Cintia Nunes
Cintia Nunes is the Director of The Mills Fabrica, which focuses on sustainability, impact, and innovation in the techstyle and agrifood tech space. She has worked in strategy, insights, and marketing at a FMCG MNC, a Series A apparel startup, and a social impact led platform. She holds a BSc Economics degree from the University College London and is a strong advocate for cross-sector collaborations.
In the investment world, it's tough to report on the impact. We get the ESG or exclusion list, and ESG metrics and the sustainability theme or the kind of impact investment that you get by strategic philanthropy, but impact is definitely in the eyes of the person who owns that resource, which leaves a lot of room for debate. I don't think there is a straightforward answer that can give you as to what is the best model. Because it is such a complicated topic, everyone has their own passion area and their impact area. And so I think it's also just a matter of always asking why you do certain things.
— Cintia Nunes
Interview transcript
Can you do a quick introduction about yourself? Tell us about your background and how did you get into this field?
I'm Cintia, I'm currently leading the Mills Fabrica here in Hong Kong. We also have a branch in London. So a bit about my background: I have a hybrid of different experiences. It all began with a very standard corporate job at Procter & Gamble, where I was leveraging consumer psychology to encourage people to purchase more of their brands in different markets, with a focus on sales and marketing. I did that for seven years and gained a lot of great learning and basic skill sets from the corporate world.
So what brought me to what I do now? Well, back when I was at UCL, I did economics as a degree and there was a lot of economic theory and frameworks that left me with questions and no answers. Particularly, on the point of profit maximisation or utility maximisation, as if we were born to just make money and get more happiness from that, which is not true. And I know that economics is often over-stereotyped and generalised in how it views the world.
I came across the book, "Creating a World Without Poverty" by Muhammad Yunus, and that was kind of my magnet that really broadened my view in terms of understanding that you can actually do business and make both profit and purpose at the same time. I joined Procter & Gamble in 2011 and then took a break from Hong Kong and went to follow Yunus in 2014, and met him in person. I was so mind-blown. I met so many different social entrepreneurs. At the time, social entrepreneurship and social innovation was all about job-making. That was 2014, when Professor Yunus was emphasising entrepreneurship and why creating jobs instead of seeking for a job was the beginning of social innovation.
Of course, now there are a lot of different interpretations and talks about social entrepreneurship, but rewinding back then, that was kind of the beginning. When I came back to Hong Kong, I thought that maybe I should stay in the corporate world for some time to learn more about businesses, because I thought it was not yet the time to jump directly into social enterprises in Hong Kong, as I didn't know enough. Plus, I was not yet fully convinced about it.
In July 2017, I left my job because I really wanted to explore what work could bring me. Of course, my salary paid, but on top of that, was there more that I could explore? So I left without knowing what was next, because that was when I got married and then joined two startups. I couldn't find the answer there. But what I picked up was how to start something from scratch. So, as you know, in the corporate world, you are part of a big engine, whereas in a startup, you are the one running the engine. So, entrepreneurship definitely seemed like a very important skill set, but startups were not my answer, because there were also a lot of integrity issues. There was a lot of bending in places where I did not agree with, and I think that was one of the training experiences until I went to Impact, which was a community with a lot of impact organisations. I was helping the team to develop this model from the co-working space to the community, so now there are 100 impact organisations in Hong Kong, from the Tortoise to Phase Two. Part two was investment, there were also partnerships, and then there was the ESG service.
Now, my mission is accomplished, because I also felt that there was a lack of resources available at the time, so I was just exploring. Business might have ended up with me getting a job as a project manager. In a nutshell, what we do is we leverage the resources that we have to make positive changes in industries. One is the textile industry, two is the food and agriculture industry, both of which are heavily polluting if you stick with conventional practices.
We have a basic investment fund, so we invest in early-stage startups from seed to A-round. Our success rate ranges from 30K to up to 2 million. There are a few considerations we make when investing in startups: financials, of course, but also impact. We've mapped out what the key impact areas are based on the textile and food agriculture industries, and we know which parts of the entire value chain are causing negative impacts.
Besides funding, entrepreneurs need more than just money to grow their businesses. So, we connect them with connections and provide advisory services. Additionally, our marketing team does a lot of content and PR to increase awareness and help them attract people with more resources. We connect entrepreneurs with investors, brands, retailers, manufacturers, research institutions, universities, and schools.
Finally, we have our spaces. We have our working space, event space, and a retail store called Fabric X. Last year, we mapped it and it became our education hub. The retail store is our educational home, closest to all consumers, and lets them learn about the technologies that are assisting nowadays in replacing conventional practices which are polluting.
How would you define impacts in your own words?
It's a great question. I'm sure everyone has their own interpretation of what impact is, but I think it's something that has to be planned and executed intentionally in order to bring about positive change, be it environmental or social. Now, I'm stressing on the execution part because unless it really happens, there won't be any impact. And that also needs to be measured, because you can't measure it if you don't know whether something has happened or whether you are managing it properly. So in general, we ensure positive change, either environmental or social, and it has to be intentional. When we talk about positionality, if it didn't exist or didn't happen, then the status quo would continue to either worsen the situation or stay the same. Our point on positionality is very important for impact and how we could generate models for social innovation. These models could be anything from charities to businesses to investments, so it doesn't necessarily have to be a business model. We need to be able to measure the impact of these models in order to generate positive change.
How would you evaluate the potential impacts of your work or investment?
Right now, there is no standard approach for assessing impact. However, there are different approaches. For our investments, we have identified key metrics to improve the state of the textile and food/agriculture industries. For upcoming investments from this year onward, we will ask for impact metrics. We have a list, but it takes time to align with the startup, and operational barriers can be an issue. Startups are often extremely early stage and have small teams. Therefore, we invest in the right people with a growth mindset so that they understand why we ask for data and impact.
Going forward, we will require startups we invest in to provide impact data that aligns with their businesses. This data should not be difficult to collect, but it should be sufficient to measure and assess whether they follow our agreement. This year, we are piloting our impact measurement accountability exercise. We will produce our first impact report, partnering with five startups from our portfolio and some funds. We invest in both direct investments and funds.
We also measure impact through non-investment approaches. For example, we host workshops at our store and track the changes. Last year, from July to December, we featured ocean plastics. Kids could bring plastics from home, do beach cleanups, and learn to sort them. Then, they used a machine to shred the type two or type five plastics into small pellets or pieces. These pieces were then melted in a second machine at 240 degrees, and morphed into a new product. 1300 participants were surveyed after the workshop, with results showing a significant increase in awareness of plastic's health impacts. They also learned about the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle model, and considered buying or upcycling waste. This data gives us hope that even retail can do education.
From January to July of this year, we featured a new thing called biomaterials. These are degradable materials that can be used in various industries, such as: textiles, fashion, furniture and airlines. The workshop was developed in a lab team and they are now using egg shells to create tea rooms. The egg shells were collected from the restaurant next door. Angela was also part of this process. In each workshop, a pre- and post-survey is conducted to track awareness and understanding of the issue, as well as the impact of circularity. But of course as you can see investment and non-investment related activities would have a different way to measure because of its nature.
Can you share an example of an impact initiative that worked great? What made it work well?
I'll stick with the example I just shared. So, how we have revamped our retail store to do education. So, as I said, many people just took the stand as an investment idea which is my passion, but also I strongly believe that retail has a very strong influence and power to change the minds and mindsets of consumers and the general public. In this case, anyone who is in sustainability or impact cannot walk away from the fact that they are also an educator. I don't know if people think like that but at least I do.
And so, as an investor, the more we work with stores, the more we see that there is an imbalance with the supply side and demand side, because the markets are just not there in terms of understanding the challenge we have in terms of dealing with the whole supply chain and value chain. If you forget about the zero sum things and pretty much that's done, you know, ultimately there are people who are putting money in.
So, because we saw that there was a gap and a challenge, we revamped our retail store to become this place. Before that, it was just really a place where we showcased technologies and startups, but we always got feedback from people who said, "Oh, I should feel like it's very distant from me," which is understandable.
And so, right now, the three components are retail space, education, and a workshop experience. The retail space is often interpreted or translated as a beautiful display where you can touch, smell, engage, play around, and be very tactile. The workshop experience is the discovery phase where you can get hands-on experience related to the movie. And then finally, of course, reach out, because it's important to also show that you can take action at the end of the day.
My KPI behind the store is not necessarily sales, it's how many people we can reach out to, and also make people realise and lead that their daily lives from what they wear, what they eat, how they travel, etc. have direct positive or negative impacts to the environment. And ultimately, this is best done in a retail store.
So, the retail part is the action part, but then education and the workshop experience is learning. And I think, just from the example I gave in terms of ocean materials, we actually weren't expecting it because the data is substantial. We're talking about 50%, 60%, 70% of the participants actually learning, raising awareness, and saying that they will consider buying a type of material for now and for what they want to consume.
And so, there is a very strong avenue for us to do education and I felt that that was a great success. I wish I had done more campaigns, but we are on the second campaign now. Yeah, I think having revolutionised and given a new meaning and definition to retail is great.
Can you walk me through the collaborators in the project?
From the beginning, my team and I have been in the processing state. We worked with an NGO to deliver a workshop and managed the retail part for several brands to ensure that every product and even skills level were not greenwashing. We also engaged a designer for the VM side of the retail space. After launch, we engaged with media, companies, schools, universities, investors, and provided tours. Everyone became intrigued by the topic and ready-made collaborations were triggered. We realised that having this platform space was beneficial, as we could have many dialogues and show people that our concept was a reality they could touch and feel. The dialogue part was very key for the entire process, and this was also the case with schools and universities.
Can you give an example of a company/ brand that you partner with?
Last year, we worked with The Ocean Material. They use plastic bags and bottles to create jewellery. Resolar use plastics they find in the sea, like fishnets, to make sunglasses. There were a few brands we featured, all of which upcycle plastics. Rising Lotus was one, and [...] was another. They turn fishnets into [...] and use nylon for their garments, like yoga pants.
Can you walk me through how you collaborate with different parties?
Companies showcase their brands and their products, so we would send a few pieces to showcase in our store. For every sale we make, we earn a commission, the brands do not need to pay rent. So, we kind of aligned with the commissioning model. NGOs provide workshops to the general public; I'd say they may not necessarily have customers, because some visitors we actually provide for free, or some pay - it depends on the school, and organisation. We also featured content from the company that sponsored the NGO. The sponsoring company has these, solar-powered boats that pick up plastics from the Aberdeen area and then pick up the plastics and give them to another NGO called New Life Plastic. So, that's actually two NGOs we work with: New Life Plastic was the NGO that treats the feedstock of the plastics, and then another NGO called Ocean Materials. They were the guys who did the workshop.
What are the key blockers that need to change in order to create impacts and at what scale?
I think it is the mindsets. I felt that, in general, the industry in terms of overall social innovation was not as collaborative as I would have liked. We have businesses that we cannot be in competition with because we don't have the same resources, so I always believe strongly in collaboration. And I felt that, in general, or across different stakeholders, we wished that there was more collaboration in general.
Secondly, I thought that there was also a lack of resources for the allocation of different areas, be it models and business models that are not suitable for certain funding, but still go for those funding. What happens then is that you get chased for things that you're not ready to provide, and that kind of distracts them from delivering the impact that they've been wishing to deliver.
To put it in a more mild way, I thought that there was a lack of understanding of different funding models for different impacts. That's the second thing. The third one is that, in general, social innovation and social businesses should not feel that because they are making an impact, people should buy their stuff. We're not charities, we are businesses. So I think that is also a reason why certain social businesses and this model is not working the way they expected it to, even though they felt like their model was perfect.
What makes it hard for people to collaborate?
I think just in general, across different stakeholders across profitable nonprofit, in the capitalist world people are very fixated on the idea that there's always competition and that's kind of engineered into how we think business. Now. I think impact is very much a thing of the nature that requires you to kind of break that cycle in order to really impact because the answer is there is no one organisation or one individual that can make the change. You need to work with different people, different organisations and industry change. And so having that competitive mindset is the biggest blocker, I think.
If there was a magic wand, how would you use it to create a positive impact at scale? And how would and what would you use it to remove? What kind of blockers
It's really the system. Could our DNA be more collaborative? I mean, thinking about how we actually began these communities and you know, how we actually why the human kind of communities became who we are today is because we worked as a community for a while and now it just seems like because of capitalism and lack of resources, we turn ourselves into anomalies that we chase after profit. If we see values, different types of values as a whole, then maybe the world will be very different.
If we have to be more practical, then I'll say maybe, education, even in kindergarten, we definitely have to talk about topics on empathy and compassion. We lack the ability and probably that's also how the human brain cannot do it if we're not we're just not able to process things that are too far away from us and not being able to kind of see our relationship and our connection with how we impact the environment is what the human brain lacks. And so, say for example, if we don't live by the sea, then we probably haven't seen the plastic but the problem is there. But then, on a daily scale, every day, we use straws, glass, and plastic cones, whatever it is, and we felt that as soon as we confer that way it's all done that were very long. So I think it's also an inability to see the relationships and connections that we have, whether positively or negatively to, to the environment and even even if closer to the community society.
How do you address the challenge of investors being sceptical in the impact space?
In the investment world, it's tough to report on the impact. We get the ESG or exclusion list, and ESG metrics and the sustainability theme or the kind of impact investment that you get by strategic philanthropy, but impact is definitely in the eyes of the person who owns that resource, which leaves a lot of room for debate. I don't think there is a straightforward answer that can give you as to what is the best model. Because it is such a complicated topic, everyone has their own passion area and their impact area. And so I think it's also just a matter of always asking why you do certain things.
Yes, we've been working with investors and different investors have different thoughts. You have this whole different spectrum, you have all these nuances. You have people who strongly believe that investment is a tool that makes money and to them ESG exclusion is just something that they need to apply it to. At least that does kind of pivot from our resources to a way for negative impact, at least. But I think you were talking about making water, creating positive impact and to get about ESG issues, just basic hygiene factors, right.
Yeah, and then like, kind of the positive impact part, even that you have nuances, and then the different verticals. I mean, who could say that gender is more important than education and education. And so I think it's a collaborative process because we all need to learn from each other. And so there's never like, "Oh, this is the best way." I mean, so far from a lot of the VC firms that I entirely admire their work, like kind of how they rationalise their investments have this framework on the why, and then the how, and not the other way around. That's a mindset that is kind of what we need more, so we'll discuss more of the "whys" and then the "hows" instead of just I think a lot of people just go back to education. Why, what is wrong with education? And so you get a lot of messages that in a toggle have not been aimed at Tech, content, clean tech, whatever it is a gender lens and then as soon as you have the "why" you then straightaway be able to feel and understand and learn how this impact because the "why" is really from the person who places the money. I think that is always the key question and not many.
Do you have another example of your most favourite innovative impact events, projects, and what makes it so great in your eyes?
I was involved in a project with teenagers. Our goal was to revamp the youth centre to become a way to illustrate mental well-being, like a tree that represents their personalities. During the process, we interviewed 500 young people between the ages of 14 and 34 to learn about how they deal with stress, depression, and difficult situations. We also wanted to understand why it is so challenging to deal with stress in Hong Kong, which is often due to a lack of space. They shared stories about how they don't have a private space to cry, and how they end up going to public places at 2am where they feel uncomfortable and unsafe. We also interviewed social workers who worked at the centre, and I was amazed to find that what they said was exactly what the young people said. They completely understood the needs of the young people and knew how to speak to them to make them feel better.
After gathering insights from the interviews, my job was to translate them into design and brief the interior designer. We came up with three redesigned centres that were fit for young people. Throughout the 12-18 month project, we procured furniture with young people. We went back to the young people and social workers for feedback and made adjustments accordingly. By the time the project was launched, we saw the happy faces of the young people, and it was priceless.
This was one of the most impactful projects I have worked on. Going back to measuring impact, sometimes you cannot measure because there were a lot of emotions. It's something that cannot be measured. I mean, you can't just go around taking pictures of their faces. It kind of goes against what you're usually rationally with. It was a human-to-human measure that cannot be quantified. The young people felt like they belonged and that the centres were designed for them. We also came up with creative ideas like the juice station, where young people could mix different flavours of juice to express their emotions. This made it easier for social workers to communicate with them and engage with them in a less straightforward way. Seeing the happy faces of the young people and the social workers involved in the project was very impactful for me.
Is there anything that you would like to share?
I hope that the next wave of innovation involves both big companies and corporates. When talking about blockers, I would rephrase this to say that one of the biggest changes we are seeing is how social innovation, startups, and technology can be incorporated into large companies to bring about change. It is only possible to make a small-scale change with a single startup, but if the solution could be applied to other big businesses, that could bring about a change in the entire industry.
We often discuss scale. It's not just related to a particular solution or technology, but also how the major players recognize the need for innovation to be successful. There is a shift in mindset from focusing on individuals to realising that companies must embrace these advancements to thrive.
And so I think one of the most exciting things I've seen in the past few three years is that it's no longer a wish or like, "Oh, I feel good." It's more like a need, and it's a must. And so there's urgency in big companies to find innovators to work with, and there's also always urgency on the innovative side and how and who they can collaborate with. The two are now finally realising that they need to work together. And so as an investor and as a platform where we can really facilitate this, this is one of the biggest lessons in the next five to 10 years. And so then we can talk about scary terms of impact, and how we can then negotiate terms and the business, particularly in the space of, for example, sustainability. Could you not think much wider, even about competitive use? It's like asking the brands not to be exclusive with the technologies. Some do, some ask you like, "Well, I think about sustainability." So you're trying to kind of change the mindsets of these topics as well. And you probably just need to not be afraid to speak up sometimes, but I think every time when I'm on panels, I also take the opportunity to speak up and just say, "Hey, guys, we should just be more open with how we operate our business. So if we all want to thrive, then we should respect these innovations and technologies rather than thinking that 'Oh, remember who has the money so listen to me.' I don't hope that the world doesn't work that way anymore. And that kind of also goes hand in hand with the competition, as well. So if we all want to thrive, then we should respect these innovations and technologies.