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MADRID (SPAIN), MARCH 2023. Jaime Garcia-Prieto, founder and CEO of Galeneo, was polishing the deck for the fundraising for his healthcare start-up. The seed round of €1 million would take him to the institutional A round scheduled for Q3-2024, a comfortable 18-month+ runway. His proposal to decentralize healthcare through a tech-enabled hospital@home platform offered the solution people were looking for not only in Spain but also in most advanced economies. According to a recent Economist article, the NHS, like many healthcare systems, had become a sickness service, not a health service. To live up to the promise of its name would require a shift in focus, away from hospitals to the community, from centralized treatment to community-based prevention and bedside medicine. In other words, health systems needed to be investing in smoke alarms, not fire extinguishers. In 2020, as the Covid pandemic began, Jaime envisioned the future of in-home care for patients with chronic treatment needs. In 2021, he embarked on developing a platform to coordinate bedside medical care anywhere, anytime, in minutes. Galeneo was born. By 2023, it had integrated 200+ healthcare providers (HCPs) and 11+ institutional partners in the Madrid region, enabling the provision of general high-value services outside hospital. Revenues of €1.6 million in 2023 were expected, with a growth rate of about 8% every month and net profit breakeven reached in February. Things looked positive, but there were issues around scaling fast – although Jaime had found solutions. To counter the limited availability of qualified healthcare workers, he developed the Galeneo Academy to train future in-home bedside specialists. Tech-enabled standardization reduced operational complexity through an easy-to-use app and included real-time monitoring and quality control. Finally, the whole concept of community-based bedside medicine was still nascent, which meant market participants needed to adopt original approaches. But it was a large market with great potential.

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Although Patagonia is not a player in the luxury segment per se, its track record in achieving circularity speaks volumes to luxury brands in terms of what a more mass-market brand is prepared to achieve in the circularity space and on its implications. Patagonia has discouraged overproduction and overconsumption, consistently working to create products that would never end up in a landfill. The main tenets of the company’s approach were called the five Rs. Reduce: Don’t buy what you don’t need. Repair: Fix items that still have life in them. Reuse: Sell or pass clothing on. When you’ve exhausted those options: Recycle. The last tenet, Reimagine, was a pledge to “take only what nature can replace.” Early on, Patagonia executives began investigating how they could encourage customers to reuse older clothing items that were not worn or no longer fit. Nevertheless, studies on textile circularity in general have pointed out that the practice has yet to establish sustainable economies. Large-scale reuse, repair and recycling have typically been hindered by high transportation, labor and processing costs as well as the decreasing quality and cost of new products. Furthermore, notwithstanding its status as the clothing industry’s beacon of sustainability – and billing itself as “in business to save our home planet” – Patagonia has never shied away from pursuing a high-growth, for-profit business model.

Jewelry manufacturer and retailer Pandora is one of the largest jewelry players in the world. One of the key programs in Pandora’s circularity efforts had to do with the target of sourcing 100% recycled silver and gold by 2025. Executing on this goal became a complex journey, particularly as recycling precious metals represented a supply chain in its own right. It also came with its own set of carbon impacts and environmental protection requirements. Could Pandora overcome the many constraints in operationalizing a viable circular model for silver and gold?