Climate Change Fund: Youth for Climate Change

Perhaps it is the end summer and the monsoon, or just the right time of year, festival season is beginning, as it happens, our entrepreneurs are being very entrepreneurial.

They all got together and decided they’d like to have a shop, a place to sell what they make: wild honey, leaf plates, cotton pajamas.

They called us and told us this was the plan, that they would invest and would we? We thought it’s a great idea but we had one reservation, retail is in free fall. In India, renting a space or place can be very expensive and you’re never sure if you are in the right place after all: location, location, location. There’s also a lot of traffic, so people don’t want to drive far to shop. Online is a place where this ‘sustainable shop’ could be, but then we also told them we thought they needed to go further: differentiate. What sets their sustainable shop apart from everything that is out there?

Our design-team took a look at their products. They then designed more products for children age 2-9 that they thought children and parents would love. As pure as possible, made in India, sustainably sourced, with a story behind them products for the outdoor child who loves to play, swim, surf and explore. Cotton mosquito nets, colored leaf plates, honey in glass jars, tents. T-shirts made of organic cotton, nightshirts and pajamas from pure weaves.

The prototyping process following our design-team’s guidelines for color, production and sustainable brown paper packaging has not been easy.

The Climate Change Fund has been everywhere working with the entrepreneurs to prototype, experiment, try to be organic, register. We’re not there yet, but the good news is we’re closer than we’ve every been.

The brand has a name (top secret for now) and we have some amazing breakthrough products. And while it will all be deliciously wind-swept and sold online, we still wonder if we need a small place, with bamboo floors, sand, a cloudy sky painted on the ceiling, bamboo straws and an old-fashioned hand pulled juicer. Maybe we do, maybe we just need to draw it and put that online too.

What we have learned through this process? That sustainability is difficult. Organic is not inexpensive and hard to regulate, ensure. That we all have different notions of what is good design and packaging. That we need more of our epic design team’s help. Hopefully as more of our other projects move to completion this will be our next priority. After all our entrepreneurs wanted it, and we’d like to try to help them achieve their dream and be sustainable, bringing children and the next generation into the meta narrative of products that take on the root causes of climate change and are also beautifully designed.