EP150. Can new beauty brands be more sustainable?

When you first start a beauty brand, there are hundreds of questions to answer. What formulations are you going to sell? Who is your target customer? Where do you want to sell your products? What sort of packaging do you plan to use? What will your brand look like? This is a fun, creative time for beauty entrepreneurs where they can pour all of their passion, their innovation, their ideas into their own business to create something that is uniquely theirs. But my guest on the Green Beauty Conversations podcast last week, Ben Grace of Subtract, raised a really interesting point that I want to dig into in a bit more detail. He suggested that it might be easier for new brands to start out with sustainability in mind, rather than existing brands having to add in elements of sustainability at a later date. And that message really resonated with me because of course, not only does Formula Botanica train up new brands all the time, but I instantly could see how retrofitting a brand to embrace sustainability aspects would be time consuming and costly if it hadn't been done right from the start. I feel this is a topic we need to talk about, which is why today I want to unpick whether it's easier for new beauty brands to embrace sustainability and whether the existing brands on the market are perhaps going to struggle more than they realize. Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my green beauty opinions in which I share my main takeaways from the podcast interview we release, released last week and set you a challenge to make the green beauty sector a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. So is retrofitting a beauty brand to embrace sustainability even an easy thing to do? I'm sure it's not. It must be a huge challenge. But what exactly would be involved? And I thought it would be interesting to look at the different aspects of how beauty brands work and the steps that an entrepreneur would have to take to bring sustainability into their daily operations and products. Now, the first, most logical point that everyone thinks of is packaging. The formulations made by brands on the market will have been stability tested in that specific packaging. They will have gone through microbial challenge testing in that specific packaging. The labels and designs they use will be perfected, you got it. For that specific packaging. So suddenly changing to more sustainable bottles or jars or perhaps even no packaging at all is a lengthy undertaking. I interviewed Jana Blankenship recently here on the podcast, and she also talked about how hard it was to move her entire range across to aluminium. But the beauty of entrepreneurs is that they love a challenge, which means all of this is doable. It just takes time and money and effort, which is why the big players are slow to catch up. I've mentioned it here on the podcast before that some of the big packaging companies are only now starting to develop recyclable toothpaste packaging. For instance, I have no doubt that the R and D for that project took many years. I'm sure it cost a huge amount to undertake. Whereas of course a new brand could start tomorrow and decide to sell their toothpaste in jars or as tablets and shortcut all of that work that has been undertaken by brands already on the market. Then of course there's the discussion around the sustainability of ingredients. It's quite possible that an ingredient that a beauty brand originally launched with is no longer deemed to be environmentally responsive, possible, or was never sustainable in the first place. Now brands reformulate all the time, but it takes time and again, it can be costly because you have to retest your formulation, get all the new paperwork in place for it, and hope that your customers like the reformulation itself. If it feels different or smells different or performs differently, I would imagine an increasing number of beauty brands will have to do this. One industry article I read recently talked about the fact that some cosmetics are even being reformulated with the bio based equivalent balance of their petroleum counterparts. This is obviously to do with mainstream beauty products. However, ingredients can behave in different ways when they come from different origins, so this approach won't be without its challenges too. And as we saw when I talked to Madhuri Prabhakar in episode 115 from the Plastic Soup foundation, we heard loud and clear that the beauty industry is resisting the removal of microplastics and liquid microplastics with all all their might because they understand the cost that's at stake when it comes to reformulating. There will be many elements that brands have to change in order to retrofit their business for sustainability, but I think the most problematic, and possibly even the most challenging one will be to retrofit their marketing, messaging and overall business model. When you've spent decades telling your customers that the only way they'll be good enough is is when they buy your products, you're clearly not contributing to sustainability. In fact, I would go as far as saying that you can forget all the other commitments and steps, because if a cosmetics company exists purely to make you feel bad about yourself so you buy more stuff. They will never be Sustainable this is why I get so annoyed when some of the big players receive these big industry sustainability awards. There was a flurry of activity from l' Oreal towards the end of last year, for instance, where they were awarded a triple A rating by the nonprofit Carbon Disclosure Project, as well as receiving a prestigious recognition from King Charles for their environmental work. I'm sure they're doing great things in their operations, but I only had to spend three minutes on their YouTube channel to be told I would only be worth it if I reduce my wrinkles, even the deep ones, quote unquote, smooth my skin texture and take care of any signs of aging the moment I hit 30. This messaging is not compatible with the sustainable beauty movement, so retrofitting a beauty brand, particularly one of the big mainstream players for sustainability, may be much harder than we think. The smaller brands will be more nimble and possibly more driven to do the right thing. The bigger brands, like oil tankers, will likely take significantly longer to turn around. Whether they get there at all remains to be seen. So my challenge to you for this week is to continue supporting those smaller brands. Here we are in 2023 and the biggest difference you can make to those entrepreneurs that care deeply about doing the right thing is to support them. Head over to the formulabotanica.com website, click on Graduates at the top, find graduates in your part of the world and go and buy their formulations. You'll be so pleased that you did and so will they. And if you're a new brand owner coming onto the market, keep in mind that you might be better placed than everyone else because you can start with a clean slate. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so now in your favourite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode. Sam.