Simon Mainwaring is founder and CEO of We First, a strategic consultancy accelerating growth and impact for purpose-driven brands. He’s a member of the Steering Committee of Sustainable Brands, the Forbes Business Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Simon was a Featured Expert and Jury Member at the Cannes Lions Festival for the Sustainable Development Goals in 2021, host of the ‘Brands With Purpose’ series with Harvard Business School Association of Boston, and his company, We First, is included in Real Leaders list for the Top 100 Impact Companies in the US for 2021 and 2019, as well as a B Corps ‘Best for The World’ Honoree. He was a Real Leaders Top 100 Visionary Leader in 2018, a finalist for the Conscious Company Leadership Awards in 2017, received the MAKE CHANGE, ‘Conscious Leadership’ Award for 2016, and was a finalist for Global Australian of the Year in 2015.
Simon’s first book, We First was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of the Year by strategy+business. It was named an Amazon Top Ten Business Book, 800CEORead Top Five Marketing Book, and Sustainable Brands listed We First as one of their Top Sustainability Books of the decade. It has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean. Simon also writes of the popular ‘Purpose At Work’ blog in Forbes. His new book Lead With We launches November 9, 2021.
Simon was a Real Leaders Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World in 2020, voted a Top 5 Marketing Speaker by speaking.com for 5 years in a row, and on the cover of the National Speaker’s Magazine (U.S.). He’s been featured in BBC World News, The Economist, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Inc., AMA, Fast Company, and Forbes, among others.
Prior to We First, Simon was a copywriter, Creative Director and Worldwide Creative Director at agencies including DDB (Sydney), Saatchi & Saatchi (London), Wieden & Kennedy (Portland) and Ogilvy (Los Angeles) winning awards at all major advertising festivals on clients such as Nike, Toyota and Motorola.