Marion Glover On The Diverse Forms Of Social Enterprise And Turning Obstacles Into Opportunity
Marion Glover is the founder and Managing Director of Vessel Nundah, a BYO container shop for skincare and cleaning products in Brisbane.
With a background in environmental management and public health, and with experience in government, private firms, and community based organisations, Vessel Nundah was her first foray into business, and social enterprise. Marion completed Impact Boom’s Elevate+ program in 2019, and is currently developing a second business, which will help non-profit groups around Brisbane to start their own refill shops.
marion discusses the driving force behind vessel nundah’s success, their eco-friendly and sustainable product range, and Arising opportunities for the social enterprise sector in Brisbane, and nationally.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - Marion, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be speaking with you again.
[Marion Glover] - Hi Indio. Thank you very much for having me today. It's a real pleasure.
To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to you working in the social enterprise sector?
I grew up in Northern New South Wales, where there are some truly magnificent rainforests and rivers, and I've always had a deeply rooted appreciation for nature and a desire to protect it. This led into me doing my undergraduate degree in Environmental Management, and then when I moved up to Brisbane for my degree, I went into work for the Queensland Government in the environmental department, and learned about the UN's Millennium Development Goals as they were at the time.
They have now morphed into the Sustainability Goals and I really latched onto those concepts and ideas and love that triple bottom line, where I think about the social, environmental and economic goals, mutually reinforcing each other and working through that as a global framework.
I've always kept them as personal goals for what I want to work towards in my own life and business as well. Then between having my two kids, I went back to study a Graduate Diploma of Public Health in continuing that line of interest. Then, after my eldest started school, I decided to act on plastic waste in my own household and was really frustrated with the lack of options that were available to me in Brisbane to shop for household essentials, because they produce plastic. They were just way too expensive and there weren't many around, so I decided to solve that problem myself by starting Vessel Nundah.
Vessel Nundah is an eco-friendly store selling a variety of zero waste cleaning, hygiene and self-care products. Could you tell us maybe a little bit more about Vessel Nundah and the impact that you want to create?
We're a bring-your-own container shop for skincare and cleaning products, but basically the concept is you refill the containers that you already have [or we do have some that you can buy] to refill household essentials like hand soap, dishwashing, liquid shampoo, multipurpose cleaners.
Basically, all that stuff that you go through on a day-to-day basis. You don't need the bottle every time, there's a whole heap of issues with the type of packaging that you usually get those products in, including mixed plastics, coloured plastics that can't be recycled, and people get confused about what can and can't be recycled. It's really just much better to refill what you've already got and just get that whole recycling confusion out of the way.
Vessel Nundah has been open for just over two and a half years now, and in that time, we've saved over 13,000 500 mL equivalent bottles from being produced, shipped and disposed of. There's a lot of impacts all through the supply chain with packaging that we're using just completely avoids, which is a great solution.
We also work with Nundah Community Enterprises Cooperatives who I think are one of Queensland’s, if not Australia's oldest, social enterprises. They're real giants in the ecosystem who are wonderful to work with, and we employ one of their constituents with a disability, Susan, and she does a shift in the store each week, which she really loves. We love being able to help her with that as well.
All the products we sell are sourced as locally as possible, and most of them are made by family businesses in Southeast Queensland or Wide Bay, Northern New South Wales. That really helps us reduce the impacts from transport as well, and we're supporting a network of local businesses.
The products are all cruelty free and they're all people and planet friendly too. It's just a win, win, win, really.
That's amazing Marion. There's so many areas and facets of impact there, it's very clear that you've thought deeply about all of these areas that you can kind of target, and I think looking at that as well, you'll be able to maybe share some of the biggest lessons that you've had and that you've learned in starting a social enterprise yourself.
Yes, as you said again in the start, Vessel Nundah was very much my first foray into business, and the first business I've started. Making it a social enterprise just to me really felt like a no brainer.
If you're going to do business, make it the best it can be and make it work for everyone. But one of the main things that I really love about social enterprise now that I'm more familiar with are the people and players and shapes they can come in with that diversity of business types.
There's just so many [aspects] to social enterprise and I love it. You've got businesses who create the impact through their actual operations, like Vessel Nundah, Mumma Got Skills or Food Connect. There's ones who support employment for disadvantaged groups, like the co-op that I work with. Those are like Mantua Sewing Studio.
Then there's ones who just donate through more mainstream businesses, like Give Industries, who are electrical tradies who give a massive amount to really important global causes. I just love that you can work with your passions and skillsets to create, change and impact in so many ways.
Then you've got the really big players, like Whitebox Enterprises and Jigsaw, and then businesses using tech platforms like Shenovi. There's really something for everyone in social enterprise at every level, and I love that diversity in skillset and business types. You can work so many ways to make your impact.
Fantastic. It's really good to see that passion there, Marion, and it's a really good summary of the sector as a whole that you've provided.
It's been a big year 2020, but it's also been a fantastic opportunity through all the difficulty for enterprises to pivot their brand and kind of offer value in different ways. What opportunities do you see for the social enterprise sector moving through obstacles such as COVID-19, and what were some strategies that Vessel Nundah even implemented to adapt?
That's a really big question, there's a lot in there. Starting with Vessel Nundah, being a bricks and mortar retail store, there were some really immediate and apparent changes we needed to make, to adjust to COVID. First of all, we were very fortunate to be in Brisbane, so we've faced much less severe impacts from COVID than other parts of Australia or the world. We're in the best possible place, I think really.
We actually doubled our average monthly sales in March, because we had hand sanitiser and hand soap when the supermarkets and things were all sold out. That was entirely due to our local supply chain, like local manufacturers, and we had lines down the street for Vessel. I had more customers than I've ever had, so there was quite an opportunity there.
We were also selling reusable masks, which became a hotter item later on. It was something I never saw coming, but we've managed to serve a purpose there which was good.
As a sector, I think it's helped the shift for customers to support local [businesses] and to think about supply chains, be at home and be more mindful of their local businesses. I think it has been really positive for a lot of social enterprises that I know, and I think we need to get better at communicating our benefit, impact and our needs as a sector.
I see QSEC, the Queensland Social Enterprise Council, has been doing a lot of work on this now, and I think that's been really great. I think we need to get better at working together and that's something I saw through COVID was that a lot of businesses were reaching out to each other to support, compliment and work together. I think we can really keep that going.
Amazing insights there Marion. It's fantastic to hear how well Vessel Nundah managed to capitalise on that opportunity, and it shows that there is a lot of opportunities even in those difficult times.
What inspiring projects and initiatives have you come across recently which you find are creating positive social change?
That's a fun one to talk about. I'm currently participating in SEFA's Kickstarter program, which is going until the end of the year. That as everything is being run this year in an online version, and I'm in a cohort with social enterprises from all over Australia, which is quite fun.
One of the enterprises is Borne Clothing who do mosquito repellent T-shirts. Obviously, they serve a purpose in themselves, but then the money from that they raise through that business is funding mosquito nets overseas to help combat deaths from malaria. They are a really awesome young team who are just so full of energy.
I think their product and their mission is just so valuable, and they've been really fun to work with. There's another business in the cohort called Boxhead Plastics who are a bit more aligned with the plastics theme that I'm working with. They're using recycled plastic for injection molded items like golf tees.
Then one that's kind of come out of left field for me that I haven't been involved with a lot before is Naughty Noodle Fun Haus on the New South Wales central coast. They're like an arts and culture hub who are trying to foster diversity and community inclusion through their arts and culture program. They've obviously had a really hard year with events due to COVID, but they're starting to sort of get more active again now in the end of the year and their vision and passion has just been so inspiring to see behind the curtain of, and it's all been really fun.
It's definitely a difficult kind of space to be stepping into there, especially now. A couple of amazing initiatives there.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
It sounds funny for a social enterprise, but I did recently read a book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz and it sounds really bad, but it's mostly about ensuring that you pay yourself as a business owner and founder, and that your business is profitable. Now, obviously what you choose to do with those profits is up to you, whether you donate them or buy a mansion. Obviously in the social sector we are going to do something bigger than buy a mansion.
But I think it's something that certainly myself and possibly a lot of social entrepreneurs probably need to take quite seriously because unfortunately you really can't support yourself on passion alone. Your business does need to be profitable to make the impact that you're wanting to make, so the money matters.
I did also recently read Melinda Gates’ The Moment of Lift, which is probably my favourite book I've read this year, and that's about her work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Philanthropic Foundation. Basically, it's about how empowering women will change the world. Who doesn't love a story about that! I love looking to Boyan Slat’s The Great Ocean Cleanup, which is about large tech solutions to cleaning up the great ocean garbage patches. He's got to the point with that initiative where they're actually turning the plastic that they've salvaged from the ocean into products. He's just released a line of sunglasses which you can buy to go back to support the cause.
I find his global scale and his ability to take such a technologically difficult task and just say, "we're going to do this, we're going to solve it," is just so inspiring.
Similarly, Thank You products have recently decided to take on the world, and I think they've approached Unilever and a bunch of the other FMCG businesses globally to really take their poverty tackling initiative to the big stage. I love thinking big like that, so they're really inspiring to follow the journey of.
Fantastic vision there to kind of take on the world as you were saying, and a couple of excellent reads, which for anyone listening, will be on the website. But apart from that, Marion, thank you so much for spending time today to come chat, it was a really great discussion and you had amazing insights there into the sector as a whole and Vessel Nundah. I've really enjoyed speaking with you, thank you so much.
