Alice in Wonderland's 18 Pillars of Purpose & Sustainability

Chapter 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 blueprint for building a business?” scoffed one visitor to our market stall. “It’s a Victorian children’s story, for goodness’ sake!”

We smiled. We’d heard it before.

“Alice isn’t just a children’s story,” we explained. “It’s a parable, that uses absurd humour to show how a little known, radical logic can create extraordinary things, as it did 100 years ago when it changed the world.” 

“We’ve used that same 19^th century logic and a 19^th century children’s story to turn our children’s hobby into a 21^stcentury purposeful brand.” 

Mental Kung Fu

We first stumbled across the engine of Wonderland’s logic as schoolkids, rummaging through the “Philosophy” section in the library. There we met a serious-looking German fellow named Georg Hegel.

Hegel is a hugely influential philosopher; he created a wonderful way of looking at problems called dialectical reasoning—a way of solving them through contradiction.

We bring it down to earth and call it ‘mental Kung Fu.’

Shortly after Hegel published his dialectic, Karl Marx used it to critique capitalism and spark a revolution that changed world order. A few years after that, along came Lewis Carroll, an Oxford maths professor, a logician with a lively imagination, and used this upside-down thinking to create one of the most loved of all children’s stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Now, 160 years later, it was our turn to use Hegel’s Kung Fu, to go on a journey of enlightenment and, with Alice’s help, try to create our own Wonderland, and build a purposeful and sustainable startup in this unsustainable world.

Our Kids’ Hobby

Our journey began with a hobby we invented in lockdown.

It was a simple idea to keep the kids entertained while we all learned about nature; making beaded bracelets with designs inspired by endangered animals. Each bracelet told a story about the animal it represented—and the threats it faced.

We weren’t maths professors, but it didn’t take long to work out that 100 years from now, most of the planet’s wildlife will be gone.

So, we thought we’d have some fun continuing the kid’s education by helping the animals, planting trees and adding momentum to the Carbon Neutral revolution that had begun years before.

Here’s The Thing

Years ago, we helped pioneer the Carbon Neutral revolution by planting trees to offset the CO₂ created by companies; now, so many years later, we decided to do the same for people.

From boardrooms to living rooms, doing for people what we’d done for companies.

Our kid’s hobby gave us the idea, Hegel the means and Alice the model.

We began by creating our own Kung Fu, a logic built on Hegel and Alice’s thinking, we call it ‘non-cents.’

The Logic of Non-Cents

Most businesses are based on “cents”—dollars and cents.

But Alice’s Wonderland runs on nonsense.

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

We took Alice’s advice and decided to build a business based on ‘non-cents’—a different currency altogether. Instead of profit first, we put purpose first. And since you can’t take purpose to the bank, we invented our own currency: trees.

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

With over two million trees planted, non-cents now makes cents to us.   

Two Books, One Promise

Our adventures with Alice have grown into two books, so far:

      · Book One – The Market Stall That Planted One Million Trees: Fifty short, crazy, adventures about our startup.

       · Book Two – Alice in Wonderland’s 18 Pillars of Purpose & Sustainability: Our code for families, entrepreneurs, and dreamers wanting to build purpose-driven businesses to make a difference by making people happy.

Both books were born from 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 stands 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 way to do business than profit.

And to keep the “difference” bit real, every copy of the book plants fifteen trees—enough to offset one person’s equal share of annual global CO₂ emissions.

So, owning a book makes you net zero for a year.

Welcome

Welcome to Bands of Courage. You’ve stepped into our Wonderland—where problems are friends, logic is nonsense, and words like purpose and sustainability make sense.

Publication: Q1 2026