Ten years building brands. A lifetime in love with the ocean. Here's why this is the only role that matters to me right now.
This feels like one of the few roles where my commercial background and personal values genuinely overlap.
I surf. I freedive. I shoot underwater photography. The ocean has been the constant in my life for as long as I can remember and living in Bali right now, it's also the thing I find hardest to look at.
Jimbaran beach during the wet season is genuinely distressing. Some days you can barely see the sand. It's buried under plastic that washed in overnight; bottles, bags, thousands of those horrific single use Aqua cups! I've had the same experience in places that should be pristine. The Banyak Islands were pristine 6 years ago but now even these beaches are littered with washed up plastic. It follows you everywhere.
I know what causes it. The problem isn't people who don't care, it's the complete absence of systems that give people a way to do the right thing. That's exactly what makes Free The Sea different. You're not running an awareness campaign. You're building the infrastructure that was never there. That's the work I want to be part of.
"The households don't need to be told plastic is a problem. They need a practical way to do something about it. That's what Free The Sea actually gives them."
This isn't background interest. Back in 2020, when I had the chance to build a brand from scratch, I made ocean conservation part of its DNA from day one. OCEANSAN was a full eco-friendly janitorial range; hand sanitisers, surface disinfectants, washroom products, degreasers, drain solutions - built on naturally derived ingredients, zero single-use plastic, and a direct donation of 10% of profits to the Sea Turtle Conservancy. I wasn't chasing a trend. I just couldn't build something that didn't try to leave things better.
That's the instinct I'd bring here. You're entering a rebrand. A new website. A bigger vision. I've led exactly this kind of chapter before - not as a consultant who hands over a deck, but as the person who owns it completely. I want to do that with you.
And practically - I'm already in the region. I understand the coastal communities, the way people in Indonesia relate to the ocean, what this problem actually looks and feels like up close.
What I bring to this:
"When plastic has nowhere to go, it ends up in the sea. I've seen it up close. It's why I sometimes get out of the water angry."
Free The Sea fixes the root cause, not the symptom. I want to build the story around that distinction - because it's the thing that separates you from every other ocean charity people scroll past.
In 2020, while the world was locking down, I built an eco-friendly cleaning brand from scratch. Not because there was an easy gap in the market - there were hundreds of cleaning brands launching that year. I built it because I couldn't find one that actually gave a damn.
OCEANSAN was a full eco-conscious janitorial range - hand sanitiser, surface disinfectant, washroom products, degreasers, drain solutions - built entirely on naturally derived ingredients. Zero alcohol. Zero petrochemicals. A refill scheme that meant customers could return bottles rather than throw them away. Every product held EN certifications and built to outperform conventional alternatives without compromising environmental principles.
The brand donated 10% of profits to the Sea Turtle Conservancy. Not as a footnote but as a founding principle. The wider janitorial operations I'd built funded the development, which gave us the freedom to do it properly.
I explored biodegradable packaging first, but there were no genuinely practical options at the time. So I focused on what could actually work: creating financial incentives for customers to return and re-use bottles, reducing waste through behaviour change rather than empty sustainability claims. Because we primarily sold to businesses, we introduced “Bottles For Life” alongside reusable 5L and 20L refill containers. For larger customers, we offered 1,000-litre IBC tanks, cutting packaging waste at scale while improving operational efficiency.
Everyone was selling cleaning products. Nobody was selling a worldview. The positioning wasn't "clean hands" - it was "clean conscience." The question we kept coming back to was: what if buying your cleaning products was itself an act of environmental stewardship?
We led with what wasn't in the bottle. No alcohol. No Pyridine. No petrochemical stabilisers. No single-use plastic waste. The things we refused to include became the brand's loudest statement.
For B2B buyers, we framed it as a CSR proposition: switch your janitorial supply and make it part of your sustainability reporting. For individual buyers, it was simpler - this is the brand that takes the ocean seriously. Which side of that line do you want to be on?
It means the story exists for the person in it - not for the brand telling it.
For Free The Sea, this means the families in Batam aren’t just case studies or faces for a pitch deck. They’re the partners doing the actual heavy lifting. If a family in the collection program looks at our marketing and doesn't recognize themselves or feels like they're being used to sell a story then we’ve failed. I want to tell stories that the people in Batam would actually be proud to share themselves.
"The ocean has a story. So do the people closest to it every day. Those are the two stories I want to tell."
Before I write a word of copy or brief a designer, I would want to spend time in Batam. Not a press trip - genuinely in the community, understanding how people talk about plastic, about their income, about the sea. That's where the right tone comes from. That's where you find out what not to say as much as what to say.
Every community feature we publish gets built with the person involved - they see the draft, they shape the narrative. This isn't just the right thing to do, it's also better marketing. People who've grown up on polished NGO content know authenticity when they see it, and they know immediately when it's missing.
People-first inbound means content so genuinely useful and honest that the right supporters find Free The Sea because they wanted to - not because they were retargeted. A raw visual diary from a collector. A series on the economics of plastic in coastal Indonesia. An impact report that reads like a story rather than a spreadsheet.
I track numbers carefully, but I'm selective about which ones drive decisions. For Free The Sea, the figures I care most about aren't impressions or click rates. They're households enrolled, plastic diverted, and community income generated. Everything else is in service of moving those three numbers.
The best ambassador programmes don't recruit advocates - they find the people who already are advocates and give them tools to be louder. The collectors in Batam. The surfers who came across your work. The sustainability managers who've been quietly following you for months. Find them early, give them the language and assets, then step back.
Collect, process, give plastic a second life, that's the mechanical side of the mission. Each household that earns an incentive is a chapter. The before and after of a beach or a drain is a chapter. My job is to make someone in Berlin or Sao Paulo feel the weight of what's happening in Batam and then do something about it.
I'm Lloyd Russell - brand builder, growth operator and senior digital marketer.
Entrepreneurial growth operator with a decade of experience driving rapid, profitable expansion for founder-led brands across B2B, consumer products and e-commerce. Combines hands-on digital marketing (SEO / PPC / AI creative) with commercial acumen and deal-making skills that deliver real ROI.
I founded Global Protection Supplies during the pandemic - a group of janitorial brands that scaled quickly and landed contracts with Rolls-Royce, Lloyds Banking Group, the MOD, and various government bodies. The revenues from that funded the development of OCEANSAN - an eco-friendly janitorial range I built because I wanted to prove cleaning products didn't have to be a disaster for the environment.
Today I'm in Bali. I surf most mornings. I freedive. I shoot underwater. I watch the beaches get buried in plastic every wet season and paddle back out anyway - because I still love the ocean more than I hate what's happening to it. That tension is probably what makes this application exist.
I'm ready to own a marketing function that matters. I want to help build Free The Sea's next chapter. And I'm already here.
I'm in Bali. I'm available. And this is genuinely the role I'd drop everything for.