Unreasonable
stories.

She turned London’s retired fire hoses into a luxury brand

In this episode, Daniel Epstein sits down with Kresse Wesling CBE, co-founder of Elvis & Kresse, the company that has been rescuing decommissioned London fire hose from landfill since 2005 and turning it into luxury bags and belts. Kresse was in the very first cohort of the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays, back in 2016. Fifty percent of the profits from the fire hose range go to the Firefighters Charity. In year one that was £134. Two decades on it is approaching half a million pounds and has funded more than 29,000 therapy sessions for firefighters and their families. Since 2015 she and Elvis have been rebuilding the company around a stricter test than circularity: clean more water than you use, generate more renewables than you consume, sequester more carbon than you emit. That meant a straw bale workshop, a wetland sewage system, and a farm of degraded pasture now holding 11,867 hand-planted vines. The conversation goes well past the business. Kresse talks about reading Silent Spring at 13, the mother moose her father lifted her up to see, meeting Elvis at a superheroes party in Hong Kong, the Apple order that nearly ended the company, and the sentence her grandmother said to her at 12 that she has been answering ever since: if you're capable, you're responsible.