Introducing WholeLoop Labs: Transforming Products, Professionals & Business Models Beyond Extraction

After nearly a decade driving growth for consumer tech companies, I’ve seen firsthand how extractive business models dominate the industry, from 'hacking' growth, maximising user attention and funnelling profits to a select few.

It made me ask: who benefits from this growth? What gets displaced when businesses scale?

Against the backdrop of escalating planetary breakdown and social inequality, I’ve also sensed a deep hunger among other professionals for something different: business that balances commercial success with collective wellbeing.  

It’s time to question the business norms that enabled these global conditions and importantly, to return business to its rightful role: serving society and the planet, not just shareholder profit.

Today I’m launching WholeLoop Labs, a research studio and consultancy dedicated to post-growth business transformation. Structured as a Community Interest Company, we help conscious professionals and mission-driven organisations reimagine digital products and business models that serve people and planet.

Closing the Loop

The tech sector represents the pinnacle of extraction, operating as a new form of colonialism that harvests attention, data, and labour from billions while concentrating profits among shareholders. This makes regenerative business consulting most urgently needed precisely where these colonial patterns are most sophisticated.

As digital policy researcher Michael Kwet puts it:

“The digital economy is actually central to the environmental crisis. It drives rapacious growth and concentrates wealth, income, and power at precisely the time we need to create genuine equality.”

When I researched support for a business paradigm rooted in social and ecological wellbeing, I discovered I wasn't alone.

In collaboration with LSE's Post-Growth Transformation Lab, the study found that 86% of professionals surveyed personally support business practices compatible with this vision of sustainability, but believe it’s a polarising topic amongst their peers. That gap represents enormous untapped potential for much-needed post-growth business transformation.

Take infinite scroll. At the pixel level, it eliminates stopping cues, keeping users online longer than intended. That attention is monetised, and the resulting revenue fuels more extractive systems, from overconsumption to corporate lobbying and militarised supply chains.

It’s all connected. These design choices are not neutral. They’re downstream from business models that prioritise financial returns for shareholders over collective wellbeing.

That’s the loop we aim to close.

Built for Impact

WholeLoop Labs is structured as a Community Interest Company (CIC), legally committed to prioritising social and ecological benefit alongside commercial success. This ensures that any surplus is reinvested in collective outcomes, not extracted for private gain. Our work helps organisations transition from extractive to regenerative practices, from design systems to business model design.

What's next?

Thanks to runner-up funding from the LSE Spark Award to operationalise our recent research into practical tools for real-world impact, we’re developing:

• A Post-Growth Business Diagnostic Tool to help organisations assess where their practices support (or undermine) collective wellbeing.
  
• A cohort-based (un)learning programme for individuals and teams exploring what it means to transform their approach to business in line with planetary boundaries and justice. Register interest today and get notified when it's ready.
  
• We’ll also be publishing deep-dive case studies exposing extractive patterns in tech and surfacing real-world pathways to regenerative practice.

Let’s Connect

If you’re building digital products and questioning whether they’re serving the future you want to create, I’d love to hear from you.

We can reimagine business as a tool for thriving, not extraction each time we choose to close the loop.