[00:00:12] Barry O'Kane: Welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast. 

I'm Barry O’Kane and this is season 10, which feels like a big milestone for us, so stick around until the end to find out how you can help us celebrate.

Season 10 is titled “Technology Isn't Magic” and that's because we're exploring what actually happens when circular economy technology meets the messy reality of real business and real people. And this episode is a good example of that. Many fashion brands hear Extended Producer Responsibility and think compliance burden or another tax.

My guest today, Gerrard Fisher, co-founder of WEFT, thinks that's the wrong frame, and the EPR designed well could actively reward brands making better products rather than just penalising worse ones. He also has some pretty surprising data on what shoppers would actually notice on the price tag. 

Full disclosure, HappyPorch is part of this story. Gerrard used AI tools to prototype the data visualisation that's at the heart of WEFT's work, and he got it working well enough to prove the concept and then watched it become an unmaintainable mess that he couldn't fix. It's an honest account of vibe coding as a startup tool, the real benefits and an example of when it makes sense to start working with professional development partners like us here at HappyPorch.

As always, the full transcript, all the links and more are at happyporchradio.com. 

So, let's meet Gerrard.

[00:01:38] Gerrard Fisher: Hi, I'm Gerrard Fisher. I'm a co-founder at WEFT and we help businesses explore circularity of their products and how that might play into eco-modulation of future fees they'll have to pay in Extended Producer Responsibility Systems.

[00:01:51] Barry O'Kane: Outstanding and welcome to HappyPorch Radio! 

Thanks for joining us again. Let's, first of all, just set the scene and define some of the terminology, I think some of the listeners will know. 

So let's start with EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility. What that is and what the landscape is for EPR at the moment? 

[00:02:06] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah. Okay. So it all fits under a bigger umbrella of something called product stewardship, which is trying to look after your products throughout their entire life cycle. And typically systems don't tend to encourage that very well. Certain industries do it very well, like the chemical sector, but in a lot of retail settings we don't have that kind of product stewardship approach. And so governments tend to use this regulation called Extended Producer Responsibility. 

So it's not full product stewardship, but it's a nod in that direction and it's trying to recover some of the future costs that are needed to deal with that product when it reaches the end of its life or when it needs a repair intervention or reusing in a different setting. So EPR gets talked about a lot and we're absolutely not saying it's the perfect solution, but it does help bridge some of that funding gap. And we see it, it's in place in lots of markets. Electrical products have it, batteries have it. There's an awful lot being talked about in packaging. So every time you buy something at the supermarkets, actually part of the money you pay is paying for the future recycling of the punnet that your grapes were in or the box your sandwich was in. And it's coming to more and more product areas because they all have an environmental impact. They all have a treatment requirement. And so for us the next hot topic is textile products. So clothing, home linens, might extend to workwear, footwear. These products actually are very complex to deal with at the end of life. 

So how EPR can fairly collect the cost for that recycling is the big challenge.

[00:03:38] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. That makes great sense. And I think even those of us who are familiar with some of the terminology, I think, sometimes forget how simple the concept is. It's basically X products or materials going on to the marketplace and the people producing that are making their profit, hopefully from selling that product, but then society is paying for whatever happens to that at the recycling of the waste collection and so on.

[00:04:03] Gerrard Fisher: Yes and that is a huge issue. 

If you look at the report saying our consumption of clothing has, I think, doubled since 2020. And so the burden on the waste systems has grown substantially, but, you know that cost burden is being passed to if you put it in the bin, it goes to your local authority that's gonna come back through your council tax.

So whether you're buying clothing or not, in great volumes, you're still paying for it. So it's just trying to pass that cost to the right place. So you know, more people who are buying more clothing are supporting more of that cost.

[00:04:33] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. Yeah. And then, and as you say, so this is one part of the broader product steward or stewardship or circularity journey, but we described that as a simple concept, but obviously the details very quickly get very complicated by depending on the type of product and so on. 

But you then also mentioned the term eco-modulation and that is WEFT's kind of core, what's the word, like, assumption or view on the world. So, opportunity. Yeah. Better. So tell me a little bit about what that is and where WEFT fit into that.

[00:05:03] Gerrard Fisher: If you cast your mind back to 2005, if you can, some of your listeners may not be able to do that, but so when the original Waste Electronics Regulations came in, the Holy Grail was being able to inform shoppers of the recycling cost. To be able to do that individually for every product that went on the market, something called individual producer responsibility. And, Sony would try and collect Sony's products back and things like that. At the time, just data systems weren't ready for that. It was massively complicated and it ended up not working. Even though that was the ideal. 

So it's long been an intent of European policy makers certainly to try and inform customers about the impacts of their products.

So we see energy rating labels, we see various things on tires and washing machines, things like that. But the challenge they had was two different pieces of regulation. So they had the Waste Framework Directive, which was to collect this rubbish and deal with it. Resource, we should say. And you had the eco-design regulations, which are trying to encourage better products to go onto the market. And they pointed at each other and said, Oh, the other regulation's gonna sort out this thorny issue. They never managed it. 

But where we are now with the kind of data that most brands have, actually you can do some really quick and effective pricing of products. So you can look at a garment and say that's a hundred percent cotton. It's got no vinyl prints on it or anything like that. So it's highly recyclable, it's made of certain materials and you can start to assign a price to those things. So cotton T-shirt can go into mechanical recycling and happy days. It could go back into a new garment. If there was too much elastin in there, it couldn't. And so just being able to see that recipe of the garment helps you determine how recyclable it is and you can start to price in the end of life cost, of what that means. 

So effectively that's what WEFT does. The clever thing, we think, about what we do is some systems that have tried to do this in markets like France, they're really granular and really laborious. So they dictate how you classify your products, how you apply for this sort of eco-modulation fee or benefit, if you're trying to reduce your fee. And that costs so much that actually businesses don't do it, so they don't claim the financial benefit, they should be able to, because it's too expensive. And then actually that information doesn't go onto a consumer label. So the consumer doesn't know it's a more durable product or a more recyclable product, whatever it is. And so actually it's a barrier to information flow and to proper market dynamics. 

So what we do is we take the data in whatever form it comes from the brand, and we can assign the score and do the reporting and the financial reporting, but then we can report that back to the brand in its own language and taxonomy. So every brand has its own menswear, womenswear, tops, bottoms, sportswear categories, we can match that language. And then it does two things for them. First of all it's like a complete circular map of all their products, which are the best, which are the worst, and why. But then secondly, you can start to project that onto this sort of eco-score or eco-modulated fee and show them how it's possible that their well performing products could have a much lower charge when they go onto the market and save them money. 

[00:08:17] Barry O'Kane: Just to clarify one thing, so eco-modulation, apart from in one or two places like France where there's some variation of that, it's not something that's currently in legislation anywhere.

[00:08:27] Gerrard Fisher: It's, until now, it's been deemed too challenging simply because of the kind of data work that has been done in the past. We're taking a fresh approach. And the other thing to, I think, point out is so we create an eco-modulation score that could be projected onto a fee.

So if 20 cents per garment fee, you could vary that by a score or there are other ways to implement that. So you could, within EPR, for example, sometimes the government set collection targets. So you must collect three quarters of the quantity of stuff you put on the market, for example. You could vary that obligation by the eco-modulate course.

There's different ways you can apply it, but it's just from our point of view, we think it's important to help brands explore it and understand it so that they can, when government's consulting this kind of thing, they can advocate for the system that works fairly and obviously understand the impacts of that on their business and their costs in future.

[00:09:20] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, so it feels like there's a long list of potential major wins there. So one is you're saying reducing that sort of complexity because, let's explore the “because” in a moment from a brand or somebody making textiles or clothes, but two also, then you're talking about that data, not just going to some legislative body to say, this is how much we need to pay in our EPRs, and we're trying to keep that down, but actually feeding back into decisions around I can see which products are, it's almost allowing the EPR conversation to go beyond what we just talked about.

[00:09:54] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah, you go to proper eco-design, and that's that eco-design regulation piece. How do I encourage my brands to go further? And it also helps them map out, for example, we can map individual eco-design elements. So whether it's recyclable, whether it's recycled content, whether it's, you know, some people are advocates of pure natural fiber products. You can look at carbon water impacts, you can look at durability. You could look at any one of those dimensions or any group of those dimensions, or all together and see how that works. So if you are a brand trying to explore “how circular are my products?” this instantly gives you lots of different ways of assessing that and a holistic picture.

So give you an example from a brand we've worked with recently. We've done all the mapping, we're developing the durability scoring, so we haven't included there, and they're like, now they understand which products it's most important to look at durability on. It's not necessarily the ones that everyone talks about, denim and t-shirts and things like that.

A lot of those products are already quite pure cotton and highly recyclable, so they already score quite well. There's a lot more complex products with multi materials in them for durability purposes and actually perhaps that's where we should be focusing our durability assessments first.

[00:10:59] Barry O'Kane: So from a sort of circularity nerd point of view, that's instead of just saying there's this moral sort of societal reason to think about these things, you're tying it back into benefits for the product, financial benefits for the company, and potentially better products, and so there's interesting stories to be told there.

[00:11:16] Gerrard Fisher: And there's three things we talk about that are important if you're trying to set up this kind of system. One of them is trying to understand what it's gonna cost. How much money do you need to build an effective system? And we've literally just seen CalRecycle in California select its PRO for its future textiles, EPR scheme. And they've put some pricing in there. It's really interesting to look at, if you've not looked at the application documents, I recommend that. It's not a quick read, but really interesting. 

So how much is the system gonna cost? How do you fairly allocate those costs to the producers that are putting stuff on the market? So that's where our eco-modulation comes in. And then the third part is what can customers afford to pay? 

And if those three things match, then you've got a functional system. And it's really interesting. So we've done some world leading research on what level of EPR charge customers will actually notice. And then we've played around with that figure and said if we go above and below that, how does it change your purchase choice? And it's amazing. It's so much higher than people have been talking about as EPR charge levels.

[00:12:14] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, put some numbers on that, so when you say people talking about, you see in the policy conversations and they're talking about a few pence or whatever, and then the work that you did in the research, what came out?

[00:12:24] Gerrard Fisher: There's various prices in market. France, I think eco-modulates between 2 cents and 60 cents, depending on what the product is. And there's a really broad range there. In the Netherlands, I think they've been talking about something like 20, 30 euro cents per kilo of products sold. So they charge by weight only, which actually encourages you to make a lighter product that might be less durable. And then if you look at places like Australia, they have a charge of 4 cents per garment which can be reduced to 3 cents if you pass their criteria for eco-modulation. 

Now, if you look at PRO application for California, they're talking, I think about 30 cents per pound which is much, much higher. By weight. So that equates to American costs are less than the European cost of fuel and things like that, but probably equates to around 40, 50 pence a kilo. So much, much higher. When we've done consumer research with British shoppers that buy clothing they tell us, they wouldn't even notice 50 pence being added onto the price of a garment. And that is like any garment from a couple of quid, right the way up to hundreds of pounds. When you get up to hundreds of pounds, actually the noticeable threshold goes up quite a lot. So they said 50 pence. And so we went back and we tested charge levels from 10 pence up to 2 pounds 30. And we can now see EPR charges up to 50 pence, have almost no difference on their choice between different products, different prices, different thresholds. Once it goes above 50 pence, they start to notice it and they start to select other products with a lower charge, even if that item is more expensive, they’ll go for the one with a lower charge preferentially. Because price is the top motivator in selection. Price, fit, and comfort. And people are really price sensitive. And it's amazing to see how such a small tweak in that charge level can really influence their shopping choices.

[00:14:08] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, so there's quite a lot of complexity there. One in how that is presented and the amount that the customer buys. But also, just what's interesting there is the difference in, so a few pence per kilo or per whatever, versus the kind of numbers you're talking about, which is per purchase.

And what is the conclusion from that? From your and WEFT's point of view?

[00:14:28] Gerrard Fisher: Coming back to those three sort of critical questions, what it means is actually customers are actually quite willing to fund the cost of the system. And what it does, I think people perceive EPR as it's just another cost of business. But actually through our research we've talked with customers about shoppers, about should we put this charge level on the label or an indicator of it, like red, amber, green, or something like that. 

If you understand what this charge represents, is it just recyclability or broader sustainability. And actually, understanding of that as a concept is really high. It's 75% of surveyors read a short paragraph and got it immediately. And actually 8 out of 10 shoppers wanted to see that on the price ticket information, whether it's as a traffic light or as a direct pence figure because they've got no other proxy for how eco-friendly or not is this garment. 

And we've sat in focus groups with people. We've done quant research, even people who you perceive as non-eco, the heaviest shoppers buying 10 items a week, would still welcome this information. It might not always change their purchase decision, but actually they would quite like to see it and sometimes they might like to buy something a bit greener. And if it's independent, it is not the company making a green claim,which is the risk that they run at the moment with marketing.

[00:15:40] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, so the risk of greenwashing or whatever. 

So that's quite exciting because what you said there was that like EPR is seen as this sort of legislation coming in and then hurting my business. But part of the story you're saying here is that there's benefits and opportunity is the other word you used.

[00:15:55] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah. It's how you use that then to raise the funds, inform your customers and help everybody drive towards greener products. If you think about where eco-design regulations have succeeded in Europe, for example, they drove energy efficiency in washing machines and then they had to change the scale because everything was getting more efficient and they could cut out the bottom ones. And it's that sort of, how do you drive the market or incentivize the market without having to be really draconian and doing blunt force kind of policy interventions that really don't help anybody.

[00:16:26] Barry O'Kane: One of the things that I think that's interesting there from what you're talking about and what I've seen you write about on WEFT’s blog for example, is how much of the work you're doing. You're doing multiple things. You're creating this product, and the sort of data model to understand this, but you're also watching or involved in sort of policy conversation. 

So I'm interested in a little bit about what that looks like within WEFT and it's quite a small team, so how are you juggling all those things?

[00:16:51] Gerrard Fisher: Very carefully. The short answer. Yeah, so obviously it's a relatively different way of approaching the problem. I think until you prove that this is possible, people don't really understand what it's capable of achieving. And so going back a few years, we started, I think just after the pandemic, we started engaging with retailers and asking them what their concerns were about EPR because it's coming. And they were most concerned that the system wouldn't be fair, that they would end up the fee that wouldn't really drive any substantial market change, and we'd all just be effectively paying an extra tax without really getting a lot of benefit out of it. 

So that was the big driver behind a lot of our discussions.

And so then it's a parallel journey. You've got to explain to the producers what's possible, how it can work and what the benefits are. And you've also, in parallel, got to engage with policy makers and say, guys, this can be done now. This is a thing we can do. And actually another benefit of the data, if you manage it in this way and you understand the composition of everything going into your market, you can report on the national level and say, this is how much pure cotton or mixed poly-cotton or polyamide is coming onto the market. So if you are thinking of building a recycling plant for this is how many of them you need, or actually go and send it to the one in Sweden, if that's running. Those kinds of infrastructure level options suddenly become available.

So it's just helping people realize what's possible with data now. People bang on about big data and how you interpret it, you've gotta have a value, a use for that data and actually this data, the same data can serve lots of different purposes. 

So it is just keeping all of those stakeholders informed and helping industry understand, yes, obviously there is a cost coming to somebody somewhere, but how we might make that work and what the benefits are. And actually, back to the recycling plants, the huge opportunity of EPR is collecting that funding, keeping it in a pot, don't go and spend it on other things, but actually invest it in really high quality collection and sorting and then really high quality reuse and recycling in the UK.

There's a really big issue I think about where our collective clothing is currently going. Some of it is being very carefully sorted and sold, explicitly for reuse in international markets, which is great. Some of it is going overseas and then being sorted elsewhere. And I think at that point we lose visibility of the processing yield of that sorting step and then the ultimate end destination of those fabrics and fibers. 

And this is the same with any international recycling system, if you don't keep track of the yield downstream, how effective is it actually? If we do that here, we can see.

[00:19:18] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, not just can see, but you can say, there is a sort of story to be told about dumping problems in other parts of the world, but there's also a story to be told there about losing the opportunity,

[00:19:27] Gerrard Fisher: Yes, exactly that.

[00:19:29] Barry O'Kane: Which is what you're touching on.

[00:19:31] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah. And there are valid reuse markets overseas. Absolutely fine. There are end-of-life legacies in those markets, which we need to think  carefully about. There's been this discussion for things like critical raw materials for years. Fine, you can get stuff reused, but if you then lose it from your market, you can't recover it. So if they're strategically important, you have to decide which option is best.

[00:19:49] Barry O'Kane: So strategically important opportunities for jobs and like we're talking about keeping stuff and reducing. So I find all of that interesting because we started talking about how EPR is this one small part of this bigger conversation, but actually if it's thoughtfully thought about there's potential to bring all these other benefits.

[00:20:06] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah. And you know, there's lots of EPR systems working and none of them are perfect, but actually if we could cherry pick the best bits of all of them, you could get a much, much better system. And that's what we're trying to help stakeholders do.

[00:20:18] Barry O'Kane: So what is the interest? Are you shouting in the dark or is everybody queueing up to speak to you about it? What are the reactions?

[00:20:23] Gerrard Fisher: So it depends on the market. In the UK we are waiting for the government to release the outcome of its Circular Economy Taskforce review. Which was supposed to be, I think, September ‘25. We're now in March ‘26, that's not happened yet. Not sure quite when that's going to happen. That will set the firing gun, I think, on a lot of brands here being interested. 

Actually we've already been testing data with about a third of the UK market, so lots of people are interested in this. It's just their toes are not quite in the fire yet to act on it. There are a few progressive brands who are thinking more strategically about this. They know it's coming. They know they need to make provision in their balance sheet for whatever this is going to be or how they're going to pass it on to customers if that's their choice. And also their circular product mapping. So they're getting on with that now. Suddenly we're seeing a lot more interest.

Netherlands is looking to implement eco modulation very soon. California, it will be 2030, they've got two years to work out the methodology.

Brands need to understand it's going potentially to be a huge cost. They need to understand how much it is, how they bring it down.

[00:21:23] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. And presumably the idea of going back to what we were saying, aligning incentives, so that for some of those negatives become opportunities for the brands as well. 

There was one thing, just you mentioned the, did you say forward thinking brands, there's a line in your 2025 blog post on the site that says many brands are focused on next week's figures rather than the strategic picture.

So my question partly, you've said, you've spoken to a big chunk of the market and they're at least looking at it even if there's no action yet. But what are the, sort of, blockers, and I'm particularly interested because this is a technology podcast particularly interested in things like the data.

Does that data exist? Our brand saying, I can't give, I can't share, what are the reasons that the data might be a blocker.

[00:22:03] Gerrard Fisher: Actually the data governance one is, although time consuming, it is actually quite straightforward. Providing reassurance that things are kept confidential and not shared with anybody else and all that, our systems are secure, relatively easy. The data quality can vary, but then part of exploring this is to understand how ready is your data for this. And if you are missing critical information that might result in a future cost. So now you can start planning why it's worth getting that data point now for whichever market you're selling to. So there's a bit of that. 

And then I think the other thing is, depending on where the brand sells a lot of its product, how pressing EPR in an eco-modulation is a regulation. We've spoken to an American brand that's forecasting a potentially huge cost. So right now the business case is really clear. In four years time, we will have this huge cost.

How do we understand it? How do we bring it down, how do we influence it?

That's definitely got a business case. In the UK not implementing yet, is it a bit of a barrier, but it will happen in time. It's just a case of, is it 2029, 2030.

[00:23:03] Barry O'Kane: And what does it look like ,which is why it's interesting if you're able to influence that conversation. Let's make this a positive so that there isn't just “Oh, I’m constantly pushing against the legislation.”

[00:23:14] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah. Yeah. I think the other risk that people need to really understand is the value of collected clothing now is much, much lower than it ever used to be because there's so much available in the market because we've doubled consumption. And there are many other countries trying to pass it onto these markets. And so actually what used to cover the cost of collection sorting no longer does. And we're seeing many charity collectors, for example, withdraw banks from street corners. It's just not viable anymore. And we're actually at risk of losing our collection sorting industry. And so I can understand why people say, I'll push this back, we can deal with it later, kind of thing. But actually one day, very soon, a lot of that system's going to collapse. And then we suddenly face the cost of building a whole new thing rather than building on a solid foundation of knowledge and experience.

[00:24:02] Barry O'Kane: And aligned incentives so that everybody's winning. Which goes back to what we were talking about, the societal cost. So let's go into the work you've done recently and a little bit of the taste of work that we've done together.

We talked about that policy and the sort of big picture work you're doing, but at the same time, you're working with the data and you're trying to demonstrate this. What does that look like in terms of maybe, what a WEFT product might look like?

[00:24:24] Gerrard Fisher: Yeah, there's lots of different outputs we can create. But what we find at the moment is presenting some data visually, really helps people understand. So we create a kind of heat map or bubble charts depending on where your bubble is and how big it is indicates how big a problem or how good the product is in your portfolio. And we, as I say, because we tailor it to each individual brand, they can analyse that at a, like, whole company level, department level, and they can drill right down to individual product items. That helps them check how different groups are doing. 

And so for example, if you're a brand looking to design some circular products, until now, I think we've seen brands talk to the design teams they're friendliest with because that's what is easiest. But now this helps you go, actually you need to focus on these ones over here because these are more challenging. So it gives you intelligence like that. But the important thing is converting, all of these numbers, all of this data processing, all of this scoring is something really simple.

So that's how we came up with this bubble chart idea. And then the most useful thing that we find is being able to, in real time, dynamically change that diagram. So let's focus on these products. Arguments say, we can do a carbon and water score. We know it's an approximation, so that might take a little while to work into eco-modulation. Let's take those out for the moment and see how your products suddenly see all the bubbles move, and you're like, Oh, now I understand why carbon and water are really useful to have in my score. So maybe I need to invest a bit of time in helping agree on the methodology for that so I can have it in my scoring system. So it's helping explore that for people. 

But, the journey for us has been to create some data. We started with static outputs, but very early on, it became apparent that being able to move these things around is what's really useful. So that's how we started developing the system that we have now. 

[00:25:59] Barry O'Kane:  From the brand or from the data owner's point of view, you're taking their existing data and potentially, we touched on pointing at places where they could improve their data and reasons why that might be good. But you're not creating any extra work. You're talking back to them in their own language. So using their own categorisations and terms and so on, and presenting this in a nice little, I say little, in a simplified, presentable and understandable, but still useful. 

So that's really interesting. You have this idea, you've got, I'm gonna do this bubble chart. And then, so I know, this is where you and I started working together, you worked with some of the AI tools and mocked that up. 

What was that like? I'm really quite interested in that. Were you going, I know what I want to build, there's no limited resources, let me try and use this AI tool or were you using the tool to help you think through what the visuals might look like?

[00:26:43] Gerrard Fisher: The layout was less of a priority. We already had our kind of static outputs. And this was a way, actually, it was a way of simplifying them, simplifying our workload. So if I want to compare these options. 

[00:26:53] Barry O'Kane: Just to clarify, starting up, so you had a sort of spreadsheet version of this tool, basically?

[00:26:58] Gerrard Fisher: Plotting charts on sheets. Yeah. Basically, which you can then, you can put that into Power BI or any other sort of system.

But what we were finding is the setup and process needed to get to any of those systems was gonna be very long-winded. It wasn't something we readily understood. Going to cost a lot. And so that was the reason for, “Can I, is there a bit of code that could do this?” What we are presenting is not rocket science.

It's put this chart up and let me play with it.

Yeah, it was straight into a secure AI system and can you help me write some code to do this? And I think, my experience of that is, I'm not a coder. Be the first one to admit that. So I don't really understand what code is doing, how it works. So it's like searching a room with a torch. You're trying to find something, but you're only looking at a little bit of the problem at the time. And the risks of that are AI will take you down lots of little rabbit holes and get confused about things. 

Ultimately we got to something that kind of worked. It did a reasonable enough job, but key concerns for me were, I had no idea what the code was doing. It got to the point where, if I tried to change anything, it stopped doing stuff properly. And under the bonnet, it's really not put together very well. And I wasn't using a bespoke coding AI tool, that was another risk, I guess. 

But at the end of the day, it got to the point where it couldn't even label its coding up to explain what bits were doing what. So that's not gonna work long term, is it? So we need to get this properly reviewed and checked out and structured. And that's the point, we came to yourselves and ask you to use your expertise on that. 

So it got us to a point where we could conceptualise, I guess, almost a living wire frame, if you like, but it wasn't a robust enough system.

[00:28:29] Barry O'Kane:  Two interesting thoughts about that process. One is the sort of proper startup approach, where you're saying, Okay, what are the big assumptions? What are the things I need to prove? And what's the quickest way I can do that?

I can do my data model and my calculation and think about visualisations in a spreadsheet, okay, but that's not gonna work to get to go to clients and so on. And then, in the more recent times, you now have an option. And I think, and despite this being my job, I encourage people to look at these tools before coming, because I think there's genuine value. One in visualizing that idea and because it allows you then to either have something, even if, as you said, you're not confident yet, in it being sort of production ready. But you know that there, it's sort of proof of the pudding, I know this can be done. I know this exists. And then what you came to us with was like a really good specification. It was like, this is what I want. I just want it to be performing better and more robust.

[00:29:18] Gerrard Fisher: Please fix my clapped out old banger.

Yeah, that's the thing. I think one of the major challenges of anyone trying to develop any kind of software is what do I want? How do I specify it? And actually the closer you are to something that kind of looks and feels a bit like where you're going that really just helps you nail it down. And then you are refining rather than speculating on what the design is. Refining, talking about color decisions and layouts and things like that. But actually the underlying functionality is what's really important. And then even with that early wire frame, you can start playing with apps and customers you've got a close relationship with and seeing how they respond and “Ah okay, we need to improve the way it does this or to be able to do that, that kind of functionality.”

[00:29:57] Barry O'Kane: That being the key thing you’re getting to the, using old fashioned startup language to gain out of the room thing, you're speaking to and doing less sitting in dark rooms worried about what to do or spending a lot of money on something that you’re building, where you're not learning from or whatever. That's the real power of it.

And you said you're not a coder, but you are obviously. You deal with data. You've got a technical background, it's not like, what's a computer kind of level?

So my question there is I think, having gone through that process once and then seeing, and now having a hostable version built on what your initial vision was for this early stage, what would you change if you were to go through the process again?

[00:30:32] Gerrard Fisher: Oh, that's a really good question. That's, yeah, that's a really good question. I'm not sure what I would change going back, I think. It's easy to look at the outcome you've got and say, Ah, I'll do it differently to get to that outcome quicker. But actually the exploration process itself was really useful because learning what did and didn't work, it was an actually quite useful knowledge for us.

I think what would've been more prudent to research some AI tools more suited to do the tasks I was trying to do. Then you've got to understand which is the best coder, how it works, and how it integrates with other systems. Yeah, I think that's probably the thing I would've done.

So that advice would be useful on which tools are probably best to play with for this kind of development before coming to yourself with, maybe that's a launch plan for you. Go and play in here and then come back and tell us what your spec is.  Because as a newbie, is it Gemini? Is it Chat? Is it Claude? Is it bespoke coding tools? For a beginner actually, what prompts would help build a more clearer code set so that even when you first look at it, it's really clear what sections are doing. You might know that anyway, there's those sort of the text fields that this bit of code is doing this.

Because what I'd built actually was doing two or three different things in different places. You tried to fix one, you ended up breaking the other and so I'd got myself into that coder's nightmare without knowing what code was. 

[00:31:47] Barry O'Kane: Very well known problem, even if you're hand coding everything. 

So yeah, I think that's really interesting because and it's interesting that the most valuable thing is the process because for me the most valuable thing in any of this sort of early stage of ideas, whatever that looks like, is whatever accelerates the process of getting real life feedback.

So it almost doesn't matter how good the code is. If your idea is, I'm gonna build this, show it to five people and then start again.

[00:32:13] Gerrard Fisher: Kind of works. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that's, I think going way back, we talked, we had a Mario board set up with kind of chunks and what things were going to be, and I was still struggling to visualise what that might actually look like. And that helps me to understand why those building blocks are still needed to drive that system.

So at least now we've got to a first version of that system, we can better understand what those building blocks need to be.

[00:32:34] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. And very intelligently push some of those other problems, like not problems, but those assumptions to the next stage of the process because you've identified the priority ones and now have a thing that you can go and work with clients on and do that experimentation.

We're kind of running outta time, unfortunately. Much as I enjoy… Just to bring everything together, you've described where EPR is and your work and policy and you now have this and what you're calling the sandbox product, which allows you to have these conversations.

What's next? And maybe more importantly, what's beyond that? What's happening next with WEFT?

[00:33:06] Gerrard Fisher: Where we are at the moment, so we provide our scoring system to brands and back to the how do you present it to them in real terms. We now convert that into a cost.

So actually on our model, what we're gonna start doing is playing around with let's put in some cost values and convert these numbers into pounds and pence or euros or dollars or whatever it is. So you can see what those impacts are. 

Now that's not to say that's actually gonna be a cost, but it lets you see very quickly, “Ah, now we're talking about 15 million instead of 20 million,” that order of magnitude itself is quite useful. So that's the direct output to brands. 

But then, behind the scenes, the other thing we can start doing is back to this national level thinking. And saying well, you know, we now think this much pure wool is coming on the market, this much pure cotton and so you know, we can start talking with policy holders about national infrastructure plan, need to be thinking about collection sorting centers for this stuff. But then, the opportunities for building PET Chemical Recycling Facilities is this because we could, you know, if we can collect and sort this pure polyester, it can go into these processes. There's a kind of a backend piece, which is less the front end development that we've been talking about, but still a useful outcome for policy holders.

[00:34:09] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. Fascinating. Interesting. And for anybody listening, actually, two parts to this question. One is for anybody listening how they get in touch with you, but also who do you want to reach out to? Who do you want to speak to?

[00:34:20] Gerrard Fisher: Have to get in touch with us. Go to our website, weft.org uk. Our contact form is on there, but there's also a lot of really useful information about the work we've done in the past, how our system works, some of this consumer research we've been talking about, and that's on there as well. 

And also some really interesting stuff on how SMEs can benefit from this because they often get overlooked in a lot of this regulation. And a key driver for us has been making sure they can take part in it and they can benefit from it, which so far it looks like very much, that's possible. 

And then in terms of who we want to hear from, really it's any brand that either wants to understand its portfolio and the circularity of those products, or it's selling into one of these markets that's about to implement EPR, which is most of Europe, California, Australia and very soon the UK. 

You need to get ahead of this. We've seen so many brands still struggling with the pain of the cost of packaging EPR which has just been implemented. And it's not so much the way it was done, it's just, I think a lot of brands actually didn't really plan for that cost very well. So even if it is 2030, if that's 10 or 20 million pounds, that's got a value today. And you need to be informing your finance teams about, “We need to start budgeting for this, guys. It might be in or out by a million or two, but how are we gonna cover that?” So yeah, any brand that wants to try and get ahead of that curve.

[00:35:32] Barry O'Kane: Awesome. And not just get ahead of it, but then change it.

[00:35:34] Gerrard Fisher: There's real risk, actually, sorry, just, I know we're going on, but there's a real risk that governments might implement something like you must have a certain amount of recycled content.

And whenever we've seen relatively blunt policy changes like that happen, they cause a real market shock and actually, they interrupt a lot of things, because suddenly everybody wants recycled content. None is available. You get fraud, you get all sorts of things. It's actually, why don't you just incentivise it financially and let everybody dial it up? And then when you reach a threshold, then you can put a floor in.

But until then what is the right floor and why?

[00:36:06] Barry O'Kane: Excellent, that’s a whole other conversation. But thanks so much for listening. So just to reiterate, that's WEFT, weft.org uk. As usual, we will put all the Show notes, all the links and a full transcript on happyporchradio.com.

Thanks, Gerrard. It was a great conversation. Thanks for joining me. 

[00:36:21] Gerrard Fisher: Thank you very much. Great to talk to you again. Cheers.

[00:36:27] Barry O’Kane: That's all for this episode. Thanks so much to Gerrad for such a generous and honest conversation. 

Now, season 10 feels like a moment worth marking, and I'd love your help to do that in two ways. 

First, we've had some incredible guests over the years and I'm curious, who would you most like to hear an update from? What past conversations left you wanting to know what happened next? Let me know at [email protected]. 

And second, if you're based in the UK, we're planning an in-person event to celebrate the season, and we're looking for friends who want to help make it happen, whether that's a venue, sponsorship, connections or just enthusiasm, and same address [email protected].

Finally, if you want to make sure you don't miss an episode this season, the best way is to join our email list. Go to happyporchradio.com and we'll keep you up to date with the new episodes and everything else we're exploring. 

Thanks for listening and see you next time!