Mission impossible: Lily Cole’s online revolution

She’s the flame-haired catwalk queen whose new social website is firing up an e-topian future where giving is free. Welcome to Lily Cole’s online revolution
22 November 2013

If she hadn’t become a model, it seems quite possible that Lily Cole would have ended up a complete hippy. After sitting with her for an hour in a Soho tea shop (she doesn’t drink much coffee but likes Chinese Oolong tea), I have a vision of her living in an old van (donated, natch), letting her smooth red curls fall into frizz and dressing only in Indian rugs and eschewing all superfluous material possessions.

“The relationship in general of giving and receiving, not of the material object, but the spirit of giving an object or your time, that’s what is most important,” the 25-year-old is saying by way of explaining the ideology at the core of her new business, Impossible.com. The website, which is currently still in beta, is a tool to facilitate a gift economy on which people can exchange their skills, knowledge or possessions for free.

Users upload their wishes or their offers and can connect with someone in their local area who either has what they want or wants what they have. Cole has been working on it for three years — although it has only now officially launched.

She is relaying her experience of Burning Man in the Nevada desert this August, citing the festival at which virtually no money is exchanged (aside from the ticket fee) as an example of a “gift culture” in action.

“That environment was great for my deeper belief in what I’m trying to do with Impossible because everyone you walk past, instead of missing your eye contact, they want to say hello or give you something. It makes you think, ‘What can I offer?’ Our behaviour in society is often very reflective of one another. If the world around you is quite alienating, arguably you react in the same way. I do that myself. If people are stingy with me it makes me feel more stingy. If people are generous I feel like it makes me generous.”

As if timed as a demonstration of the giving and sharing spirit at play, a Chinese tourist approaches Cole to ask for a photograph with her. She says yes, but doesn’t smile for the camera. I ask her later if this gets on her nerves. Cole says not if they are polite, like this girl, and talks of others who don’t ask first or just want a picture to tweet. To one recently she said, “Why don’t we have a chat instead?” “We had a nice talk,” she explains.

The lack of this type of interaction in the big city has been a driver of Impossible for Cole. “I wonder sometimes if the reason I feel so strongly about these issues is because I grew up in London,” she says. “In smaller communities it’s less relevant because giving is community-orientated behaviour. Some part of my soul really misses that and a lot of people do too.”

She puts the loss of this down to dense, metropolitan populations in which “everyone lives in isolated units, going to their jobs with the message being predominantly about monetary ideals”.

This, she says, “is where technology can play a part” as a tool to facilitate giving behaviour.

“I hope Impossible taps into a value system that is part of human nature, that exists today in the same way it existed 30 years ago and arguably hundreds of years ago. It’s just the tools we have in our lives that enable us to act that way to a lesser or greater extent.”

Almost indefatigably serious, Cole talks with the conviction of someone who knows she is clever. She has a reputation for being a model with brains, having graduated from Cambridge University in 2011 with a double first. Although she was born in Devon, she grew up (and still lives) in north London.

Impossible is her latest venture but the girl whose doll-like face made her famous has so far had an itinerant career — beginning with modelling from age 14 and moving through acting and environmental campaigning, to launching an ethical jewellery range and now into the tech world.

Modelling was never going to fulfil a thinker like Cole. “I was always excited and very interested by the things that modelling exposed me to but the reason I stayed in school was that I knew very young that I never saw myself doing it as a full-time career,” she says.

However, “I would have been totally shocked 10 years ago if you’d told me at this point in life I’d be working in technology,” she says.

There have been no half measures, though. Impossible has been created under the advice of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (another example of a gift culture) and Nobel Peace Prize recipient and economics professor Muhammad Yunus. She met them at the Davos World Economic Forum, having been invited there as part of the Government’s post-Olympics GREAT campaign.

On the advice of Yunus, Impossible.com will run as a for-profit social business, with profits being re-invested into the company or in other social enterprises. Cole won’t yet elaborate on how the site will eventually make money, though it’s a wonder how users could be viably expected to donate their skills and goods for free if there is any kind of charge to use the site itself. “It’s challenging,” she admits. “I don’t want to do anything that philosophically compromises what we can do.”

One of Cole’s partners, entrepreneur and investor Kwame Ferreira, was so convinced by the idea of a social business that he asked his developers to work on the project for free. “That was incredible as you would expect most investors to run away,” says Cole, who has invested her own money in the project.

In fact, since the idea struck her on an aeroplane: “Whenever I’d meet someone who was interested in these ideas or worked in technology I’d start telling them these ideas. Again and again people would say, ‘I love it. How can I help?’” she explains. One of those was Jimmy Wales.

Cole herself appears devoted to the world perspective fostered by her own site.

“Its success is predicated on trust and the point of me doing it is to encourage and create trust,” she says. “People always say, ‘What if someone abuses the system and takes more?’ I think that’s one in a billion. I think people are much more generous and good of spirit than we give them credit for. That’s what I was investing in and continue to: the faith that people are generally quite cool.”

As it happens, Cole has been ridding herself of belongings, clearing out a storage unit in New York where she lived for a couple of years before she turned 20.

“I learned recently that mortgage means death grip. I’ve got mortgages. I’m in a death grip,” she explains. “Our society has emphasised ownership and the aim of owning something as a pinnacle without realising that your house or your things can own you ... I do think that there’s a real freedom that can come with having less and sharing more.”

She ditched clothes and shoes, giving them away to friends, family and a homeless shelter. The rest she intends to get rid of by turning her office base in Soho’s Berwick Street into a shop to launch Impossible, where all the items are free.

“When you own something you are basically safeguarding the future. The more dependent you are on a present- to-present existence the more you have to trust that the people around you are going to be supportive ... It’s absurd, I should either use things and love them or let them go,” she says. And there it is: the image of the van, the rugs, her red hair gone wild. Lily the hippy. Perhaps not so impossible.

How Impossible works

Impossible.com is a gift economy tool on which users can offer or request knowledge, services or goods for free.

Users download the iPhone app or sign up at Impossible.com with an email address, Facebook or Twitter account.

With permission, the site registers your location data and displays wishes or offers in your region.

They post wishes or offers in text form on the site. For example: “I wish for someone to help me pass my #gcses”, “I wish for old paintings that I can have artists re-work and sell for charity” or “I can #DJ”.

By using hashtags the site can identify the offers that correspond with your wish, or vice versa.

When a wish is fulfilled, recipients upload a thank you in image form — adding a message if they desire.

Lily’s column in the Evening Standard with examples of wishes on Impossible will begin next Thursday. To make a wish, visit Impossible.com or tweet using #impossible

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