Dear all,

Sustainability is a topic that touches me both personally and professionally. The way I live my personal life and the way I lead this company is built strongly on the belief that we should aim to improve the way we operate and to make sure that we work towards a society where our children and their children can still be happy, healthy and successful.

Since the publication of our first sustainability report in 2017, we have continuously refined our “serious about sustainability” approach. Being a global player, we are aware that sustainability challenges need to be addressed at all levels of our supply chain. We have taken this up as our core challenge and have built a holistic strategy and a 5 year roadmap with ambitious goals and KPI’s in order to measure our progress.

Putting sustainability considerations at the centre of our company’s strategy means looking at all core business topics within our organization and along our global supply chain. Just like any major business development topic, results don’t show overnight but need a long-term management approach which we have described in our vision 2025.

We based our goals on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals because only a global focus on the same topics will really drive change. You can find our vision on these goals and how we implement them in our company on this website. Described in our vision 2025 these goals translate into three main strategic pillars: People, Products and Processes. Together with internal and external stakeholders we aim to improve our supply chain, make our products more sustainable in regards to materials and packaging and lastly improve the CO2 footprint of our operations.

Some tangible examples are the partnership we started with Prevented Ocean Plastic for the use of recycled plastics in our H2O active bottles. With Elevate NXT we have launched a completely sustainable line of corporate wear, certified from source to branding. Our objective is to reach 100% of new products with sustainable content in 2025. This is a tough goal, but in 2021 we will reach 25% of new products with sustainable content. And our product teams are fully focussed on increasing this percentage with every launch.

We believe that being serious about sustainability also means that you ask third parties to validate your efforts by certifying products and processes. The fact that we have certified PF Concept Logo Express for GOTS and GRS certified printing is something I am very proud of and is a tremendous achievement of our teams in Poland. The same goes for the FSC® certification that we recently passed in PF Concept UK Ltd. These very strict certifications on processes show the professionality of our teams throughout Europe.

Sustainability is making sure that our actions of today will not have such a negative impact that future generations cannot develop. Well, I enjoy testing our sustainable products and ideas on my children who are Millennials and Gen Z. They are already grown up and very critical in terms of sustainability. Their feedback is always very helpful and valuable to me.

We believe that people will always enjoy receiving gifts, also in the future. We enable the art of gifting. Corporate gifts and promotional products are the ambassadors of a company’s corporate image, and we want to give our end-users the assurance that a product with their company logo has been sourced and branded with people and the planet in mind.
 
Ralf Oster
Chief Executive Officer