Posted by Bare Necessities
on July 09, 2026
Little did we know that our next team meeting would be at a mass tree-plantation drive. Last week, we swapped laptops for saplings and joined the Green Bengaluru Initiative, organised by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA).
The scale of it was hard to miss. Timed with Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Jayanti, the BDA brought together over 50,000 volunteers across four locations in the city to plant 1.5 million native saplings, an attempt at a Guinness World Record for the most saplings planted by volunteers.
Organisations like Bluedot, and Hosachiguru partnered on the ground to pull off the logistics of it all, from sapling distribution to zone-wise coordination. It's the kind of number that's easy to read past on a screen, but standing in the middle of it, watching entire stretches of bare land slowly fill up with rows of saplings, it felt real in a way statistics rarely do.
Our team showed up at one of the sites with caps on and reusable bottles in hand, ready to get our hands dirty. We spent the afternoon digging, planting, and learning about native trees. This wasn't about planting for the sake of a photo; it was about restoring a bit of Bengaluru's own ecological balance.
We won't pretend one afternoon of planting makes us environmentalists, or that a single drive solves a city's green-cover problem. It doesn't. But initiatives like this matter because they get thousands of ordinary people, including teams like ours to spend a few hours thinking about something bigger than a to-do list.
They build a habit of showing up for the city, even in small ways. And there's something genuinely grounding about digging into soil with your colleagues instead of sitting across a conference table from them.
That's really what outings like these mean to us as a sustainable brand. Sustainability is a value we try to live out through small, consistent actions, whether that's in how we make our toxin-free products or how we choose to spend a team afternoon. Being part of Bengaluru's plantation drive was a reminder that sustainability is as much about participation as it is about policy.
It also connects to something closer to our own roots: our ongoing partnership with Maruvan, an afforestation initiative working to green the arid landscapes of Rajasthan. Where Bengaluru's drive is about restoring an urban forest, our mini forest with Maruvan is about proving that even a desert can hold onto trees, if you're patient and deliberate about it.
Muddy shoes, sore backs, and a lot of laughs later, this was, without exaggeration, one of our favourite team meetings yet.
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