Andy Redfern, co-founder, Ethical Superstore

Dec 6 2010 by John Hill, The Journal

Ethical Superstore's co-founder Andy Redfern has a mantra that it's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. John Hill finds out how this willingness to take a leap has shaped his career.

THERE’S a time in everyone’s life when the fur starts flying, and you can either keep your head down or stick it above the parapet.

Ethical Superstore co-founder Andy Redfern admits he generally finds himself doing the latter.

“I’m like a stick of rock”, he says. “What you see on the outside goes all the way through to the middle. If you believe in an issue, it should go into all areas of your life.

“For example, I believe optional air travel is something we should avoid, so I haven’t flown for six years. If I had to be somewhere at a certain time I’d do it, but I’ve found a way of not doing that so far.

“It’s the trips to places like Prague for a weekend of getting p****d out of your head I don’t understand. You can just do that in North Shields.”

Ethics and values have played a powerful role in the life of the Manchester-born businessman. Redfern left his apprenticeship with British Aerospace partly due to his political beliefs, and was fired from his first job in journalism for participating in a union walkout.

He took a large salary cut to switch from a magazine to a fair trade company, and stood in Gateshead this year because the Green Party didn’t have a voice in the election.

As an advocate of fair trade, he has a strong platform in the form of the UK’s biggest online ethical retailer. He set up Ethical Superstore with Vic Morgan six years ago, and the Team Valley business now sells more than 9,000 products.

He said: “I don’t think I’ve ever been scared of jumping in with both feet. One lesson I learned early on is there’s one thing worse than taking a wrong direction and that’s not taking any direction.”

Redfern was born in Manchester and raised in Stockport as the eldest of three, and made his first leap after taking a dislike to school as a teenager.

He said: “My dad suggested I do an apprenticeship and be treated like a grown-up.

“I started before I even got my O-level results. Within about three or four days I released that the life of an electrician or fitter wasn’t for me, but it was fantastic to be in the workplace and be trained. I came out of it at 21 with a degree, and I’d been paid for five years.”

Redfern attended Warwick University to do an electronics degree, and worked as an apprentice electrical technician at British Aerospace in the holidays. When his degree course ended in 1987, he left the company.

He said: “Working for British Aerospace didn’t sit well with my affiliation with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

“I went to university during the miners’ strike so the growth in student radicalism was very high. It became very aggressive and violent but you felt there you were fighting for something. Having an ogre like Margaret Thatcher to test your politics against was good for student radicalism, because every day there seemed to be a barking-mad policy to work against.

“I became much more interested in technology at university, but I didn’t really fancy the idea of being an engineer with a soldering iron. I was more interested in seeing how technology was developing.”

He explored this new direction as a technical writer for Personal Computer World magazine after answering an ad for writers in 1988.

He said: “I was also deputy father of chapel with the NUJ and we got into a dispute in my second year over a colleague who had been sacked.

“We ended up having 110 people walk out and man the barricades for several months until we were sacked under Thatcher’s legislation. In hindsight, we were a bit naive in what we did but it was completely correct.”

Redfern later joined former colleagues who had set up a magazine looking at the strategy behind the implementation of technology. Strategy lasted four issues before folding in 1991, and he became Byte magazine’s European editor.

He said: “It was fantastic. On Monday morning I would get on a plane at Heathrow and go to Paris, Munich, Tel Aviv or Milan to talk to technology companies.”