A listener reached out and said, you've got to get this woman on the show. She's got a really

creative resale business, actually getting inventory donated for free, and then applying

some really savvy branding and marketing to build what she calls a sustainable soft toy adoption agency.

She's saving the planet one teddy at a time from Loved Before. London, Charlotte Liebling. Welcome to The Side

Ussel Show. Thank you very much, Nick. It's lovely, lovely to be here. I'm excited for this one.

This is a big deal. Your kid outgrows their stuffies. There's probably 50 or more in the next room

over there. They're still in okay condition, most of them. And a lot of donation places won't accept them. Parents at a certain point want them out of the house,

so they end up in the landfill. I got to get rid of them some way. I can't donate them. So you come

in with love before and say, there's got to be a better way. With over 10,000 sales now, adoptions

now, beautiful branding, retail

partnerships. We'll get into all of that. But it started as a sidehouse. You're working full time.

You say there's got to be another alternative path here. Yeah, that's exactly it. I was actually

volunteering in a charity shop at the time, and I started to notice just how many

donations people were bringing in of stuffed animals, and often what a really big and sentimental

and emotional moment it was for them. But as you say, the process, as it was, is these charity

shops are really overwhelmed and thrift stores, charity shops,

op shops, same thing. And they were going straight out the back and into the bin, unfortunately,

or they were just sold as dog toys. And the memories that they came with and the love and

stories were just thrown away in that moment. And that really struck me. I kind of went from

there, really. Yeah. So you say, well, what if we could re-home these? What if we could turn this,

what is now, unfortunately, going to be garbage into give it a new life? And so what are some of the

first steps here? Well, the actual first step in that moment was for me to go home and understand that that was a wider problem than just one that I was seeing in this specific shop.

...