Gain

From Personal Pain

Meet Gun Ana:

meet the founders

     For years, the dominant story of sustainability has been a story about personal virtue. Read the label. Skip the plastic bag. Choose organic. Each small purchase becomes a kind of vote, and the implicit promise is that enough of these votes, cast consistently enough, add up to real change. It's a comforting idea — mostly because it puts the power somewhere tangible: in our own hands, at the checkout.

     It's also, mostly, a myth.
     It places the burden of fixing a systemic problem onto individuals who never had much say in what was on offer to begin with.
     "The responsibility has been pushed a lot towards the consumer — to recycle, to select the right option," says Elizabeth (Liz) Lee, co-founder of the material innovation company Carbon Cell. "And I see that as a false choice, because you can only choose from what's available."

     Most people aren't equipped to evaluate a product's lifecycle, its manufacturability, or its end-of-life impact on a daily basis. "It's not their job," Lee says. "Their choices are not necessarily as considered." And when guilt becomes the primary driver of sustainable behaviour, it tends to exhaust people rather than mobilise them. "Perfection can become the enemy of change," she says, "because it just feels like guilt rather than the weight of responsibility."
     The real question, then, isn't how to make consumers choose better. It's how better things get onto the menu in the first place — and what does it actually take to put them there?

     Most founders, she argues, obsess over the first two. The third is where things quietly fall apart.
     "You can have an exceptional product. You can do the first and the second level really well, but still fail at the third level," Liz says. "And that happens all the time."

     Liz's father is a woodturner. A bowl he makes by hand takes six to eight hours of skilled labour and, by her account, produces genuinely beautiful objects. But price it to cover six to eight hours of real wages, and "nobody would buy that bowl." The craft is exceptional; the business model doesn't work. "It can be a great idea," she says, "but it might not be a great business idea."

     This is, in a sense, an occupational hazard of loving the craft. Founders who are deeply skilled at the first two levels — who can make something technically excellent and beautifully designed — often assume the hard part is behind them once the object exists.
     It rarely is.

andrej:

80%

of a product's environmental impact is determined at the design phase

European Commission, Circular Economy Strategy

A Great Product Can Still Fail

     The operational weight of running a company — accounting, business development, health and safety, managing people and space — "is itself its own job," Lee says, one that in an established business is covered by existing revenue. With a new product, that revenue may not exist yet.
     "For us, it's constantly going back and forth between those levels of design — figuring out not just how to make the material, but how to turn it into a working business model. It's a loop, not a straight line," Lee says.

     Those constraints have directly shaped the kind of company Carbon Cell intends to be. Rather than building an end-product brand, the long-term plan is to operate as a raw material supplier — selling granules to downstream manufacturers who already have the distribution, the customers, and the industry relationships. "We want to be a material innovation company," Lee says. It's a decision to plug into existing systems rather than build parallel ones from scratch.

     The external market, too, has to be ready — and that readiness can't always be forced. Microsoft Zune launched roughly a decade before Spotify, with a similar idea, and failed — not because it was wrong, but because the surrounding infrastructure simply didn't exist yet. A decade later, the systems had caught up, and streaming became one of the biggest business models in entertainment.
     Systems, though, extend beyond supply chains and market timing. They include the conditions that allow the people building something new to keep going at all. For Liz, an American in the UK, that became unexpectedly personal. A visa rejection put her residency at risk — one day, she says, from having to leave the country she'd chosen to live and work in.

     As a founder, she was already accepting the possibility of no salary, no guarantee of success. The visa rejection added a different kind of stakes entirely: if the business didn't work out, she wouldn't just lose a job — she'd lose the country she'd chosen to live in.
     "I really feel like we cannot have innovation, we cannot have business growth, if we do not have safety for people who are doing the work that is required to make change happen," she says. If companies and countries want change to happen, they need to make it safe enough for people to attempt it.
     Before any of that can happen, the product itself has to be discovered, understood, and trusted within a much larger system — a market that wasn't built with it in mind.

Communication as a system

     Getting people to understand something that doesn't yet exist in their mental map is, in many ways, the central challenge of launching anything genuinely new. And it starts earlier than most founders expect.
     Before the first samples even existed, the founders made a deliberate decision about how the brand would look and feel. Rather than defaulting to the visual language of sustainability – earthy tones, organic textures, the aesthetic that quietly signals 'responsible' before a word is spoken – she made a different call.
     "We wanted to feel like it was coming from a lab than a field," she says, "borrowing some of those codes – in the logo, typography, even in the colours – of scientific development." It was a strategic choice as much as an aesthetic one: a sustainable brand that leads with design and innovation, rather than ethics, can reach a much wider audience.

     Visual language sets the first impression. What follows has to be calibrated just as carefully — and differently, depending on who's in the room. Liz describes this as a triangle strategy: think of how fashion works — the bold new colour of the season catches attention, but the plain, familiar pieces are what actually sell. With consumers, lead with what's striking — then make sure it feels accessible and low-friction by the time they're deciding.

     The language around the problem matters just as much. Abstract framing — carbon emissions, global waste — has lost its pull, worn down by fatigue and years of greenwashing. "When I say it's a natural polymer, people already don't believe me," Lee says. What lands instead is something closer to home: microplastics in the body, local jobs, supply chains that failed during COVID.
     The broader context still matters, but it travels further when people can see how it connects to their own quality of life. For anyone communicating change, the principle is the same — find the version of the argument that lives in someone's immediate world, not in a graph or a global target.
     Communication isn't something that happens after the product is ready. It's one of the systems that has to be built alongside it.

     With investors, the logic inverts. 'They want to know the known anchor thing — familiar, predictable — first, and then what makes it unique and innovative after that.

     Regardless of the audience, there's the comparison trap. Every new material has to be explained in terms of something people already know. There's no other way in. But that anchor can become a cage. "In actually using the language of what exists to describe what we're trying to do, we actually harm ourselves," Liz says. "People's expectations change. They set really high bars for performance."
     Early plastics were sold as ivory and horn substitutes for decades. It was only when designers stopped mimicking natural materials and started exploring what only plastic could do that it became a material in its own right. Carbon Cell is navigating the same arc — starting close enough to foam to be understood, while building objects that could only exist in this material, to show what it can do on its own terms.

andrej:

     None of this means individual choice doesn't matter, or that consumers are powerless. It means the burden has been placed in the wrong spot. The harder, slower, less visible work — the work that actually determines what ends up on the shelf in the first place — is building the systems around an idea: the internal operations that keep a company alive long enough to matter, the external infrastructure that lets a market actually absorb something new, and the communication that makes a new thing legible and trustworthy enough for someone to choose it at all.

     Carbon Cell is still in the middle of that work — navigating all three levels at once, with no guarantee of how it lands. But that, Liz would argue, is exactly the point.

     A great material, on its own, changes nothing. A great material that fits into existing supply chains, survives its own company's operations, and is explained in a way people can actually believe — that has a chance of becoming something people get to choose.      The future of sustainable innovation may depend less on inventing better solutions, and more on doing the unglamorous work of turning better solutions into real choices.

andrej:

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