This week’s Glad Tidings is all about balance – and why finding the “Goldilocks” sweet spot really matters for Glad.

Ben kicks off with an update on the totaliser: we’re at 51,700 kg of greenhouse gases funded for removal. That’s progress, but the bigger story this week is about how we deploy those funds. As a small player in the carbon removal market, Glad faces higher prices and has to accept terms set by bigger buyers. But the goal is clear – become a major player. Once we reach that scale, we’ll have the power to shape the market, set fairer prices, and accelerate the clean-up for everyone.

To get there, we need around 5,000 corporate members – a tiny fraction of the 5.5 million businesses in the UK. With that support, Glad could quickly grow into one of the largest buyers of carbon removal globally. The challenge today is choosing the right providers: not so small that they’re unproven, not so big that we’re lost in the mix. It’s about finding those partners who are “just right.”

It’s early days, but the vision is big - and with every new member, brand, and provider, we get closer to becoming the kind of buyer that can change the rules of the game.

Watch Episode #14 now

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Transcript:

Hi everyone, welcome to Glad Tidings. My name's Ben Wynn and this is the weekly update on the progress we're making towards cleaning up the atmosphere as the Glad community. So where are we at in that journey? Well, we're at 51,700 kilograms on our totaliser. So that's the amount of greenhouse gas that us as a community are going to remove from the atmosphere from your membership fees. So I'll start with a big thank you.

Now, we all know, if you've been paying attention, and for those that haven't, I'll explain very quickly how it works, that the way in which we're incentivising members to join Glad and to contribute to the climate clean-up is through savings from brands. And I've got three, no I haven't, I've got four brilliant brands to tell you about this week. So, Odd Box, the subscription service where you can get fruit and veg, odd, weird-shaped, wonky fruit and veg, shipped to your door are giving us 25 % off for the first four weeks. So a fantastic saving from Oddbox and a really well aligned brand for Glad and our community. So really pleased with that one. Butternut Box, another box, this one is for dog food, not for human food. But Butternut Box has given us 40 % off. So if you are a dog owner and you would like some fantastic savings of feeding your dog, 40 % off first two boxes, there you go.

Next up, very different category is a business that I'll be candid, I hadn't heard of before we went down this route, but the more I've looked at it, the more I like it. It's called Bedeck and it is a home furnishings business. So if you're in the market for duvets, bed sheets, pillows, et c, they're the ones for you. And as a Glad member, you can grab 10 % off even items that are in their sale. So really, really pleased with that one as well.

And another 10% off, this one from the Body Shop. Now the Body Shop we've talked about a little bit because we've been looking to partner with them for a long time. They went through a transition and needed to work with Unique Codes. So we've done some real hard graft in the last few weeks and have refactored our backend. We can now work with Unique Codes. We've now got Body Shop live 10% off there. So as a Glad member, grab yourself a saving on the Body Shop.

That unique code piece is quite a fundamental underpinning and as I say an overhaul of how the tech works behind the scenes at Glad. And so that new platform is humming along quite nicely which is fantastic. So what I wanted to do this week is just spend a moment explaining where we're at, how Glad works and to do that I have, I don't know how this is going to work by the way, but I've prepared a little diagram.

I'm going to try and show you with my trusty clipboard. It feels like I'm in a GCSE school project in the woods with a clipboard. And I really don't know how this diagram is going to come through on video, but I'm going to have an attempt at explaining it. And it's just a value flow diagram. Business speak really for where does the money come from and what do each actor contribute. So Glad's in the middle. We are a marketplace business and

Our market sits between members, so that's you guys, who contribute the funding. So that's the flow of cash from members into Glad. And brands are the ones that are creating the incentive. So it's the savings from the brands that inspire the climate action from the members. And in some cases, we get a commission. So Glad earns a commission from those brands.

And the idea of course is to build as big as possible Climate Pot and deploy that to clean up the atmosphere. And that's not us doing that ourselves, we do that through a partnership or several partnerships with Providers and our providers are the ones that deliver the cleanup. So the flow of money is from members through Glad through to the providers. Dead simple, really simple model, heavily reliant on, let's go the other way around, finding the right providers, thoroughly vetting them, making sure that

we go through rigorous due diligence to get the right providers to do the clean up in the right way, to get the right brands on board to provide the right incentive, which will get us the members. Now, in recent weeks, we've almost exclusively been focusing on building brands and getting that savings value up. And I'll have an update for you next week where we've been able to build that quite significantly in the last few weeks. And we're at a point where the savings value is meaningful, which is great, significantly more savings to be had than the membership fee, which allows us to start to drive members, which will allow us to drive up that impact totaliser. Of course, what we've got to do is deploy the money. And what I just thought I'd tell you about is the challenges we face around doing that with providers. And the reason for that, frankly, is because we're a small player. So right now, 51,000 kilograms is a drop in the ocean for the cleanup that we need to deliver. But it's also a very small amount for a lot of the providers that are doing greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide removal. And that's a challenge for us right now because when you're the small player, you pay the price, you accept the terms, you don't really have much buying power. And so I guess even though we've set ourselves this long-term ambition of cleaning up a billion tonnes out of the atmosphere, our first target really is to become a major player in the greenhouse gas removal market. Because then we can set the price, then we can dictate the terms, then it becomes a market we can influence. And if we can do that, then we can get significantly more value for our members, for the community, and the flywheel goes around faster. So, let's just talk about that, shall we? What do we need to do to become a major player? Well, if we were to become a major global buyer of carbon dioxide removal today, then this is the sad news, we would only need to be removing 200,000 tonnes. And I say the only and the sad news because it's just tiny. In the grand scheme of things, that number is nowhere near where we need it to be for all of us globally. So of course the goal of is to drive that number up significantly. But if we take that as a target for today, 200,000 tonnes, then we would need 5,000 corporate members of Glad.

Now, 5,000 from a standing start is of course quite a lot. But in the grand scheme of things, oh and I should explain, that's based on £4 a month ex-VAT, which is what we're selling corporate memberships for per employee, per month, and businesses, an average of 70 employees - just for simplicity of modelling, 5,000 businesses paying £4 a month per employee. Now, of just the UK, and we've deliberately designed Glad to be a global business, but of just the UK, there are 5.5 million businesses. So that means we would only need 0.1 % of all businesses to be a member of Glad. Or of those with 10 or more employees, we would need 2%. So the intention is not to remain just in the UK. It's global ambition from day one. We're just starting in the UK. And our intention is not just to rely on contributions to the Climate Pot from membership fees. Really, we think of that as our gateway product. It's our way in. It's our source of inspiration. It builds a relationship with businesses and those businesses have to take sustainability more seriously, have to contribute to the climate clean up. They have to today if their team, their investors, other stakeholders, their customers are demanding that they do so and that pressure is only going to increase. And in time the regulations will catch up.

So we think of this a bit like a carrot and a stick, the ways in which you can influence people, and we can't control the stick. So the incentives that come from the savings from the Saver Card are the carrot. And if we can start to build those relationships with, let's say, those 5,000 businesses, we think there's a world of opportunity to tap into additional revenue for Glad and contributions to the Climate Pot. All in all, what am I trying to say?

I actually think we become a major player in the carbon removal market relatively quickly with relatively modest ambition around the number of members we need to secure and become part of this community. So we're very excited about it but we do have to work on it. the consequence is, if I go back to my diagram, we're actually finding it quite hard to deploy some of this money because we're trying to find the sweet spot of the right providers for us to work with. We need those Goldilocks providers. Not too big and not too small. If we go too small, which means too early stage, then the risk increases that those providers...won't be able to carry on, won't be long-term relationships and there may be questions around their methodology and how much rigour they've put in place around the measurements they do on their clean-up. If we go too big then they're taking multi-million pound deals from large corporates and we become inconsequential and it doesn't really fit. So finding them and getting the sweet spot right is the art to this.

We've made some good progress, I'll have some updates for you, but that is taking a little bit of time and what that means is membership fees come into Glad, they sit in a segregated bank account for the Climate Pot, totally dedicated to the climate, and that is only deployed when we're able to deploy it to the right partners. So I hope that helps. It might just be a useful insight into the inner workings of how Glad operates and where we're at, what stage we're at, and I hope to have some good news on how we're deploying that money in due course.

I think that's it for this week so thank you for listening thank you for being a member and until next time thanks a lot