I had the pleasure of meeting Cameron Saul, co-founder of the Bottletop Foundation during this year’s Art Basel.
Perfect venue and occasion to introduce Bottletop’s new campaign #TOGETHERBAND alongside his partner Oliver Wayman, UBS (founding partner) and Alessandra Ambrosio, Ambassador and supporter of “Life below Water”, UN’s Goal #14. #TOGETHERBAND is a global movement to change the world.
“The 17-month #TOGETHERBAND campaign aims to engage over a billion people with the UN Global Goals in partnership with the UN Foundation, WWF-UK, Project Everyone, Eco-Age, to.org, MECA, Global Citizen and the Founding Partner UBS.”
Let’s meet Cameron
First I’d like to thank you for taking time away from your busy schedule to meet with me. I hope that I can surprise you a little with some of my questions!
Tell me a little bit about Bottletop. How did it come about? How did your interest in sustainable fashion get sparked? Any particular reason other than a purpose driven one?
Bottletop was launched in 2002 together with my father Roger Saul. Then in 2012, my partner Oliver Wayman and I decided to found the Bottletop fashion company to fund the operation of the Bottletop Foundation, using contemporary art and music to raise funds and awareness for education projects that tackle teenage health issues such as HIV/AIDS, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy.
For me it was an intersection of purpose with possibility. I think the sweet spot for me with Bottletop has been about making very beautiful sustainable designs, sustainably sourced materials assembled in ways that are impactful for those doing the making and buying. I guess it was inspired through growing up in a family that was very much in the business of building brands in the shape of Mulberry, which is my father’s company, and witnessing the passion and energy he poured into that. He’s my biggest inspiration reference in many regards.
The brand design and product design are inspired from my having had that experience growing up. And combine that with having volunteered for an incredible NGO in Uganda during my gap year. For nine months I lived in the mountains and taught health education to young people whose ages ranged between 13 and 25, some older than me at that time. I was very much motivated by their desire to learn in creative ways. This journey was extremely inspiring for me in terms of seeing how some people could learn to make healthy choices in ways that they had never been exposed to.
On that same trip I came across a beautiful rustic, dare I say Pop-Art kind of design bag made with recycled metal and glass bottles. I brought it back to London, lined it with waste leather from the Mulberry factory and launched it through a design collaboration with a brand. It became a best selling bag globally. We raised a lot of money for the NGO in East Africa and created teams of Artisans (in Nairobi and Cape Town) – most empowering experience for everyone involved in that project.
That experience and success initiated our approach of using design to empower Artisans and young people while cleaning the environment through the use of those materials. That’s what got the juices flowing. Then I wanted to take what was a singular product and create a brand around that. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last 17 years.
What would you say your life purpose is today? Were you always clear about your life Purpose?
It’s about Empowerment. That’s really been at the heart of everything I’ve dedicated myself to doing my entire adult life. It’s all been about empowering people and the planet – financial inclusion for the Artisans, empowerment for the young people to make healthy choices and to protect themselves.
The mechanism of that has been through design and creating products that are really helping to clean the environment and force new ways of being manufactured in less harmful ways that has been often seen within the fashion industry.
How do you incorporate technology and innovations into your business model?
We launched our flagship retail store on Regent street at #84 last year. We wanted to make a statement on how technology can also play a critical role in sustainability and fashion conversations around architecture and design. It’s the world’s first 3D printed store using plastic bottles. Plastic has been collected from the communities in East Africa and India then cleaned, crushed and turned into huge panels that make up the walls of the store. The latter structure sits behind an extraordinary sculpture on the ceiling. It’s a metal canopy made out of thousands of reject manufactured cans. It’s the play on concept of effectively creating fabric out of the remaining part of the can. We use the metal ring pulls as a signature material in our designs. Then we created a fabric from the remains part of the can to create the sculpture covering the ceiling. We did that on a 3D printed waste plastic.
That’s one of the ways we’ve been using technology- in design itself.
But we’ve also been using technology in our story telling and in the harvesting of the tool kit that we have at our modern day disposal in the shape of Social Media. We’ve been working at creatively harness that to tell the stories of the people whose lives were hopefully positively impacted.
And in a more dynamic way now with our #TOGETHERBAND campaign created to help the planet in union with the UN Global goals. We’re effectively inviting the world to choose the global goal that’s closest to their hearts and share with someone that they love. In doing so what we find is that people learn in a very proactive way what the framework of the global goals is and how this represents a healthy pathway to a healthy planet. It almost is, I believe, one of the missing links in helping people to feel close to it and engaged in it as part of the solution. Up until now people have not engaged with the global goals because they feel left out of the conversation. There’s a lot to digest.
What #TOGETHERBAND does, it gives people an entry point into the global goals and helps them become more positive and engaging. These are topics we all care about. This is why I believe that design, fashion and culture play the most dynamic and important role in helping it to become accessible to people.
How many doors did you have to knock and how many closed ones before one big one opened?
Wow, my entire adult life has been one big knocking! I actually don’t dare to think about how many doors we had to knock on in order for the right ones to open at the right time. If there’s one thing we are is being really, really determined. We don’t tend to take No for an answer. Whilst we may not be the biggest of organisations, we’re possibly the most determined. But because of what we’ve done for quite some time now, we’ve also built a little bit of a track record which never hurts.
What we’ve done with #TOGETHERBAND is a straight forward extension of what we do as an organisation. We noticed over the years that people become amazing proud ambassadors for the issues that we address through Bottletop by wearing our handbags. Our vision for the campaign was to have billions of people around the world being proud story tellers for the global goals rather than having people feeling left out of the conversation.
Where does it stand now? Are you close to having achieved your goals?
I think we’re going to be working on it for a very long time! The 2030 agenda is ambitious enough that we won’t be resting on our laurels any time soon. I think as a human rights we all have our work cut out to do more, to do better, to think smarter, to make tougher choices, be more innovative, creative and kinder and many more…
Whilst we’re making great progress, the fist phase of #TOGETHERBAND is a countdown to the UN General Assembly in September 2020 which is a critical 10 year milestone ahead of the 2030 target date.
The first phase of #TOGETHERBAND is a global rallying cry to bring the world up to speed and on board with this conversation.
The milestone itself is 2030 and we’ll be building to that point and using everything in our power to engage people in the conversation and shed spotlights on extraordinary projects that can be scaled to achieve those ambitious targets.
How did you pick your Ambassadors?
We’re curating these groups of extraordinary voices for each of the global goals in each of the areas. We have some great partners in the campaign. There’s obviously our founding partner Swiss Bank UBS who have been brilliant in their ability to really come behind the campaign and give us the broad shoulders of a major multi national. They are leading the pack by a significant distance in regards to sustainability investing and smart highly efficient philanthropy through their Optimus foundation. So they’ve added quite a bit of muscle weight and credibility to our humble voice. Unusual but awesome partnership, one that I think is hopefully symbolic of the kind of unusual partnership that needs to be formed in order to tackle these unprecedented problems.
Our other strategic partner with a key role is Project Everyone. Then Richard Curtis, the UN, UNDP, UN Environment, Global Citizen, WWF. So we’ve got some extraordinary groups that all have immense credibility and standing in the areas that we’re touching.
And also amazing networks and friendships.
Some may say that luxury, philanthropy and finance don’t go together. What would you say to them?
I can understand why people would say those things don’t go together. My perception of luxury is probably different to others. For me luxury is about creating a product and an experience where everyone is valued for who they are, what they do and supported properly. It’s about creating supply chains that have a positive impact for people on this planet. For me coupling that with philanthropy and finance it creates a very dynamic formula. If we are genuinely setting out to create a healthy planet by the year 2030, how could we ever begin to think that finance cannot or shouldn’t be a part of that conversation. For us that’s why we partnered with UBS on #TOGETHERBAND because we want for them to succeed in their mission to be the leaders in the finance world. We want to see businesses thriving in each of the areas of sustainable development goals which is very much their approach to backing sustainable investments.
I think it’s critical. In the same way that none of these global goals can exist in isolation, none of these issues exist in isolation.
Nowadays we have to go way beyond what things appear to be on the surface and really understand their make-up and how they’re put together and why. There’s smart Philanthropy and there’s less smart philanthropy. Certain kinds can be damaging or less effective and others can make a difference in parts of the world where there aren’t yet social enterprise or impact business.
If you combine all these with a luxurious product made from recycled materials that are, in the case of #TOGETHERBAND, retrieving ocean plastic and illegal fire arms and supporting communities in the process, then absolutely, that’s my kind of luxury and my kind of collaboration.
Now I would love for you to finish these sentences with a few word.
To me beauty is an artisan in Salvador Bahia going home to her family at the end of a long day feeling tired but proud of the work that she has done. She knows that she’s in a strong place to provide for her children and that she’s respected, seen, valued by her community as a whole.
To me luxury is Empowerment.
To me happiness is friends and family.
To me love is trust and romance.
To me aging is challenging but hopefully an adventure.
My life mission is to Empower people and the planet.
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