s, rose water, red and green clay and lemon myrtle. And while the range, which is packaged up in recycled cardboard, demonstrates the brand’s efforts to be more sustainable on the shelf, the business is focused on implementing more sustainable practices throughout the entire supply chain.  “In our core range we’re looking at how we can make what we’re doing more sustainable from carbon offsetting through to every part of the supply chain,” Daniel Flynn, managing director and co-founder of Thankyou, told Inside Retail.  But it’s taken the business a lot longer than expected to come good on its sustainability goals, Flynn admitted.  “It’s a journey. I think, like most pretty ambitious companies we were like, ‘Ah, it won’t take long’, and that was years ago. Now we’re not even anywhere near where we thought we would be. And part of that is that it’s complex, that’s not an excuse, it just is,” he said.  “But we’re not going to wait until the world’s perfect before we step out, it might be a bit muddy, it might be a bit difficult, but we’ll try and wade through it and we’re really excited with the wins that are coming through for Thankyou.” Getting it wrong  Flynn admitted that the business hasn’t always gotten it right with its sustainability efforts, particularly with its water range, but he is adamant that they will come back to the market with a better offer.  “We always said bottled water is a silly product, but if there’s going to be a brand on the shelf there should be one that exists to end the world water crisis. We thought, naively, that we’d find sustainable solutions quickly, but actually most of our investigation over the years led to greenwashed solutions, that sound better to consumers but they’re not. So, we made the call last year to exit water,” Flynn said.   “We’re coming back with a different claim. It is more sustainable, it looks different and that will come in time.” Talking trust The message Thankyou is hoping to convey with the plastic-free products is, “good for you and good for humanity”. The business, which was founded in 2008, funnels its profits into causes that aim to alleviate the impact of poverty around the world.  While the funding gap to end extreme poverty by 2030 is estimated at US$2.5 trillion dollars a year, consumer spending totals around US$63 trillion a year. To date, Thankyou has raised over A$17 million to fund projects across 22 countries. But Flynn said they’ve learned a lot of hard lessons about philanthropy along the way.  “In this donor world, which we are one of them, there’s a really big power imbalance. Donors, with good intentions, end up telling charities what to do … people are giving them money with strings attached. That imbalance is hurting a lot of people and a lot of partners and no one has intended it,” he said. This realisation is what prompted Thankyou to operate under the Trust Based Philanthropy model, meaning partners inform the company about where the money should be used and report back on their progress.  “We now have a list of partners on our website, over 16 now, who are really data driven, and we trust them. We give them money, we don’t tell them where to spend it, how to spend it or what to do, but they’ve committed to impact and how they measure that and we hold them accountable to that number.”