Sussex needs businesses that don’t fit the template

Sussex says it wants growth. It talks about entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, sustainability and local pride. It likes the language of bold ideas and future industries. But when you listen closely to two very different founders in Brighton, a more awkward question starts to emerge: what kind of business does Sussex actually know how to back?

Because not every important business fits neatly into the categories local systems tend to recognise.

On the Sussex And The City podcast, Matt Barker of MPB and Shiv Mishra of Kindly of Brighton describe businesses that, in very different ways, are rooted in Sussex, shaped by Brighton, and valuable well beyond the city.

One is a global scale-up in the circular economy (a tech platform for reused camera equipment), now employing more than 500 people across Brighton, New York and Berlin, but still with more than half its workforce based here. The other is a zero-waste, plant-based supermarket trying to make ethical retail feel normal, convenient and mainstream rather than niche and worthy. Together, they tell a bigger story about what Sussex is good at producing, and what it still struggles to support.

Barker’s point is that MPB is exactly the sort of company most regions would proudly hold up as proof that their economy works. It started small, grew fast, built real jobs, attracted investment, expanded internationally and stayed in Sussex. But his argument is that Brighton did not really notice it for years. The city helped shape the business culturally, through its creativity, diversity and general refusal to be boring, but not necessarily structurally.

Office space has been a recurring battle. Commercial buildings are poorly maintained. Growing firms fall into an odd gap between start-up celebration and serious economic planning. Sussex likes the idea of entrepreneurial energy, but is less confident when that energy needs floorspace, transport, long-term networks and joined-up attention.

Mishra, from a very different corner of the economy, actually lands somewhere similar. Kindly is not a venture-backed scale-up. It is an independent retailer built around low waste, refill and sustainable consumption. But his frustration is also about systems that still make too much happen business by business, shop by shop, workaround by workaround.

Small firms are expected to build websites, market themselves, organise logistics, source locally, absorb higher costs and somehow still compete with businesses that already enjoy scale, supply chain power and delivery infrastructure. His answer is that practical coordination: shared delivery hubs, county-wide loyalty schemes, better networks between farms and retailers, and incentives for businesses doing things in a more sustainable way.

That is connected to devolution, because both conversations expose the same underlying weakness. Sussex does not simply need more growth. It needs better ways of connecting the assets it already has. That might mean transport that reflects where people actually commute from, including the many workers travelling in from Shoreham, Worthing and Mid Sussex. It might mean support structures for firms that are too big to be treated like plucky start-ups, but too locally invisible to shape policy. It might mean recognising that independent retail is not a lifestyle extra for nice high streets, but part of the social and economic fabric that gives places their distinctiveness. And it might mean treating sustainability not as a boutique concern, but as part of how Sussex wants to define competitive advantage.

There is also a wider cultural challenge here. Both founders describe a region that can be timid about its own success. Barker talks about a lack of belief. Mishra talks about the need to make better choices feel mainstream. Neither is asking for special treatment, but for regional economic leadership that notices, convenes and builds the conditions for more of this kind of business to thrive.

That is where a future Sussex mayor, and the new local structures forming around devolution, could matter. Someone needs to be responsible for seeing the whole picture. The independent economy. The scale-up economy. The sustainable economy. The awkward bits between Brighton and the rest of Sussex. The practical barriers that stop good ideas becoming ordinary parts of regional life.

To listen to the interviews in full, alongside many others, visit
www.sussexandthecity.info