1.    Alice - The Entrepreneurial Child

 

“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent [the child]. The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own way.” 

Yvon Chouinard, Founder Patagonia 

Alice 

“Who on earth uses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a model for building a business?” one visitor to our market stall remarked, laughing.

“It’s a children’s story, from the 19^th century, for goodness’ sakes!”

 

We smiled. We’d heard it before.

“Alice isn’t just a children’s story,” we explained.

“It’s an absurd parable showing how the way you think can change the world.” 

 

Alice’s way of thinking is based on an extraordinary logic invented in 1807.

By German philosopher, Georg Hegel.

A logic that sparked global revolutions in the early 20^th century,

changing the world forever.

 

Nonsense v Nonsense 

“Why Alice?” Our, now intrigued, visitor asked.

“Alice says, ‘if I had a world of my own everything would be nonsense.”

“So, we’re creating our own version of Wonderland,

A world of nonsense.”

 

“Why?” Our now puzzled visitor asks.

 

“We’re using her nonsense story to solve a nonsense problem.”

“Which is . . ?” Our visitor pressed.

 

“To save the planet’s wildlife,

we’re losing 1% of our wildlife every year.”

 

We close:

“We want to use a nonsensical parable,

to ridicule a nonsensical world.”

To use a logic that’s changed the world,

to save it from destroying its wildlife.”

 

“You’re bonkers,” said our visitor.

“Maybe,” we replied.

Mental Martial Arts

We first stumbled across Alice’s logic as kids.

Rummaging around the “Philosophy” section in the school library.

 

There we bumped into Georg Hegel.

 

Hegel is a hugely influential philosopher,

he created a wonderful way of looking at problems.

It’s called dialectical reasoning—a radical way of solving problems through contradiction.

 

We bring it down to earth and call it ‘mental martial arts.’

Powerful, insightful, a real problem killer.

 

Shortly after Hegel published his dialectic, a friend of his published a book using it.

The book - The Communist Manifesto.

The author - Karl Marx,

The date - 1847.

Revolutions followed.

 

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s author, was the first to use logic to tell stories.

He was an Oxford maths lecturer, a logician with a lively imagination.

He renamed Hegel’s logic - ‘contrariwise thinking.”

Thinking backwards, or upside down, or back to front.

 

From it, he created his Wonderland,

Where everything is back to front,

And Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, followed.

 

Now, 160 years later, it was our turn.

To create our version of Wonderland.

A purposeful, sustainable nonsense startup,

In this nonsense unsustainable world.

 

The question on our minds:

“Could a 160-year-old little girl create a 21^st century business?

Our Kids’ Hobby

Our journey began with a hobby; one we invented in lockdown.

A simple idea,

to entertain the family while we learned about nature.

 

Making beaded bracelets with designs inspired by endangered animals,

each bracelet capturing the colourful soul of the animal it represented.

Each a sad story, that needed telling.

 

Unlike Lewis Carroll, we weren’t maths professors,

but we managed some math:

100 years from now, most of the planet’s wildlife will be gone.

It already is.

 

We want to help them,

Plant some trees, give them a home,

and raise some awareness.

 

We figured out what we needed to do.

Add momentum to the Carbon Neutral revolution that had begun years before.

 

Here’s The Thing

 

Years ago, we helped pioneer the Carbon Neutral revolution,

planting trees to offset the CO₂ created by companies.

 

“Could we do the same for people today?” We wondered.

After all, animals can’t plant trees!

 

From boardrooms to living rooms,

doing for people what we’d done for companies.

That was the challenge.

 

Our kid’s hobby gave us the idea,

Hegel the means,

and Alice the model.

 

Hegel called it ‘dialectical,’

Alice called it ‘contrariwise,’

We now call it ‘non-cents.’

The Logic of Non-Cents

Businesses are based on “cents”—dollars and cents.

But Alice’s Wonderland runs on nonsense.

So, we decided to follow Alice’s lead,

and build our business, our wonderland, on ‘non-cents,’

the opposite of cents.

 

Instead of putting profit, cents, first,

we put purpose, non-cents, first.

A different currency altogether.  

 

And since you can’t take non-cents to the bank,

we invented our own currency:

trees.

 

One bracelet plants 10 trees.
Simple. Silly. Powerful.

 

Another Nonsense

 

With trees as our currency and purpose our goal,

We encountered our first problem.

 

We didn’t know what ‘purpose’ meant,

Or even how to measure it.

 

More thought followed,

and we stumbled on our second and third problems.

 

We didn’t know what ‘sustainability’ meant.

‘Endangered’ too.

 

Three meaningful words,

Purpose, sustainability and endangered

Used every day, by everyone,

And they’ve lost their meaning.

 

“Another nonsense,” we said to ourselves.

 

The Mission

 

We resolved to define these three meaningful words.

In a way even a child, Alice, could understand.

And define them in a way we could measure them too.

Two Books, One Promise  

 

Our adventures began with a promise,

our first ever Instagram post in 2020,

before we planted a single tree:

 

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

 

Four years on, that promise still sits on social media,

with its smiles and difference.

 

The smiles are the stories of a family,

going on adventures with a little girl,

to prove that purpose is a better than profit.

 

To keep the “difference” bit real,

every book plants fifteen trees,

offsetting one person’s equal share of annual global CO₂ emissions.

 

Owning a book makes you net zero for a year.

 

Welcome

 

Welcome to Bands of Courage - our Wonderland,

where problems are friends,

logic is non-cents,

and words like purpose and sustainability now make sense,

 

And welcome to Alice’s first Pillar of Sustainability, the need for our business to be sustainable and purposeful.