because the partners have been somehow influenced by either their children or by social media itself, that this is something that's expected of us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think in that particular case, you're the thick slice of your own brand, and you need to kind of create a thin slice of your brand that can be used to communicate about you. I've had this happen to me recently. We've published a book and it got nominated for Business Book of the Year. And so I was asked to make a statement about that, and I read all the other statements from everybody else, and they all started with, I'm so proud to be nominated, and I wish all the other authors well. So everybody's opening statement became vanilla because everyone said the same thing, the perfect thing. Actually, but the truth is I really want to win this.
SPEAKER_01Right, and so do they, I'm sure, you know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So the the imperfect thing to say is actually I need to win this. And so that's what I went out with, and it raised a few smiles and no doubt the odd eyebrow. What we you talked about is the difference between what you say and what you do. And that's what I was referring to earlier with storytelling and story doing on a brand level, but on a personal level, if you walk into a dinner party and you say, Hi, I'm Bob, I'm a cool guy, everybody immediately knows you're a bit of an idiot. But if you go into the dinner party and you don't say that, you just introduce yourself, you sit, you wait, you listen to everybody, you don't interject until maybe you know the dessert course, but you've listened to everybody and you interject in a way that shows you've listened and absorbed everybody's opinions and then have an educated uh answer, then you've behaved in a cool way. So the difference between what you say and what you do can be the difference between synthetic and authentic. And so with social media, what we tend to see is people communicating I say rather than I do. They're more concerned with the impression of their saying than their actual doing. And the truth is somewhere in between, the being of a person is somewhere in between. And the issue is when you get to a situation where there's just too much of a gap and people can see the gap. I was at a festival last summer, and there was a woman I knew who was quite famous, and she was having a terrible day at that festival. She looked really anxious, and then someone took a picture of her and she immediately snapped from being anxious and uncomfortable into the perfect pose. And then that pose went on to social media. And so there's literally a massive gap there, and that gap is synthetic, and we bend as humans towards. Authentic and away from the synthetic. So I think that the more we become attuned to this, the less we will consume it and it will start to change.
SPEAKER_01So I hate to use this word because it's so overused, but are we less capable of authenticity than we were 15 or 20 years ago? Have our predilections and expectations been permanently changed? Or do you really believe that we can cycle back to a different sort of communication about ourselves?
SPEAKER_00No, I think it's like when Gladiator the film came out, and we're like, wow, how did they do that? But now when you see, you know, you just recognize you become attuned to the CGI. And now we've got AI, and AI is doing some amazing things. But you become attuned to how AI looks and how AI talks. And what that does is it throws into focus the authentic, it throws into focus the human. And so I think actually it's not about going back, it's about moving forward. And you need light to understand shade. And so I don't think that it's putting uh authenticity at risk. I think it's putting a premium on it.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting. So you mentioned, you told me a story about being on a podcast recently, and it was about a physical endurance event, and then seeing photos of yourself after this event and having to decide whether it asked for them to be touched up or changed. And in the end, you didn't, which is interesting to me because there was a moment like there is for so many of us where we want to reach for the perfector, but you stepped back. Is that story doing in practice?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was just coming to realize, you know, I'm 56 and made some pretty unhealthy lifestyle choices throughout my whole life, and that's sort of starting to show. So when I saw the images and I thought, Jesus, look, that undeniably a 56-year-old body running up that hill, and that's undeniably a 56-year-old face that's exhausted. And the truth is, you haven't got me on this podcast because of how I look, and people don't connect with me because of what I own. People connect with me because of what I do, and they connect with me because of what I know. So actually, the attraction of me is not in my 56-year-old body or my 56-year-old face or my possessions. The attract the attractiveness of me is in my knowledge and my experience. So I had no real right to ask to change the image. It just is. And I think that's a there's a sensible decision.
SPEAKER_01So I think that could be true for all of us that at the end of the day, we're interesting because of who we are and how we think. Here's what I keep coming back to. We're all fluent in the language of performance now, including people who maintain they see through it that they're not performing. Outrage has become content, resistance has become a brand position. And even the people who oppose all of this have somehow been shaped by this same ecosystem. Does the distinction between authentic and performed conviction still hold? Like, how do we work our way through this?
SPEAKER_00Cicero said that nothing convinces like conviction. And I used to use that quite a lot actually to describe George W. Bush. Because even when what he said was patently wrong, he said it with such conviction that people followed. And I have to say, if anybody has not read his biography, they should. That's definitely in my top one. And I disagree with most of the content and most of the views, but it's so searingly honest. You know, the opening line is I wouldn't be writing this as the former president had I not stopped drinking at age 40. And so it's just a searingly honest take, and he shares his vulnerabilities. And so, back to your question around do we have to reshape how we are presenting conviction? Conviction, I think, comes from having a very clear point of view and then in a very committed and consistent way sticking to it. And I don't think that will change depending on the media channels that people communicate through. And in many ways, I don't think we can blame social media for this conversation. I think we are just going through a period of how humans are coming to terms with their opportunity of social media and how to communicate through it, and eventually we'll communicate through it in a more authentic way and a more way that reveals more conviction. In the same way that, you know, when the radio was invented, people thought that would lead to a decline in family values because of what was coming through the radio waves, but also people just sort of sat around the dining table. And now, you know, it's one of the most auth authentic means of communication and enjoyable means of communication, just like the book is. So I think we're just coming to terms with the way humans are interfacing with this new media phenomena, or not so new now, but evolving media phenomena. And it representing an opportunity for us all to tell our story. What we haven't quite got to grips with yet is that more authentic stories will resonate and stand the test of time than synthetic stories that are just performative and the edited highlights.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm going to push back on that because you're right about radio and television, even, but it became something that families did together, as you said. They sat around a dinner table, they watched shows together, they listened to shows together. The difference with social media is an algorithm. And you've almost taken the human to human out of it. So you have an algorithm now that's a machine, and it's basically rewarding certain content. And the content is rewarding is the performative, is the outrage, it's that sort of content. So I agree that humans are choosing to use it and we might be finding our way through, but the odds are a little stacked against us. How do you navigate that?
SPEAKER_00Well, they are, but then they're not because we need to be sensitive to this distinction between volume and consumption. So the algorithm may be turning up the volume on certain narratives, but that doesn't necessarily mean we consume them authentically and they hold water. So, for example, my company was at a conference and their head of Santander's marketing made a speech and he said something like the more we do performance marketing, the less connection we have. The more we do brand marketing, the more connection we have. And we're like, no shit, share a lot. And so the more the algorithms send up the fireworks on communication that's all about perfection, that doesn't necessarily mean that we actually consume that noise. So I'm more optimistic about it than that because I think we tend to bend towards the truth, and the things that will endure beyond the algorithm will just come to understand, oh, it's the algorithm rather than it's the truth. And and it drives me mad when I flick on streaming sites and it just gives me the choices of things it thinks I want.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I flick onto my kids just to get a different choice.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And we have a thing in England called Desert Island Dist, which is a kind of autobiographical radio show using music to tell the biography of a person's life. And there are something like 3,000 episodes.
SPEAKER_01No, I love it. It's one of my favorites. I love it.
SPEAKER_00If you go onto the website, you can pick your own episode, and invariably you pick the famous people you've heard of.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00But when you listen to it live on the radio, then you've no choice. And that person may be a nuclear physicist, which as a brand designer would not be someone I would choose to listen to. But invariably those are the ones I learn the most from. And so, you know, where I get value from something that's algorithmically free versus something that's algorithmically full. And so you we learn to distinguish between the two, I think.
SPEAKER_01So earlier, the story you told was actually Malcolm Gladwell's opening of Outliers. And it was the story about a town called Rosetto in rural Pennsylvania that was settled by the Italian immigrants. We've built an entire ecosystem that runs on conspicuous consumption, on displaying not just wealth but identity, opinions, conviction, grief. Is there a Rosetto today? Can there be?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I don't know if there is one, but there can be. And one of the areas I'm working really hard to redesign is the world of fashion. Because fashion has a brand model that pivots off conspicuous wealth and conspicuous success that the Rosetta example shows can be damaging. It also has a product model that pivots off perfection, which can be damaging on a human level, but also leads to short product lifespans, etc. And it has an economic model that pivots off planned obsolescence. So you've got conspicuous wealth, perfection, and planned obsolescence all conspiring to create an industry that's on the wrong side of history.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Earth can't afford to have industries that behave like that.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00I was at a conference recently, and around the table the chat was about Elon Musk and his pay reward, and they were just all collectively agreeing that was, you know, a really bad idea. And I said, look, you know, clean out your own closet. To paraphrase Eminem, the fashion industry is about planned obsolescence, it's about notions of perfection, it's predicated on the new, it creates anxiety, it creates waste, and it's on the wrong side of history. And so a person that can move an industry from a reliance on fossil fuels towards renewable fuels deserves to extract the value that creates as it's done something that's sustainable. Even if he's called Musk, it doesn't matter. And someone needs to do that in fashion because fashion at the moment is on the wrong side of history.
SPEAKER_01So you believe that consumers came out of COVID wanting more meaningful lives. I'm not sure the shift has held because the influence to our economy is still enormous and fashion is still enormous. So, what makes you confident that this will shift?
SPEAKER_00A couple of things. Consumers, I believe, what happened during COVID was certainly my own case, we spent two years trying to survive because literally our income stopped. And then there were 63 different changes of employment law during that time, which we had to navigate. And I just said to my team when it started, before there was furloughing, I said, look, we're gonna have to all go freelance, and I'm the first. So literally, we're gonna have to all go from being employed to being freelancers because we're HMS Fresh Britain and it's leaking and we can't see sights of land yet. And if we all stay in, the boat's gonna sink. So what we have to do is rotate people in and out of the boat, so you swim alongside the boat, and then when you're tired, you can get back in the boat, and someone can jump off, and we'll have to rotate people in and out of the boat as we go. And that was just focused our entire energies for two years doing that, and most companies were in the same situation, but at the same time as consumers, we spent two years of forced introspection, two years literally rethinking about what the important things are in life and what the purpose of our lives are. And so when we all emerged from COVID, I think consumers had a much stronger, much more progressive, much more advanced view of the way they wanted to live their lives. The brands who came out of a kind of vegetative state as if nothing had changed. And so you still have the influencer economy, you still have fast fashion, you still have luxury, and you still have fashion. But their numbers aren't good. And I think what's happened is consumers have moved much further ahead and the brands have to catch up. I think the consumers are creating space for brands and for governance to move towards. So I feel optimistic about that. The reason, though, I'm most optimistic is because I operate in the belief that in my lifetime, in our lifetime, we haven't figured out sustainable life on Earth. We haven't redesigned economics so they're not dysfunctional, and we haven't redesigned desire so it's not delusional. We haven't done that yet. And we haven't figured out the technologies that will enable us all to live purposeful lives above the economic threshold for what that means, but below the ecological threshold for unsustainable life. We haven't figured that piece out yet. But someone will, and it may not be in our lifetime. Our job is to make choices around leadership, make choices around how we design our companies and our brands, and make choices around our consumption patterns in such a way that we extend the window of time for someone in the future to use the technologies of the future to figure out sustainable life on Earth when there are 12 billion of us living on this one planet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I want to jump in here because the sustainability conversation has always been focused on supply and how we make things where they come from, how we produce them more cleanly. And you basically have said this is the wrong half of the equation, that the real problem is demand. So when you talk about creating space, is it for us to rethink what we want and how much of it? Where do you think things sit right now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's the two sides. There is the production of things and the consumption of things. And in economic terms, there's the supply side and the demand side. And I don't think the attention has been misfocused on the supply side. I just don't think enough attention has been given to the demand side as well. Okay. And so the profit motive has existed for 350 years since McCantilism morphed into capitalism, and the profit motive has organized human behavior in such a way that it there's not many comparative forces that are at our disposal to organize how we live on Earth. So we can't deny the profit motive, but we can use it in our favor, we can use it as a wind to our sales. And what I talked about earlier, Generation Z, by 2040, will be the most economically powerful consumer groups on earth. You know, the work I did in the Indian election was mind-blowingly eye-opening. One in ten people on earth are Indian and under 20. And they'll be the first generation that will be more defined by what they know and less defined by what they own, and more defined by what they do, and less defined by what they have. And when you unpack that, what that means is they'll be more defined by their memories and their experiences and their knowledge and their intelligence than they will be about the things that they buy. And so, in that small observation, we can unlock demand. We can change the way we demand from our brands. So I did some work three years ago with a brand in Chamony called Simond, or an ISAx company, and they asked me to redesign the brand, 100 million pound brand, the Isaacs that were used by Hillary and Tenzing on top of Everest. And they were folding a $1 billion brand into this cooler brand called Simond, but the $1 billion brand was entirely regeneratively sourced and manufactured. So we ended up with a $1.1 billion brand that's entirely regeneratively sourced and manufactured, and then it was going to be sold through two and a half thousand decaphlon stores, so it would become about a $3.5 billion brand bigger than the North Face and regenerative. And then they said to me, Bob, we want to meet our Paris obligations. So now we want to learn how to grow, but with making 20% less products, and you're not allowed to put the prices up. And so I was like, oh, that's kind of an interesting challenge. And the answer was in Beyonce. My friend used to run Columbia Music in New York and 20 years ago, and his economic model was sell CDs at Christmas. And so earlier in the year, he'd get on the phone to Beyonce and say, write an album, and he'd get on the phone to Destiny's Childs Manager and say, promote the album. I need to sell CDs at Christmas. And then Napstar came out, and then that got scaled to iTunes, and then his things got streamed, so he had nothing to sell. So he had to pivot his economic model into the byproduct, which was the tours. And now music is structured on economics generated from live music.
SPEAKER_01That's where the big money is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So that said to me, okay, all Beyoncé and Destiny's Child R are a brand. They had to grow without selling things anymore, but they did by selling experiences and memories. So I went back to Simon and said, okay, you're an Alpinist company. You're about living frugally. You're about mountaineering in a fast and light way. But I live in Hampstead in North London. And so an Isaacs is pretty useless to me. But I wouldn't mind getting Alpinist fit. I wouldn't mind training for alpinism. I wouldn't mind being coached on the techniques of alpinism. I wouldn't mind the nutrients for alpinism. I'd like to travel to go and have alpine expeditions. I'd like to be guided when I get there. I'll need to take the insurance out. I'd like to have rental. I'd like to have a repair service. And these are all ways of me connecting to alpinism through the brand of Simond that don't require me to make a product. None of that ends up in landfill.
SPEAKER_01That's really interesting.
SPEAKER_00And so that's how we can change the model so that companies, you know, we start to access companies. We still have the desire of fashion brands and sports brands and lifestyle brands, but we can connect with them and to them in a way that nourishes our need to be defined by our knowledge and our experiences, unless by what we know and what we have.
SPEAKER_01I love that.
SPEAKER_00There, I think we can sort of start to change demand, change what we demand. And if we do that, and if I can prove the connection that incremental growth can come that way, then the profit motive will redesign production because we've redesigned demand.
SPEAKER_01Well, you've also talked about redesigning demands, in a sense, also means redesigning the self, but it requires exactly the kind of sustained attention and genuine conviction that we've talked about is just harder to come by right now than it used to be. So, how are all of these things going to work in practice?
SPEAKER_00So I talked about two things. One is the space we need to create to enable people to move into, but I'll come to that in a minute. The things that have adversely affected our lives in the last decade have been COVID, climate change, and conflict. And those phenomena are global and do not respect national borders. And as citizens of the world, we had to watch, especially during COVID, 195 different countries in their own disintegrated way try and manage a phenomena that ignored national borders, but they had to manage it from within their national borders, and we saw all the failings that had. So that brings into focus the importance of brands and the importance of commerce, because they are in themselves a phenomena that successfully circumnavigate national borders.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And so the sort of potency of them is really important. And the potency of them is really important because they can create a space for us to move towards. So if we want to create real change, we need four types of people. We need optimists and idealists that create the space for the realists and the pragmatists to move into. Using an American example, if you take the civil rights movement, the optimists and the idealists were people like Bob Dylan singing Blowing in the Wind, and that pissed Sam Cook off. So a white guy singing about black rights, so he wrote A Change's Gonna Come. And then that was creating a cultural space that helped galvanize the movement, and the movement created a space that helped politicians move towards till eventually the pragmatists and the realists in the form of LBJ enacted the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act. And so you need both. You need the culture and the arts to create a space for policy and commerce to follow.
SPEAKER_01I'm just going to jump in right there because the Supreme Court, basically, in the third case about the Civil Rights Act, has finally killed it. So 60 years later, what you've described, which was an extraordinary moment in the United States, has literally just been struck down by the Supreme Court. So I was going to ask you about this. I I love this idea of the four different archetypes the idealist, the optimist, the realist, and the pragmatist. Who's out there today? Day, who are the artists and pragmatists who watch who have the potential to shift things now? Because there's some things that are being really torn up.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I'm gonna just come back to the one industry that occupies a space in culture, a space that creates that helps shape the way we think, but also in a very dynamic way and an uh at an industrial scale that delivers very complex production systems to deliver products to the marketplace is fashion. And so fashion really is the prototype for how the rest and other industries can change, and that's why I'm placing a lot of focus with fashion. And some of the protagonists that are helping create that space, I would say there's a brand that everybody should take notice of, which is called Houdini.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love Houdini. Yeah, she's great.
SPEAKER_00Based out in Sweden, and you know, they've designed a jacket which is a high mountaineering jacket that used to be a plastic bottle, and in the future it will become a carrot. Literally, the circular design, you know, of a product that's been created that will ultimately be composted and will create vegetables.
SPEAKER_01It's incredible what they do, and it's also run by a woman, which is really unusual in that industry. Yeah, across it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's a really interesting aspect. And I think what we can do is use devices such as collaboration, where we can use a brand like Houdini, and someone should invest in that brand and turn it into an intel chip. So it becomes a kind of regenerative intel chip inside the world of fashion. So you end up with Houdini regenerating the world of LVMH or Levi's or uh Uniglo or whoever, and it becomes like the intel chip. That's what I'd like to see.
SPEAKER_01That's really fascinating. So I want to get to a program that you're personally developing, which targets 15 and 16-year-olds at the transition from childhood to adulthood. The idea being that if you're going to redesign the self, that's the moment to do it. I'd love you to talk about that, what it looks like, and how far along it is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it was a product of various conversations, one of those being a conversation with senior military leaders in the UK who need to recruit more cadets, and cadets have much more successful adult outcomes than non-cadets. And at the moment, the cadet infrastructure layer is centered on what we call public schools here, but private schools there. So that was one issue. Another issue I talked about with a leader in government was that we have a million children in the UK who are not in education, they're not in training, and they have no jobs, and they're not employed, not educated, and not in training. That's the acronym is NEETs, and so they're excluded at the very level of society. And then I've got my own agenda, which is to redesign demand so that we're more defined by what we do and know rather than own and have. And so we had various conversations at a governmental level, at an army level, and at a brand level, and uh been working on this with people, senior figures in the world of private industry, as well as senior figures in public and civil service. And the idea is that we have a four-week program at precisely at the time when people are transitioning from childhood to adulthood, when their identities are at their most fragile and most formative, most compulsory for all children at that age during the summertime. And it's a program about citizenship. It's a program that shifts their bias from what they want to own to want to know, for what they want to have to want to do, from being served to serving. It's something that's gonna include an outdoor component, it's gonna include a creative component, obviously, an educational component, and it's gonna work in a much more synthesized way that isn't binary, like education is binary and leave some children behind. And the outcomes should be superb. You know, it costs us £5,000 a week in this country to have someone in a hospital bed or in intensive care. It costs over that to have someone in prison a week, and this is a £2,000 course per child, and so the economics are just undeniably supported. So, what we're doing is we're building a proof of concept, we're raising two million pounds to create that proof of concept, and then once we've done the proof of concept, there is already one that has happened that's made the societal proof. We want to make the brand proof and the benefits What's it called? At the moment, the working title for it is guiding forces, and it should then unlock government money to roll this out on a national basis.
SPEAKER_01Will it be blueprintable? Is it something that other countries and regions Yeah?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it should be a global thing, you know, and it should be a shared IP that helps shape national resilience and national character. So we're really hopeful that it's going to work.
SPEAKER_01That sounds amazing. So 30 years of closing the gap between saying and doing for companies, for brands, and for institutions, your work with young people suggests you think there's a way to navigate through all the performance. And it sounds to me like you're hopeful for our mental health as well as for the planet.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, hopefulness on optimism and idealism is the tip of the spear. The rest follows.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Bob.
SPEAKER_00Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I think we're done. Thanks to Dax and the team at Speech Dalks for the sound editing and Ilia Kuznetsov for the music. If you found value in this conversation or in any of my writing, a paid subscription is the best way to support my work. Just go to all that I have met.substack.com or click the link in the show notes. Finally, please share this episode or leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It makes a real difference to how the show gets discovered. See you in a few weeks.
