“If we want a better tomorrow, we should stop waiting for the perfect plan or for someone else to solve our problems. Everyone just needs to start. Now."
After her first sustainability venture failed, Kresse Wesling found a new starting point in London’s discarded fire hose.
Kresse Wesling’s fascination with waste started young.
Growing up in Alberta, Canada, trips to the local dump with her father left her looking at discarded things differently. Where other people saw the end of something, she wanted to know what else the material could become.
Her first attempt to build a business around that instinct did not go to plan.
Wesling founded a biodegradable packaging company in Hong Kong before bringing it to the UK in 2004. The products were designed to break down. Unfortunately, some of them did exactly that in transit. The business failed.
Then she encountered London’s decommissioned fire hose.
It was durable, difficult to recycle and destined for landfill. Wesling and her partner Elvis had no background in fashion and no obvious product in mind. They simply thought a material that had spent years saving lives deserved a better ending.
Elvis & Kresse grew from that conviction.
Since 2005, the company has transformed retired fire hose and other discarded materials into luxury accessories, rescuing more than 300 tonnes of waste. Fifty per cent of profits are donated to charities connected to the materials it uses, including the Fire Fighters Charity for its fire-hose collection.
In 2021, Wesling and Elvis moved the business to a farm in Kent and began applying the same thinking to the land itself, generating renewable energy, treating wastewater and developing a regenerative approach to farming.
Wesling did not set out to build a luxury brand.
She started with something nobody wanted and asked whether that was really the end of its story.
Join the conversation with < Kresse Wesling CBE>
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