Julia Hailes: We met when she arrived at Earthlife, having spent a couple of years travelling around Latin America. She joined me to help produce Green Pages and we co-evolved The Green Consumer Guide. When Earthlife went down in flames part way through both projects, we co-founded SustainAbility in 1987. We have co-written 8 books and she remains a close friend, Muse and member of the SustainAbility Council. I am particularly grateful to her for her advice to split johnelkington.com and theelkingtons.com - and for her reminders of people to list under Influences, including Roger Payne. Our work together is summarised in Timelines.

Fiona Byrne and Annie Dimmock: SustainAbility's first employees and tremendous allies and great friends in the early days.

Lynne Franks: The PR queen and a model for TV's Absolutely Fabulous, Lynne helped us propel The Green Consumer Guide and linked Green Consumer Week into orbit in late 1988, with the aid of a £6,000 grant from WWF.

Dorothy Mackenzie: After several years based in our Barnes home, SustainAbility moved to the Notting Hill area, to share offices with Brand New Product Development, run by Dorothy Mackenzie. We did pioneering work with her on green consumerism and joint projects with companies such as Dow Europe. In 2003, we worked with her again on SustainAbility's rebranding. She was also part of our 2003 conference series in Australia and New Zealand.

Tim Moore, Stan Eales and Rupert Bassett: Tim helped me put together Earthlife News, while Stan provided cartoons and design for SustainAbility News. Rupert has been a profound influence on the evolution of SustainAbility's branding and design. We are grateful, yet again, for his work on this website, alongside Lynne Elvins.

Steve Warshal: A Director of Greenpeace UK for many years, Steve organised an early conference for Marketing Week on the green consumer. We became close friends and have taken each other to various concerts, including evenings with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn.

Wouter van Dieren and Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker: Wouter had co-founded Friends of the Earth in Holland, then founded IMSA, a consultancy that I have seen as a sister organisation of SustainAbility's. I first met Ernst in Tokyo in 1981 and later served alongside him on the European Commission's Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development. Wouter I have seen as a competitive benchmark, Ernst - who later founded the Wuppertal Institute and served as a member of the German Bundestag - as a towering feature in our landscape, providing a powerful reference point.

Liz Knights: Liz edited a number of our books, most notably The Green Consumer Guide. She was pretty much a third author on several books, indeed The Young Green Consumer Guide was her idea. She died of cancer in 1996 and is much missed.

Claude Fussler: Both when at Dow Europe and later at the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Claude supported early work on green consumerism and life cycle assessment, plus our 1995 report Who Needs It? We also worked together in the early years of establishing European Partners for the Environment (EPE).

Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel: Ever since Jacqueline took over as director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)'s Industry & Environment Office in Paris in the late 1980s, we have been co-conspirators. SustainAbility's work on reporting ('Engaging Stakeholders', 'Global Reporters') would have taken a very different course if she hadn't been there to support us through thick and thin.

Lise Kingo: We started to work with Denmark's Novo Nordisk in 1989 and continue to do so today. Lise Kingo was there when we started, as a marketing assistant; today she is an executive vice-president for the triple bottom line aspects of Novo's operations. Throughout, together with the company's president (and now chairman) Mads Ovlisen, she has been both ally and inspiration.

Douglas Adams: Born 1952, died 2001, but his work lives on. I adored the BBC radio series of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The babelfish notion took deep root. Douglas helped us with 1992's 'Holiday Extravaganza'.

Vernon Jennings: Joined us from Unilever and represented a major investment for us at the time, which we largely funded out of royalties from The Green Consumer Guide. He was with us for nine years and helped turn SustainAbility into the organisation it is today. A vice president for social and ethical accountability with Novo Nordisk and now an independent consultant.

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