Last year, Rainbow Productions won three Chamber of Commerce Awards: Best Large Independent Business, Best Creative Business, and Best Business of 2022. This year, the team has its sights trained on the Best Sustainability Award.
This is the target being set by managing director, Simon Foulkes, who is placing sustainability at the top of the company’s initiatives for 2023.
Coinciding with Rainbow Productions’ 40th anniversary – 40 years of fluff, as it calls it – the team is bringing sustainability to the forefront by establishing an in-house Green Team to collect data and assess the trajectory of the business’ lean into impact reduction this year.
The initiative will see Rainbow Productions employ the efforts of Sophie Elliot, a third year student of the University of Greenwich, who will carry out her dissertation in Business with Finance by interning at the character costume specialist. Here she will evaluate Rainbow Productions on how the business can most efficiently restructure and implement its sustainability strategy to increase performance.
Sophie’s report will look to complete four objectives, the first being to assess the company’s current impact, procedures, and culture. It will then identify the five most impactful projects Rainbow productions can undertake – dependent on resources – while reviewing the activity of competitors and consumer trends in sustainability.
The report’s fourth objective will be to identify return on investments into sustainability and efficiencies that will “give cost savings to offset the price of employing a sustainability manager.”
“Last year we were lucky enough to win three Chamber of Commerce Awards: best Large Independent Business, Best Creative Business, and lastly the top award of Best Business 2022,” said Simon Foulkes, Rainbow Productions’ md.
“This year, I want to set a target that we win the Best Sustainability Award.”
The company’s announcement coincides with 2023 plans to ‘ramp up character appearances at retail venues’ throughout the year, following the major boost it saw from the return of shoppers to the high street in 2022. Rainbow now expects almost half its planned character appearances to be taking place in retail venues.
