Introduction: Young, Dumb and Still Foolish

“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one.”
The White Rabbit 1865 & our family 2025

Black Swans - Feb 2020

When the world stopped, so did time.
Covid was the Mad Hatter’s clock — jamming us forever at tea-time.

We looked around and found a world in chaos.
Pandemic, protest, pollution.
Black Lives Matter. Forests burning. Plastic everywhere.
Four million people dying each year from the air they breathed.

“They call them Black Swans,” we discovered —
catastrophes that could have been foreseen,
and should therefore have been avoided.

And yet, somehow, we were all surprised.
Has it happened before? Yes, just years before.

By 2025, the number was nine million.
Nine million people dying every year because of dirty air.
Another Black Swan?
No. A flock of them, by the looks of things.

Destiny Comes Calling

Covid gave us something rare — a window in time.
Space to think.
A chance to stare out of the rarest of windows and ask the oldest question in the world:
“What can we do?”

The answer came back, blunt and cold: “Not much.”

We felt small. Powerless.
Like spectators at a game we wanted to play. Frustrated.

Years earlier, we’d help give the carbon-neutral revolution a shove —
young, dumb, and idealistic.
Helping pioneer a business that planted trees to offset the CO₂ emissions created by companies.
We believed in trees then.
We still did.

Now, we wondered —
could we do it again?
But this time, plant trees for people, rather than companies.

The bracelets we’d been making in lockdown sat on the table,
glittering souls of the animals they represented.

“Maybe this is it,” we thought.
“Maybe destiny has come knocking again?”

“You forgot about the people,” she reminded us.

We didn’t need reminding; we’d always felt regret.

We just didn’t know how to do it, for people.

How to work out a person’s CO₂ emissions, practically and legally. 

Parental Responsibility

As parents, we did what parents do.
We decided “to try.”

We would try for our children —
for their future, and maybe ours too.

What began as a whimsical hobby during lockdown
turned into something more serious when the world reopened.
It became a vow.
A promise to act.

We were, by nature, doers.
And destiny had given us an opportunity “to do,”  to finish what we started, so many years ago.

Could we turn this family hobby of ours into a business that gave back?
A purposeful business?

We had no idea.
But we were determined to find out.

A World of Pain

Starting a business is like inviting a monster to dinner.
You want the entertainment,
but you’d better have an awful lot of food.

Monsters are hungry beasts, and the poorest of company when they’re not fed.  

We knew enough to know it would be a world of pain feeding this monster.
Meals every day and night, for years.  

A commitment indeed.

Knowing nothing about the jewellery business or much else, didn’t help.

But we did have opportunity, and time —
and the curiosity to find out.

We also have a passion for creating stuff.

We weren’t young any longer,

But maybe we were still dumb and foolish enough to try.

But how, doing what, helping who?

A Promise 

Humanity we, discovered, wasn’t exactly top of the class.
The planet’s report card read: “Couldn’t do much worse.”
The math told us the planet’s wildlife would be gone within a hundred years.

So, we decided to be idealists, once again.
We would help the plants and animals.

To make it work, we’d help people too.
All three species.
An urban jungle filled with dangers.

It would take courage.
And, as we’d later discover, madness.

So, before we began, we made a promise.
A real one.

In September 2020, sitting at our living room table, our bracelets before us,
we recorded a small video.
A declaration of the problem we wanted to solve.

And we posted it online, to an audience of zero.

With the problem, we made a bond. 

“We promise to make you smile while we try to make a difference.”

It was a line.
A lifeline.
A flag in the sand that said: we’re in this now.

If we failed, we’d fail publicly.
If we succeeded, maybe — just maybe — people would smiling.

Either way, we’d plant some more trees.

2025: A Different Family

So, we set out on a journey to prove purpose a better way to do business than profit.

More reckless idealism, as we got under way.  

But also fun.

 Four years later we are different people.

As are those around us.

We’d gone from buying beads in 7.5-gram tubes, to buying them by the ton.

We had over a billion beads in stock and on order.

Single orders for threads,

they jumped from 25 metres to over 100 kilometres.

And were still passionate market stall holders.

Rocking up every weekend, without fail.

And now we had a shop too.

A market stall and shop, together planting a tree every 2 seconds.

20,000 trees a week.

How to Build a Business

Building a business, we’ve learned,
isn’t about luck or brilliance.

It’s about solving thousands of problems in a row —
hour after hour, day after day, desperately holding on to your sense of humour.

This book is a collection of those small battles.
Fifty short, funny, idealistic adventures.
Each one a problem solved,
a lesson learned,
trees planted.

Over two million trees later, we’re still learning.
Still smiling.
Still trying to make good on that promise.

Trying, as best we can,
to make a difference —
one band,
one story,
one customer at a time.