🌍 Can shopping be a force for good?👜
Plus foraging for elderflower cordial cocktails, stylish asparagus and the new faster slow travel
Welcome to BRiMM, the collective, journal and planet-positive shop here to help you live a lower-impact life, without life feeling less
We’re gonna jump straight in with our top BRiMM news: today we can reveal what – after much meticulous scouring, testing, pampering and debating – is going to be included in one of our first, curated Reset Boxes. Think of our Reset Boxes as your one-stop bathroom (or kitchen or utility room) do-over to planetary settings. Our first boxes (and there will be five in total) focus on resetting your everyday. There will be three bathroom versions, including a plastic-free one, a minimal one, and this one - focused on British luxury features cool brands that really work, smell fantastic and also look seriously good on the shelf. Check out why our Head of Beauty Sam personally picked each item, the unique story behind them all and the benefit BRiMM members get when buying them, in our latest Journal feature: What’s In Our First Ever Reset Box? (And for more on Sam herself, scroll down to her BRiMM Life Questionnaire, below).
Secondly, it’s your last chance to RSVP for our inaugural BRiMM event, which we’re hosting together with the great people at E.L.V. Denim in their London pop-up this Wednesday – full details above 🪩. You’ll get to meet the BRiMM team, find out more about our grand plans, gain access to unique founder member offers as well as see our Reset Boxes IRL. Plus, you can check out E.L.V. Denim and its tailored, upcycled pieces with fit advisors to hand. Oh, and did we mention the negronis? There’ll be plenty of those too. Message us now to reserve your spot or with any questions.
This week’s theme is… can shopping be a force for good? 👜
Well, can it?
We’re handing over to James, our founder, so he can share his thinking – which also just happens to lie at the heart of BRiMM’s own creation and philosophy.
When I tell people we're building a business with low-impact living at its core – but with a shop at its heart – I'm often met with skepticism.
"You're selling more things. We don't need more things!" has come up more than once in conversations. It's a fair challenge. Commerce is extractive. We're buying more than we've ever bought before. Industries are churning out products at unprecedented rates. And there's more waste than ever. So why build BRiMM around shopping?
Because we believe where we spend our money can be our power – an everyday form of climate activism. Each purchase can be a vote for the kind of world we want to live in and it can be a powerful one.
As Chris Baker, the co-founder of Serious Tissues, puts it in his book Obsolete: How Change Brands are Changing the World “If we moved just 1 per cent to brands making the world a better place, that's $700 billion annually.”
So you see, even small shifts in behaviour can redirect huge sums of money to businesses that are building with a more planet and people conscious view.
And to extend this thought that conscious consumption is someone voting for a planet-positive future, BRiMM actually offers a double vote. One for the products we’ve curated and vetted that are doing better by Earth and her resources, but another for our people-powered model of change which is designed to helps those brands lower their impact even faster.
Our Planet Fund will be investing 10% of our revenue in this model which has a continuous buy better, make better feedback loop at its core. Our members lower their impact by shopping with us and in turn lower the impact of the brands they’re shopping from.
We’re starting this with a solar energy project that will enable our brands to switch to 100% renewable energy… funded by the commitment of our founders members to join our movement. Beyond our initial project we’ll be looking at supply chain or material innovation or something else that our members and brands vote on.
On the journey that led to BRiMM I studied a fantastic course which pointed me towards two theories for how we might be able to navigate out of the climate crisis. One was degrowth (which is what I think we actually need but feels extremely unlikely anytime soon, based on the global co-operation required and current state of global leadership). The other was decoupling - where our economy can grow decoupled from precious resource use. This idea is what we hope we can achieve with the businesses we work with - enabling them to grow in a purposeful way, where one unit of growth no longer requires the same unit of resource resource.
And even though we’re flipping the model of a shop through repurposing our margin. We’re doing more than selling new things. We’re going to partner with pre-loved curators. We’re going to partner with services that enable you to extend the life of the things you already have. And beyond things at all, what we're really doing is building a collective of people and brands who believe in a different version of the future. Who together can imagine and usher in a new, planet-positive future.
We hope you join us on the journey and help us to build a roadmap. (Or should we say railmap? See more on the rapid train travel taking over Europe, below, as well as three other ways to spend with impact).
Shopping is (one of) our powers. Make it a force for good.
Whatever we do to move the needle – we obviously need to get cracking. Even more so after the publication of fresh data from the World Meteorological Organisation published this week, showing there is a small but realistic threat of a year that’s 2℃ hotter than the preindustrial era before 2030. Which really messes things up with that big 2030 deadline we’re all working towards. But Chris Hewitt, the director of climate services at the WMO who conducted the research, remains optimistic that cutting emissions can still have an impact. “We must take climate action,” he says. “1.5℃ is not inevitable.”
Team up, tune in and let’s turn the tide,
BRiMM x
p.s. What’s your quote to live by? One of ours is this half-remembered line by Jack Kerouac: “And then their souls expanded through their skins and floated round the room.” Go ahead, be as random as you like: which phrase spurs you on?
The BRiMM Life Questionnaire
This week it’s the turn of BRiMM’s own Head of Beauty and the woman behind our brilliant Luxury Reset Box, available very soon (see the hot preview, below) – Sam Zimmerman
Favourite planet-positive products and why?
“There are so many brands I’ve discovered since working on BRiMM. Firstly, Make Waves which is a great everyday (even in sweaty situations) deodorant that’s natural. It’s refillable and entirely made in the UK, unlike others you might compare it to.”
Causes you give to every month?
“I’ve just joined the leadership council for a NGO called RIVET, which is helping young entrepreneurs who have created social impact businesses, with funding and experience to grow their business. I work with them on a monthly basis and take their young change makers through pitch practises as well as connecting them to businesses they can partner with to raise funds, through sales collaborations. It’s incredibly rewarding and amazing to see people across the world creating such impactful change.”
Who is your planet-positive hero?
“James, our founder: he has brought together such interesting people to create BRiMM and his mission and passion to change how we live has made me rethink many of my life decisions and choices, for the better.”
Watch out for the rest of Sam’s answers on our site soon. Fancy doing our BRiMM Life Questionnaire yourself? Get in touch
FROM THE COLLECTIVE
Jeff’s heading to Town, the new London restaurant from chef Stevie Parle that’s doing something fabulous with asparagus. Tis the season! How much would you pay for a perfectly on-point spear?
Jimmy’s feeling inspired by Paris-based designer Oliver Church and how he chooses to make only 200 items a year – and very lovely ones at that
Tiff’s cheered by the fact that fast-fash behemoth Shein’s London IPO apparently missed out on approval from Chinese regulators this week, as detailed in this BoF piece 🎉
We love to hear what our collective is finding. Share your links with Becky
FASHION’S ‘PALATE CLEANSE’
BRiMM friend and founder member Amy Powney is the award-winning designer sometimes referred to the style world’s “pin-up girl of sustainability”, thanks to hit 2022 documentary Fashion Reimagined, which traced her attempt to create a “fully sustainable” collection, as well as her success as creative director of responsible womenswear label Mother of Pearl. This week, she launched the first line from her much anticipated next act: AKYN – ‘A’ for atelier and ‘KYN’, a play on kinship. It “is very much about the power of community,” she tells the Guardian in this excellent interview. And it’s already won a rave review from our resident fashion advisor, Tiffanie Darke. “To my taste, it’s beautiful, and it perfectly understands what modern women want to look like.”
→ READ MORE
THE BLUE PER CENT
Founded by Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia and Craig Mathews of Blue Ribbon Flies, 1% for the Planet is a worldwide network of thousands of people, nonprofits and companies that all agree to donate at least 1% of annual sales to environmental organisations. BRiMM friends, Blue Earth Summit, meanwhile, is a ‘festival for the future’, where businesses, investors and changemakers get together to try and create a regenerative future. Now the two are teaming up, to support the growth of the 1% movement in the UK. Don’t you love it when great people hit it off?
→ SEE MORE
MONEY TALKS
The 2020-launched campaign to highlight the environmental impact of where our pensions are invested may have ended in February this year, but the essential information it was sharing remains on its site. Such as the staggering fact that for every £10 you put in your pension, £2 goes towards deforestation. Or that UK pension schemes invest a staggering £88 billion in fossil fuel companies. To put it even more starkly: “Making your pension green is 21x more powerful at cutting your carbon than giving up flying, going veggie and switching energy providers.” Don’t believe us? Watch the strange videos with Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman on there too.
→ READ MORE
JUST THE TICKETS
One silver-lining (silverliner?) most of us probably didn’t see coming straight after the pandemic was the doubling of EU passenger rail traffic. Whether driven by a desire to travel in a more planet-positive way, to spend more quality time using a slower, more satisfying means of transport, or just to avoid being trapped in a flying small space with spluttering other people – demand for trains immediately shot up, and hasn’t really stopped since. The result? Huge investment in high-speed routes across Europe, from France to Spain to Portugal, and a goal from the EU to double these fast lines’ use by 2030, and then to triple current passenger levels by 2050.
POWER TO THE FLOWERS
Did you know it’s elderflower cordial-making season? Judith on Bristol collective site The Everyday shares important details on how to forage for it (waterproof overtrousers are apparently ideal for avoiding nettle stings) – then add tequila, sugar and fresh green peas and you’ve got Mr Lyan’s own Moonlit Gimlet.
MUSIC TO BUOY YOUR JOY
Regular BRiMM Journal author Lisa Oxenham’s pulled together her favourite “spirit-lifting, grounding, feel-good tracks” to lift us all up while simultaneously soothing us down this Sunday morning.
The carbon footprint of an email depends what device you use to open it, but sending you this one used about 3.5g of carbon.