Last month, Nat Woods & Dan Smith, founders of Clean Coast Collective, spoke at our 2nd annual #RadLivin Festival in Sydney. In case you weren’t able to make it on over to down unda, we spoke with Nat & Dan to get all of the details on how they got to where they are and how you can go for your dreams now too.
Once learning about the impact of plastics and pollution on our oceans and beaches, Nat and Dan took it upon themselves to clean up beaches around Australia. Their journey led them to create Clean Coast Collective – a not-for-profit lifestyle brand shifting consumer behaviour away from disposable plastics.
From launching their idea through ING Direct Dreamstarter, to starting a rad lifestyle brand that gives back, Nat & Dan will teach you how they turned this epic idea into a reality.
Meet Nat and Dan…
Where are you in the world?
We are in Byron Bay in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, Australia! It’s such a beautiful spot up here with an incredibly inspiring and supportive community.
How do you follow your bliss?
We follow our bliss by always reaffirming with ourselves that we love what we do and remind ourselves why we set off down this path. Sometimes it is so easy to settle into comparisons or resent the hard work, so when we feel ourselves getting into those types of moods we look back at where we’ve come from, how much we’ve achieved and why we set out on this path. Reminding ourselves to be grateful, giving ourselves down-time when we can and celebrating small wins also help!
When did the inspiration for Clean Coast Collective first come about?
Three years ago we were both working in jobs that we found uninspiring and unfulfilling. Every weekend we would escape our work week by driving an hour to the coast. We would leave straight after work on a Friday and return as late as we could on Sunday evening. We were living for the weekends, and it was during these weekends that we started exploring new sections of the coastline and finding ridiculous amounts of rubbish washed ashore on beaches that barely received foot traffic. All of the sudden we became aware of this huge issue affecting our weekend paradise.
From that point on, driven by jobs that left us unfulfilled and an issue too big to ignore, we started Clean Coast Collective.
How did you go from idea to reality?
Good question! I think we were quite naive to what we were getting ourselves into. It began as an Instagram account and blog, that then quickly grew into a registered not-for-profit as we realised we needed to cover ourselves with insurance to run beach clean ups with volunteers. We googled ‘How to start a not-for-profit’ and followed any advice we could find!
When launching your campaign, what did you need to do in order to ensure its’ success?
When we were accepted into the Dreamstarter program we were part-way through a six month journey around Australia cleaning beaches and we were in Darwin at the time. Within a day of finding out we would be running a crowdfunding campaign, we knew we needed to make a video to convince people to support our cause – it’s difficult to create a video about cleaning beaches and the love of surfing when you can’t go near the water for fear of crocs! So we left our 4wd/home-on-wheels at the Darwin Airport and flew back to Brisbane to spend a week creating our crowdfunding film.
Once the film was done and our campaign was launched, it was then a case of reaching out to all of our networks to ask them to support and share our campaign. We were so lucky that many ‘Insta-friends’ resonated with our cause and helped share our campaign to the wider community. Even so, it was still a tough slog and there was a moment in Port Hedland in remote Western Australia where we were sitting at the local bakery days out from our funding deadline and we said to each other ‘you know, we’re not going to make our required target, but oh well we gave it a crack!’.
The next day over $3,000 of pledges came in and we *just* made it across the line in time!
Why do you believe your Dreamstarter campaign was so successful?
I think all the efforts we put into building our community of supporters (which was tiny at the time!) and engaging all of our networks for support really helped us reach our goal. A big thing we always told ourselves when reaching out to people for support was “the worst they can do is say No!”.
Can you tell us about your Cape York experience and what that all lead to?
The first time we went to Cape York was in 2014 during our trip around Australia. We spent days and days cleaning beaches on our own, and also met up with local rangers to help them with their efforts. The amount of rubbish up there that simply blows you away – you honestly can’t comprehend it until you see it for yourselves. Beautiful remote beaches, littered with the world’s rubbish.
It broke our hearts, made us question what we were doing and really made us feel like we were just two dumb kids trying to solve a problem too big for us. But after the lows, we got that fire in our bellies and knew we couldn’t walk away from the problem. From then on, we knew that the focus of Clean Coast Collective had to be on getting people up to these remote areas to help clean them up, and also getting that message out to the wider community in Australia and across the world.
How has Clean Coast Collective evolved from when you first launched it, up until now and where would you love it to go?
When we first launched we knew nothing about business, social media or marketing so it was probably a pretty rookie exercise in the early days. But practise makes perfect and we’ve honed our branding, our image and our marketing to really focus on our target audience – millennials who care a bit about the environment, but who don’t really want to be a full-on ‘greeny’. We started as a clean up organisation but have now evolved into a not-for-profit lifestyle brand – our products help people ditch harmful and unnecessary plastics without sacrificing their style, and all the profits help fund our clean up efforts in Cape York and other remote locations.
We would love for it to evolve into a recognised leading lifestyle brand of products that people buy because they love them, not because they feel like they ‘should buy them for the planet’. Ultimately we want to be self-sufficient and not have to rely on grant funding or donations. We have a long way to go to get there!
At #RadLivin we heard a lot about collaboration. How has collaborating directly helped CCC grow?
Without collaboration, we would not exist! Right from the get-go, from our very first clean up, we collaborated with as many people as possible. We’re lucky as a not-for-profit that people are so open to supporting us and are incredibly generous – in the early days we had a lot of brands work with us when we were just a little old daggy clean up crew, and we are so thankful for that. Now that we have a bigger online presence and following, we try to collaborate with as many smaller and newer groups and brands as we can to give them the support we received.
If someone is wanting to start a business, or already has a business, why do you feel that bringing in a social-good element is so important?
Two reasons; firstly, it makes your brand stand out from your competitors – people love that feel good aspect to making a purchase! Secondly, it gives you purpose in your business and in your life – what do you want to leave behind in this world, a whole lot of tees and bikinis, or an impact bigger than your brand and yourself?
It’s so easy to get caught up in ourselves in this life, but as privileged, safe, and lucky people, we need to support and help those less fortunate than ourselves and not leave a damaging impact on this planet.
In your talk at #RadLivin, you spoke about the consumer and how we like to have instant gratification, and so when a brand or organisation is trying to get the consumer to switch behavior to make a positive impact (that would effect them years from now), it can be harder. We thought that was such an interesting point! Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Definitely, it’s something that all organisations trying to create behavioural change struggle with! We are such short-sighted beings – look at the tobacco industry, we’ve known for years that smoking kills us, but yet we all think ‘oh just a few smokes won’t harm me’ because we don’t see the impact instantaneously. So for us to say to you, ‘don’t use plastic straws because in 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea’, you’ll think ‘oh yeah, but one straw won’t hurt and the ocean looks fine to me!’. Guilting people into change is never going to work or be long-lasting.
So through Clean Coast Collective we really try to market the issue and behavioural change in a desirable way – to put it simply, we try to make living a life without plastics ‘the most desirable lifestyle’. Plastic is cheap, it’s made from petroleum and nasty chemicals, and it’s utterly polluting – why the heck would you want that sort of thing in your $18 cocktail or alongside your designer handbag?!
At the end of the day we’re all a bit vain, so we need to be convinced that doing something ‘greeny’ will make us more hip, trendy and live a life more desirable than others. And looking good on the ole ‘gram doesn’t hurt either!
Where do you see the future of businesses who don’t have a social element going in the future? Do you think they will be unreliable in a few years from now?
Businesses purely concerned about profits will always exist, but as the social enterprise industry continues to grow they will demand attention away from the greedy corporates. It’s only natural that businesses that go good in the world will flourish – news outlets love promoting them as the new ‘feel good’ story, people feel good buying from them and the charities or causes they support will also promote them. Not to mention the connections and doors that will open from being a business owner who is seen as genuine, authentic and ‘good’! Hopefully we can push the bad guys out of the way and carve a way for good companies with good causes to flourish and succeed!
What advice can you give to someone who knows what they would love to do, but haven’t yet gone for it?
Think about what is holding you back from doing what you want to do – whether that’s your skill set, your current job, where you live, or anything else, and then figure out what steps you can take to change those things. It might mean enrolling in a course, taking on some unpaid volunteer work to get your foot in a door, changing to part-time work to give yourself time to work on your passion. Just pick one change you can make today to get you closer to that goal.
And also create space in your life for new opportunities to arise! If we spend our lives hanging out with the same people, in the same jobs, doing the same things, the opportunities to expand and change will never appear – meet new people, put yourself into new situations, go to a networking event (or #RadLivin!) and start putting energy into creating the life you want.
We live in Byron so everyone up here is all about telling the universe what you want and manifesting your dream life or situation – that might sound a bit too out there for you, but it could be a simple as engaging with new people and new situations that might lead to where you want to be. If you don’t put energy into your dream, it’s never going to eventuate.
And finally, ask for advice! It’s scary putting yourself out there and saying to people ‘oh I do this right now, but what I REALLY want to do is this….’, but who cares what people are going to think?! Email people who are doing what you want to be doing, ask them for advice, ask them to meet you for coffee – they might ignore your email, but who cares, we promise at least one person you reach out to will reply and share with you what you can do. Put your genuine self out there and the genuine people will respond.
Follow Nat & Dan’s journey on Instagram. x
