Madelyn Postman

In the late 80’s, a friend of Madelyn’s quipped to her after she threw some rubbish in a bin, “Out of sight, out of mind!”

That gave her pause for thought — and she often thinks back to his comment almost four decades later.

In the meantime, she graduated from Brown University with a double major, in visual Arts and with honours in Art History, lived and worked in Italy, and moved to the UK in 2000. In her working life, Madelyn has always focused on business objectives, be it connecting strategy with creativity in branding and design, or building the business case for sustainability.

Grain (and a previous incarnation of it) has been a member of 1% for the Planet since 2008, donating 1% of revenue to environmental charities. Madelyn serves on the 1% for the Planet Board as well as on its UK & Ireland Steering Committee. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Fluo Technologies.

Madelyn believes that businesses need to play a key role in creating an equitable and safe world and must take responsibility for their activities. Her background is in branding and communications, working with a variety of purpose-led brands over the years. She shifted her focus wholly to sustainability after studying Business Sustainability Management at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in 2020.

You may have spied Madelyn on BBC News and BBC World, commenting on branding, business, and communications, and she lectures on sustainable fashion at the University of East London. She holds a BA from Brown University and speaks Italian fluently. In 2019 she received an honorary MBA from the University of West London’s Claude Littner Business School.

She is a published author and has written a short story collection that links memoir with her family history of Chinese and Eastern European Jewish immigrants who converged in California.