At Notpla, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future.
How materials should behave. How packaging should disappear. How businesses can move beyond simply managing waste and start designing systems that work more closely with nature.
But once a year, we pause to think about something else too: how we work together as people.
Last Friday, the entire Notpla team came together for our annual Values Day, a full day dedicated to the culture, behaviours and shared mission that sit behind the products we create every day. As Notpla continues to grow, the day has become an important moment to reconnect around not just what we’re building, but how we want to build it.
Notpla’s values have evolved alongside the business itself. From early workshops in 2019 to the framework we use today, they’ve always been designed as practical tools rather than statements that sit quietly on a wall.
Today, those values are:
They shape how we innovate, collaborate and grow together. They influence how products are developed in the lab, how partnerships are built, and how teams support one another through the challenges that naturally come with building something innovative.
This year’s Values Day focused on the relationship between values and behaviour.
The morning workshops were led by Steve Charlton, founder of REAL Leadership Consultancy, whose work centres around helping organisations develop more authentic, human-first leadership cultures.
A central theme of the sessions was “Teamship”, the idea that successful teams are built through shared responsibility, active contribution and collective accountability, regardless of hierarchy or job title.
As defined during the workshop:
“Teamship is the practice of taking shared responsibility for outcomes, actively supporting one another, and holding each other to high standards, regardless of role or hierarchy.”
Throughout the sessions, teams explored what those ideas actually look like in practice. Not in theory, but in day-to-day behaviours.
What helps collaboration thrive?
What creates trust inside a growing company?
What behaviours create silos or slow progress down?
And what does ownership really look like in a mission-led business?
One of the strongest ideas to emerge from the day was simple: “Passion doesn’t scale… behaviour does.”
For a growing company, that shift feels important. Values only matter when they become behaviours people can recognise, practise and hold each other accountable to.
Across breakout sessions, teams worked together to identify both positive and negative behaviours they’ve experienced within growing organisations. Some conversations focused on communication and transparency. Others explored accountability, ownership and the importance of constructive challenge.
The sessions weren’t about creating perfect answers. They were about building a clearer shared understanding of the kind of company Notpla wants to become as it grows.
Like every Values Day, the conversations extended far beyond the workshop sessions themselves.
Over lunch, the team gathered outside for Lebanese street food with A’albak, organised by Peppermint Bars, a chance for people across completely different parts of the business to slow down, reconnect and share ideas away from their usual routines.
The afternoon shifted into team-led workshops and activities across the business, including coating experiments in the lab and collaborative sessions imagining what Notpla’s next breakthrough product could become.
That mix of scientific experimentation, creativity and systems thinking is part of what makes Values Day feel distinctly Notpla.
The day closed with the annual Notpla Values Awards, where team members are nominated by their peers for embodying the company’s values throughout the year.
From scientific breakthroughs and commercial leadership to collaboration, positivity and ownership, the awards celebrated the people helping shape Notpla’s culture every day, often quietly and behind the scenes.
At Notpla, we often talk about designing materials differently. Packaging that works with nature rather than against it. Systems that leave no trace behind.
But building a company also requires design.
Designing behaviours. Designing trust. Designing ways of working together that can grow alongside the mission itself.
Values Day is one of the moments each year where the whole company pauses long enough to reconnect around that work together.
Because while materials can be designed intentionally, culture has to be as well.
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