Faye Clifton is a director and head of growth at Green&Blue, a British company that makes a unique collection of sustainable products to give nature a home within the built environment. The range includes the Bee Brick, a nesting site for solitary bees that is a winner of the Soil Association Innovation Award. Green&Blue is a certified B Corp, meaning the business meets the highest of standards for social and environmental impact.
“We’ve worked hard on our values to ensure that innovation and empowerment are cornerstones of our culture because we believe in the power of our team. If everyone is empowered in their roles and inspired to question then we’ll all be driving at the best solutions.”
A house filled with colour
I grew up on the moors in Cornwall within a creative family, folk music, fair isle knitting, fine art and colour filled our house! I pursued art for a while, taking the foundation art course at Falmouth College of Art & Design I then went on to Nottingham Trent University to study knitwear design however I found the focus too industrial and also realised how much I’d always taken the sea and the space in Cornwall for granted, Nottingham was a great city but I craved home!
Spending a few years back in Cornwall enjoying life I ‘fell’ into working for my creative sister who had set up her own textile label, Poppy Treffry. Here I fell in love with the marketing side of the business and the varied tasks you get to pursue as part of a small business, creativity every day. I worked with Poppy for eight years until leaving in 2014 to join the team at Green&Blue after forming a friendship with founders Gavin and Kate Christman at various design fairs.
Growing nature, impact and people
I became a director at Green&Blue in May 2021 and I am our head of growth. We chose the title because to us, growth reflects so many things. We’re not a business driven by the relentless pursuit of profit, we want to grow nature, grow our impact, grow our people and we liked the way ‘head of growth’ left space for all these aims.
We’re a small business with a team of ten at the moment and so we all wear a lot of hats. A typical day involves a heady mix of problem-solving, strategy and planning, making sure our team is happy, supporting our community, and always raising awareness of the importance of nature.
Connecting with nature during COVID
We actually saw a real uplift in our business during COVID-19 as people spent more time at home and in their gardens and more time connected with nature, there was a real reminder of the solace the natural world can bring. That came with strains though, as we had team members on furlough as they dealt with home-schooling and the other trials it brought to all our lives.
But it taught us a lot about our capacity, about teamwork, about supporting one another, and as we’ve all come back together it’s motivated us to do more work around our values and our culture, recognising that strength in our team is vital to achieving the things we want to achieve.
Nesting and resting
Our mission at Green&Blue is to make homes havens for wildlife and this is what our products are designed to do. We create nesting and resting places for wildlife species, from the award-winning Bee Brick, a nesting site for solitary bees, to our range of British-made birdfeeders. Our vision is to reconnect people with nature and our products are support this.
The innovation in our range lies in the fact that products can be used in construction to make space for nature in the framework of new builds. Products like Bee Brick, BatBlock and the SwiftBlock create space for solitary bees, bats and swifts, putting nooks and crannies back into developments where otherwise there would be no space for wildlife.
Slowly, it’s becoming part of planning policy that developments consider planet and wildlife as of equal importance to humans and it’s this kind of thinking we need to stop our disconnect from nature and the loss of biodiversity which is a big part of the climate crisis.
Commitment to do our best by people and the planet
Green&Blue has been a certified B Corp since November 2018 and we see it as a really transparent mark of our commitment to do our best by people and planet. It sets our guiding principles and holds us to the highest account, seeking to challenge the historic business as normal approach of profit for shareholders.
To become certified, you have to go through a lengthy and rigorous assessment which is a brilliant tool in itself for shining a light on all parts of your business, this looks at your workers, your governance, impact on environment – no stone is left unturned! If anyone has been on the fence about certifying you can access the impact assessment tool and use this without commitment so I’d definitely recommend having a look and a play, there’s definitely things there we might not have thought about otherwise.
Nimble, thoughtful and curious
At Green&Blue we seek to solve problems with design and we aim to challenge both ourselves and the wider world. We write into all our job descriptions that we must consider planet when making each and every decision and this keeps us nimble, thoughtful and curious!
We’ve worked hard on our values to ensure that innovation and empowerment are cornerstones of our culture because we believe in the power of our team. If everyone is empowered in their roles and inspired to question then we’ll all be driving at the best solutions.
Big plans spurred on by positive customer feedback
We’re excited to launch new products this year, making more space for even more wildlife species. We’re also running the fourth Solitary Bee Week, which is an awareness campaign we started after realising how many people don’t even know solitary bees exist.
We’ve got big plans to launch a citizen science study so that we can start to build data around the impact of putting nesting sites for wildlife species into buildings, and we want to continue to make Green&Blue a brilliant place to work – so it should be another busy year!
When a customer sends a picture of a sparrow emerging from a nest box, or starlings bathing in one of our BirdBaths, when we get the first emails letting us know that the red masons have started appearing from the Bee Brick – we can handle any level of busyness because that makes it all worthwhile!
