Lucy Shea
CEO | Futerra
Lucy Shea is the CEO of Futerra, the change agency.
Futerra isn’t just a logical sustainability consultancy or a magical creative agency; it is both. Futerra uses magic and logic to help big brands and major foundations create change. Shea joined Futerra in 2003. She has grown the business from a start-up of 5 to a global agency with teams in London, New York and Stockholm. Futerra is majority female owned and run, and a proud B-Corp.
Shea is an expert in the business of fashion and sustainability. She helped Kering successfully launch their ground-breaking EP&L (Environmental Profit and Loss) in 2015, for which Kering was dubbed “Luxury’s Activist” by the New York Times. She works closely with C&A Foundation on articulating their big idea of transforming the fashion industry, and making it happen.
Her particular passion is how fashion makes sustainability desirable. Over 10 years ago, Shea and the Futerra team radically reimagined garment takeback and recycling with the creation of Swishing, the global clothes swapping movement. Shea and Swishing have featured in and on the BBC, Vogue, Glamour, the Daily Mail, CNN and many others.
Then, in 2008, she co-founded the RE:Fashion Awards. It was a small but important step in our collective journey to make sustainable fashion a growth industry, with one-off pieces created by leading designers like Vivienne Westwood and Bora Aksu, and awards given to sustainable fashion’s pioneers, including From Somewhere and Pachacuti.
Shea sat on the board of the Ethical Fashion Forum from 2009 to 2016. In 2014, she joined the Global Organising Committee of Fashion Revolution. This core team leads the worldwide movement that calls for greater transparency within the fashion industry and reaches millions of people every year on the anniversary of Rana Plaza.
Apart from fashion, Shea has long experience in persuading people to take up sustainable lifestyles. She was a founder member of the UN’s Sustainable Lifestyles Taskforce in 2005, when she authored Communicating Sustainability. This special UN Environment Programme report has been downloaded over 1 million times from the UNEP website, and remains one of the organisation’s most read reports.
Shea is a firm believer in the power of brands to create change. She gave D&AD’s White Pencil keynote in 2013 on this topic. That same year she published Futerra’s Change-maker Cards, which provide guidance to brands on how to use behavioural science to drive pro environmental and social change. She runs regular masterclasses on how brands can build billion dollar businesses by imagining a better world, then making it happen.
