Most "sustainable gifting" content leads with numbers — willingness-to-pay premiums, market growth rates, recycling percentages. Those numbers are real, and they explain why the demand exists. But they're not what a recipient actually remembers about a gift. What sticks is the story: why this product exists, who made it, and what it means that it landed on their desk instead of a mass-produced alternative.
That's the thinking behind two of the partners Smilie sources from — resavour and The Art Faculty. Neither is sustainable or local in a vague, marketing-brochure sense. Both were built around a specific problem they're trying to solve, and both put that story front and centre in every product.
resavour: turning food waste into wellness
resavour calls its own approach "Go WTF" — waste-to-food. The brand, built by Singapore studio the moonbeam co., started from a simple observation: spent coffee grounds and spent barley grains, byproducts of coffee brewing and beer production, are usually thrown away even though they're still packed with fibre and protein. resavour's cookies, granola, and banana bread are built around upcycling exactly those byproducts — the brand says its spent-grain products carry 33% more fibre and protein than a standard equivalent, with no artificial sweeteners and reduced sugar (resavour.com).
The story doesn't stop at the ingredient list. resavour's products are baked locally by what the brand describes as a trained community of bakers at its microbakery in Singapore, and the moonbeam co. frames resavour's wider mission as one of social change — using the brand to provide training, employment, and skills that help people, particularly youth, build toward meaningful work (themoonbeam.co). resavour also runs corporate workshops — sessions on food waste and food security, sustainable coffee, and sustainable baking — that Smilie can fold directly into a gifting or team event, turning a snack box into an actual conversation about where the ingredients came from.
A resavour cookie isn't just a locally-baked treat — it's a small, edible argument for why "waste" is often just an ingredient nobody's looked at properly yet.
The Art Faculty: art that pays artists directly
The Art Faculty is a social enterprise run by Autism Resource Centre (Singapore), a charity founded in 2000. Its products — mugs, tote bags, notebooks, drinkware, homeware — are all built around original artwork by artists on the autism spectrum, most of whom come through Pathlight School's Artist Development Programme, a talent-development track launched in April 2011 for Pathlight students and alumni (theartfaculty.sg). Every product carries the artist's profile, giving them public recognition, and every sale generates direct income for that artist — a structure The Art Faculty describes as core to building the artists' financial independence and confidence.
The social mission runs through the whole operation, not just the products: The Art Faculty also trains and employs differently-abled individuals across its retail outlets, café, design team, and warehouse. It operates a flagship retail shop, gallery, and café at Enabling Village, plus additional stores integrated with Professor Brawn Cafe at two Pathlight School campuses, and is recognised on Singapore's Enabling Mark Honour Roll as an employer of persons with disabilities (theartfaculty.sg).
For corporate gifting, that means a mug or notebook from The Art Faculty isn't simply "locally designed" — it's a specific artist's work, with their name attached, and a purchase that pays them directly. That's a considerably more concrete story to hand a recipient than "eco-friendly materials."
Why the story matters more than the label
Consumer appetite for sustainable and local goods is well documented — 80% of consumers say they're willing to pay more for sustainably produced or sourced goods (PwC 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey), and in Singapore specifically, more than 90% of consumers already shop often at local businesses, well ahead of the 71% who do the same at international ones (American Express / Kantar Shop Small Research, 2023). But that demand is increasingly discerning — a generic "eco" label doesn't move people the way a specific, verifiable cause does.
Partners like resavour and The Art Faculty give a gifting programme something to actually say: the snack in the box exists because someone found a use for a food byproduct that used to go to waste, and the mug next to it is signed by an artist who was paid directly for the work. That's a story a recipient can repeat to someone else — which a green logo, on its own, rarely is.
Building a gifting programme around it
In practice, this looks like treating story-led, cause-driven suppliers as a standing part of the sourcing shortlist, not a once-a-year "impact edition" campaign. A resavour snack pairs naturally with a hero item from The Art Faculty in the same box — one addressing food waste, the other paying an artist directly — and either can be scaled from a single welcome kit to a bulk festive campaign.
Smilie works with both resavour and The Art Faculty, so their products can be built directly into your gifting campaigns rather than sourced as a one-off. Get in touch and we'll help you put together a set around them.
