Photo: Christopher Sardegna
Our mission
We hope to see a day where regenerative living in eco-homes is the norm.
We want to accelerate the move towards energy efficient homes and decarbonised lifestyles in the most smooth and design-friendly way possible.
We want to help make homes beautifully sustainable while also adding to their long term value and enriching people’s lives.
Our story
DesignTracker was born out of a desire for fresh thinking in how we engage with the subject of climate change and sustainable living.
Let’s be honest, the conversation around sustainability is hard to get your head around. The climate and biodiversity crisis is the story of our lifetime but the associated complexity can lead to apathy or inertia. We take this story into a space that everyone understands. The home.
An estimated 24 million UK homes need to be retrofitted between now and 2050. That’s about 1.5 homes a minute over the next 20 years. The UK has the oldest and coldest housing stock in Europe and the process to improve it is happening slowly. There is not a one size fits all solution and the market and supply chain is in transition and evolving. It can also be confusing and costly.
We want to change that.
Our journalism
Our style of storytelling applies the same level of journalistic rigour to a solution as it does to a problem. So when we cover it, you know it stands up to scrutiny. We connect you to the most trusted and certified products and services for the home. This is underpinned and anchored by our annual DesignTracker100 index of the best sustainable brands. Empowering you and compelling business to be exceptional.
Our founder
Journalist and entrepreneur Anne-Marie Tomchak spent the first decade of her career in public service broadcasting with RTE and BBC. Innovation and social justice have been consistent themes of her work. In 2013 she launched the ground-breaking social media investigative unit BBC Trending. She has also worked at the top of digital media leading editorial teams at Mashable and Vogue.
Anne-Marie’s time as a digital executive exposed her to the challenges and opportunities of news, technology and fashion. She saw first-hand the positive role that industry was playing in unlocking social change and progress. But she could also see aspects that were concerning and an awareness among her peers that the system needed a rethink: namely, the limitations of an overwhelmingly negative news cycle, the impact of misinformation on democracy and the damage fashion was causing to the environment.
Spurred on by a will to instigate positive change during the pandemic, Anne-Marie co-founded the social enterprise ShareJoy which sells pre-loved fashion to support mental health charities. Now she’s turning her attention to how our homes can hold the key to helping tackle the climate emergency with DesignTracker.
Photo: Joanne Warren
You may have seen Anne-Marie’s work in:
Our values
trust
We only feature certified products and services and we actively scrutinise solutions
authority
Analysis of the housing market produced in partnership with the best researchers
transparency
Constructive conversations focused on sharing ideas and collaboration across sectors
accessibility
Talking about sustainability for the home in a way that you can relate and understand
quality
Focusing on quality as a key metric to minimise risk and connect you with the best
empowerment
Inspiring you to make planet-positives choices for your home and lifestyle