🏎 Formula One’s Race Towards Sustainability

Jamie’s career took a defining turn when he joined Honda Racing F1, a sport driven by milliseconds and cutting-edge innovation. While many industries hesitate to embrace sustainability due to concerns over cost and complexity, F1’s relentless pursuit of efficiency provided a unique testing ground.

🚀 Key Sustainability Challenges in F1:

• Carbon Fibre Waste: Unlike metals, carbon fibre is notoriously difficult to recycle, leading to excessive waste.
• Energy-Intensive Logistics: The sport’s global calendar requires frequent international transport, increasing emissions.
• High-speed R&D vs. Sustainability Priorities: Development cycles in F1 are lightning-fast, often leaving little room for long-term environmental considerations.

Rather than seeing these as roadblocks, Jamie recognised that the culture of optimisation in F1 could be leveraged to embed sustainability.

“In Formula One, innovation is non-negotiable. If you apply that same mindset to sustainability, you stop seeing it as a limitation and start seeing it as a way to push performance forward.”

Some of the key innovations he helped implement included:

✅ Carbon Fibre Recycling Trials – exploring methods to repurpose discarded materials.
✅ Waterless Vehicle Cleaning – reducing water use across logistics operations.
✅ Sustainable Branding – shifting team sponsorships towards companies with strong environmental credentials.

🔄 Bringing Circularity to Automotive Manufacturing

After F1, Jamie transitioned to Jaguar Land Rover, where the challenge was not speed, but scale. Unlike the bespoke world of motorsport, automotive production is about mass efficiency—meaning sustainability solutions need to work across millions of vehicles.

🌿 Key Circular Economy Strategies at JLR:

• Closed-loop aluminium recycling – melting down old vehicles to create new ones, reducing raw material demand.
• Lightweighting initiatives – using composite materials to lower vehicle weight and improve fuel efficiency.
• Reducing embodied carbon in interiors – incorporating sustainable textiles and recycled plastics.

“Sustainability at scale requires a different kind of engineering—one that considers the full lifecycle of a product, not just its performance on day one.”

This systems-thinking approach laid the groundwork for his next challenge: applying sustainability in an industry where durability and design reign supreme—luxury flooring.

🏢 Re-engineering Flooring for a Sustainable Future

Today, Jamie leads sustainability at Karndean Designflooring, a global leader in high-end vinyl flooring. Flooring presents a unique sustainability challenge: it needs to be durable, aesthetically flexible, and cost-effective—often conflicting with recyclability and material transparency.

🏗 Sustainability Challenges in Flooring:

• Plastics & Chemical Use – PVC-based products must meet high safety and durability standards while minimising environmental impact.
• End-of-life Waste – Most flooring materials are difficult to recycle due to adhesives and composite layers.
• Carbon Footprint – Reducing emissions across sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics.

To tackle these issues, Jamie is focused on:

✅ Developing closed-loop recycling schemes – ensuring old flooring products don’t end up in landfill.
✅ Innovating with bio-based materials – exploring alternatives to fossil fuel-derived components.
✅ Enhancing product transparency – giving consumers a clear understanding of material origins and impact.

Unlike industries where sustainability is externally mandated, Jamie is working to shift mindsets internally—making sustainability a proactive business advantage rather than a reactive compliance measure.

“If sustainability isn’t built into product design from the start, you’re always playing catch-up. We’re changing that.”

🎯 The Formula for Fast-Track Sustainability

Across F1, automotive, and flooring, Jamie’s approach remains the same:

🏁 Embed sustainability in R&D – don’t treat it as a bolt-on after products are developed.
🏁 Focus on efficiency gains – sustainability should drive business value, not just reduce impact.
🏁 Push for circularity – products should be designed with their end-of-life in mind.

His journey proves that the most competitive industries—those that move the fastest—can also lead the way in sustainability.

“Sustainability isn’t a barrier to performance. In fact, when done right, it drives better results across the board.”

💡 From Tech Corporates to Purpose-Driven Innovation

Julien’s story is one of progressive realisation — sustainability was not always the primary focus, but it became the driving force behind Advizzo’s creation.

👉 Early career in corporate tech giants like Oracle — focused on product, sales, and process-heavy work.
👉 A pivotal shift came when Julien joined Opower, a pioneering US energy efficiency startup, which opened his eyes to purpose-driven technology.
👉 Inspired, Julien co-founded Advizzo in 2015 — focusing on helping utilities and their customers reduce water and energy consumption using behavioural science and smart data.

“We didn’t just build a platform — we built a whole new segment in water efficiency, where few were focusing back then.”

⚡️ The Reality of Building a Sustainable SaaS Startup

Julien was refreshingly candid about the realities of founding a sustainability-focused startup. Far from the glamorous tech unicorn narrative, his story highlights the grit required to survive.

Key Challenges Faced:

💰 Raising money with no product — “We went unpaid for eight months, with no salary, building out of nothing.”
😓 Stress and health impacts — “There was a point where the pressure to meet payroll landed me in the hospital. No entrepreneur talks about that enough.”
⚖️ Balancing product innovation with regulatory navigation — Sustainability isn’t just about having a great product; you need the policy landscape to align too.

“Startups in sustainability often forget — the best product in the world won’t succeed if the regulatory environment isn’t pushing the market in the right direction.”

🛠️ Building in a Market That Doesn’t Exist

A recurring theme was the sheer difficulty of creating a market from scratch. Water efficiency wasn’t high on the agenda when Advizzo started, so Julien and his co-founder had to educate, advocate, and sell all at once.

🚧 Barriers they faced:

👉 Lack of awareness in the UK about the importance of behavioural water saving.
👉 Minimal regulatory support compared to energy efficiency, which already had established mandates in the US.
👉 Resistance from utilities that saw behavioural programmes as a ‘nice to have’ rather than essential.

“We were asking utilities to invest in saving water — a resource they are used to billing for. That’s a difficult cultural shift.”

⚖️ Regulation: The Underrated Growth Driver

Julien spoke at length about the role of regulation in sustainability success. Advizzo’s growth accelerated when:

👉They hired a regulatory expert to help shape water-saving policy in the UK.
👉They aligned Advizzo’s value proposition directly to emerging regulatory requirements.
👉They understood that policy shifts create whole new revenue streams for startups if you position yourself correctly.

“Regulation creates the conditions for growth — without it, you’re trying to sell innovation to customers who aren’t required to change.”

🚀 Pro Tip: If you’re building a sustainability business, embed regulatory engagement into your business plan from day one.

🔍 Learn from Others: Embracing ‘Graveyard Diligence’

A standout takeaway was Julien’s use of ‘graveyard diligence’ — a term coined in a fashion sustainability article, which he wholeheartedly embraced.

💀 What it means: Actively studying why similar startups failed and using that intelligence to shape your own approach.

“We saw US startups drowning in endless pilots — never reaching scale. So we deliberately moved to full-scale projects, even if they started small.”

✅ Key Learnings from Competitor Failures:

• Avoid over-reliance on short-term pilots.
• Focus on landing longer-term contracts.
• Build tech that adapts to evolving regulations.
• Don’t chase grants that create false markets.

🔄 The Emotional & Practical Realities of Exit

Julien was open about the emotional complexity of selling Advizzo after nearly a decade of building the company.

⚙️ Why Sell?

• A new round of funding (Series B) would require another five years of high-intensity scaling.
• Joining a larger company (Calisen Group) provided access to sales teams, infrastructure, and complementary products, enabling faster market access.
• Calisen’s existing focus on smart metering and decarbonisation aligned well with Advizzo’s mission.

🧠 The Transition Experience

“It’s a weird adjustment going from being in control to being part of a larger machine. The stress doesn’t disappear, it just changes shape. The hardest part was letting go — trusting others to understand what made Advizzo successful.”

🚀 Despite the challenges, Julien sees partnership with Calisen as a smart, values-aligned route to scale.

✨ Final Reflection: What Needs to Change in Sustainable Business?

When asked the magic wand question, Julien’s answer wasn’t about faster exits or better funding — it was about impact.

“The biggest frustration was knowing we could do so much more — but being limited by short-term corporate thinking and lack of regulatory urgency.”

🔥 Julien’s Wish for the Future:

👉Faster, more ambitious regulation that drives sustainability initiatives forward.
👉Corporate leaders who genuinely understand that long-term value comes from embedding sustainability, not treating it as optional.

“We didn’t just want to make money — we wanted to save water, improve resilience, and leave a positive legacy. That’s what sustainability startups should be aiming for.”

🎯 Key Takeaways for Sustainability Founders

✅ Embrace regulatory strategy — don’t just build product, shape the market.
✅ Study why similar startups failed — don’t repeat the same mistakes.
✅ Build for long-term partnerships, not quick wins.
✅ Accept stress as part of the process — but find ways to manage it.
✅ Stay true to your impact mission — but be commercially smart about how you achieve it.

Julien’s journey through the trenches of sustainable entrepreneurship offers a goldmine of practical insight for anyone looking to launch or scale a purpose-driven business. As Julien put it:

“You don’t build a sustainability startup to make millions. You do it to make a difference — but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the business fundamentals.”