Brand Sustainability Strategy: Connecting Vision to Impact

For years, and now more than ever, a magnifying glass has been placed on sustainability as a discipline in the corporate world and companies have spent a lot of time just figuring out where to “put” sustainability— does it go with finance? With marketing? Its own department? Ironically, the souls in sustainable management often get cast out on their own, with the burden of moving sustainability forward in isolation.

But, that’s just it— it actually belongs everywhere.

If ‘instinct’ is the natural drive within us to survive against odds; to sustain our lives, then sustainability is both individual and collective responsibility, because we must work together to survive. It’s a broad and complex topic because it connects and concerns all of us.

In an ideal world, brands would appoint sustainability as an interconnected, interdisciplinary hub within the individual brand or group. And, all of us involved in the industry would revise and relearn how to ‘create’ as an industry— meaning evolving the purpose and function of packaging and product and innovation in general. But, these are big aspirations that will take time; and there is an urgent need to start the unlearning and evolving process for sustainability in the meantime.

Enter: Here.

We believe in the power of applying this thinking to our own processes - instigating those unexpected connections — to allow the most progressive ideas to emerge. At its core, this is the essence of good design: bridging gaps and building innovative solutions.

We founded the Beautility Collective, a group of innovators, pioneers & entrepreneurs united to create transformative ideas and accelerate sustainable best practice. This enabled us to super-charge our team - to ensure their strategic and creative responses were hyper-connected to the world of progressive and sustainable innovation and far exceed a singular response.

Working with our clients, we established the key areas where our expertise could help them make the most meaningful change. We developed two distinct, purpose-driven products that reflect our focused approach to solving today’s challenges while paving the way for tomorrow: Brand Sustainability Strategy and Material Roadmap.

Brand Sustainability Strategy is an answer to a problem we were seeing across clients consistently— a disconnect between corporate-level sustainability goals and the individual brand's ability to deliver these goals in an authentic brand manner. We’ve seen time and time again: a brand either being silenced by greenhushing or struggling to speak about sustainable innovations or achievements in a way that mattered to consumers, or had any ownable tone of voice. So, our Brand Sustainability Strategy is a method by which we connect strategy and sustainability, that supports the brands’ desirability and brand equity by following some simple steps and combining skill sets across the agency.

Material Roadmap identifies the opportunities for your brand to make sustainable and regenerative material choices for your packaging, your product, and other touchpoints. We call it a roadmap because making material change can be hard and sometimes costly. It’s important to map out the smartest series of changes. Sometimes making a sustainable material change is partly waiting for technology to catch up, meaning necessarily adding steps toward that shift in the meantime. In other words— we get you on the road to sustainability, even if that means illustrating multiple steps between now and your end goal. Incremental change can be good, especially in this context.

This innovative approach has allowed us to create holistic solutions that address brands' needs in a way that’s both progressive and sustainable. Both offers represent what we have found in everything we do— a brand can't succeed without thinking about all its touchpoints holistically and connecting the dots amongst them.

How do we change the way we innovate and create in a way that’s sustainable in the first place? By seeing sustainability as a method by which previously unconnected things are connected, opening up fresh concepts, helping humanity sustain itself along with the planet. It’s just good design.