In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Aya Jibreel, lead inclusion consultant for disability at the United Nations for the MENA region and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Aya’s work sits at the intersection of design, technology, law, and culture — and her perspective is both eye-opening and immediately practical.

The conversation covers why businesses treat accessibility as an afterthought, what that costs them, and why retrofitting accessibility after the fact is far more expensive than building it in from the start. Aya is clear on this: if you thought about accessibility while designing your building, the cost is almost zero. If you retrofit it afterwards, it’s substantial.

What makes this episode particularly useful is the cultural dimension. Aya explains why a universal standard like WCAG doesn’t mean a universal solution — and why local context, infrastructure, and user needs have to be understood before you design anything.

Worth 18 minutes of your time if you work in product, design, digital, or any customer-facing role.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham visit the ideas behind Lush’s Green Hub — the physical nerve centre of their circular economy operation — with Eloise Flinter, Business Development Manager for the Green Hub. Lush has been doing things differently since the 1980s, when their founders invented the solid shampoo bar to eliminate packaging entirely. Nearly four decades later, they’ve doubled down with a 2.3 million pound investment in a facility that repurposes, repairs, reuses, and recycles — and has opened it to the public.

What makes this conversation worth your time isn’t just the Lush story. It’s the principles underneath it: that transparency beats statements, that the customer has the right to ask where their products come from, and that inviting people to see what you actually do is more powerful than any marketing campaign.

The bring-it-back scheme — where customers return packaging for 50p off their next purchase — is a clean example of closing the loop between brand promise and brand behaviour. The decision to leave social media platforms until they can demonstrate they protect their users is another.

Worth 18 minutes if you’re thinking seriously about how sustainability connects to customer experience and brand loyalty.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Nick about what that work actually looks like, what he’s learned from thousands of conversations with founders, and what the difference between equity and equality means in practice. His fence analogy is the clearest version of that distinction we’ve heard.

He’s also refreshingly direct about the mistakes well-meaning organisations make when they try to support underrepresented groups. The biggest one: arriving with assumptions about what those groups need, rather than listening first. His advice — shut up and listen — sounds simple. It’s harder to consistently do than most people realise.

His tips for aspiring founders are grounded in the same principle: don’t fall in love with your solution, fall in love with your customer’s problem. Validate before you plan. Test before you scale. Get comfortable being uncomfortable — it’s not a temporary phase of starting a business, it’s the job.

Worth 17 minutes if you work in inclusion, work with founders, or are thinking about starting something yourself.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Shivika, founder and CEO of Veneka — a capsule wardrobe styling service built around sustainable, ethical, and cruelty-free brands. She was recognised by Forbes Next 1000, honoured by the UN’s Decade of Women, and is a TEDx speaker. She also talks like someone who has genuinely thought through the problem, not just the positioning.

Her chocolate analogy for the ripple effect is simple and sticks: if you switch to Fairtrade chocolate and influence five people, and they each influence five people, your individual purchasing decision compounds through generations. The point isn’t guilt. It’s that individual choices have more structural impact than most people give them credit for.

Her challenge to Western consumerism is harder to hear but worth sitting with. We have, as a society, tied status to stuff. We buy things to say something about ourselves. Unpicking that is inner work as much as it is commercial behaviour. Shivika doesn’t moralise about it — she just names it clearly.

Worth 16 minutes if you’re a consumer (which is all of us), or a brand trying to understand where purpose-led business is actually heading.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Praval about how CX touches every stage of the customer lifecycle, why silos between sales, marketing, and service are the enemy of a good experience, and what the practical path from spreadsheet to CRM actually looks like for a growing business.

His point about employee experience is one worth sitting with. Good CX is delivered by engaged employees who have access to the right information about customers, can see the full picture, and are empowered to act on it. Siloed teams with fragmented data can’t do that. It’s not a philosophy problem, it’s an information architecture problem.

The conversation is unusually grounded for a topic that often veers into abstraction. Praval’s advice about what small businesses actually need — not an enterprise platform, but a tool that works out of the box, onboards in weeks, and provides that single source of truth — is practical and applicable.

Worth 17 minutes if you’re responsible for customer experience, CRM, or any part of how your business acquires and retains customers.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Madison Kranis, Social Impact Expert from the Department of Corporate Responsibility at Fenwick. Madison’s background is in human trafficking research, and she came to responsible business through the very hard end of what irresponsible supply chains produce.

Her distinction between traceability and transparency is one of the most clarifying things in the episode. Traceability is knowing where your product comes from. Transparency is choosing to share that publicly. You can have one without the other, and consumers increasingly know how to tell the difference.

The materiality assessment she recommends is practical: pick three things your business can actually change, own them fully, and do them well. That targeted approach creates real change and credible narrative, rather than the paralysis that comes from trying to address everything at once.

Worth 17 minutes if you buy anything, make anything, or sell anything.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Imran Ali, Director of Payments at KPMG and co-author of the Paytech Book. Imran has spent two decades working with the world’s largest banks and has a rare ability to make the history and future of payments both clear and genuinely interesting.

This isn’t just a technical episode. The conversation covers what fast, seamless payments are doing to spending behaviour — the buy now, pay later debt spiral, the psychological difference between tapping a phone and counting out cash, and why a healthy amount of friction might actually be good for customers. It also covers what businesses consistently get wrong: treating payments as an afterthought at the end of a beautifully designed purchase journey, and then losing customers at the checkout.

Imran’s practical advice is simple and immediately applicable. Think about your payment process as part of the whole experience. Offer choice. Look at open banking and account-to-account payments as a growing alternative to card details. Know your customer.

Worth 17 minutes if you’re responsible for ecommerce, checkout design, or customer experience.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham talk to Andrew, Director of Policy and Partnerships at Planet Mark, about what good sustainability practice actually looks like from the inside. Planet Mark works with over 700 member organisations helping them measure, reduce and report their carbon footprints. Andrew chairs the Institute of Directors National Sustainability Taskforce and is a TEDx speaker.

What emerges from the conversation is a practical framework for getting started — and a clear argument for why businesses that treat sustainability like a strategic discipline, rather than a PR exercise, consistently outperform those that don’t. The Unilever example he cites is striking: purpose-driven brands in their portfolio outperformed non-purpose-driven brands on profitability, growth, and pandemic resilience.

The greenwashing section is equally useful. Andrew’s three-step approach to communicating your sustainability journey transparently — show your working, frame it as a journey not an endpoint, and point to your own Achilles heel — is advice that applies well beyond carbon reporting.

Worth 18 minutes of your time if you’re in any way responsible for how your business presents itself, or where it’s heading.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Laurel, CEO and Founder of award-winning LA-based marketing agency Elevate My Brand. She’s also a podcast host, board member, mentor, and someone who has seen how easily brands lose sight of their customers in the pursuit of their own ideas.

Her word vomit exercise — listing everything you want your brand to be associated with, followed by everything you definitely don’t want it to be — is a useful starting point for any team trying to find clarity. So is her point about the customer feedback loop: using a survey not just for insight, but as a sell-through opportunity by attaching a small discount to completion.

The most important thing she says, though, is about myopia. Brands that focus only on their own narrative, without tracking what their competitors are doing and what their customers actually believe about them, are building on sand. The data, she argues, should constantly be testing whether who you think you are matches who your customers think you are.

Worth 17 minutes if you work in brand, marketing, or customer experience.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Vineeta Anuj, Head of Customer at Mindful Chef, about how the business navigated that growth — and what values-led decision making actually looks like when you’re trying to source fresh, just-in-time ingredients at triple the usual volume.

The research insight she shares about their actual customer is one of the most practically useful moments in the episode. The founders assumed their audience was a fit 25-year-old male. It turned out to be a woman in her fifties — a pragmatic parent managing fussy teenage diets and complex household health needs. Once you know who you’re actually serving, every product, recipe, and service decision becomes clearer.

Her concept of moments of truth — the five specific things Mindful Chef customers said mattered most — is a clean model for any subscription or recurring delivery business. Delivery on time. Ingredients correct and quality. Recipe tastes good. Easy to contact when something goes wrong. Easy to use the app. Those are the things measured every week at leadership level.

Worth 18 minutes if you run or work in a subscription business, manage customer experience at scale, or are trying to navigate growth without losing your brand’s soul.

In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Lucy about what genuine community looks like, how brands can enter one without being seen as just monetising it, and what it actually takes to keep a community alive and growing. The Red Bull example is well chosen: they don’t sell energy drink in their community spaces — they build experiences around sport and energy, and the brand association follows.

Lucy’s point about brands and influencers is worth pausing on. Most brand-influencer relationships are transactional: here’s a product, promote it to your audience. The smarter move, she argues, is to work with community leaders to create genuine educational or experiential value. People end up loving the brand not because they were sold to, but because the brand made their community better.

The section on moderators is also practical and honest. The best moderators are your most active members — they’re already policing the community and building trust within it. Give them a title, a framework, and a little recognition. You probably don’t need to pay them.

Worth 17 minutes if you’re building a brand community, managing one, or thinking about whether you need one at all.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Tony Preedy, Managing Director of Fruugo — a global marketplace operating in 42 countries, 31 currencies, and 28 languages, with over 1,800 retailers and 240 million site visits in 2021. Tony has spent his career in ecommerce, and his analysis of where consumer behaviour is heading is both clear and grounded.

His concept of atomic shopping — buying the smallest possible unit that satisfies a need, then searching again when the next need arises — reframes how businesses should think about basket size, loyalty, and channel strategy. The old model of minimum order values and basket building hasn’t disappeared, but the dominant consumer behaviour has moved well beyond it.

The practical advice is direct: get your own house in order first, then add marketplace as an incremental channel. The data work to integrate is a one-off project. After that, you’re accessing footfall you couldn’t reach yourself, paying only when you make a sale.

Worth 17 minutes if you’re responsible for ecommerce strategy, channel development, or digital commerce growth.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Swathi about the real-world tensions that shape what gets built — budget constraints, approval layers, business stakeholders who want what Gucci has without doing the research to know if it applies to their audience, and the peculiar difficulty of designing for a public sector user who has no competitors and no choice but to use what you make.

Her visa application story is the episode in miniature: a 14-page online form, ambiguous questions, no in-context help, a missed step that took two months to resolve. Nobody ran user research before they built it. The call centre cost of that decision never appeared on the same spreadsheet as the design budget.

The broader point is one that applies everywhere: if you don’t understand your product vision and your audience, you’ll build something for the wrong people, regardless of how technically well it’s done.

Worth 17 minutes if you work in digital product, UX, or any team trying to justify investment in user research.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Lucy Aitken, UI UX designer at Booking.com, who has worked across agency and client-side roles on ecommerce sites and SaaS platforms. She makes a clear and practical case for progressive enhancement: starting with the mobile experience and building up, rather than scaling down from desktop.

Her point about touch points is something most designers know but few translate into product decisions. When a user is holding a phone in one hand with a coffee in the other, the entire spatial logic of a desktop interface needs to be reconsidered. Where can their thumb reach? How large does a button need to be? Does the shopping cart even need to look the same?

She also makes a strong case for iterative change over big bang redesigns — especially for businesses with a loyal, returning customer base. People are resistant to having to relearn things they already know, even when the new version is objectively better. The touchscreen transition is a useful analogy: it took time, and some people resisted until they didn’t.

Worth 16 minutes if you work in digital product, ecommerce, or UX.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Luke about what good experimentation culture looks like from the inside. The answer involves more than running tests. It requires a shared understanding of what learning is worth, a willingness to let failure produce something useful, and — crucially — a way of sharing results across the business that doesn’t just celebrate wins.

Spotify’s approach to this is concrete: every concluded experiment goes into a shared knowledge base, accessible to the whole company. Not just the successes. All of them. Because the failures contain the learning that eventually leads to the uplift.

Luke is also practical about how to work alongside businesses or internal teams that don’t yet have this mindset. The key is finding common ground — understanding what metrics the other team actually cares about, and explaining experimentation in those terms. Not in terms of how many tests ran, but in terms of how it helps them get where they’re trying to go.

Worth 15 minutes if you work in experimentation, optimisation, product, or any team trying to use data to make better decisions.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Ged, a consultant at Accenture with hands-on experience across both European and Asian markets. He unpacks live commerce, social commerce, and the fundamental difference in how Asian platforms blur the lines between video, community, and purchasing — compared to the siloed approach most Western businesses still take.

The Snow Beer example is worth hearing alone: a brand that sold 400 million extra beverages during COVID by turning WeChat into a network of nano-influencers, each running their own micro-event for up to ten people. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a model built on understanding where people actually spend their time and what motivates them to buy.

Ged is also clear about where social commerce doesn’t belong yet — and what businesses need to have in order before they attempt it.

Worth 16 minutes if you’re responsible for growth, channel strategy, or digital commerce.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Ted, a leading social media marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and author. He is characteristically direct: if you’re only focused on the money, you risk completely overlooking the people. And if you don’t invest in those relationships, you might as well throw your marketing budget away.

His Amazon analysis is worth hearing. Amazon doesn’t run ads saying they care about customers. They just take things back, fix things, deliver on time, and make the process easy. That is the relationship. The message is in the behaviour, not the campaign.

His point about simplicity — that it’s the new everyday low pricing — reframes what convenience actually means for customers. Not just easy checkout, but easy returns, easy support, easy cancellation. If any of those moments are hard, the trust you built evaporates.

Worth 16 minutes if you work in marketing, customer experience, or any role that involves acquiring and keeping customers.

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Will’s advice on crisis management is practical and doesn’t overclaim. Have a document. Assign levels of severity. Agree who has sign-off for which type of response. Know the difference between a tweet that went badly and a member of staff doing something genuinely damaging. And use a social listening tool to track the velocity of negative comments, not just the volume — because the spike, not the baseline, is the signal.

His analysis of the Adidas sports bra campaign — showing diverse bodies to promote a new product — is balanced and honest about where brands have to make calculated decisions about controversy. So is the KFC chicken shortage example: a crisis that was genuinely theirs to own, handled with humour because no one was actually hurt.

The section on going viral is equally clear. You can aim for remarkable content, you can increase the probability of something spreading, but you cannot manufacture virality on demand. Even with a new Avengers trailer, Disney still pays to promote it. The algorithm doesn’t owe anyone an audience.

Worth 16 minutes as the natural continuation of Part One — especially if you’re responsible for social at a brand that’s big enough to have real exposure if something goes wrong.

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This is the first of two episodes with Will, and it covers the fundamentals: how social strategy differs dramatically between big and small brands, why organic reach is effectively dead on Facebook and Instagram (but alive and well on LinkedIn and TikTok), and why most social media teams are measuring the wrong things.

His point about business benefit is one that should make every social media manager uncomfortable. A 2% engagement rate is meaningless if you can’t connect it to something the CEO actually cares about. That connection — between content activity and commercial outcome — is the conversation most social teams avoid. Will argues it’s the one you have to start with.

The content pillar framework he describes is practical and immediately applicable: three to five things you will always post about, used as a filter for every piece of content before it goes out. Does this post fit a pillar? If not, why are you posting it?

The 80/20 rule he advocates — 80% value-adding jabs, 20% right hook calls to action — is not new, but his framing of it from real-world brand experience at both ends of the scale makes it land differently.

Worth 16 minutes if you manage social media, commission it, or are trying to make sense of where to focus your effort and budget.

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In this episode, Shelley and Graham get that perspective from Kat Henry — established social media influencer, TikTok and Instagram creator, and current Ms Great Britain. Kat is clear-eyed about what makes influencer marketing work and what makes it fail, and she doesn’t pull punches on either side.

Her core message is one that applies far beyond influencer marketing: authenticity wins. During the pandemic, her most-engaged content was the most honest — including the post about losing her mother to COVID. The glamorous, aspirational content didn’t perform. The real stuff did. Audiences are smarter than brands give them credit for.

She’s equally direct about what she looks for in a brand partnership: shared ethos, honesty about the brief, and a product she genuinely believes in. If a product is poor, she takes the feedback to the brand privately rather than posting a damning review. That kind of integrity is rare, and it’s also what makes her audience trust her.

Worth 17 minutes if you’re considering influencer marketing, running a campaign, or want to understand how to select the right partner.

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