Being positively different

From the start, Red-Inc has sought to rewrite the script of the office supplies contract business model. A post in our series on B Corp companies in the UK.

When Red-Inc was established in 2008, there was no other purpose driven office supplies companies in the space. Red-Inc became a B Corp in April 2017 (B Corp set up in the UK in 2014). The business sailed through the process. This post tells the Red-Inc story in the words of its founder and managing director, Adam Huttly, whom we sat down with recently to understand his business and how being a B Corp affects what Red-Inc does and how it operates.

Adam started by describing his ideas when he was setting up the business:

“I wanted to rewrite the script of the office supplies contract business model. And to approach it with a completely different view. Almost elevating yourself out of the industry and saying I’m going to look in with a fresh eyes and question absolutely everything that goes on within the industry. I wanted to mix all that together and create a purpose driven triple bottom line business.

“We just wanted to be the best and that means being the best for everyone.”

Going beyond stationery

But what does this bold ambition mean in a traditional business, like stationery? Adam continued:

“Today we would say office supplies is a by-product of our business, to the point where we are actually far more consultative than we are sales. What we sell is a package of helping clients rather than just getting stationery from A to B. And there’s all the kind of minutiae that sits in there. So, we do high end reporting on sustainability, CO2 and Scope 3 emissions for our clients. It makes us add value to their supply chain and their value chain. We’re not just a stationery company that sits in their supply chain.”

Adam told us that Red-Inc’s approach meant really getting beneath the surface of their customers, and showing how they could be better with Red-Inc’s help and expertise:

“We also do a sustainability audit that encompasses a lot about how they operate, how they could operate in the future, what their own goals are. You know, what their ESG positioning is or, are they on a Net Zero pathway? And we put it all together as big audit. We give our customers the data they need to understand what they’re buying and what they could buy. We report a life cycle of [stationery products] for our clients.”

For Red-Inc this has meant going beyond just being a supplier:

“We always dive deeper and go further but are careful too. The suppliers and wholesalers that are labelling something as a green product could be misleading - when in fact the product itself it not actually that “green” but perhaps has green elements. We have to ask too, could it be recycled? Could it be made out of recycled materials? We’ve been working for the last five years on end-of-life solutions as well. How do we help the customer right to the end of the products life, not slope our shoulders on the tricky bits.”

Breaking down the traditional model

In an industry driven by cost, bringing in sustainability is bound to be a challenge:

“The industry will have to change at some stage, for example, the weighting on tenders. If we want a truly sustainable net zero future in the procurement world. You can’t have a weighting that only weights 10 points on CSR or sustainability and 70% on price (cost) because this is the race to the bottom is destroying everything: it’s putting people out of business. Stationery companies feel that they’ve got to follow that chain. It leaves no room for error, and it certainly doesn’t leave any room for progression, and innovation. That’s the conversation we have with our clients. If you want us to be the best fit for your value chain, and you want us to innovate, we simply can’t do it on the bare bones of cost. You can’t do it, nor should we have to.

“Everyone is a customer, and everyone is welcome to be a customer, but I think ultimately the success we’ve got comes and is driven from the bigger organisations where we can have a really, really big impact. Our purposeful model and open honest thinking has changed the game”

Adam said one good example of this is how rebates were handled:

“One of the first big clients we signed up in London back in 2008 had a historic rebate system with their previous supplier. So, the deal was done and then this ugly conversation came up about the rebate. ‘Well, if we spend £70k a month we want some of that back. So, I sat down one day and started an honest conversation about what this meant or how it could look! The conversation went a bit like this ‘I just don’t like it, I think it’s out of date and you don’t really need it. Can’t we do something better with this rebate? Can’t we give it to someone else? I don’t really want to give it back to you because you’ve just bought stationery from me. It feels a little bit wrong, and it feels like we’re not moving forward’. We sat down and we came up with an idea. What we’d do is pass the rebate forward, not directly to the company, but we’d open it up to the staff and they could all put a charity forward. So, there’s a real piece here about bringing the culture together, getting people to understand why they changed their stationery company to Red-Inc and bringing purpose into the mix. So, every quarter everyone could put their name into the hat, we would give the money to the charity of the choice of one of the staff. It was so engaging.”

Continuously developing understanding, continuously developing staff

Achieving B Corp status and continuously delivering to customers relies on having well developed, committed staff who question, listen and act. Adam highlighted a few areas:

“Red-Inc is not a traditional business. Everyone is very ingrained in our mission and that works for both staff and clients. We are continually educating our staff on the matters that they need to know about. A good example is the current paper crisis? It’s not dealt with by one or two people. Everyone in the company knows the ins and outs of the paper crisis that’s happening in the world. The reasons behind it. The cost of pulp, the cost of energy, costs of logistics containers. It’s about a continual sharing practice I guess ultimately.”

So flexibility and responsiveness is important to Red-Inc?

“Obviously people have a fixed job in terms of 80% of their job, but we will turn our hand to anything that happens.

“Pretty much everything we do within the organisation is shared, and we try and continually educate our staff. I think it’s important because we are a very niche business and sustainability is a huge topic. So, we need our clients and our staff to be up to speed and to understand the basic principles of what we’re trying to achieve.”

In particular Adam was really proud of his first apprentice (he’d like another if he could find one):

“We’ve got a lovely story with our apprentice who joined us six years ago. He came in straight from college at 17 and he’s been with us all that time. He does a great job and is integral to the business. It’s a great success story and we would do that again. He undertook business administration, then moved into running the warehouse, and has recently moved into purchasing as it suits his skill set which are very systems oriented. We want people to succeed, and we’re happy to hold people’s hands and pull people on that journey with us.”

Attracting interest

Adam concluded:

“We get more and more contact now from people saying: ‘We understand it might cost more to be truly sustainable but because you are a purpose-driven business, and you’re doing great for the world and we’re happy to pay.’”

We left Adam with a clear impression that Red-Inc has developed several levels of sustainability capability. One level wraps around the whole business and is fundamental to everything it does: with suppliers, with staff, with customers, and with the community. Another level is the ability to listen, understand and challenge everything and to develop practical solutions all along its supply and value chains. The clear purpose and drivers of Red-Inc carries into its customers and starts to change how they operate too. This is the beginning of a virtuous cycle that the B Corp movement is built on.

Thanks to Adam Huttly of Red-Inc for his time in making this Green Edge post. Green Edge opinions may not necessarily coincide with Adam’s own.

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