We’re creatures of habit. Humans have been buying and consuming goods for over 400 hundred years (at least). It’s one hell of a habit to break out of. And that’s the challenge facing sharing app Olio. The company wants to make sharing, rather than shopping, the new normal to tackle the global problem of over-consumption and waste. Launched in 2015 by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One, Olio has nearly seven million users and has saved over 97 million portions of food from going to waste – often through its B2B partnerships with large UK food retailers. Now, after a $43m Series B round of funding, the company has global ambitions to create hyper-local sharing networks all around the world. We talk to Iona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, about how they plan to make that happen.

Iona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, Olio. Photo: Olio

What is Olio challenging?

Our mission is about ending waste to solve the climate crisis and doing that one share at a time. We’re operating in a very emotive space. The dislike of waste is universal. We used to fight food waste, which is our heartland and origin, but now we fight anything going to waste. That means any household object, not just food. Waste could be food destined for the bin, but it could also be anything sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, that’s unused.

The enemy is overconsumption; that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve, and obviously, the West plays an outsized role in that. We believe that the model of consumption of today is completely broken, and we need to move to a new paradigm based on sharing, not shopping – so when we need something, we turn first to utilising the existing resources in our local communities rather than buying new products.

You’ve recently undergone a significant strategic rebrand, including a new visual identity. What was the thinking behind this shift?

The reason for the rebrand was twofold. The first was that as a brand with global change ambitions to reinvent consumption, there was a need to update and modernise the brand to reflect that scale of ambition.

The second reason was strategic repositioning. The organising idea for the Olio 2.0 brand is transformation and a shift in mindset from despair to hope. In my view, there’s a real lack of leadership in the world today when it comes to positing theories of change that people can believe in and galvanise around. In a world where the demands of consumer culture to ‘buy, buy, buy’ have alienated us from valuing the things we have, from valuing each other and valuing our planet, Olio 2.0 centres around the transformative power of giving and sharing. From transforming the giver and the receiver to transforming the fortunes of our planet, the simple act of sharing has the power to drive profound change across the world. It’s time for more brands to step up and bring a positive vision for the future; it’s missing from the conversation at the moment.

The big opportunity for us to have an impact is by driving decluttering behaviour of household items on the supply side of our marketplace with a more mainstream audience. The brand to date had been highly effective for the early community-building phase of the business but now needed updating to reflect that strategic shift in audience. We’re no longer just for the eco-warrior early adopters; Olio is looking to cross the chasm to a more mainstream adoption. The brand needs to speak much more specifically to that ambition and strategic objective.

How is Olio trying to reach more of a mainstream audience? How are you driving that behaviour change?

Much of the strategic work that's gone into our rebrand leans into the EAST model. It’s a framework developed by the UK Cabinet Office that looks at positive social tipping points and unpacks what drives mass adoption of behaviour, such as recycling. EAST stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. We could spend half an hour on each of those pillars, but one of the most relevant for us in encouraging behaviour change is making it attractive. Both our proprietary and readily available research suggests that people generally think of the climate crisis as an abstract, distant, scary problem and, as individuals, they lack the agency or urgency to solve it right now. People’s motivational hierarchy reflects The Age of Selfish Altruism concept, so the number one driver of behaviour is feeling good about oneself and being the best version of oneself; decluttering allows people to take control of their lives and homes.

Next down is wanting to help other people and then the planet. And so that hierarchy is really incorporated into our marketing strategy and the way we talk about the Olio proposition, which is ‘Share your spare, to feel good and do good.’ And it’s in that order. Of course, the planet is our ‘why’ as a business. But when we think about how we’re going to motivate people to share, we need to be clear-eyed about what will get them to take photos of things they don’t need and arrange a pickup with somebody else who would value or use them.

And through the rebrand, did you revisit the company values?

No, we haven’t changed the values because they’re extremely core to the Olio culture. Our four company values are inclusive, caring, resourceful, and ambitious. And it’s been those four from the very beginning. They drive more company behaviour than I’ve seen in any other organisation I’ve worked in. They show up during the hiring process, where as much time is dedicated to presenting against the values as against the skills assessment, which I’d never seen before. It’s a very incisive way of understanding whether someone will fit the company’s culture well. It’s also something that everyone is scored on in their 360 performance reviews. So the values inform much more of the culture than I’ve seen elsewhere, where they can often be a bit of an empty comms exercise.

What we have done, is we have updated our brand principles around how we show up in the world because they also relate to the behaviour change challenge we’re trying to crack.

What are the brand principles you landed on, and how do you see them as helping shift that behaviour change?

There are four principles. First, ‘We see the good in everything’, which speaks to our optimism but is also about seeing the value in things that other people might miss. We’re trying to drive a change in mindset and attitude towards the things around us, which are often invisible. We define our outlook as ‘urgent optimism’. People want a positive theory of change to rally around that’s inspiring. Too many sustainability communications fall into the trap of doom-mongering or lecturing people — and it switches them off.

The second is ‘Small is big’. This is about empowering people as individuals. It’s so easy to feel powerless in the face of the climate crisis, but what we do as individuals matters. The simple act of sharing at a local community level can change the way we live and consume. Sharing is something we’ve been doing for millennia, and as humans, it’s core to why our species has been so successful. But in our consumer-driven culture and incessant demands to buy stuff, we’ve become alienated from that core behaviour, which makes us feel good because it connects us. So individuals can have an impact, and that’s why we’ll always talk to the end user as an individual. We’ll always choose the ‘50% of the clothes in our wardrobe are never worn’ statistic over ‘The global fashion industry produces billions of tonnes of waste’, for example. Our founder Tessa talks about the idea that billions of small actions got us into this mess, so billions of small actions can get us out of it. It’s really this idea that you’re empowered to create change and build a more positive future, all through the simple act of sharing.

The third is ‘People-first, planet second’, which speaks to people’s motivational hierarchy I mentioned earlier. People know about the climate crisis now and want to do their bit, but at the same time, it’s so big and global, they don’t think they can make a difference. And so, we need to motivate people by speaking more directly to a personal perspective. And again, our research showed that people are much more motivated by the idea of helping someone else than they are with the more abstract idea of helping the planet. When people use Olio, they feel really good about themselves. A phrase came up in our research that using Olio is like micro-dosing on happiness, and it is: you get this kind of high from sharing.

The fourth is ‘Humour galvanises’, which is about using humour to draw people in. Sustainability brands often overlook humour when it comes to communications, but we believe it’s critical to win hearts and minds and drive behaviour change. We all acknowledge that the planet is cooking, that we should be using less than we do, and that some people have a surplus of food and stuff whilst others are lacking. The way to bring people around to our way of seeing the world is not to hit them over the head with it or shout at them but to use connecting humour to bring people together. It’s not about laughing at people, and it’s not about being overly clever or obscure. Instead, we use accessible, inclusive humour that points out the ridiculousness and absurdity of overconsumption. One example was the guy who tweeted about his 250 million-year-old pink Himalayan salt passing its expiry date. In my view, brands under-index on developing voice and tone, and over-index on visuals: both are key to driving the behaviour change we all want to see.

The rebrand markets Olio as ‘your local sharing app’. How important is being local or hyper-local to the company’s change ambitions?

Hyper-locality, and the idea of redistributing resources that already exist in our local communities, is one of the very core foundational principles of our product. The Food Waste Hero programme, our B2B proposition, connects volunteers with, for example, their local Tesco to collect unsold food at the end of the day, take it home and add it to the app to redistribute it that day to people living nearby. It’s core to the Olio vision and differentiates us from other circular economy apps or pre-loved platforms. So there’s a nimbleness there, but it also speaks to the social impact vision of what the business is trying to do, which is to strengthen communities.

What barriers does Olio face in encouraging sharing, and how do you overcome them?

Sharing food certainly presents a number of barriers, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve broadened out into household sharing in order to get people sharing in this way for the first time, as it’s a lower barrier to entry. Household items offer a bigger, addressable market today, and we believe that it’s the wedge to people starting to adopt that sharing behaviour widely. Then the same people will ultimately go on to share food because that is core to our mission and the impact we want to have. People not understanding what Olio is or how it works is also a barrier. When you’re inside a brand, you can sometimes forget that you need those core educational and informative parts of your messaging. But until you have mass awareness, functional messaging is incredibly important. There are also barriers around safety: food safety, yes, but also personal safety. And again, it’s about educating people that you don’t have to hand over the item on the doorstep; you can put it in a safe space, and many people use Olio in that way. So there’s a lot of education to do when it comes to Olio.

How does Olio think about ‘brand’?

I always say that brand is a multiplier in everything you do. If executed well, it’s a multiplier not just on your customer acquisition funnel but also on your talent funnel, your B2B sales funnel, and to your investor relations. Often people think of brand as sexy ad creative and punchy ATL media spend. That’s a part of it, of course. But building brand virality is about getting crystal clear on what your brand stands for and how it expresses, and then manifesting that across every touchpoint of the customer journey. And again, when I say customer, I mean not just your end-user but also your investor audience, talent, or the media. It is an organisational-wide job to be done. And a task and piece of ownership that everybody plays a part in and has a hand in. It’s thinking about the brand in that very holistic sense, rather than just your creative, comms or messaging, which drives virality and meaningful customer love.

How do you measure success? What KPIs are you looking at?

Internally, the metrics we look at everyday are split into business north star metrics (ARR and listings added to the app) and team KPI metrics. Most brand teams review a scorecard of metrics from across the funnel to get a picture of health and performance: ours include brand awareness and consideration; search volumes and website traffic; new user acquisition and CAC per channel; and listings added.

Then there are KPIs we surface to the user and then that the company reports on externally every year. From a user perspective, you get an email with your individual impact stats at the end of every month. And we deliver an annual impact report as a business: portions of food shared, litres of water saved, car miles taken off the road, and tonnes of CO2 saved. In addition, because we operate on a hyper-local community level, we’ve recently expanded to look at Olio’s social impact, and we’re now able to look at reporting on mental health. Some amazing numbers came out of the last piece of research on this: 40% of Olio users say they’ve made friends using the app; 66% say it’s improved their mental health and 75% their financial well-being. So it’s a combination of sustainability impact metrics and social impact metrics.

What advice do you have on being a custodian of a challenger brand?

As a brand team, the first thing is to be pragmatic. So over-index on the high-impact, high-visibility communications, and don't worry too much about the longtail of every social post going out.

Second, don’t be too precious: encourage the team to have fun with the brand. Over-invest in what I call internal implementation. It’s really important to promote ownership of the brand across the org. I’m a big believer in everyone being responsible for bringing the brand to life, not just those with ‘brand’ in their job title.

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All images courtesy of Olio

‘We need to move to a new paradigm of consumption, based on sharing, not shopping’: Iona Carter, Chief Brand Officer, Olio