INTERVIEW: POC on Five Years of Impactful Change

As Products of Change Celebrates its five-year anniversary, we sat down with founder, Helena Mansell-Stopher to discuss the achievements to date and what’s next for the trail-blazing organisation.

Congratulations on the wonderful five-year milestone! Run us through the last five years…

The last five years have been busy and crazy – when we started out having this conversation there wasn’t really anyone discussing sustainability in an impactful way, so to find our ‘crowd’ was one of the first challenges. For the first couple of years, we had core supporters and members who believed in us and kept us driving forward, we have grown from 7 people around a table to over 1,000 people connecting over the POC platform . Our first Sustainability in Licensing Conference (SILC) was online because of the global pandemic, in fact the first two-and-a-half years of Products of Change was all pretty much online as we focussed on getting the message across, connecting people, and sharing best practises.

There wasn’t really anyone doing anything like POC, was there?

No, not within our industry, and even those outside our industry driving change weren’t aware that our industry existed.  During our first conference we did a poll and only 17% of people who attended knew what the sustainable development goals were. There was this lack of awareness, or more importantly, a lack of knowledge in how to implement practical change. Fast forward to today, and that awareness has grown dramatically. People are becoming really engaged with the subject… and it’s just in the nick of time, too. There’s a tidal wave of incoming legislation that’s about to transform the business landscape completely, so the time to get engaged with this topic – and start making those changes – really is now.

We started by wanting to educate the industry, share best practise, and put some guidelines out there to help the businesses and brands we all work with navigate the conversation, which is why we launched the POC framework last year – a free sustainability plan for brand owners and product manufacturers. This year our focus has been on developing and providing educational content, giving our industry more practical tools and guidelines, and start measuring a baseline for the industry to work from and develop upon.

Without getting too technical, we have been working hard on a methodology (framework) for measuring and tracking the industry’s scope 3 emissions. These are greenhouse gas emissions that we all need to be accountable for but aren’t directly under our control. So, it’s about working with our supply chains and stakeholders to plan how to reduce these.

At this year’s Licensing Expo, we discussed practical examples of what the top ten brand owners are doing to reduce their environmental impact. The next five years will be about collaborating to reduce our industry’s collective greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact.

Do you get any practical support from ‘higher powers’, eg, the government?

Products of Change is a not-for-profit membership organisation and while many of the initiatives we are working on – take Wastebuster for example and its Recycle to Read campaign which launched with Tesco or our work to introduce the first official UK Water Week campaign in partnership with the United Nations, impact both industry and education, we don’t receive any financial support from the UK government. But we certainly wouldn’t sniff at the opportunity. We’ve had members of Parliament attend our Products of Change Sustainability Conference and we’ve worked closely with representatives from the United Nations… But everything Products of Change delivers is for the industry generated by people who have lived and breathed the industry.

Is there anyone similar to Products of Change in other areas of the industry?

In the music industry, companies such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have come together to forge the Music Industry Climate Collective (MICC), while in the fashion industry the Textile Exchange is doing some fantastic work to drive collaboration (both which we work closely with). These are great examples of areas of industry coming together – at a pre-competitive level – for a greater cause. For the global brand and licensing industry, Products of Change partners with Informa Markets, Licensing International, The European Toy Association and ICTI, uniquely placed to be a platform dedicated to driving the sustainable development of our amazing consumer products sectors.

How do you gather what must be a vast quantity of information to create best practises and frameworks?

Like everything, our best results come from working collaboratively and partnering with multiple business sectors. We work closely with our Products of Change Ambassadors and Advisors who will pull information in from other areas of business. We then look at how we can cross-pollinate and connect people to where they need to look next.

This is an international effort. Currently, there is limited international guidance on the carbon emissions data a brand owner needs to be calculating when it comes to licensing. Until now, the guidance which comes from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, fails to capture licensing as a business model, ‘licensing’ falls under the ‘franchise’ methodology. The issue here is that ‘franchise’ really only applies to things like chain restaurants… now that’s a world away from how a licensing company operates.

So, for the last year we’ve been working with some real carbon emissions experts to build a methodology for the brand and licensing industry. By presenting our own methodology to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the hope is this will become the global standard for any brand owner.

There are very big names who are part of the consultation process and we will share more at the Products of Change Sustainability Conference in November this year. It’s been a huge part of what we’ve been working on recently, so please do watch this space!

You’ve got some of the top names in the industry involved, haven’t you?

Yes, we are extremely lucky that the brands we work with cover around 40% (by value) of the industry, before Licensing Expo, we had a big meet up with some of our Products of Change members, including Disney, Moose Toys, the University of California, and many others, where we presented the future of POC for the next five years.

We’re really looking forward to catching up with all our members at BLE where we will once again be partnering with Informa to showcase innovations within this area. We’ll be hosting a panel with licensors and licensees, as well as having the brilliant conversations with members and people new to us as well, please do check out the events page on the POC platform to see our planned activity.

And of course, we have the Products of Change Sustainability Conference on November the 6th… there have been some major developments across the subject of sustainability, including the introduction of some huge pieces of legislation, so we’re really looking forward to diving into all these areas at this year’s Conference. We’ll be announcing our Conference line-up very soon, so again, watch this space.

There are so many projects we’re working on within the not-for-profit POC membership, across our media arm with our magazines and conferences and even our advisor’s arm, consulting with top brands within the industry such as Microsoft, Bravado, Netflix, Fujifilm, Paramount and many more. 

When we look at the calibre of the members we have and the engagement from brands we are receiving, it’s easy to feel positive about the journey we have ahead of all of us over the next five years, but then you look at the to-do list, and it’s never ending, which is a good thing. We would love for more companies to come join our community and come on this journey of improvement with us, to have 100% of the industry to be on this journey by 2028 would be amazing… please do come join us and say hi at the POC conference.