As part of our series on women in cleantech innovation, the Grantham Institute’s Linsey Wynton meets Safia Qureshi, Founder and CEO of pioneering and award-winning reusable packaging company CLUBZERØ.
After qualifying as an architect at University College London and the Royal College of Art, Safia Qureshi realised she wanted to make a more fundamental impact on how we live than she could by designing houses, schools and offices. She wanted to re-design part of the fabric of our cities in a sustainable, pioneering way.
Appalled that only 10% of the 142 million tonnes of plastic packaging produced each year is recycled, Safia drew up a solution. In 2018 she founded CLUBZERØ, an intelligent packaging reuse system for the food and drinks industry that treats packaging waste as a valuable, tracked, reusable asset. CLUBZERØ has processed more than three million reusable packaging items and worked with leading brands including Just Eat, Nestle, Starbucks, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.
How has Safia achieved this and what lessons has she learned on route?
What made you realise that architecture was not for you?
Architecture is about designing for well-being at scale. It’s organising where people work, live and play, and understanding their long-term needs. You’re also trying to coordinate all the things required for a city to function by asking questions like: ‘How do you feed a growing population in cities?’, ‘How do you make the cities more sustainable?’
Architects are some of the smartest people, but the work you do in the industry is fairly repetitive. We don’t have vast amounts of space to go out and build fantastic projects on. Most architects will be in housing because we have a housing shortage, and maybe 10% will be designing interesting school projects, or designing a big visitor centre. I realised that I needed an invigorating challenge. I wanted to put my time and effort into a project with vast impact, something I could steer and design.
Tell me how you formed the ingenious idea for CLUBZERØ?
We consume our resources faster and faster every year and I wanted to tackle that as we don’t have infinite resources. I started to read up on the circular economy, and I was inspired by the work that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation were doing at that time.
I joined the dots. I wanted to come up with a system that would enable us to avoid creating waste, rather than trying to make recycling work better or accepting that as the norm. I had to become a packaging and a technology expert, to create economic evidence for why a city would benefit from a move towards zero waste.
CLUBZERØ was born out of this desire to establish a smarter way of consumption, to create a better future with less waste and more information. It brings together governments to identify where to put upgraded infrastructure that enables consumers to return packaging to be refilled and reused. It’s a multi-stakeholder process that also involves retailers, industry brands, manufacturers and waste management.
It’s 10 years since I had the light bulb moment in 2015. This isn’t an overnight project. I knew from a design angle how it would all work and function and then I brought in experts.
How did you turn your vision into a reality?
It’s 10 years since I had the light bulb moment in 2015. This isn’t an overnight project. We didn’t start trading until 2018, because I had to upskill in environments that I had no previous expertise in. I didn’t know the packaging industry or how the market is structured, or the key players. I also had to upskill in technology systems. What I could do was design the architecture of all of it. I knew from a design angle how it would all work and function and then I brought in experts.
What other hurdles did you face?
When we launched, consumers were not widely aware that waste was just leaking into our environment. The turning point for us came when we got some award funding to start developing our plans. Suddenly, we didn’t have to go out and explain to people what the problem was.
We’ve been trading for six years, and I’ve realised that infrastructure technology is some of the most slow-paced. It requires a gentle shift in market needs through policy reform, which has now developed. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), a specific waste tax law, has now been imposed across 43 countries worldwide. It’s a copy and paste policy that governments have implemented to ensure that if you are putting packaging on the market, you are partly paying for the recycling or recovery of it. As a result, in that six-year period, we have now become compliance, regulatory technology – a ‘need-to-have’ as opposed to a ‘nice-to-have’.
What seems to be the biggest challenge is the perception that there isn’t enough evidence to prove that women who have raised finance have been able to build million- or billion-dollar businesses because there’s just not that been that many out the gate.
Where are your business operations focused?
We operate in the UK in major cities because concentrations of consumption and packaging is obviously going to be in urban centres, so it’s a repeatable model.
We decided to pause our business in the United States because of the change in political attitude and approach to decarbonisation technologies. We have changed our strategic focus to look east, and we have started to trade in the United Arab Emirates and focus more on Singapore.
In terms of funding, did you start with grants?
Grants really have been a key part of our research and development. We have had grants for a multitude of different pipelines, infrastructure and technology. We also had funding from other philanthropic means, like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
We have also won a bunch of awards, and we’ve been fundraising directly through a combination of Venture Capital and angel investors. It has been piecemeal. We have been operating with an incredible level of efficiency and care with spending generally.
We’ve had a fantastic number of customers from food delivery platforms. During the Covid pandemic the businesses we were working with had two-year commercial contracts, which enabled us to create a lock-in with clients to defer, so we knew that revenue was coming in at some point.
We are finally reaching profitability now, which is exciting, but it’s taken time to get to that level of growth.
Do you think it’s particularly difficult for female founders to acquire funding and what insights can you offer?
Some of my mentors have been women, but a lot of them have been men. What seems to be the biggest challenge is the perception that there isn’t enough evidence to prove that women have been able to build million- or billion-dollar businesses, because there’s just not that been that many out the gate. And I suspect that, if we have more evidence, we can normalise this.
Unfortunately, if you find yourself pitching to a woman who is a VC or investor you still sometimes get preventative questions – probably because some women perceive that, because they had a hard time, we must apply that to whoever else is coming through. It’s like a recognition that hardship must be maintained because their generation had it. I’ve seen this myself in my own career.
I don’t know what the solution is, other than being conscious about it. Women generally will tend to question whether they are the right person for something, so a female founder who is pitching may come across as lacking in confidence.
What’s the best way to deal with preventative questions when pitching?
I’ve learned a lot from my lawyers. They told me to grasp the question behind the question. So, what is the actual thing that they’re trying to say behind the thing that they’re saying? And if you can frame your response in a positive way, that helps.
Let’s say if somebody says to you: “How are you going to scale this into 26 cities?” You can then turn that into “I think you are asking, how are you going to reach X million people in X countries?” And the way that we’re tackling that is we are going to be hiring these kinds of people to do this kind of business development, these sort of marketing outreach people to do this. We’re bringing a channel partner to enable our campaign to run here. We’re going to ensure that there’s incentives for different brands and consumers and we’re going to save a record amount on average per brand per city.
You break from the negative assumption of “I don’t know if you can manage 26 cities” and show them a breakdown on how you’re delivering that with positive wording. You’re effectively showing off. You’re not trying to defend yourself. You’re trying to win the argument. It does take a bit of thinking and the person across the table will see you are reframing it, and hopefully they will appreciate that you are doing that in real time, and it will tell them a lot about how you think.
Do you advise thinking of various possible scenarios investors might ask you about in advance and rehearse?
Yes. They might ask: “What if something goes wrong?” The answer to that is: “Well, we’ve actually created this really comprehensive risk matrix where we all sat down as we wanted to deliberately look at how we could break our own system. We listed the issues and gave them a prioritisation of high, medium, low risk factors and worked out a solution to address each. Would you like to see it?”
Whatever you do, you can’t get angry about the preventative question, and you can’t say: “Would you like to rephrase that?”. What you want to try and do is take that person on the journey. It’s hard. But this is the game. You want their money. We don’t have enough proof points, they have biases, they’re not sure. So you need to get them to a point where they know that you’re not messing around.
Read more about women leading the field in cleantech innovation.
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