Happy Monday Grovers~
Sustainable intentions alone don’t make a convincing sales pitch.
This week, Zain Ansari of Phyta Biodesign describes his success running through into this wall the last few years.
We also callback to Celine King of GreenIRR because her example in trucking unlocked the massive growth she's seen this year.
Let's dive in.
In this week's issue
- The bees weren't earning their commission
- It's 'data transparency', not 'sustainablility'
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The bees weren't earning their commission
Zain spent over 10 years as an architect before starting Phyta Biodesign in London.
He got in right as England rolled out a policy called biodiversity net gain, which basically made nature an architecture problem overnight.
If you want to put up a new building, the law now said you have to
- leave nature at least 10% better off than you found it
- PLUS keep it that way for the next 30 years.
Phyta’s flagship is a wall panel grown from mycelium, the root system of a mushroom, printed into molds full of little cavities where solitary bees move in.
There's a terracotta version too, for birds and bats that like a good cavity.
For a while, Zain kept coming back to the bees, which was why he loved the product in the first place. But that story wasn’t selling it.
The developers and councils signing off on a wall were much more interested in how it could serve the people.
Those same panels could also insulate buildings, capture stormwater, and reduce noise.
So instead of asking customers to spend more just to be greener, Zain started competing with regular building materials on price and performance, while throwing in the bee habitat for free.
Phyta got there by starting with free installations, which gave Zain the chance to prove the wall worked, before landing their big break at the Chelsea Flower Show.
The truth is talk only gets you so far.
Two full-scale shows are coming next month, one in London and one in Italy, relying on the ultimate form of persuasion ~ direct physical contact with the wall itself.
It's 'data transparency', not 'sustainablility'
Celine King has been on The Grove twice. She runs GreenIRR, a carbon accounting platform for Fortune 500 shippers and the trucking fleets they contract.
Her read on her own industry is that the story between sustainability and profitability has been told wrong. In most sectors the two pull against each other. In trucking they move together, because burning less fuel and emitting less are the same act.
Celine King, from her first Grove episode
So when a fleet cuts idling, that lands as an expense it stopped paying. Route optimization, driver behavior, an equipment upgrade, all of it shows up in both columns at once.
Celine doesn’t ask carriers to care about emissions. Her framing is blunter:
a carrier won’t invest in anything unless a customer requires it or it makes them more money. She sells to that.
Both founders started by selling the outcome they cared about, and both hit a wall until they connected it to something the customer already wanted.
That shift isn’t nearly as exciting as inventing the technology, but it may be the thing that decides whether anyone ever buys it.
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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