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Hey Wonderland: How are you Tackling Sustainability?
Hey
Wonderland:
How
are
you
Tackling
Sustainability?
Senior Strategist and Business Developer
We define sustainability as the need to
work for companies that do something
good for the world, period.
Before we start, it’s maybe a good idea to
disclose that we define Sustainability in a
slightly different way. While the technical
definition is the avoidance of the depletion
of natural resources in order to maintain an
ecological balance, for us we view it as the
need to work for companies that do
something good for the world. This could be
companies with a sustainable mission or
operations, like Patagonia or Allbirds,
institutions looking to benefit and further
society such as charities or scholarships, or
businesses looking to alleviate issues such
as access to clean water, like Lifestraw.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we
should also come clean and admit that
sustainability isn’t something we’ve always
been good at. We’ve always tried, but it
hasn’t been a central focus for us for the
simple reason that we thought we were
already quite sustainable because of our
work in digital. It was only when we began
diving into the topic towards the end of last
year that we began to fully understand the
environmental cost of our - and the world’s
- digital products. Hence our push to
become a B Corp.
With just four months between now and the
submission date, we’re rapidly adding and
refining the day-to-day processes of
Wonderland, coupling easy wins like
shifting to all-vegetarian lunches and
composting our food waste via Grow It
Away to writing and formalising our internal
code of ethics and whistleblower policies.
The main shift has come from a change in
perception. Somewhere along the way, we
got tired of doing creative work for the sake
of creativity and profit. Instead, we reviewed
our priorities and realigned them on
contribution, not consumption. In this, we’re
actively seeking clients and partners who
contribute to the world in positive ways and
want to leave it better than they found it,
rather than relentlessly consuming it like
some commercialised rendition of
Augustus Gloop. It’s not a fast process,
true, but increasingly we’re starting to see
the rewards.
Especially at the start, this was a difficult
reality for us to come to terms with. We
have a running joke in the office that our
MD’s favourite phrase is that he wants to
“push it” and “go fast”, but with time we’ve
realised that to achieve this, we have to first
go slow, and map out exactly what we want
from this process. Clarity is key, and we
can’t do everything right from day one. We
can’t abandon clients we’ve worked with for
years. We can’t risk the continuity of
Wonderland in favour of quick results. And
we can’t ignore the economic signalling
that pervades the news like Covid did just
months before.
What we can do is slowly increase our
proportion of ‘for good’ clients as we
complete existing projects. We can educate
our current clients and improve their
projects to make them greener and more
sustainable, which we’ll do. And we can plan
ahead and map future scenarios for
Wonderland that look one, three, and five
years into the future, which we’ve done.
With time comes clarity, and clarity is key in
shifting a business - any business - to a
greener, more sustainable way of
working. This summer has been one of the
hottest on record, with the extreme heat
wreaking havoc in the world's three largest
economies.
For as long as we can remember, the time
to act has been now. But, now more than
ever, the shift needs to accelerate. We’ve
seen it more clearly than ever before when
the clock hit 2020, and it’s only become
more evident as we’ve moved through the
decade.
We’re just a small company, but we want to
make a difference and be more
sustainable. We want to educate our
industry, help our clients, and leave the
world a little bit better than how we found it.
With this desire comes sustainably-charged
decisions, each of which brings us closer to
our goal, and nearer to becoming a
certified B Corp.
INC 16-22 BRAND EXPERIENCE DESIGN 
