"We’ve come to a crossroad as a company ourselves. Our old way, of just making beautiful things, isn’t the best use of our expertise anymore. We need to use our skills to create beautiful, desirable products of tomorrow that have responsibility to the planet and to people at their core. We are living in a pivotal moment, moving from think tanks to action tanks.

In 2018 we began work on Heckfield Place, a hotel in the countryside with a more humble perspective. It's a place where people, nature, time, place, seasons, cycles – universal things that we all feel deeply and connect to instinctively – are at the core.

For us, what started as a branding project soon became much more profound. As we explored the history of the land Heckfield stands on, the nature that brings life to it and the community that surrounds it we found our eyes opened. It was a realisation that everything is connected, that what you put out into the world is what you get back.

The world is changing and so must we. From brands and organisations ‘presented by’ we are moving to how they ‘contribute to’ things, and this is exactly what Heckfield Place is about. Learning, growing, contributing.

At the same time we were also producing the second issue of our journal, To Think, which was co-edited with our responsibility advisor Siân Sutherland. The culmination of these projects had a profound and irreversible effect on our team, it was the wake-up call we needed to see differently."

Ben Parker, co-founder Made Thought