WRÅD shows how to talk about sustainability in an engaging way

Every year, Benefit companies devote a great deal of energy and investment to producing their Impact Report: an official document that outlines the activities carried out, the objectives achieved and the value generated for people, society and the environment. However, very few people actually read it. It remains a document confined to a small circle of industry professionals, consultants and internal stakeholders. The WRÅD brand sought to address this very contradiction: if sustainability aims to change the world, why does it continue to be communicated through formats that people avoid? It therefore set itself a concrete challenge: to transform this reporting into content capable of capturing the public’s interest.

This is how ‘Real-World Puzzles’ came about – a publishing project that transforms WRÅD’s 2025 Impact Report into a book of games and puzzles designed to entertain, connect and stimulate dialogue. So, if impact reporting can become something to take with you under your beach umbrella, then perhaps it is not just the format of the report that changes, but also the role these tools can play in making change more accessible, understandable and widely embraced.

‘Puzzles for the Real World’ uses the most iconic puzzle formats – crosswords, rebuses, anagrams, quizzes, brain teasers and trivia – to raise awareness of responsible design and to showcase the projects, research and cultural references that have characterised WRÅD’s work throughout 2025 and beyond. The themes range from design to fashion, from health to responsibility, from history to systemic transformation, inviting the reader to participate actively. WRÅD chooses play as a design tool to transform complex information into shared experiences.

“Companies, including many of our clients, invest enormous amounts of resources in drafting these documents,” says Giorgio Fermanelli, Director of Impact at WRÅD. “But if nobody reads them, what’s the point? This project arose from a real need we identified. Most of the brands we work with told us of their frustration at the limited real impact these reports had.”

The publication was launched and handed out to passers-by on 15 July at the Edicola Erno newsagent’s in Rome. However, this initiative does not replace WRÅD’s standard social report, which remains freely available online on the company’s website, but rather complements it perfectly, presenting the data in an interactive and inclusive format.

In this way, a document typically analysed in the office or during briefings is transformed into a magazine that can be read anywhere, even under a beach umbrella. This choice represents a clear strategy for WRÅD, a design and consultancy firm founded by Matteo Ward in 2015 and which, in 2025, became part of Inside Out (IO), a global holding company dedicated to improving human and planetary health. Operating at the intersection of culture, business and policy, WRÅD helps organisations rethink the role that products and services play in society. Clients who have worked with WRÅD to rethink how they communicate their impact initiatives include EssilorLuxottica, PVH, Ferragamo, Vestiaire Collective and Montura.