Futures 100 Innovators : August

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sector - food & drink
sector - beauty
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category - society
sector - media & technology
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Futures 100 Innovators Awards
The eighth instalment of our Futures 100 Innovators spotlights a new generation of beauty manufacturers, African alcohol producers and circular jewellery retailers

In this month’s Futures 100 Innovators, we reveal 10 more names in our global longlist and awards, featuring a line-up of 100 innovators, disruptors, activists and change-makers.

Each month, we will profile 10 people that our team of researchers and analysts have identified as driving forward industries ranging from beauty and wellness to luxury, design, retail and travel. After 10 months, our complete Futures 100 Innovators list will be presented to a panel of industry judges who will select and award their 10 leading innovators, revealed in October 2022 at our physical Trend Briefing 2023 event.

The Future Laboratory has launched an annual Futures 100 Innovators Award to celebrate those among us who are taking on those challenges that some of us may regard as unimportant, unworthy or unrighteous. They’re the people using new approaches, and sometimes counter-intuitive processes, to tackle those age-old problems of inequality, inclusion and levelling up that will still sit with us unless we innovate and imagine differently.

You can nominate your own innovators here: futures100innovators@thefuturelaboratory.com

Published by:

7 September 2022

Author: The Future Laboratory

Image: The Future Laboratory

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Left: CG-Labs Cosmetic Manufacturing, US. Right: Ovid Clinic Berlin.

Beauty : Caitlin Green

Centring women in beauty manufacturing’s anti-corporate future

The unceasing acceleration of the indie beauty segment is down to people like Caitlin Green. As the owner of women-led Cg-Labs, a recently overhauled beauty R&D and innovator lab in the US, Green’s ambition is to eradicate barriers to entry for budding entrepreneurs. Indeed, the company exists to help independent beauty brands ‘remove or hop over those barriers’, helping to develop new products, from concept to creation, manufacturing and shipment of orders.

Green also understands that in order to reach this audience, Cg-Labs must reflect their values and aesthetics. A quick glance at its platform and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a brand in its own right, with pages peppered with smiley faces, shimmering fonts and clean beauty explanations. Green’s company swaps staid manufacturing for fun and experimentation, resulting in partnerships with some of the most exciting new brands in beauty and wellness.

Health & Wellness : Andrea Jungaberle

Using science to unlock the potential of psychedelic therapies

Amid a growing global mental health crisis and surging interest in escapism through psychoactive substances, Andrea Jungaberle is helping to educate and reframe people’s perceptions of psychedelics, positioning them for use in therapy and wellness settings.

As medical director of Ovid Clinic, a dedicated medical institute and facility in Berlin, Jungaberle promotes ‘efficient, safe and sustainable therapy’, with a notable focus on the latest scientific knowledge and research to uphold explorations into ketamine and psilocybin-led therapies. Having attracted global press coverage and a growing client base, Ovid shows the potential for the Psychedelic Wellness Market.

Elsewhere, Jungaberle is a therapist on the EPIsoDe study, a large therapy trial involving the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. She is also a co-founder of Germany’s MIND Foundation, a non-profit organisation with a vision to inform, educate and reframe people’s perceptions of psychedelics for use in therapy and wellness settings.

‘I am constantly questioning what culture and identity mean to me.’
Shamma Buhazza, graphic designer
Spearhead Spirits, South Africa

Design : Shamma Buhazza

Using design to experiment with the meaning of identity

‘Being born and raised in the Emirates, and coming from an Emirati, British and Somali background, I am constantly questioning what culture and identity mean to me,’ says Shamma Buhazza, a graphic designer from the United Arab Emirates.

Her work seeks to explore identity through design and type, using colours, patterns and letterforms found in Arab and Eastern cultures to provoke conversation and decolonise the design industry. As a result, Buhazza’s work often features clashing and blurring design cues as a way to unite, understand and archive her own sense of identity. Her work also unpacks how globalisation is amalgamating Eastern and Western cultures, and the resulting divides or misunderstandings that can occur.

Most recently, Buhazza’s work has appeared at The Museum of the Future; she created a large monolith for the museum’s entrance that explains and translates the calligraphy on the façade of the building.

 

Food & Drink : Chris Frederick and Damola Timeyin

Amplifying African spirits through local ingredients

Chris Frederick and Damola Timeyin are putting Africa’s spirits market on the international map. As best friends and co-founders of Spearhead Spirits, they’re not just showcasing fresh takes on classic tipples through African ingredients, but are also crucially promoting greater diversity in the drinks industry – especially among brand owners and innovators. ‘We believe it is time for African spirits to sit on the world stage and give consumers a taste of the finest craft and quality, directly from the source of humanity itself, Africa,’ the duo write on their website. Most recently, they have received £2.5m ($3m, €3.02m) to pursue further expansion into the American drinks market.

Among its premium products, the baobab fruit takes centre stage. Spearhead Spirits’ Vusa Vodka is made from African sugar cane grown in the Kwazulu-Natal province of South Africa, which is later filtered through the shells of baobab fruit to give it a crisp finish. The Bayab Gin, meanwhile, uses locally grown wheat, locally sourced juniper berries, coriander, cinnamon and orange peel, with its main botanical the baobab fruit, which is blended with water from South Africa’s Midlands Kwazulu-Natal.

Left: Bedroom 6 by Rhys Osborne, Los Angeles. Right: Finematter, UK.

Travel & Hospitality : Rhys Osborne

Combatting loneliness with absinthe-fuelled private parties

In the wake of lockdowns and people seeking more meaningful connections and experiences, many cities have seen the revival of louche-feeling speakeasies as spaces for strangers to meet and converse. At just 24 years old, Rhys Osborne is pushing things further by creating Bedroom 6, a clandestine social space operating in Los Angeles and New York that puts absinthe at the heart of goings on.

Created during a house party at Osborne’s own home, while he was studying at the University of Southern California, Bedroom 6 is a response to the loneliness and disconnection many of his peers felt during the pandemic. ‘I had an idea of creating a speakeasy inside the party, in my bedroom. It was all decked out with vintage furnishings including an absinthe fountain, and I saw how it gave people the chance to experience something new and meet people and have a meaningful face-to-face interaction – it was magic,’ he says. To keep an air of excitement and intrigue, the only way people can book into one of his modern-day absinthe parties is to directly message Bedroom 6 on Instagram and join a waiting list. Those who are successful sign a pre-party liability waiver – a sure sign that anything goes.

Luxury : Caroline Chalmer

Creating a fully circular fine jewellery retail platform

Finematter represents a new generation of fine jewellery companies that recognise the potential for luxury to be circular, more creative and certified. Under the stewardship of Caroline Chalmer, its co-founder and CEO, Finematter has evolved beyond selling accessibly priced fine jewellery from a global roster of designers, to recently becoming a mission-orientated, circular company. ‘We’re taking a huge leap forward in our mission to make the jewellery industry radically better,’ explains Chalmer. ‘Finematter [is now] the only place to buy, renew, recycle and resell real jewellery – making jewellery the first 100% circular consumer product.’

Customers are able to buy items from Finematter, but also send in their own unworn or unwanted jewellery, which can be resold by Finematter or traded for vouchers to use on the site, while Finematter recycles any precious metals or gemstones for use in new designs. Underpinning this circular strategy is the Finematter Digital Certificate – an independently verified, standardised and immutable record of provenance, which Chalmer says creates a whole new level of trust and transparency in the jewellery industry, ‘a notoriously opaque and fragmented space'.

‘We’re taking a huge leap forward in our mission to make the jewellery industry radically better.’
Caroline Chalmer, co-founder and CEO, Finematter
The Giving Movement in collaboration with Yoox, Dubai

Fashion : Dominic Nowell-Barnes

Using charity to magnify Middle Eastern streetwear

Founded in 2020 and growing out of Dubai, The Giving Movement is a locally made streetwear brand proving the potential that regional labels have to appeal to more conscious consumers. Created by entrepreneur Dominic Nowell-Barnes, the brand offers basics with a twist – think activewear, loungewear and sandals – with items featuring the brand name in both Arabic calligraphy and English, a nod to its multicultural identity and target audience.

Recognising just how large the streetwear market is – and with this, the potential to use customers’ shopping habits for good – The Giving Movement donates £3.38 ($4, €4) from every item sold to two charities, Dubai Cares and Harmony House in India, in its own words, ‘using streetwear to champion sustainability and slowly [transform] the world’. According to Vogue Business, The Giving Movement has grown rapidly since its launch and now employs 110 people. It has also sold more than 133,000 units since 2020, with plans to expand further globally.

Retail : Tariq Musa

Taking Mexico’s B2B wholesale business online

With more people seeking to understand where the products they buy are sourced, who made them and how, Miferia is transforming Mexico’s business-to-business (B2B) wholesale market by connecting retailers in the country with domestic indie brands, and with this, the stories and provenance behind their products.

Offering items across categories such as jewellery, home décor, food and drink, and cosmetics, Miferia was founded by Tariq Musa with the ambition to help retailers to bring their inventory relationships online, expand their product selection and get more favourable credit terms for orders. Musa also wants to solve the issue of selling online in Mexico – he notes that over 90% of retail in Mexico still takes place in just 2m physical stores, and fewer than 1% of B2B transactions have moved online, despite the global acceleration of e-commerce. Once a retailer is registered with Miferia it can view wholesale pricing for more than 5,000 individual items from 500 brands, simply shopping as they would for clothes or homeware online, except they’re ordering for their own stores, rounded off with free shipping.

Left: David Orlic, co-founder of Anyone, Europe. Right: HÄN, UK.

Media & Tech : David Orlic

Connecting people via an audio advice network

Imagine calling anyone in the world to ask for advice. That’s the premise behind Anyone, a platform co-created by David Orlic that gives people exactly five-minute phone calls in which they receive advice. Anyone is the product of several converging social trends: the rise of audio as a medium of communication, the growing global market for talking therapy, the rise of bite-size learning platforms, and the time-pressed lives that many people lead.

By championing convenience, Anyone’s non-visual interface also seeks to be less threatening, making micro-mentoring more accessible for both users and givers. ‘Our belief is that there are a lot of five-minute problems that we could be solving – whereas there are a lot of 30- or 60-minute problems that have solutions designed for them already. So we’re kind of building this for those conversations that aren’t happening,’ Orlic tells Tech Crunch. There’s also potential, Orlic notes, for Anyone to become a sounding board for personal concerns – something that could connect people with advice if they aren’t able to speak to friends or family. ‘[Some] people will call a lot of people and ask them basically the same question or bounce ideas… it’s like building an advisory board for yourself.’

Youth : Ella Boucht

Connecting generations through a queer history archive

As a co-founder of HÄN, Ella Boucht is building an archive dedicated to the history and creativity of dyke, lesbian, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming communities, seeking to fill the gaps and voids in queer history. Boucht co-created HÄN in 2020 as a way to capture and share queer stories, and spotlight the communities and complexities that many people felt at the time – as well as past and present. Of note, HÄN seeks to provide room for a new generation of queer people to explore their identities, and that of others, determining their own bodies, choices and lifestyles.

Existing both online and as a physical publication, the first edition of HÄN is a 64-page book that documents the modern queer and LGBT+ culture in London, featuring interviews, poems and black-and-white portrait photography of couples, sex workers, drag kings and even a martial artist. Online, HÄN seeks to be open-source and accessible for all, ensuring that infinite numbers of people can access the archive and, in future, help curate it.

‘Our belief is that there are a lot of five-minute problems that we could be solving’
David Orlic, co-founder, Anyone

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