Sustainability Activists

Rosie Brown and Ed Perry
Founders and co-chief executives, Cook

As sustainability ramps up in importance for the wider industry, retailers are looking for inspiration on how to embed more purposeful and environmentally focused actions into business processes. Ed Perry and Rosie Brown, founders of frozen ready meals retailer Cook, provide that. 

The creators and co-CEOs were rewarded for their work with Responsible Retailer of the Year at the Retail Week Awards 2024, building on their success as 2023 Speciality Retailer of the Year. 

Led by Perry and Brown, the retailer became one of the earliest UK B Corps in 2013 and joined the Business Declares movement in 2018, making it one of the first corporates to acknowledge the climate emergency and start mapping out action. 

The positive momentum continued in 2023, with the launch of its subscription service. Perry said the service was based on convenience, not discounted prices. 

“As people are busy, the benefits of a frozen, fully flexible, no ties subscription is that there really is no waste – if you haven’t eaten what’s in the freezer or don’t have room for more, just push the next delivery date back,” he explained. 

Its most recent full-year results show being a sustainability activist can also benefit the bottom line, with net sales in the 12 months to March 31, 2024, up 12% year on year to £106m, pre-exceptional EBITDA increasing 6% to £6.6m, and headline operating profits nearly doubling from £2.3m to £4.5m. 

Maria Chenoweth and Wayne Hemingway
Co-founders, Charity Super.Mkt 

Rebranding second-hand shopping has been key to the growing popularity of the pre-loved movement in the UK. Maria Chenoweth and Wayne Hemingway are playing their part as co-founders of Charity Super.Mkt.

Chenoweth is chief executive of charity retailer Traid and Hemingway is the founder of fashion business Red or Dead, which he sold in a multi-million-pound deal in 1999. Together at Charity Super.Mkt they have helped raise over £1m and have ambitious plans to appear in more locations in 2024 and beyond – the ambition being to help influence more circular shopping habits while also supporting good causes.

The duo uses an innovative business model that brings multiple charity retailers together under one roof in the form of several pop-ups across the UK, including at London’s Brent Cross and Glasgow Fort shopping centres. The pair’s Brent Cross store was particularly successful: selling 40,000 items in six weeks, raising £374,454 for 10 participating charities and increasing footfall at Brent Cross by 7% following the opening. 

With Charity Super.Mkt recognised as one of the best new stores of 2023, fellow sustainability activists will be watching on to see what else Chenoweth and Hemingway can achieve.

Mark Constantine
Co-founder and chief executive, Lush 

Mark Constantine has further strengthened his position as one of retail’s most prominent sustainability activists, giving licence to his Lush team to roll out a range of new environmentally and socially conscious initiatives in the past year.

One example, in September 2023, saw the cosmetics brand team up with campaign group Right to Roam to distribute guides on how to trespass responsibly. The retailer’s stores handed out the guides and advertised the message on shop windows, aiming to encourage access to nature in spots that are traditionally off limits to the public. Lush also sold a ‘Right to Foam’ soap with proceeds going towards the initiative to encourage “nature for everyone”.

Beyond its eco credentials, Constantine oversaw Lush’s return to Covent Garden London in November 2023 and the opening of its largest site in Glasgow in December 2023. The retailer has also experimented with innovative pop-ups, launching a Shrek-themed store in London over Easter 2024 to sell its limited-edition range. More stores and pop-ups are likely to come with circa £5m in capital expenditure put aside for investment into physical retail.

Following The Body Shop’s collapse into administration, Constantine and his team are primed to capitalise and have sustainability and experiential retail in their armoury.

Matt Hanrahan
Co-founder, Reskinned 

A sign of serious retail influence is when a raft of industry players team up with the same company over a short time and Matt Hanrahan’s Reskinned is a prime example. His company has secured partnerships with more than 30 retailers and brands in the four years since its inception.

Seasalt, Dune, Oliver Bonas and Anthropologie are among the most recent retailers added to the list that already included River Island, Finisterre, Joules and several others – and all are reliant on Reskinned to support their pre-loved fashion operations.

Hanrahan, a new entry in the Retail 100, has a background spanning many years in sustainability and is focused on building a more circular economy. Reskinned gets hold of unwanted garments and repairs them to look almost new, before selling them on and keeping them in circulation as opposed to landfill.

Environmentally conscious retailers can work directly with Reskinned to help fuel their pre-loved fashion strategy and take-back schemes. Thanks to a deal secured by Hanrahan with eBay in September 2022 retailers can also benefit from speedier routes to setting up pre-loved ‘shops’ on the online marketplace to take their proposition to a wider audience.

Adam Jay
Chief executive, Vinted 

Adam Jay’s role as chief executive of Lithuanian-founded marketplace Vinted gives him industry influence as the move to more sustainable retailing continues apace.

Jay, former president of Hotels.com and Expedia, is in his third year as boss of the second-hand fashion platform, and the popularity of Vinted has swayed other retailers to adopt their own initiatives to help consumers buy pre-loved items.

Vinted is emblematic of the sector and was the third most popular resale website in the UK over the busy December 2023 trading period – behind only long-established players eBay and Gumtree. Fifteen years since its inception, Vinted now has 16 million registered users in the UK alone (double the number of users of last year when Jay made his Retail 100 debut) and 105 million users across more than 20 countries.

Financial performance is strong too. In April, Vinted reported adjusted EBITDA of €76.6m (£65.5m), while net profit in 2023 reached €17.8m (£15.2m), up from a net loss of €20.4m (£17.5m) the previous year. It also posted a 61% increase in revenue year on year to reach €596.3m (£510m), up from €370.2m (£317m) in 2022.

In October 2023, the business launched an item verification service, which enables members listing items of €100 (£84) or more to be substantiated by Vinted’s team of experts. This is viewed as a way of boosting authenticity and tackling counterfeiting in the pre-loved designer goods market.

Eric Mazillier
UK chief executive, Decathlon 

Eric Mazillier is Decathlon through and through, having spent his whole career since 1994 working at the retailer. In recent years, he has spearheaded the UK business’ move to promoting more circular consumption habits as part of greater group-wide emphasis on sustainability.

Now four years into his role as UK chief executive, sustainability has never been so high on his and the sportswear giant’s agenda. The launch of a bike buy-back scheme and the roll-out of rental products across its UK stores in 2023 added to the Second Life pre-loved marketplace Decathlon launched in 2021.

Meanwhile, the first electric vehicle chargers were added to Decathlon store car parks in April 2024, as the retailer looks to help society’s ongoing transition away from fossil fuel reliance.

Group revenue in 2023 grew by 4.4% year on year at constant exchange rates or by 1.15% to €15.6bn on an adjusted basis. Expect to hear more sustainability news from Decathlon in the 12 months ahead, after a global rebrand in March 2024 led to the mission statement “to build happier, healthier societies by moving people through the wonders of sport”.

Josh Silverman
Chief executive,
Etsy 

Josh Silverman, new to the Retail 100, is now in his eighth year as chief executive of Etsy, which finds itself at a crossroads in 2024. 

Ranked among the top-four most visited websites by UK consumers over Christmas 2023 by data intelligence platform SimilarWeb, Etsy has shot to prominence among Gen Z for its support of boutiques and small businesses and facilitation of preloved shopping thanks to its ownership of Depop.  

Acquiring Depop, which allows peer-to-peer selling of second-hand goods, for $1.6bn (£1.3bn) in 2021 elevated Silverman – an experienced tech leader with spells as an executive at eBay, Skype and American Express – to an industry sustainability activist. 

Silverman has used his experience steering tech giants to increase annual sales at Etsy for most of his tenure, but those revenues have flatlined in the last two years. In response, Silverman laid off 225 employees in December 2023 to cut costs, with chief marketing officer Ryan Scott among those to leave as part of a major restructuring. 

With the second-hand goods market continuing to grow, Depop’s strategy to remove selling fees for its UK users in April and experiment with opening pop-ups shows there are plenty of sustainability-themed revenue drivers in Silverman’s Etsy stable yet. 

Hanushka Toni
Founder and chief executive, Sellier

Justifying Retail Week’s decision to make her one to watch in 2023, founder and chief exec of Sellier Hanushka Toni oversaw £20m in revenue last year through the company’s online resale platform for luxury goods.

One of a growing cohort of sustainability activists in retail, Toni and her Sellier business operates a store in the heart of Knightsbridge and has experimented with pop-up shops, including Flannels’ department store.

She has the ear of government, too, speaking to policymakers at 10 Downing Street in March about what is required to boost British fashion and drive growth in a more circular-retailing model.

Looking ahead, Toni is hiring new operations staff for Sellier’s London store and sales professionals to help grow the brand further in the coming years. Social commerce is also a focus and in April Sellier was among the first British brands to be part of the new pre-loved category on TikTok Shop.

With celebrity fans such as singer Rita Ora, the business and Toni have some influential backing that bodes well for their future endeavours spreading the sustainable luxury shopping message.

Chris Turner
Executive director, B Lab UK 

Making his inaugural Retail 100 appearance is Chris Turner, executive director for B Lab UK – an organisation helping businesses restructure their operations to put people and planet alongside profit in their list of priorities. 

Turner and B Lab UK set the framework for companies to achieve B Corp certification, which is a designation they meet high standards of verified performance, accountability and transparency on factors ranging from employee benefits to supply chain practices.  

Many retailers including Berghaus, Fat Face and Finisterre have gained B Corp certification by demonstrating a high social and environmental performance, changing their corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders and ramping up transparency across their operations. 

Turner, whose previous career was in market research and consultancy, announced in April that B Lab had certified its 2,000th UK B Corp – a major landmark for the movement, which is set to evolve in 2025 to make it tougher to gain accreditation. Potential changes include dictating B Corps purchase all the electricity they use from renewable sources as well as an amendment to the scoring system that means businesses will have to achieve a higher minimum standard in areas such as fair wages and workplace culture. 

Eve Williams
Vice-president and general manager,
eBay UK 

Online marketplace eBay is a retailer operating with renewed vigour, and a lot of that is to do with the positive shift in consumer attitudes towards second-hand purchases.

Tapping into this, eBay calls itself a pre-loved “pioneer” and has put the circular economy element of its proposition front and centre of its marketing communications over the past few years.

That has not changed in the first year of Eve Williams assuming the role of eBay UK managing director in March 2023 from Murray Lambell.

Indeed, the sustainability focus of the business appears to have accelerated under Williams’ leadership. In October 2023, eBay launched the Circular Change Council alongside major retailers to promote circularity and reduce furniture waste. In April 2024 it scrapped selling fees for UK users to buy and sell fashion items to encourage shopping for used clothing.

With eBay the second most visited website in the UK over Christmas, according to Similarweb data (second only to Amazon), Williams and her team hold considerable influence in helping consumers towards more sustainable shopping behaviour.