Alex (Airhead)
Alex Smith is a co-founder of Airhead, a London-based pollution protection startup. After a couple of years in finance, the Airhead team left corporate life to start their own company. With over 3,000 Kickstarter backers, the team are close to releasing their first pollution protection face mask.
This blog series is going share the stories of startups’ sustainability journeys, hoping to encourage more companies to think about their climate impact.
At ScholarTribe, we’re supporting our clients’ sustainability journeys by connecting them with brilliant climate academics for freelance projects.
Tell me about your journey to starting your own business
It started while I was at Barclays on the grad scheme. We’d (Alex, Elliot, and Harry — the Airhead team) each started an Amazon business on the side. Getting up before work and doing an hour, then doing stuff in evenings and weekends, quite often in the toilet on your phone as well.
I knew I wanted to leave the corporate world and that gave us a taste of what it was going to be like. It taught us a lot and we’d got to the point of earning enough revenue to give us the confidence to quit. It was also helpful doing it with my two best mates. We were in the exact same boat, motivating each other, nagging each other on. We all handed in our notices on pretty much the same day. I was the last to do it. I was pretty nervous walking into the canteen with my manager handing in notice.
We left our corporate jobs, and all lived together in a one bed flat for a year to save money. That was intense. During that time, we set Airhead up, moving from these four Amazon businesses to focus on Airhead whilst on the NatWest accelerator. The NatWest accelerator was utterly unreal for us. It gave us space to grow and meet a load of other businesses.
Simon Sinek has the famous “Start With Why” Ted Talk, what’s the ‘why’ for Airhead?
The ‘why’ for Airhead is getting more people active. If it was up to us, cities wouldn’t have any cars, everyone would be cycling, walking, on scooters. We’re trying to build a community to encourage people to travel in more sustainable ways.
One side of that is for mental health, believing that exercise is good for you. We’re also thinking about the eco side of our business, trying to reduce pollution and emissions. We’re trying to get people to travel and live more sustainably.
From a personal perspective, there are huge overlaps in terms of who we are as a team. We’re all exercise and health-conscious people who like to make choices based on sustainability where we can. Airhead’s mission aligns perfectly with what we care about, and I think that makes it so easy to come to work and do what we’re doing.
The other side of the personal ‘why’ is freedom. Being our own boss lets us live life as we want to live it. If we want to go and play a round of golf on a Thursday, then we’re going to do that.
How has sustainability come into Airhead’s journey?
One of the key ways for us to be sustainable has been through our product development and packaging. We’ve put a lot of thought into our process, i.e., we’ve chosen to have all our manufacturing in the UK, so we’re not shipping it halfway across the world.
The materials we use are also important. Asking ourselves questions like: are we using recyclable packaging?; how often do we replace the filters?; that sort of thing. Going back to the ‘why’, what we’re trying to do is get people to travel more sustainably. This feels like a big part of it.
The third angle, and maybe this is an unusual one, is to do with grant funding. There are loads of grants available around eco or low carbon products. We’ve worked with GreentechSouth, who provided funding towards making our production and tooling more eco.
Building a sustainable product and company comes with challenges and compromises. Sustainability wise, what’s the biggest challenge for Airhead?
The biggest one is not being as eco as we would like to be. The challenge here for us is the plastics. With plastics, there’s a difference between recyclable and recycled plastics. Recycled plastics are more expensive, harder to come by, and have longer lead times. They often don’t perform as well or look quite as good.
We’ve made the decision to get our first product out. With this in mind, we’ve made as many eco choices as we can, but we’d love to make it a whole load more sustainable. In an ideal world, it’s zero waste production and completely carbon neutral. This would be the dream. We’ve not been able to achieve that. So now, it’s up to us to keep working with our suppliers to keep improving.
I’d say overall the timeline is the toughest aspect, trying to rush everything through. The three things are quality, cost, and time and unfortunately, something has to give.
Things to check out
Airhead: https://www.airhead.cc/
Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
