Heather Poore

How did your interest in brand begin? And how did your interest in environmental impact begin? Did your interest in both of those fields grow separately and then converge later on, or did brand and environmental impact always go hand-in-hand for you?

I’ve always loved art, design and science, and studied Physical Geography at uni. After three years learning about Climate Change and what we’d expect to see happening across the world in the coming years, I couldn’t understand why more wasn’t being done. That’s when I circled back to my interest in design, and finding ways to make the issues and actions people need to know about, interesting and relatable. Brand and comms had a core role in this, borrowing the techniques from the advertising industry to raise awareness and shift action positively. At the time there were few organisations set out to engage the mainstream in environmental action, and that’s where Hubbub found its place.

Hubbub briefed Sonder & Tell to build a brand story and tone of voice. What were the challenges you needed to overcome when you first came to us? And what was it like working together towards a new positioning that would help overcome those problems?

We approached Sonder & Tell to help us work through two tightrope challenges; 1) how can Hubbub refine it’s tone of voice to keep engaging mainstream groups not already deep in climate action using positive and playful approaches, while recognising the scale of the climate crisis we face, and 2) how can we better thread together the many campaigns and topics we cover into a strong story of Hubbub people can get behind.

Hubbub has a brilliant team of creatives and we often tackle these sorts of challenges in house when creating campaigns. But when it comes to your core brand, sometimes the team can be too close to it, and having an external perspective to ask questions, connect dots and help you eke out the solutions to your challenges is unbelievably useful.

Hubbub recently published a report – Reuse System Unpacked – exploring how to accelerate the shift to reusable food and drink packaging. Can you tell us a bit about why this project began? And can you tell us a bit more generally about why research like this matters?

Could you imagine daily life without single use food and drink packaging? It’d be hard, right? It takes 11 billion pieces of single use packaging to meet the UK’s lunch on the go each year. Yet the public are hungry to change this – Hubbub polling found 3 in 4 of us think more needs to be done to make it easier to choose reusable alternatives. ‘Reuse Systems Unpacked’ set out to explore what would be needed to make reusable food and drink packaging the norm. We spoke to 40 organisations working in this space and did polling with 3000 people to find out the challenges and opportunities, and pulled out 10 recommendations to help reuse systems in this sector set up and scale.

At Hubbub’s heart is collaboration. Research that brings together different organisations, brands, even sectors and industries where possible, to exchange learnings, what works and what doesn’t, can only help avoid making the same mistakes and accelerate finding solutions that stick. We hope ‘Reuse Systems Unpacked’ contributes to the vital shift we need to make away from a throwaway culture.

What’s a project that you’ve worked on that you’re super proud of?

Gift A Bundle has a strong place in my heart. An estimated 180 million items of outgrown baby clothing is tucked away in homes across the UK yet the average family spends £11k on a child’s clothing. Most parents find it hard to let go of clothing because of its sentimental value. Hubbub partnered with mothercare and over 50 community groups across the UK and encouraged parents to pass on bundles of clothing as gifts to families across the UK that could use the support, using Mother’s Day as a hook. Parents also shared memories and a message of support making it easier to part with the clothes. At its biggest we redistributed 52k items of clothing and supported 6,000 families, and has been a great way to prove environmental campaigns can have a strong social impact too.

We’ve since created a similar model with ‘Community Calling’, partnering with Virgin Media O2 to encourage people to pass on unused smartphones, reducing e-waste, getting more value from tech and reducing digital isolation. We hope to do even more campaigns like this in future.

Who would you love Hubbub to collaborate with, and for what project?

Hmm, there are so many! We have a Hubbub collaboration crush list. I’d love to collaborate with eBay; it was brilliant to see them link up with Love Island and it’d be great to help take fashion resale and break down taboos of buying second hand to the mainstream all year around.

Other than Hubbub, what’s an eco-platform that you love?

I’m a big fan of Adapt; they’re brilliant at disruptive communications and calling things out directly, yet do it in a way that uses clear and simple language, and doesn’t assume knowledge which can otherwise alienate people. Their design is also beautiful.