The Future of Ethical Shopping: Insights from Good On You’s Gordon Renouf

0:00 Mick Liubinskas: You're listening to a DayOne.fm show.

0:05 Gordon Renouf: What drives you to make bold moves, to build something that didn't exist before, to live, lead, and choose life with intention? Welcome to Perspective X. I'm Pauline Fatowi, and this is not your typical business podcast. Each episode, I get to speak to extraordinary entrepreneurs and leading innovators to unpack what truly fuels their journey. Not just the wins, but the inner work, the overlooked decisions, the mindset shifts, and the personal moments that sparked something bigger. This show is about the ripple effect of choice, the kind of deep accountability that lets us respond to life rather than react to it. Because when you realize everything is temporary, and you are the creator of your own experience, you start to play the game differently. So if you're curious about how people build meaning alongside success, how they evolve through challenges and shape the world with intention, this is your invitation to listen in. Perspective X, where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the moments that changed everything. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

1:16 Mick Liubinskas: Hey everybody, this is Mikael Vinskas from Climate Salad. We're doing another podcast. And today I'm getting to chat to Gordon from Good On You.

1:29 Speaker C: Gordon, how you going? Hi, Mick. Hi, everybody. Great to be here.

1:33 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, well, good, good. Really good to have you, no pun intended. Now we've known each other for a long time. You've been doing this for a while. So I know all about you and I'm a very happy customer. But can you give us the quick elevator pitch and then let's delve into the deep and meaningful story.

1:49 Speaker C: Yeah, so Good On You started as a way to help consumers make a difference by choosing products from brands that were doing better on their impacts on people, planet, and animals. So we knew that consumers were motivated to use their purchasing choices to help change the world for the better, but it has to be very easy for them. You know, they want to make that change with the minimal effort. They want trusted information. They want easy-to-use information. And ideally, they want to be able to find products that are similar quality, similar price, but are better for the planet.

2:22 Gordon Renouf: Mm-hmm.

2:22 Speaker C: For some consumers, they're prepared to pay a little bit more, but the real barrier that we solve is getting access to trusted information about a really wide range of brands on where they sit, whether they're the best, in the middle, or towards the bottom. Because we know that as a consumer—

2:38 Mick Liubinskas: Yep.

2:39 Speaker C: You don't want to make a sustainable choice. You want to make a choice that meets your needs that is also sustainable. And so you really need information about a very wide range of products, not just somebody writing an article saying this is the best. You know, collared shirt, if it doesn't come in the color, size, price point that suits you, that's not useful information. And which is why we try to give data on as many brands as possible.

2:59 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, got it. And so, so how does it manifest as a product? Like, how does it actually work in practice?

3:06 Speaker C: Yeah, at the moment, the consumer can access us directly or can access through one of our partners. And I'll talk about the partners in a moment. But directly, you can use products like the Good On You cell phone app or mobile phone app or the Good On You web directory of brands, and you can search the brand that you're interested in and find out how it impacts people, planet, and animals, uh, a score for each of those, an overall score, and then some further information about why that score's been awarded.

3:32 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

3:33 Speaker C: So at the moment we've got data on 6,500 brands across the fashion and beauty sectors, and we're working with partners to move into other areas. So you can expect during 2025 at least some of electronics and homewares, maybe kids' products, maybe food service companies.

3:50 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And my quick story, which I shared about a month ago, was I was in San Francisco. It's a— can be a good place to go buy a pair of jeans. I was walking towards Banana Republic, which I'd purchased previously. I brought up Gornieu and looked at Banana Republic, and it was— I think it was basically saying they need to do better. And I was like, "Well, there's a Levi's store about 50 meters away and Levi's was doing about, you know, I think Sydney's getting better than Banana Republic." So I walked to Levi's and bought 2 pairs of jeans. So that's a recent case study, but you've been doing this for a long time. And obviously we know now there's a lot more people are really, really aware of climate problems. But tell us about like when you started even actually pitching this as a business, I know you did pitch to me, I think there was obviously a lot more work to be done, right? Like it was, we're in a bit of a different place in regard to climate solutions and working on them. But tell us some of the origin story and what were the first couple of years like?

4:51 Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, my background is as a consumer advocate. So I was working at CHOICE, Australia's largest organization for providing value for money recommendations, quality recommendations to consumers about products, a wide range of categories. And we were working on things like the Green Best Buy, and some policy advocacy around climate and other sustainable and ethical issues. And when I left Choice, I wanted to focus on that particular consumer need. We knew from Choice that a large percentage of consumers were interested in taking into account sustainable and ethical issues when they're making purchases. And so the idea of Good On You was to focus on that specific problem in the way I described before, in terms of making it easy for consumers to have access to a comprehensive rating for a large number of brands that they could be interested in. And so, you know, the first few years were all about developing a scientifically valid methodology, working out ways to get that to consumers initially through the app and then in other ways, and to then explore what would be a business model for, you know, Good On You is not a charity, it's a social impact business. We're a business with a social purpose and obviously everything we do is aligned with that purpose and then it's about scaling the purpose. So we did play around with the idea of being a not-for-profit to start with and looked for philanthropic funding, but we just realized we were not going to get to the scale to make an impact if we went down that route, and then we would need investment, and therefore we'd need a business model. And that's actually opened things up for us because not only do we have a product which consumers can use directly, and, you know, up to a million consumers per month do in fact access Good On You data one way or another, including from our, um, journal website and Instagram newsletters and so forth, But it's actually allowed us to create a product which can be used by retailers and product discovery platforms where tens, hundreds, thousands times as many consumers are using than are using Good On You. And so we worked with multi-brand e-commerce retailers like Farfetch and some others, and they use our data to identify 4 or 5% of the products on their site that are doing better. And they've seen quite a lot of success in consumers taking account of that information when they're making their purchases on those sites. Similarly, we've worked with people like Microsoft Bing Shopping or Klarna, who also communicate with their users and people discover products on those platforms. They don't buy them there, but they use them as a research tool. So having to develop a business model has in fact opened up ways to find further impact.

7:22 Mick Liubinskas: And—

7:22 Speaker C: And if I haven't said too much, most recently, I think one of the really exciting things is that we're now working with a number of shopping malls small businesses to help them assess their tenants. So their tenants are fashion brands, beauty brands, multi-brand fashion retailers. So the shopping malls are using our data to work with their tenants to improve their sustainability score and to present to consumers information about the overall profile of their tenants and to push them to do better.

7:49 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, really interesting. So sometimes I think when people think of climate problems, they think of solar panels and EVs, Why this problem? What's the impact? How good on you would it be if we solved— if you were able to significantly change the consumer behavior here?

8:08 Speaker C: Well, the world has accepted for some time that sustainable production and consumption is really important. And SDG 12, Sustainable Development Goal 12, always brought together consumption and production. And so the focus is on the choices we make as consumers. I mean, ultimately, People only produce stuff, businesses only produce stuff if they have a market to sell it to. And the market is basically either the government or households, so consumers. And so it's the choices that we make that ultimately derive the impacts. It's how far we want to drive, it's where we want to fly to, it's what clothes we want to wear, it's how we want to heat our homes. It's all those consumer choices, which banks we work with. They will impact indirectly or directly the energy used or the other features. So ultimately, it's consumer decisions which drive the impacts on climate and on nature and on workers that we are concerned about. And so if we can help even 10%, 20% of consumers make better decisions half the time, we have a measurable and massive impact on those problems. And then if we take the sectors we're looking at, fashion is our first one. I mean, some people say that fashion is responsible for 10% of global emissions, which is a gross exaggeration. But even if it's only responsible for 1% to 2%, which is a very credible estimate, That is a significant part of the problem. And if we can, you know, work with other people to bring that down by 50%, then, you know, we're making a big difference. So if we can get 50% of consumers to change their purchasing habits 50% of the time, and that has a 50% reduction on the impact, that is whatever, you know, 10, 15, 20% improvement on whatever that is for fashion. And then we're rolling that out to other sectors. So, you know, if it affects your banking choices, if it affects your real estate agent choices, travel agent choices, beauty brand choices, household brand choices, pet brand choices, et cetera, et cetera, then—

9:48 Mick Liubinskas: Yep.

9:50 Speaker C: This is our theory of change and how we hope to have impact.

9:53 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, really interesting. And can you tell me a bit about the, I guess, the circular influences of this? So obviously, Banana Republic would've preferred me to go into their store. Like, what's the brand response been to this? Are they, do they care yet that people are making decisions this way? Is it enough people?

10:13 Speaker C: So Good On You was launched 9 years ago in 2015 now, and we launched the app and we had 10,000 users in 8 days. In Australia only. And that first week, or if not the first week, the second week, brands were calling us and saying, "Why are you saying we're not doing good? We are doing good." And we would explain to them, "Well, we believe that you need to be transparent and tell consumers." Yeah. And we need that, you know, so brands were paying attention from day one. I mean, fast forward 5, 10, 8 years and brands like the biggest brands in the world are regularly talking to us about their Good On You score. So it's making an impact on how they think.

10:47 Mick Liubinskas: Wow, that's great.

10:47 Speaker C: We're not the only, driver of brands' attention on sustainability, but we're certainly something that many of them will care about and get upset about if they're not doing well and factored into their plans to do better. And I think equally importantly, to communicate better to consumers what they are in fact doing so that we can empower consumers to discriminate between better and worse brands when they're making decisions, again, when all their other requirements are kind of met.

11:13 Mick Liubinskas: And where do you think we are in that journey? Like, me buying an EV or putting, you know, composting at home is a fairly, simple loop of a feedback loop in terms of a change, but a brand becoming genuinely good in their production and manufacturing and shipping and all those components, like some of those things for these massive brands, it's kind of like the bigger the brand, the worse the impact, but the better the possible outcome of change. Where are we overall in that journey?

11:43 Speaker C: You know, it's not simple. There are complex factors at play here. I mean, for all the improvement we've seen amongst a cohort of brands, including big brands, and there's been quite a lot of improvement in the way they approach many things. I'll talk about that in more detail, but the point I wanna make is that we do have a kind of a negative, which is the moves to fast and then even faster fashion.

12:04 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, yeah.

12:05 Speaker C: And the increasing reliance on polyester as the primary material in the fashion industry. I'm focusing here mainly on fashion 'cause that's the sector that we work with the most so far. So, you know, it's kind of, there's an element of two steps forward, two steps back going on here, and hopefully we can move that to two steps forward and one step back or three steps forward and one step back. So many of those big brands, I mean, like I remember being at a conference 5, 6 years ago and a big brand said around transparency, they said like 5 years ago we thought everything about our production line was our proprietary information. Now we can't believe that we would ever not be transparent. We are seeing A massive change compared to 10, 15 years ago where brands now accept that they have an obligation to their stakeholders to be transparent about how they're doing stuff. And that's reinforced by regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe, which is only applying to the biggest brands at the moment, but will roll out to smaller companies rather over time. And you know, so there's this global movement for transparency about impacts and there's a global movement for accuracy and the ability to substantiate that. And there's a global movement for consistent standards like ISSB, which is an international standard about how you report on sustainability, which has been picked up in some company legislation around non-financial disclosure. So you, for me, you need both a way to empower consumers to make better choices, but you also need responses, which will sometimes include regulatory responses to brands that don't care.

13:29 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

13:30 Speaker C: Or whose business model is just inherently no good. So for me, there's a role for government to set a floor. You can't do this practice or that practice. Also to regulate communication. You can't say carbon neutral if it's some magic formula that doesn't really mean anything or has trade-offs which are hidden. But at the end of the day, regulation can't tell companies exactly what to make and how to make it. And so we also need consumer power. Sometimes people put this opposition, "Oh, consumer power is too weak. It will never influence brands. So we have to have regulation." And they forget that it's hard to achieve regulation. Regulation can only go so far. Regulation often has unintended consequences. So we definitely need certain kinds of regulation, particularly around transparency, particularly around stamping out the worst practices. But we also need the power of consumers and indeed investors to influence companies to do better. And so the regulatory environment has to support consumers making those choices. The regulatory environment has to be pro-information disclosure and has to support innovation. Like Good On You, but like many other potential innovations that will help consumers more easily, more readily, create those incentives for brands to do better.

14:37 Mick Liubinskas: Is there any companies that are like the standard doing amazing, like leading this around the world, like that you can tell the kudos goes?

14:44 Speaker C: Of large companies, of course Patagonia has obviously been committed to the environment all along. It's a large company that has complex supply chain. There are obviously some problems occasionally that pop up, but I don't think that should put people off from knowing that Patagonia is a company that's wholly committed to positive outcomes, particularly on the environment, but also for animals and workers. VF Corporation is a big company that's doing pretty well. That's The North Face. It's one of the higher-rated companies. Some inherent problems in luxury, particularly the climate impacts of leather, but the Kering Group, which includes Gucci, are certainly better than some of their competitors in the luxury space. So there are definitely large brands that are doing better, but there are a heap of SME, small, large brands, and even tiny brands that are fantastic. Like, you know, pick a few small Australian brands that are doing great. You've got the t-shirts, you've got some like Etiko. Spell is a brand that's gone on a, you know, a much bigger brand that's gone on a journey from being so-so to being really quite focused on environment outcomes and getting a high Good on You store score. So I'm sure there are many other Australian brands I should be able to rattle off the tip of my tongue, but— Outland Denim is a great Australian brand doing well. Nudie Jeans is of course not an Australian brand, but imports to Australia. So there are plenty of good options in that. Sort of medium to smaller size. And I'd just encourage you to go on the Good On You directory and search for the product category you're interested in, whether that's jeans or tops or dresses or shirts, shoes, and see the brands that come up, filter by Australia, see the brands that you might want to look at.

16:14 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, definitely worth exploring. I think it's one of those things which I think, obviously the people who are like me, heavily motivated to do this, it's much easier. Like I'm prepared to do a bit of extra work and I'm prepared to pay a little bit more In a lot of instances, it's actually just a choice between two options, one which is better than the other. And I think as you said, one of the key things is it doesn't actually need to be every single consumer. It is like every additional person adds to the weight of that message to these brands. Yeah. And that by itself is probably not enough, but coupled with regulation is also key. Do you actually, you know, I know Australia's got some really great companies. We've obviously got within the, Climate Salad Global Growth Program. We've got Alt Leather and we've got New Era Bio. And yeah, we've got some of these products that are building alternatives and Samsara is also doing some recycled work. Do you actually, when people say we'd like to do more, like what do we actually do? Do you help them? Like obviously it's really, really challenging at scale, but are the solutions and alternatives getting better so that they can actually make choices which are both make a great product, which is not obviously, 'cause they can't say, oh, you know what, here's a pair of jeans, they're $600. I'm sure some jeans are $600, I'm not buying them, but the average person can't afford to buy those and they're not prepared to pay another $500 more. Is the technology actually getting better to the point where instead of a green premium, there's a green benefit?

17:46 Speaker C: Yeah, complicated question, Mick, but one part of my answer would be that we have a tool called Good Measures, which is available to brands to learn how to do better. So of course some of the biggest brands have, you know, very smart sustainability people who are helping them, but our tool helps them focus on the specific things which we have weighted highly in our score. We also connect them to service providers who can help them in that journey, like potentially the Australian companies that you mentioned, although some of them, I mean, Samsara is kind of close to production, the other two are very much still in pilot phase. And that tool is obviously, you know, particularly valuable for small and medium brands who can't afford to have much in-house sustainability expertise. But then in terms of our solutions becoming available, I mean, there is a lot of work being done by industry or by partnerships between not-for-profits and industry on solving a whole range of problems. I mean, you've got an organization like Textile Exchange, which is, you know, a 1,000-member organization of whom 300 or 400 members are large brands, and they connect suppliers and brands together to work on all sorts of problems with the goal of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of textiles by— in line with Paris targets, right?

18:54 Gordon Renouf: Mm-hmm.

18:55 Speaker C: And so it's about promoting recycling, it's about identifying alternative production processes like not just organic but regenerative farming, which have much lower climate and nature impacts. I mean, there's a lot of work being done in Australia on regenerative wool growing, which inputs into that global system. Australia is one of the 2 or 3 largest suppliers of wool for the global textile industry. And, you know, it's work around the world around cotton farming and so forth. So they're really doing the hands-on, on-the-ground work to make it possible for fashion brands to move in that direction. And the expectation, or the kind of the other part of that, is that we do need brands to be getting on board to support the solutions, like, you know, pre-ordering the better materials in sufficient quantities that the prices can come down.

19:41 Gordon Renouf: Yeah.

19:42 Speaker C: And so that's, so an organization like Textile Exchange is trying to promote those conversations to, achieve that outcome. And Good On You's role is almost saying, well, to the brands that are working harder in that area, you're going to get a higher score. That's going to deliver some consumers who are going to favor you.

19:56 Mick Liubinskas: It's so common in climate tech and looking at climate solutions that there are no silver mushrooms, as I like to joke, um, that there's, there's no single thing you can do, right? It's not like, oh well, if you just make cotton better, that solves all of our problems. Like, it's, as you said, it's the feedstock that come into it and the imports, but also, and especially around plastics and those things, but then there's also transport and there's, and the really big one you mentioned was obviously actually our purchase behavior. So the consumption and the attitudes towards, you know, secondhand clothing, or not necessarily secondhand, but actually like maintaining your clothing for longer. And one of the challenges obviously is, you know, companies like Stripe, which make money by the more you buy online and e-commerce platforms, And even venture capital companies that are backing those platforms and definitely the brands, they need to sell more products. So if they have a durable product which actually lasts years, so you don't have to replace it every year, basically every 3 years, it's better for the environment, but it's not better for their business.

21:01 Speaker C: I mean, if you look at the Textile Exchange's theory of change, it goes exactly to this point. So the goal is to, reduce the textile industry's emissions in line with Paris targets. The strategy requires 3 limbs. Limb number 1 is substituting materials which are harmful for materials which are less— so using preferred materials that already exist. Strategy 2 is identifying and rolling out materials which don't yet operate at scale. And strategy 3 is exactly what you said, addressing overconsumption. And so they've just put out a report quite recently about how the textile, the fashion industry can kind of rethink some of its business models to still make money whilst creating more durable, long-lasting products. But it's not just creating durable, long-lasting products, it's actually not having a marketing and sales system which relies on frequent purchase of shoddy goods, which is the fast fashion model.

21:59 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

22:00 Speaker C: And that's partly, it's not just people like you and I who kind of change shirts when they wear out. It's the model where you have to change your style to be okay. And so finding ways to allow people to have fun with fashion and to, you know, fashion's been around since Cleopatra and before, right? It's not gonna— it's quite important to humans. We don't want to all wear mouse suits. So you've got to kind of find a way that you can have that, but also not have, you know, 50-cent polyester shirts that you throw away the next day and you only wear once. Like, you know, this idea that some people in, well, a big country, treat underwear as disposable. I mean, like, that just kind of doesn't work, right? Got to find a way to disincentivize that. I mean, it's worth knowing. I mean, one thing people don't understand is that it's not just population growth and it's not just marketing. We spend about the same amount of money as a household on average in 2024 as we did in 1984 or 1974, right? Yeah. But for that money, whether we're poor or rich, we're getting 3 to 4 times as much clothing. So the unit price of clothing has come down immensely. So when we think, oh, that's really expensive, that's what it cost our grandparents to buy that thing.

23:17 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, but is it actually— we're significantly more productive, like, is it at the expense of the environment? Is that additional—

23:25 Speaker C: Basic raw quantity of materials that we're using—

23:27 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, at scale.

23:28 Speaker C: —has gone up by 3 to 4 times per household, per person, because we're buying 3 to 4. And that stuff ends up worn once, thrown away, hanging out of closets, not being used, blah, blah, blah. And so this is why the solution is really complex because we've got to reuse preferably. And then if we can't recycle those materials in low energy ways, we can't have recycling systems which use as much energy as creation.

23:52 Mick Liubinskas: Sure.

23:52 Speaker C: And we've got to find ways to address that kind of our overconsumption mindset, and we, while still allowing for fashion and choices and change in style, and we've got to discover these new materials and we've got to get them into production volumes. So as you said before, there are a lot of different challenges, but also a lot of different opportunities to dent that overall emissions and overall nature impact.

24:15 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, exactly. Well, that is, it is, again, I kept thinking that I was going to be focusing on a subset when I looked at climate tech versus tech, but it's actually so massive. And it is really complicated, right? The identity people have with fashion and it doesn't necessarily have to be runway style, Gucci, millions of dollars. No. Like it's actually, you know, whatever you wear has a reflection. And obviously there are big differences of people in the world who are in developing nations that are just looking to get some clothing. I'll never forget when I was living in Tanzania and for 4 months, exactly 20 years ago actually, I was in Tanzania and I found a Spam t-shirt in the markets. I was like, "Oh, how cool is this?" You know, these shirts are, you know, you get retro shirts that are actually, you know, for free or a dollar each. And the guy I was with, he was like, "Well, yeah, except that we used to have a really good textiles industry until we got all this free clothing." Like the complexity of all of that and actually the potential benefit of online being like, actually, I wanna buy this blue collared shirt and it exactly fits me. It's not gonna go to waste and only make it if you need it. Like the just-in-time fashion.

25:30 Speaker C: On that, one of the Australian fashion companies which is doing a fantastic job is on made-to-order is Citizen Wolf. So, you know, expensive, sure, but made-to-order, fits you perfectly, lasts well. So I mean, just on the waste and in Africa in particular, there's an organization called the OR Foundation, the O-R Foundation, who work in Ghana, and the volume of textile waste from more developed countries ending up in Ghana, not just undermining their local textile industry, but also polluting their beaches because only a proportion of that is sold to local people. The rest of it gets chucked. And the beaches are apparently out of control with fiber-based waste, mostly from those secondhand clothes.

26:13 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, I think we just really don't realize, right? I remember I went to a concert recently and was like, cool, I should grab a shirt or something, that'd be really cool. And it's kind of like, just really stopping yourself and going, yeah, genuinely, do I need another shirt, right? And we even looked at a client and said like, oh, let's make some shirts, people wanna buy our shirts. You're like, do they genuinely need a shirt? Like it's actually, we've got to the point where certainly most of my life, it was kind of like, it just wasn't a thought. It just felt like another shirt and don't even think about it and buying them from Threadless and all these things like just for fun. And it's like the cost of that is actually pretty high.

26:50 Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's some interesting possibilities in encouraging people who make merch to do two things. One is to actually investigate lower impact fibers in what they're doing. But the second one would be to find a way to, how do we make the merch shirt business circular in some way? Like, is it like bring back a shirt and we'll give you a new shirt? Is it, you know, is it rent this shirt? Probably not for t-shirts, but you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like exploring how we could do this differently. Still have the fun of having, you know, like on the other hand you've got people walking around and they've got their Chemical Brothers t-shirt from 20 years ago, they're still wearing anything. Wow, that shirt's lasted a long time. Um, and, and, um, you know, a guy I want to board with, his— where's his Led Zeppelin t-shirt from, you know, when he was younger? He's older than me and he's had his Led Zeppelin t-shirt for a very long time.

27:37 Mick Liubinskas: Well, I noticed you can get them from, um, some of the new stores now, and some people, I'm like, have they probably ever even, uh, listened to Led Zeppelin?

27:44 Speaker C: Well, that's true too. Yeah, certain big companies reissuing that sort of thing, but yeah.

27:49 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, exactly. I remember getting like a note from Sustainable, I ended up getting like 5 reusable coffee cups as gifts. So I was like, this is from Sustainability Group. So it is, I think there's 2 things there is one is climate solutions are not gonna work if they are massive green premiums or if they basically make the world feel like we're going back 50 years. So I think the difference of making actually really good quality stuff that lasts longer you want to be able to have, you know, I remember buying the Angels shirt from the Horton Pavilion with the first concert I ever went to. I don't know if that shirt's still around, but like it was so amazing to have that. I was so proud of it for years and wore it like, and that's okay. But what you don't want is like buying one every single week and you're like, they're totally fast. Like, yeah, there's obviously some really bad operators in that space. So it is, it's actually finding better ways to do it rather than actually And modifying behavior over time, like it doesn't have to be like everybody tomorrow stop doing this. It's just basically like, just use bit better products, a bit better, more, you know, to keep them longer, like can actually solve a lot of our problems. It's actually, there's a lot of value in the margins.

29:00 Speaker C: A lot that retailers, shopping malls, and brands can do to help consumers around, you know, maintenance, around, You know, like Nudie Jeans have some great videos about how to look after your jeans. Like if you're going to spend that much money on a pair of jeans, then you want them to last, right? And not shrink, etc. Or about take-back schemes, about offering rental options. There's a great Australian business called Rennta which helps brands.

29:22 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

29:23 Speaker C: Oh, sorry, I should disclose I'm a small investor in Rennta. I can't just advertise for free. That helps brands have rental systems, which is a great solution for the kinds of outfits that you're only going to wear once or twice. Yeah. Which is certainly for wedding dresses or not wedding dresses, the outfit you wear to a wedding or something like that where you just want to— Yeah. So I mean, it is really, like I said before, it's very specific problems, better materials, focus on circularity, changes to marketing, regulations to stop the worst practices. I mean, it's a real patchwork of things that need to happen and innovative business models so that you are rewarded for durability and not penalized for durability, for example.

30:03 Mick Liubinskas: This is possibly a Pandora's box, but like we talk about the complexity of all this. Do you see a, in the next 12 months, is there a particular lever or moment which would actually have a significant impact on, in terms of your world and what you're working on? Like what's the biggest change that you think if that happened, then actually we would significantly accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices in this area?

30:29 Speaker C: Well, one thing that we're actually working on that really does have some potential to roll out would be the work we're doing with shopping malls. So we're working with two of the biggest shopping malls in Europe to create a pre-competitive association of shopping malls who would all use our data and some other data to work with their tenants. Sometimes they have 20,000 tenants, right? And that would be a— and the outcome would be that each of those tenants would be incentivized to improve. Whether that's access to services inside the malls, whether it's promotion inside the malls, whether it's rent adjusted based on your score. So that's a really exciting project that we're hoping with the two shopping mall partners to announce towards the end of January next year and hoping to get more shopping malls on board. So if you're a shopping mall, please get in touch and we can give you some early information about how that will work. We're already talking to— there's a long list of about 40 malls already.

31:24 Mick Liubinskas: That's a shopping mall calling you right now. That was really quick.

31:28 Speaker C: That was quick. I'm just going to have to hang up on them.

31:31 Mick Liubinskas: Sorry about that. So many customers that that was on cue there, wasn't it?

31:35 Speaker C: And then something that is way not in our control, but something— I mean, there is a very interesting project going. One of the really important things we could do is to electrify the early parts of the supply chain.

31:45 Mick Liubinskas: Okay.

31:46 Speaker C: So a lot of the primary and post-primary production in fashion is uses rubbish locally or fossil fuel power. And if we could, one, electrify and two, increase the renewable content of those, of those electric, electric sources. So whether that's local solar or working with the grid of the supplier country and the Apparel Impact Institute is doing some focused work on that. I mean, that's a, that's a really exciting project.

32:12 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, yeah. Customers just ringing off the hook, man. That's, that's exciting.

32:16 Speaker C: Do you want to do that again?

32:18 Mick Liubinskas: No, no, let's keep going.

32:20 Speaker C: I can throw out the other room.

32:23 Mick Liubinskas: No, we just want plenty of customers coming to us. Gordon, tell me a bit about some of the other major inflection points that are possible. I think you mentioned electrification of parts of the supply chain.

32:34 Speaker C: Yeah. One of the big impacts in the apparel supply chain is the energy used in various steps in the supply chain, particularly out and close to the primary production. And so often in supplier countries don't necessarily have very good grids.. And so a lot of it's off-grid. And so replacing those heating processes with either electrification or electrification from renewables, I mean, ideally both, is a big opportunity. And the Apparel Impact Institute is an industry-wide organization that's working on that. And so that's definitely a, you know, a big part.

33:07 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah, that's, that's pretty big. So just let's look to the future. What does 2025 look like for Good On You?

33:13 Speaker C: The big thing is What we talked about before, which is rolling out with our two shopping mall partners, this industry-wide ability for shopping malls to assess their retailer tenants against sustainability criteria using Good On You data and some other place-based data that we're going to supplement the Good On You score with so that the malls can incentivize their retailer tenants to do better. And as before, malls sometimes have 20,000 tenants across their network.

33:40 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

33:41 Speaker C: And then the malls can also use that data to communicate to consumers which ones are preferred ultimately. So that's the big project for next year. I suppose the other, in parallel to that, but also having implications beyond malls is moving into more verticals. Like at the moment, Good On You has rated brands in 3 verticals, fashion and beauty. We've got 6,500 public brands, but we've also rated a few hundred just starting on what we call general services, which is like going to a mall any shop that sells you something which isn't a product is a service provider, whether that's a real estate agent or a repair shop or a travel agent or a bank. You know, so all those sorts of businesses can now be rated for the malls. We haven't rolled that out to consumers yet, but we'll do at some point. But moving into other sectors, like as I said before, households, pets, food service businesses, kids stuff would be the key priorities for 2025.

34:35 Mick Liubinskas: Fantastic. And you mentioned as well that obviously you're an Australian company with big global ambitions, but you've mentioned European markets. How do you see all the different markets and how are they developed as opportunities for you?

34:49 Speaker C: At the moment, we focus on Europe, including UK and the US, as well as Australia. We have a very important and strong partner in Japan as well, and sort of they're doing the rolling out in Japan rather than good on you doing it, so it's in the Japanese language, different branding. We're supporting them over there. So they're the countries we're in at the moment. One of our big real estate partners that we're just beginning to work with, also big in India and some of China too. So whether that will lead to consumer-facing rollout in those countries, yet to be seen.

35:19 Mick Liubinskas: And you've been doing this for a while. I know lots of people contact us with ideas and a big desire to work on climate solutions. Any kind of reflections or advice you'd give to new entrepreneurs entering this space on approach?

35:38 Speaker C: I've been in the same industries for periods of time, but previous to this business, I don't think I had the same company for more than 5 years, right? So it's now 12 years of Good On You.

35:50 Mick Liubinskas: Yep.

35:50 Speaker C: At least a few more to go. And so I think you've got to know that you care enough about the space and the solution, or perhaps the adjacent solution you're going to pivot to, to want to do it because you don't do it for quick wins. There's no quick impact wins. And if you're doing financial win, you're probably not necessarily doing it for the right reason. So yeah, so I think you've got to want to build something that takes some crafting long term. And yeah, some people will build very successful short-term businesses that— well, not short-term businesses, businesses that are successful in the short term, they'll have really big impacts and that's fantastic. Mm-hmm. And some people will work on their business for decades and have a really big impact, that's also fantastic. And some people will give it a go and figure it's not working and try and do something else. So they're all good reasons, but I think if you're just doing it for fun for 2 years, I think that's not the right—

36:43 Mick Liubinskas: You touched on a good point there in terms of firstly the longevity and time it takes, but also the fact that the initial idea you have is probably not gonna be the one that actually you end up with. Is that the journey that you took? Is it basically like your first thought is actually modified and morphed over the years?

37:01 Speaker C: Well, look, I mean, the journey went something like this. A few people sat around a room and said like, we wanna help consumers make decisions aligned with their values so that they have a positive impact on workers and the environment. And then, you know, we narrowed that down to testing a few things and then we ended up in fashion, right? We didn't start out with a vision about fashion. Now many people will just say, I'm passionate about sustainable fashion, I wanna do that. But we didn't, we learned that that was a good candidate sector because it had the right kind of impacts and the right kind of consumer behavior where our solution would actually make a difference. And then, you know, it started out being a wholly consumer-facing solution. Like we produced the data for the consumers who would then act on that data that they got from us directly. And at a certain point in time, we realized that we would reach more consumers by working with partners. And then again, we were working with partners with a particular model, which was to communicate with their customers And now we've got other equally or possibly more important partners who are actually communicating first and foremost with their tenants, with brands, and then customers later. So there is some very interesting evolution rather than revolution. But I mean, I could imagine that you could have got to a point where it just wasn't working. I guess there was such a point. We were trying to run an online store where you could buy— A car. Anything, but you would know how ethical it was. Of course, we hadn't got anywhere near anything. Essentially what we learned trying to do that was that people hate really bad e-commerce stores, which is what our store was. I mean, it was a, you know, affiliate marketing store. We weren't actually supplying the products. And so we thought, oh, you know, well, actually, I mean, at that point it was like, we are gonna roll the dice and if it doesn't work, we're gonna stop. And so we said, we're gonna crowdfund for an app. If we, if we hit our target, we'll build the app and see what happens. So we hit the target just, and we built the app and we got 10,000 users in 8 days. And that was a signal to us. That was, that was the point we said, oh, okay, this is worth doing for a bit.

38:53 Mick Liubinskas: Yeah.

38:54 Speaker C: And so, uh, and then I think a couple years later that when the retailers came aboard, said we want to buy your data, um, that was the next signal. So the validations came in small bits and small tests. I mean, there have been some tests before that app go/no-go kind of decision. Crowdfunding campaign. So that crowdfunding campaign, if we'd raised $5,000 less, we probably would've stopped.

39:15 Mick Liubinskas: Got it. Interesting, interesting. And last point, keen to know just for your feedback and feel free to be as honest as you want to be, but you've been a part, obviously I knew you before Client Salad, but you've been a part of our community and programs, especially the Global Growth Program. Can you just share, I think especially for the acknowledgement of thanks to the New South Wales Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water, for the support. What's the, I guess, the main impact you've had of being in that program?

39:42 Speaker C: I think there are a lot of impacts. I mean, there's some very practical things like just connecting with people who can provide advice, be sounding boards, like some of the mentors we've talked with have been quite useful, whether employed like Stefan or some of the other volunteer mentors, that's been really good. I think that we've made connections with other businesses with potential partnerships or where one or the other of us has some advice for the other, which has been quite good. You know, just before I got on the phone, I got an email from one of the companies I met at the last event, and we're talking about, you know, working together on some of those data solutions for malls we were talking about before and for other companies. So making those connections is really important. I think that just even just the sense of belonging to a community of people moving in the same direction. And then, yeah, finally, sort of related to the second point, which is just being a source of advice, like, does anybody know X or how do you go about Y? So I think there are many benefits to the community. I mean, we took part in the Global Growth Program and we probably weren't as active a participant as some, partly for diary conflicts with the overseas trips. But yeah, no, I mean, it was all a lot of different, you know, medium-sized benefits that add up to a very worthwhile experience.

40:50 Mick Liubinskas: I think recognizing again that the value to the different members is also about the contribution from the members. So I think you've been one of the first to put your hand up to to answer the questions in the community discussions and to help others as well. And I think that's— it's one of these I've only ever seen in climate. Like, it's— there's always been some positivity in terms of startups, but the climate tech startups, we've all— everyone's got the common goal. And I think, as we discussed in this podcast, that everyone recognizes that nobody has a single solution to everyone's problems. Like, we need a little bit of everything. So I think that the fact that we have a cohort of people doing different things is actually really critical. So Gordon, thanks so much for sharing today. Thanks for, again, for being so committed to— good on you and the work. And I hope 2025 produces those enormous inflection points that sounds like you've got the momentum for.

41:38 Speaker C: Indeed, indeed. We'll see. Thank you so much.

41:40 Mick Liubinskas: Thanks, mate. Talk soon.

41:41 Speaker C: Bye, everyone.