We Never Expected This To Change The Way We Live
There have been moments throughout this journey where I stopped and laughed at just how far we drifted from where we started. What began as an investigation into better everyday products has gradually become an investigation into almost everything else.
The way we consume, the way we design, the assumptions we accepted about convenience, the relationship between people, products and nature. Even the way I think about what it means to live well.
I didn't expect any of that.
When SunGods began, I was simply frustrated by how many of the products we use every day felt disconnected from the world around us. Designed to be replaced, designed without much thought for where they came from or where they might eventually end up.
Long before we selected our first fibre or spoke to our first manufacturer, there were more than one hundred products sitting on our five-year roadmap, everyday products we replace so frequently we rarely stop to ask why.
Looking back, I realise I was asking entirely the wrong question.
The question was never:
How do we create better products?
It was:
What would happen if we started living a little differently?
I just didn't know it yet.
Nothing Happens In Isolation
One of the biggest discoveries throughout this journey has been realising nothing happens in isolation; not in nature, manufacturing, our homes or our lives.
We tend to look at things individually; a towel, a fitted sheet, a piece of clothing or a single decision. Yet nothing arrives in our lives independently of everything else that made it possible.
Behind every product sits a landscape, behind every material sits a community and behind every decision sits another hundred that quietly influenced it long before we arrived.
The more curious I became, the more difficult I found it to separate products from people, people from nature or nature from the choices we make every day.
Everything is connected.
Curiosity Has A Habit Of Changing Where You End Up
If you have been following this journey from the beginning, you will know I have a habit of disappearing down rabbit holes. What I didn't appreciate was how deep some of them would become.
One question about fibres became conversations about regenerative agriculture. Conversations about regenerative agriculture became questions about biodiversity and farming systems. Questions about fitted sheets became conversations spanning multiple countries exploring entirely different approaches to familiar problems.
Before long, products had quietly disappeared from the centre of the conversation altogether.
What surprised me most wasn't discovering better materials or different ways of manufacturing. It was discovering how often curiosity quietly changes where you end up.
I've learnt my curiosity is rarely satisfied with a single answer. Every discovery simply introduces another question waiting patiently behind it. What started as an investigation into materials has gradually become an education in patience, interconnectedness and intentional living and I suspect we are only scratching the surface.
Building Something Different Was Never Going To Happen Alone
There are hundreds of people quietly contributing to the products we eventually bring into our homes; Farmers, Scientists, Fibre innovators, Product designers, Manufacturers, Engineers and Technicians to name a few.
There are also people I have never met in person who have nevertheless shaped the decisions we made such as subject matter experts from The Future fibres hub at Deakin University and the Uluu crowd come to mind.
One of the unexpected gifts of building SunGods has been discovering communities of people dedicating their lives to asking remarkably similar questions.
How do we do this better?
How do we do this more thoughtfully?
How do we leave things better than we found them?
I find enormous comfort in this behaviour, perhaps that's why responsibility feels less like a business decision and more like a way of living. Building something different was never going to happen in isolation and nor should it.
The Lens Has Changed
When I started SunGods, I thought I was trying to create better everyday products, then I thought I was trying to build a circular design system. Today, I am beginning to realise both answers only tell part of the story.
SunGods has become an invitation to look differently.
Differently at the products we bring into our homes, differently at the assumptions we quietly accepted, differently at our relationship with consumption, responsibility and the choices we make every day.
The products are simply where we chose to begin.
Discovery Continues
It dawned on me recently that I don't think SunGods has purely taught me how products are made, it's taught me how interconnected our choices really are. Every decision leaves something behind, every beginning creates something that follows and every choice quietly shapes the systems we are participating in, whether we realise it or not.
Perhaps conscious living isn't about becoming perfectly informed or making perfect choices after all, perhaps it's simply about becoming curious enough to pause before we make them, to ask where something came from, to wonder where it goes next and to remain open to the possibility there might be another way.
What started as an investigation into better everyday products has gradually evolved into something much bigger than I ever imagined, not because we found all the answers (we haven’t!) but because we learnt to ask better questions.
What I know for certain is this.
Everything has a beginning.
Everything has a story.
Everything leaves something behind.
And perhaps conscious living simply begins by becoming curious enough to notice.
We're only just beginning and perhaps that's the point.
The products we create, the choices we make and the lives we live are all designed with a beginning, a life and a way home.
