EP111. Are beauty samples sustainable?

Have you heard many people talking about the sustainability of beauty samples? Because I haven't. And yet this is a conversation that we as an industry should constantly be having. After all, as anyone who shops for beauty products will know, samples are freely provided in stores, in online orders, in beauty boxes, in magazines. They're everywhere. In fact, they've become so ubiquitous that many shoppers now expect them. When I googled beauty samples, I found numerous articles teaching people how to get as many free skincare and hair care and makeup samples as possible. And of course, there's no surprise about any of this, because at the end of the day, everyone loves free stuff. But can we continue to offer samples for beauty products when virtually all of them come in packaging that isn't and can't be recycled? Think back to the number of free beauty sachets that you've picked up over the years. What did you do with them when you were finished with them? Did you even use all of them? This issue of sampling sits at the heart of many of the sustainability challenges in the beauty industry. It ties in with the industry's drive to get people to consume as many personal care products as possible. And it ties in with the huge waste generated by everything to do with beauty. So why is hardly anyone talking about the sustainability of beauty samples? Well, luckily for us, one forward thinking clean beauty retailer is Join me as I interview Credo Beauty's VP of Sustainability and Impact to learn exactly how and why they've said no to samples. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. We tackle topics that will make you think and encourage debate about green beauty with your friends, followers or customers. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmeier. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have thousands and thousands of students in over 180 countries around the world who study with us to become organic formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. So in today's episode I'm joined by Mia Davis, the VP of Sustainability and Impact at Credo Beauty, the largest clean beauty retailer. Mia is a committed environmentalist and was on the founding team at Beauty Counter and created the CREDO Clean standard including their sustainable packaging guidelines. She also co founded the new nonprofit membership organization Pact Collective to start to make a dent in hard to recycle beauty waste and to bring beauty stakeholders together to move towards circularity Last year, CREDO announced that they were no longer going to provide beauty samples to their customers. So who better to have on the podcast today to talk sample sustainability than Mia Davis? Hi, Mia, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Hi. Very well. Thank you for having me.

Oh, it's awesome to have you here. So let's start with some introductions so our listeners can get to know you a bit better. Can you firstly tell us about you and your background and then introduce our listeners to CREDO Beauty, please.

So I'm a lifelong environmentalist and activist and really care a lot about environmental health, holistically, so human health, environment, and have been working for my whole career to get toxic chemicals out of supply chains and increase sustainability of materials and work on, you know, using business as a tool for positive change. So that's kind of my. My interest, my passion, and my career so far. And in the last couple or few years, even, I've been working with CREDO Beauty. I'm the VP of sustainability and impact there. And CREDO is the largest clean beauty retailer in the United states, founded in 2015 by a couple of Sephora and beauty industry expats who really wanted to bring more natural ingredients and a new way of thinking a bit more ethically and holistically about beauty, bring those to retail.

Amazing. What a fantastic track record. And I love the fact that CREDO has a VP of sustainability and impact, because I think that says everything about the organization you work for. So today we're talking about the sustainability of samples, which is such an incredibly important conversation. And I have to say, I haven't really seen anyone have this conversation yet at an industry level. But you guys are having that conversation because last year, CREDO decided to stop offering samples. Why did you make that decision? What was the trigger?

So for us, clean is a big term and a dynamic term, and it encompasses safety and sustainability, ethics and transparency. And it's not just about the ingredients in the bottle. Right. It's not about the goop itself. It's also about the bottle. It's about kind of taking a step back and thinking, what are we using? Do we need it? Is there a better way to source these materials? So we knew that we wanted to create sustainable packaging guidelines that were industry leading and that were clear, obviously want them to be attainable for our brand partners, but also really strong so that we can get ourselves out of what is, quite frankly, extremely consumptive and wasteful problem when it comes to beauty packaging. When I started to do the research for the sustainable Packaging guidelines for CREDO A couple of years ago, I was alarmed when I learned how many single use packets or sachets are created by our industry. Obviously knew it was a problem, it was on my radar. I knew I wanted to address it somehow in these guidelines. But when I found out that there's somewhere around 122 billion of these sachets created annually and that they have no value in the recycling world, they have no value, they cannot be recycled. There is no buyer for them. There is no mechanism with which we can collect and recycle them. Also, because they are usually mixed materials, you don't just have paper on the outside, you have it lined with plastic or it's foil. There's really no way that it could be recycled. And quite frankly, a lot of times folks don't even want them or need them. Right. We have kind of adopted in the beauty industry this idea that sampling is the only way for a customer to discover a product. It is a way to show thanks or, you know, encourage loyalty. And that I think needs to be turned on its head because it's a very consumptive kind of broken way of thinking about how we can help people find the products that they, that they want and need instead of just kind of throwing stuff at folks. And you know, it's human nature to get excited about new shiny objects. And if someone says here, would you like to try this for free? Most people just say, yes, I do that too. I get that. But how many times has someone put one of those in your bag or offered you something and you take it and then you're like, I don't want this. And it gets tossed and get used. So a lot of problems with those little sides sachets. And one thing that really made it clear for me and for our team at CREDO that we needed to do something about this was the footage that I saw in great documentary called the Story of Plastic, which if you haven't seen it, I encourage you and all of your listeners to check it out. It's available on Amazon prime and a few other places where you can stream documentaries for super reasonable cost. It's intense, it's a hard one to watch, but it's really brilliantly done, very compelling. And you see little single use sachets packets in waterways just lining rivers. And if it's mismanaged waste and it goes out into the environment, it's ocean bound, it's headed for the ocean and there it will break down into microplastics or other unwanted little pieces of toxic material. So we made a rule on that one. That was not an easy decision because the beauty industry feels dependent on them. But on the other hand, it was a no brainer. And when I talked with the team about it, we felt we really needed to be at the front of this and say, let's find another way to help customers find products and for brands to get their new wares out there. This doesn't have to be it.

Wow. I mean, 122 billion, that is absolutely eye watering when you think about it. And you're quite right, they do end up in waterways and even if they end up in landfills, it's still not good enough. So I mean, I commend you for making such a difficult decision. So what sort of samples did CREDO used to offer to its customers? And what do you guys do now?

Yes, so we announced the phase out. The first part of the sustainable packaging guidelines was that milestone. It was okay, we're going to get rid of single use materials. So not only the sample packets, but if it's, you know, like a little wand and an eye cream, you know those little tiny scoops that come with those products, are those necessary for to use the product? Is it a necessary user tool? And if the answer is no, we said let's not use it. So to answer your question on sampling, we did used to do that, we phased it out and now we have a couple of other options. We do have larger size products that people can use as rewards. So when you register your account with Credo, you get loyalty points. And we have some really awesome, juicy, cool things that people can experience for their reward points. But it's not just one use, it's many uses. And then that actually gives you a better, more informed idea if you want that product anyway. We also have these little jars that we sell to customers for super reasonable price. I think it's either 50 cents or a dollar for these little upcycled jars that are highly durable and can be used in store to dram out product. And then we label it for you and then you can rinse it out and reuse it again, whether it's at CREDO or put some vitamins in there or use it for travel and that can be used thousands of times.

Yeah, and of course the key issue there, and you highlighted this already, is at that point the customer has to opt into it, they have to want it. It's not just an unwanted product that's given to them. So I think that's a very clever way of Going about it. Well, let's go to the heart of the discussion and you touched on this a little bit earlier already. Do you really feel that samples can lead to increased sales for brands? Because I'm sure there are brand owners listening to this episode today thinking, if I stopped giving away samples, you know, how would I get new customers to use my products? And we've become so accustomed to receiving samples every time we shop in store and sometimes online as well, that this is also what the whole premise of the Beauty Box, for instance, was based on. So will it impact brands, do you think, if everyone was to stop offering samples?

I think that it's too early to say, like, look, I have data and I can tell you that I'm really confident that it would or would not. But we didn't really have data on the return on that investment in the first place. It was really, of course we had. Anecdotally, folks would say, oh yeah, I got a sample of this and I loved it. But no one was really tracking, not just for credo, but I haven't seen industry data that says, you know, for X samples, you know, here's your cost of acquisition or here's your ROI or here's, you know, how many folks are going to come back in and buy this product in X amount of time. So that was a bit assumptive. And what we're now saying is let's be creative at credo and with, we really hope that even our competitors, our peers in the space will do this too. Because CREDO is little and we need others to join us in this if we're really going to curb this piece of our consumption and waste problem in the industry. But if we all get creative and we kind of retrain ourselves, whether it's at the brand level, the retail selling level and the customer level, not to just expect them. I'm not worried about the industry. I'm not worried that we won't be able to sell cool product to people. I think that it has to be more informed that our every time we make something and choose to take it or buy it, we all have a responsibility for what happened with that thing. And in the case of sachets, there's no way that it has a good end of life. So we said no. And you know, we've both kind of indicated this already. It should be informed, it should be. I would like to see it be more purposeful and have intent to sampling. So if you go into a CREDO because you know that you want a new face Wash and the sales associate, we call them our clean beauty experts. They say, also, I would love to tell you about this face cream. If you know, if you're game right there, great. Buy the product. If you're not, at least it's not, oh, and here's body oil. And here's this. And you know, layering on all these things that you didn't go in there for to pull a page from Patagonia's book, don't buy this jacket, right? It's like, I believe, like, don't buy it if you don't need it. And yes, there's still fun and beauty and discovery and sometimes it, there's a lot of joy there. So I'm not kind of squashing that experience, but I feel like most of the time people, people know what they need and we don't need to oversell.

I completely agree. It's music to my ears. I mean, so few people, again are talking about consumption and degrowth and concepts like that in relation to the beauty industry. But it's obviously a discussion we all need to be having. Now. You touched on it, you said we all have a responsibility. And I completely agree with that. And I love the fact that you're saying, I hope our peers will pick this up as well. In terms of customers, how are we going to wean customers off samples? Like, what sort of leadership should the beauty industry be showing in order to get people to sample beauty products in such a different way?

I think if we normalize it again, if we link arms and say, let's do this as an industry, it will go faster. It won't take as much time for folks to say, okay, yeah, this is worth my risk of spending $20 on this product. Knowing also that there are great return policies. Look, that's a sustainability issue too. If you sell a full size product and someone returns it, you can't resell that product. So I recognize that there's always kind of these externalized or there's these trade offs all the time. I totally get that. But I think that if we just kind of take a step back and have a more informed approach to it and do things like this reusable sample jar, I mean, this is not rocket science. This is pretty easy and we've made it, you know, CREDO has absorbed some of the cost and we've passed a small amount on to the customer so that it doesn't hurt credo's business, it doesn't really impact us in a big way. But also that just further has the Customer kind of register, do I want this? It's a very small dollar amount, you know, a dollar to purchase these two jars. But it makes you stop to think, do I, do I want that? And everything that we hold shouldn't be thought of as just this kind of take use, waste philosophy or that when you're done with it, it goes quote away like that. There's just this away that we're all absolved of thinking about, whether we are the brand that's buying the packaging, the retailer that's selling it, or the customer that's using it, and then dropping it in your single stream blue bin, as we often call it in the US because they're often blue or green, it becomes something else that it has this great other life ahead of it when so, so little beauty packaging actually is recycled in the municipal systems.

And that's obviously that sits at the heart of this whole issue. How have the brands themselves responded? The brand stopped by credo. How did they respond to your decision to say, okay guys, that's it, no more samples?

No. Our brand partners are amazing and so many of them got into this industry because they care about the environment and they care about customer health. So while there is sometimes a bit of grumbling in the beginning about a new policy, our overall the response not just to the sampling, but to our entire sustainable packaging guidelines to this whole program has been very, very positive. And I am so grateful for that. Because it's hard enough to accomplish the goals that we have set out. For example, 50% recycled content petrochemical, plastic and plastic packaging by 2024. That's an ambitious goal, labeling packaging with plastic resin codes so that people actually know if it can be recycled or not. Vast majority of our small format beauty packaging, when you pick it up, you don't know what it is. You don't know, is it pet, is it hdpe, is it polypropylene, is it abs, which is styrene based? No clue. Because they are not legally required to put a label or stamp or emboss deboss the package. It is just not done. It's just like not done. And you have to ask, who benefits from that? Who benefits from not sharing the resin code? Certainly not the planet. It's not the customer and it's not the recycling facilities that are working really hard to sort all of this stuff out and find end buyers. It's the makers of the resin that want you to believe that it's all going to be recycled and go quote, unquote away. So we're pushing for that by 2024 and that is, I hope that we can meet that goal. It's ambitious and it's kind of like we have to have conversations like this to get it out there so that people start to go, that is messed up. Actually, now that you, now that you mention it, it is messed up that we don't get to know what our stuff is made out of. So I'm glad that our brand partners are for vast majority of brand partners are absolutely in this journey with us, are glad for the guidance and the leadership and glad to be able to point back to a retail policy instead of being a small indie brand that's out there. Just saying like, hey, can we make the following more sustainable choices when most suppliers are like, who are you? Your MOQs are so small, you're not a huge known brand. The answer is no. If we team together, hopefully we will make some positive change here.

Absolutely. And it sounds like you're well on your way to doing so. And it is fantastic and inspiring actually to see your leadership in the indie beauty space. And I only hope that there are more people listening today who decide to join in that mission too. But I'm sure some people are listening, thinking, oh, it's easy for you to say because you already attract in a certain type of customer that, that embodies those sustainability ideals that you stand for. I mean, do you find that is the case or does CREDO just attract in all sorts of people who are interested in indie beauty and you're changing hearts and minds in the process?

Well, I think both of those points, I mean, definitely the CREDO customer more likely than not identifies as someone who cares about safety and sustainability. They consider themselves more of a green customer. But most folks really don't know how little is recycled or how little regulation there is over the space. So even for folks that identify that way and know that they feel more empowered at credo, like they're making a better, cleaner choice by supporting these brands and using these products. When we have the opportunity, which we have often because of our packaging guidelines and because of our take back program that we have, we have a collection bin called Packed in our store that affords us a lot of opportunity to speak with customers about the problems, especially with end of life of beauty packaging. A lot of people get like cut in the head when they find out about it, like really upset that they feel misled. And so there's a, there's just a lot of different dynamics that come up. But I think that increasingly the customer, like en masse, like the mass customer is also aware that something is amiss when it comes to consumption, especially around plastic, especially around like end of life. And we know from not just the credo, like feedback from our CREDO customer, but from research that we see, like reports on industry research that the customer spoken generally the customer wants more sustainable packaging and they have specifically said that they want more recycled content and better recyclability. Now there's a lot more to that in a lot of greenwashing or kind of misleading claims that are very difficult for customers to navigate. They're difficult for brands to navigate, especially indie brands where you have very small, lean teams and usually the founders or the folks in leadership have, you know, maybe they're really amazing marketers or maybe they were formulators, but that doesn't mean that they are packaging sustainability experts. Right. Or that they can afford to have those people on staff. So sometimes even brands wanting to make very sustainable packaging decisions have a really hard time figuring out what's real from the packaging suppliers.

Yeah, it's an absolute minefield and we see it in our community as well. And people want us to tell them exactly what packaging to use. And of course it isn't that simple. Now you talked about the fact that CREDO wants to phase out petrochemical plastic packaging. What are the next steps in terms of your sustainable packaging guidelines? Like where would you like to go with credo?

So it's not about phasing out the petrochemical plastic entirely, it's about reducing the virgin content. We I'm not a plastic apologist by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think that in my lifetime we will live in plastic free world or a plastic free beauty industry. There's also a lot of trade offs with other materials though I tend to prefer metal and glass and paper. There are certain formats where it's just not an option. So we don't believe that we should be talking about zero plastic or zero, like zero anything as the way to go because I don't quite frankly think it's attainable. And I try to be industry leading and very, you know, ambitious. I'm also a straight shooter and not trying to set goals that are not actually going to move the needle or will be attainable. So the plastic goal around, you know, regular plastic, like most plastic, 99% of plastic that's on the market is petrochemical plastic. This means that it comes from chemicals that were derived from oil or gas. And that's pretty much everything the Only reason that I bother really articulating that it's petrochemical plastic is to kind of level set and remind us all that that's where plastic is coming from. But also when we start talking about sustainability and packaging, people start to make leaps to plant based polymers or biodegradability and say a lot of other buzzwords, some of which are meaningful and some not so much. So I just like to, you know, use the phrase petrochemical plastic to remind us where we're at. I think that it's important for us to use as little virgin petrochemical plastic as we can. And that's why we set the 50% rule. There are some pieces, some components of packaging where it's virtually impossible to get to that 50% really hard with squeezable tubes like tube sleeves because they're too brittle when you just. That format is tough. Pumps are really tricky. So we're working with the industry to try to push those numbers of recycled content as high as we can get. But for some of them we might have to offer exemptions. On the other hand for shampoo bottles, for other formats it's really easy to get very high and high performing stable PCR or pir which is post post consumer or post industrial plastic content. And of course, you know, we're saying, I'm saying plastic is like this general thing, plastic. There's so many, so, so, so many kinds of plastic and some of them are absolute garbage. They're toxic, they'll never be recycled. They're toxic from the moment that they were made and to the end of life. It's just a cradle to cradle problem. There are other plastics that are much, much better and more sustainable and in certain cases can be far more sustainable even than a plant based polymer or other materials. So it's complex and I appreciate that and I'm not trying to like to be over overly general here. It's a conversation like this, sometimes it can be too hard to get in the weeds and really geek out on plastic. But I, I am happy to do that some other time with people.

Fantastic. Well, I think the final question I want to end on is obviously we're seeing leadership come out of credo into the beauty industry, showing what you expect in terms of sustainability. We talked about samples today. I mean obviously we've just been talking about packaging. What role do you feel all retailers need to play in the drive to sustainable beauty?

Such an important question to end on because this is a very, very big issue and it's going to take all of us to really chip away at it. There's no one silver bullet like one perfect package or one perfect way to go, or this would be a much shorter conversation because our industry makes stuff that is meant to live on the shelf for a long time, and it's made with all these delicious actives that would, you know, grow yeast and bacteria and mold. We have the need for preservation and the need for packaging that can really be compatible with these formulas. So this isn't as simple as making food to go and wrapping it in waxed paper or something that has a much shorter shelf life and is only in contact with a product for a short amount of time. We've got a lot of complexities that I appreciate. What we really need is an honest conversation about how much we're consuming and where it's going. We need those resin ID codes that I mentioned earlier on packaging, because it is. We're not going to get very far, to be quite honest, if we don't have a basic understanding of what the material is so that we can decide where it needs to go. Right now, the idea that we can wish cycle and just throw all this stuff in the curbside bin so so few of those materials are being recycled and we have to be more honest about that and have more of an extended producer responsibility mind frame. Whether you're a packaging supplier, a brand, a retailer, we all have a role to play. And right now, the current system just kind of like keeps pushing, kicking the can down the road. Not my problem, not my problem, not my problem. And then the customer is left with it. He, she, they can't tell what that thing is even made out of. Throw it in the blue bin and hope for the best. And it's going to landfill or it's going to the incinerator. Approximately, you know, 90% of the time when it comes to beauty formats, that's not to say everything that goes in the single stream bin is going to incineration. There are some things that have great recycling rates, like aluminum cans, et cetera. But in our industry, because things are so small, they often still contain goop, they're not clean because they're made out of mixed materials. They tend to have an end of life that is anything but circular and far from zero waste. So we need to work together to design smarter and really push for more education and more information.

I love that. That's a very positive note to end on. We all need to link arms, and that's also what we're doing on this podcast episode today. So Mia, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. People I'm sure are listening, thinking where can they follow you? And obviously where can they follow CREDO Beauty? Where can people find you online?

You know, I'm not online as an individual very much though I am at LinkedIn. I do some stuff there. I can be found there. CREDO has wonderful social handles at Instagram. At Credo Beauty, we're everywhere and we do a lot of education and mission content related to sustainability on our social handles. So I hope people will visit us there. And also please check out PACT Collective, a nonprofit organization that I co founded and that CREDO co founded, working on basically everything that we just talked about today. Lorraine, we're doing a lot of work there in coalition, linking arms with other stakeholders.

Fantastic. We will include all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much Mia. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

Thank you for having me. Anytime.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and that it's made you pause and think about the way that samples in their current form need to be phased out of the beauty industry. I would love to hear your thoughts. So please do come and leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. Thank you for joining Mia and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter or LinkedIn. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today. Sam.