JFDI: "Just F*cking Do It"

Hi. I’m James.

Retired banker turned sustainable sleep wizard. ????♂?

90% Hippie / 10% Tarzan. ???????

For the past 4 years (nearly) I’ve been building a really cool brand called Ethical Bedding. Simply put, we are focused on better sleep. Better quality sleep and better products for the planet.

Why sleep?

• We spend roughly 1/3 of our lives asleep, so may as well do it properly.
• Sleep underpins our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing — but it is all too often forgotten about amongst the latest diets or fitness routines.
• It’s the great unknown — there’s still some mystery which surrounds sleep. It’s a challenge. An adventure. I like adventures.

Why sustainability?

• Without the natural world we have nothing. It provides us with nourishment, shelter and life — yet we as humans constantly destroy our own world.
• Nature is the most fascinating thing for me. It’s the only thing that can activate all our 5 senses simultaneously and provides us with an endless stream of beauty and wonder.
• We destroy relentlessly and often unknowingly with our consumption. But I have a dream to make things fairer by redesigning products to make them kinder to our planet whilst increasing their functionality.

JFDI

This concept of “just f*cking do it” (or JDFI as we use in the team), is a phrase that I’ve consistently used during the early stages of building the brand.

Why? Because we are just making it up as we go along with a series of best guesses using some knowledge, some data and some luck…

I’ve often been asked about whether I think ‘direction A’ or ‘direction B’ is better for us. My answer is to pick one and JDFI. What’s the worst that can happen?

So far, so good.

The fun stuff…

It’s probably worth noting at this point that I’ve built all of this whilst living a minimalistic lifestyle (one bag of ‘stuff’), moving across multiple continents and countless countries, now mostly just using my phone to work. It’s doable. I do it.

Oh and shortly after I started the business I lost my home and everything I had ever known. So was essentially less than penniless with a cash hungry start up. Cool.

After 4 years it’s valued somewhere in the region of ￡2.2m at the time of writing and I own around 95% of it.

Pretty sure I can grow it to ￡10m+ without too much difficulty from this point forward. Much of the ‘heavy lifting’ has been done.

So now I’m focusing a lot more on doing really cool stuff to benefit the world and humanity whilst I grow it.

Bit more spicy now hey…

Following my own advice

Given that I’m so quick to tell others to JFDI, I’ve admittedly been rather slow in JFDI’ing it myself.

Specifically, this in relation to building a personal brand. Which has been on our marketing roadmap for over 6 months, without me doing anything with is. I know it drives our CMO crazy. Oopsies.

Truth be told, I’m rather introverted and think quite deeply about a lot of things. Only when people get to know me a little or speak to me 1-to-1 do I really open up…

So, I’ve decided to start writing on Medium with the following goals in mind:

1. Empty my brain of all the things that I have learned. Even if nobody else reads it, it will be quite interesting for me to look back on as I’m building a series of super cool businesses.
2. Gives me structure and confidence to be able to record and talk on camera about things which I’m writing about.
3. Gives a baseline for some clever people in the marketing department to write a heap of other blog articles, create video content and repurpose into posts for Linkedin, Instagram and X.
4. Forces me to keep learning and then keep sharing that learning in a condensed and consumable format which will genuinely improve people’s lives and understanding of the world. (That’s the cool bit!).

My Commitment

I hereby declare that I will write at least one medium article per week on subjects which include:

• Sleep
• Wellness
• Mindfulness
• Meditation
• Breathwork
• Mindset
• Nature
• Sustainability
• Entrepreneurship

That’s it for now…

Hopefully someone reads this and gets something out of it. Hopefully that person isn’t just my mother. But even if it is: I love you mum!

Peace out,

James ?