Leveraging Design for Sustainable Business Practices

In a business landscape increasingly defined by companies’ vocal commitment to sustainability, the challenge of embedding environmental awareness into core strategy is both urgent and complex.

Richard Taylor, CEO and Founder of Brandon Brand Consulting, and I recently discussed how design thinking can transform business practices to better align with sustainability goals. Taylor argues that designers have a unique skill set that is critical to identifying and implementing sustainable solutions. These skills enable businesses to not only meet consumer demand for environmentally friendly practices but also innovate in ways that reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Taylor highlights the importance of early design interventions, such as ‘challenge and context’ sessions, which question the commercial and environmental impacts of a product from the outset. This proactive approach ensures that sustainability is considered throughout the product lifecycle, leading to more effective and holistic solutions.

With over 30 years of experience in the design industry, Taylor has seen firsthand the evolving dynamics of business sustainability. Her unique perspective emphasizes the integration of creativity and strategic thinking to drive meaningful environmental initiatives. She notes that in the companies she has worked with, what was once considered a necessary evil has now become a fundamental expectation from consumers and investors. Furthermore, Brandon’s journey to becoming a B-Corp has also played a significant role in shaping her approach to sustainability.

Below are edited excerpts from our conversation, in which Taylor dives deeper into the strategies and philosophies that guide Brandon’s sustainability initiatives.

Christopher Marquis: Do you think the design industry is uniquely positioned to help businesses address these issues? Why and how? What are the key skills of designers that are particularly useful and relevant here?

Richard Taylor: We live in an era where social consciousness has risen to a new level – people are looking beyond a brand’s face to understand the business and ethics of the people behind it. COVID has pushed us to question our purpose on the planet, hold companies accountable, and emphasize consequences for those who fail to meet our expectations. Deloitte even reports that around 45% of Gen Z and millennials have, or plan to, leave jobs that are not environmentally friendly.

Design plays a role at the very beginning of product and service creation and, as such, has a unique opportunity and responsibility to encourage the brands it works with to do the right thing.

The last four years have been the most challenging for consumer goods brands, particularly in the UK as we’ve had a triple whammy of Brexit, COVID and the war in Ukraine. All of these have combined to put detrimental cost pressures on production, whether that’s farming costs, material costs or rising logistics costs. However, challenging times have forced brands to get creative, and we’ve seen businesses look to innovate and reduce materials, find new local producers and reduce the movement of produce and materials. Designers can help explore these opportunities and work with form and function to provide sustainable solutions for businesses – and the world.

Marquis: How can businesses harness the skills and power of design to help them achieve sustainability goals?

Seamstress: Design is often seen as something binary in multinational companies, sometimes reduced to just “the packaging people” for the sake of simplicity.

However, designers can help raise the topic of sustainability early in the process. For example, by hosting a ‘challenge & context’ session for a programme brief, they can help question not only the brand’s commercial goals and how they can be achieved, but also the impact the product or service has on the wider world.

It is at this point that designers can ask the question: “Is there a better way?” It is important, especially at this stage, for brands to ask themselves whether they could have designed more effectively at a particular stage.

Integrating these processes from the start allows a new set of events to be unlocked in the conceptual design phase. This allows human behavior to be influenced and drives the exploration of new sustainable solutions; combining the two empowers businesses to be more sustainable, and still more cost-effective.

Marquis: What are the first steps for businesses looking to foster collaboration between corporate and design thinking?

Seamstress: Frankly, the first step here is for a business to decide that they are going to invest their time and money into making the change. That hurdle in itself is proving difficult for many in our current economic climate where profit margins are being hit harder than ever.

Many businesses struggle to ensure everyone is working across all functions internally, leading to lots of small interventions that then have to be combined – meaning extra time, money and stress. Design thinking explores the full journey of a product or service, unearthing opportunities for a better human experience across the board.

They can hire talent in-house or bring in an agency partner for that end-to-end production part. Once they work through the supply chain and examine how to reduce materials, implement new production approaches, and improve logistics, they can then make the necessary changes that can save the business money and give it a competitive edge – paying back that initial investment.

Marquis: Having worked in the design industry for the past 30 years, what are the biggest changes you have seen in business attitudes towards sustainability?

Seamstress: More than a decade ago, sustainability was seen as a necessary evil. It helped tick the ‘investor relations box’ and was a talking point around the world. But now we have seen the culture change, and people no longer see these things as niceties – but as necessities.

A new generation is demanding more from businesses and holding them accountable. Throughout the 1990s, we saw the implementation of Agenda 21, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and then the Kyoto Protocol. The game shifted from doing damage to helping solve global problems. We saw the launch of Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with WHY’ in 2009, and multinationals around the world scrambled to adopt a greater purpose beyond just profit, seeking a higher motivation to act as a guiding light for business.

Today, we see more and more clients coming to us asking for more sustainable solutions – whether through packaging, communications or recycling choices – and asking for our guidance on how to get there. This shows a quantum shift, but it’s important for us to continue to guide clients who may not be that far along in the journey to ensure these conversations are front and center.

Marquis: What are the main challenges you see businesses facing with sustainability today? And what is still being overlooked and needs to change?

Seamstress: There is a general trend to cut out all ingredients to reduce production costs and the carbon footprint of logistics, and this is important as profit margins become tighter. If brands can’t raise prices, they have to look at the other side of the equation: cost.

We’ve all been hit by the cost of living crisis. Goods are much more expensive than they were two years ago, and we’ve seen suppliers pass on the increased costs to consumers. However, for many brands, the key to winning lies in being more innovative in designing products; products that meet consumer needs and find new ways to do better for our planet. While it’s not easy to do without investment, businesses that invest their time and money in exploring sustainable opportunities will outperform their competitors, or extend their advantage.

Ironically, while we increasingly pressure businesses to meet sustainability goals and deliver on promises, the nature of human habits makes it difficult for consumers to change their behavior. Expecting everyone to recycle effectively is a challenge, so it’s crucial for brands to build sustainable solutions that align with consumer expectations, and don’t disrupt their daily patterns too much.

For example, we’ve seen Carlsberg cans held together with recyclable glue, new paper-based bottles for Baileys Mini, and even John West tuna cans sealed with a new recyclable aluminium strip. These incremental design-based changes help consumers become more sustainable at a manageable level, which ultimately helps guide broader behavioural change in the future.

Marquis: How does your agency, Brandon, work with clients to help guide them down a more sustainable path?

Seamstress: We, like any other business, need to stay relevant to the times we live in. That requires us to be on a journey of discovery and movements like the B Corporation have helped us stay focused on meeting the highest standards of performance, accountability, transparency and sustainability.

We take this path of discovery to help educate our team, empowering them with information they can then take to their client partners. Our initial client engagement begins with questioning the sustainability of the product we are being asked to help sell.

The journey of traditional products starts from farming to serving, but now their lives are much more than that. It starts earlier, with the procurement of materials, and ends later with recycling – and we need to be aware of each stage.

For example, with Napolina, we worked to move their traditional plastic pasta bags into a box format. Not only are these paper-based boxes easily recyclable, they also reduce the amount of air that goes into shipping – reducing the product’s carbon footprint, and saving logistics costs for the business. It’s a double whammy for the brand (not to mention the box feels much more premium to the consumer). You can really improve the experience for the consumer, the planet, and the business all at the same time.

We guide our clients to embrace their products as a 360-degree experience, looking beyond the product’s production to its impact on the world, and thinking about how we can reduce it together.