Elvis & Kresse
The Company
Elvis & Kresse make sustainable luxury accessories from materials that would otherwise go to landfill, including decommissioned fire hoses and reclaimed materials. Elvis & Kresse is a B-Corp certified business and Social Enterprise that donates at least 50% of profits to charities related to the materials they reclaim and reuse.
R&D Focus
Through the BFTT project, Elvis & Kresse have worked collaboratively with the Materials Engineering Department at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) to develop a circular business model for metal hardware in the luxury sector. The team have hacked the industrial aluminum recycling process through the design of a small scale and environmentally sound open-source alternative.
The innovative R&D resulted in a working Solar Forge, that has been used to safely and inexpensively wash, dry, shred and melt littered aluminum cans, using the power of the sun.
Team
Man Zhang
R&D Project Lead
Queen Mary University of London
Man Zhang is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. Her PhD project is to research advanced materials for sensors and energy applications. She has been involved in several joint projects on energy and developed an economical method to prepare photocatalysts with excellent photodegradation property to solve environmental problems. She also has seven years’ experience on metals including to research metal material, used as reaction vessel for nuclear energy. She has published 2 papers and 3 patents. Core skills and competences include:
- Material processing and characterization
- Metals
- Energy materials.
Kresse Wesling CBE
R&D Company Lead
Eako Ltd (Elvise & Kresse)
Kresse Wesling CBE is a multi-award winning environmental entrepreneur and Young Global Leader with a background in venture capital and significant start-up experience. After first meeting with the London Fire Brigade in 2005, Kresse launched Elvis & Kresse, which turns industrial waste into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50% of profits to charities related to the waste. Elvis & Kresse’s first line is made from decommissioned fire hose, 50% of the profits from this line are donated to the Fire Fighters Charity.The company now collects 12 different waste streams, has several charitable partnerships and is involved with collaborations across industries, from fashion houses to FTSE 100 companies etc.
Dr Haixue Yan
R&D Academic Mentor
Queen Mary University of London
Haixue is a senior lecturer in functional materials at Queen Mary University of London. His research areas include thermoelectrics, ferroelectrics, dielectrics and metals, including funding as Principal Investigator from the EC, EPSRC, TSB, The Royal Academy of Engineering and The Royal Society. In addition, he works closely with different industrial partners. His work on nanotechnology demonstrated that nano particles can work as building blocks during sintering. His current work on grain size effects in ferroelectric ceramics has shown that there are different critical sizes for optimized dielectric permittivity, field induced strain and ferroelectric polarization. He has 151 peer reviewed SCI journal papers and 4 patents, and is an Editorial Board Member of Advances in Applied Ceramics, Journal of Advanced Ceramics and Materials Research Bulletin.
Core skills and competencies include:
- Energy storage
- Materials processing and characterisations
- Nanotechnology
