EP253. How to evolve a beauty brand without losing your values

Fifteenteen years ago, launching a natural beauty brand wasn't the obvious career move that it might seem today, because back then, recyclable and recycled packaging options were limited and most of the industry still relied on conventional synthetic ingredients. But one entrepreneur saw things differently and she set out to create a brand that would evolve the beauty industry, making it more natural, more ethical and more innovative. Her story is one of persistence, experimentation and bold decisions, like bringing manufacturing in house instead of outsourcing it like so many beauty brands do, and growing a product range from 10 products to over 50. Today, that brand is stocked in over 40 countries worldwide and its approach to sustainability has become a bit of a benchmark in the industry, from using Kalahari melon seed oil to knit soil together to tackling Scope three carbon emissions, which is something that even the world's biggest beauty brands are still grappling with. In this episode, I'm joined by the person behind it all, a true pioneer of natural beauty who's been quietly shaping the sector for over a decade. I'm talking about Laura Rudow of Evolve Organic Beauty. We'll hear how she turned her vision into reality, what she's learned from 15 years of running a beauty brand, and what she thinks the future holds for sustainable cosmetics. So if you've ever wondered what it takes to move beyond the buzzwords and tackle sustainability head on while growing a thriving beauty brand, the then this is the episode for you. Let's get started. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations in which I challenge the beauty industry to become more sustainable, champion, independent and green beauty and encourage you to join me in changing the beauty industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dalnaya. I'm a Chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have tens of thousands of students in over 190 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. So in today's episode I'm joined by Laura Rudow, the founder and CEO of Evolve Organic Beauty, a leading UK based sustainable beauty brand with a passion for ethical business and natural wellness. Laura launched Evolve in 2009 to create affordable, organic and eco friendly skincare. The brand is now distributed in over 45 countries and has won over 100 awards for its innovative Products. Evolve operates from a wind powered eco studio in Hertfordshire and is certified B Corp, vegan and cruelty free. Laura's personal journey with skin issues and her Romanian heritage instilled a deep interest in natural healing, leading her to become an expert in skincare and sustainability. She's also a certified Reiki Master and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before founding Evolve, she was part of the founding team at Nude Skincare, a luxury natural beauty brand. And as a leader in sustainable beauty, Laura is on the supervisory board of the Bee Beauty Coalition, a global initiative of B Corp. Certified beauty companies driving positive environmental change. Hi, Laura, how you doing?

I'm doing really well, thank you for having me.

I'm really pleased you're here. I'm so interested in what you've built. So for our listeners, can you please introduce yourself and your brand?

Yes. So I'm Laura Rudow and I'm the founder of Evolve Organic Beauty. So we are a certified organic and natural brand of skin, body and hair products. We make all of our products in the UK in our eco studio in Hertfordshire. And I set up evolve in 2009. So we've just turned 15 and ever since we started, we've been making natural and organic products packaged in sustainable packaging.

Amazing. So you're one of the OGs of the natural beauty sector, I think is safe to say. And I've certainly heard your name many, many times over the years and have even been gifted your products for Christmas actually by family members, so. Oh, wow.

Amazing.

It's lovely. So Evolve's been doing really well and your story is wonderful. We're going to dive into it more in this podcast, but can you start off by telling us why you started Evolve?

So I started Evolve because I'm very passionate about helping people with their health and I knew that what we needed to do to get people to buy natural and organic products in a really wide scale way to really change the industry was to make them desirable and attractive and work really well and look really beautiful, because people are looking for those products that are pure, but they also want results and they also want them to fit into their busy lives. So I called my brand Evolve because it's all about making small steps towards something better. And if Evolution happens gradually and it's sort of an upward cycle. So I think that over time, brands like Evolve can help to transform the beauty industry by giving people natural and organic choices for all of the beauty products that they're looking for.

I love that. And in 2009, you know, starting a natural Beauty brand wasn't that common. So what sort of led you to really going down that route at that stage already? Because you're a bit of a pioneer.

Yes. I felt like I was the only crazy person when I started being involved in beauty. And actually I'd entered the industry in 2005. My journey into the industry was a bit unconventional. So I was a management consultant and I had been at Harvard Business School, and I decided I wanted to work on an ethical customer brand. So something that made a product that had goodness built inside it, I could have done that in lots of different areas. And I ended up entering the beauty industry because I was working for a team of investors, including Bono, and I was helping them set up a natural and ethical brand, which is called Nude. So Nude launched in 2007, and I started helping them with it in 2005, and I helped them write the business plan for Nude. At that time, I didn't know much about beauty, so I was really on a real massive learning curve. And we were working with a conventional chemist in labs, and we were the ones who were really pushing and advocating for using natural materials. And so we had to. I had to educate myself a lot to try and explain to them why we didn't want to use parabens, we didn't want to use some of the other ingredients we decided we wanted to avoid. And at that time, we were aiming for an organic certification and we wanted to use recycled packaging. But it was hard, it was super hard to find everything we needed to make the products work really well and be really beautiful. So we had to make compromises. And then with Evolve, I took a lot of the sort of ideas that we'd been developing, and I was wanting to try and take that even further. And so when I launched Evolve in 2009, we were able to get the range certified. We did get the cruelty certification. We were using recycled packaging. And actually, I saw a real shift in terms of what was available from an ingredients perspective as well. So when in 2005, we said, what's the preservative of this ingredient? They'd say, oh, well, it's a paraben. And we'd say, oh, have you got a non paraben version? And they'd say, why would you need that? Actually, by about sort of 2010 or so, the industry had started responding. And it doesn't normally take that long for an industry supply chain to make new versions of things. So it wasn't just us, of course, because we were really small, it was us and lots of Other brands who were starting to ask for all of these versions of ingredients. And now, now if you go to the Cosmos database and we work with the Cosmos Natural and organic standard and every ingredient gets checked by this independent certifier, Cosmos. You go to their database, they have a pre approved list of thousands of materials which you can use in natural and organic products. And it's actually much easier than it was when I was at Nude, when we were making our own list and trying to work out, you know, basically doing our own version of the Cosmos screening process and asking, what's the preservative, what's the solvent, what's this, what's that? And Cosmos take that to a much deeper level than we could do. And then it's very standardized. So actually I think that standard is the closest thing we have to a clean standard. If you're looking to sort of certify clean, Cosmos Natural is that. And then Cosmos Organic takes that one step further, of course, because it means that a certain percentage of the product ingredients have to be certified organic, which brings lots of additional benefits as well. So, yes, that's been. We've. I've been on a real journey and starting in 2017, 2009, we started using a family run lab in the UK, who were a great partner for us when we first started. But by 2015 we'd really learned a lot about the sort of the manufacturing and the formulation side. And so we branched out and we actually opened our own eco studio.

Wow.

That led to a really big inflection point in the business where we started growing really fast. We rebooted the range and we then moved to the packaging we have now with the printed labels, the brand glass and the recycled brand plastic bottles we use. And so that sort of been. That was a really big turning point in the business and kind of almost the reboot and the start again of the business, we completely changed the products. We had about 10 new products which I formulated and we started off quite simple at that point. But then from then on the business started growing really quickly. We had that kind of hockey stick that you get, you know, you sometimes see on a finance slide. And every year we were sort of doubling or tripling in size, which was a very exciting journey for us.

That is incredibly exciting. Well, congratulations as well because that is a phenomenal achievement. So for our listeners who aren't familiar with Evolve, and of course they should be, but if they're not familiar with Evolve, what sort of products do you make and sell?

So from that range of about 10 products that we relaunched in 2015, we've now got a range of 50 products. So the majority of them are facial skincare products. So we have cleansers, toners, moisturizers, serums, masks. And then as well as that we do body care products and also hair care products, although we have a smaller hair care range at the moment. And we're looking to branch out beyond facial skin care, body and hair care as well next year and start doing some aromatherapy products as well. We sell into a variety of different places, so we sell on our own website internationally and in the uk and then we have distributors. So we work with distributors in about 40 different countries now, particularly in Europe. We have some really amazing distribution partners and they help us get into stores in different markets. And in the uk we work in the health sector, so we work with Planet Organic and Whole Foods and Holland and Barrett, and then we work with companies like ocado. We're on sephora.com and then in department stores. Our big partner is John Lewis, so we're in quite a lot of the John Lewis stores and also on there online. So. And we've got a really great set of partners who help us reach the customers who are really interested in evolve and it's people who are looking for pure but also proven products that are also sustainable.

Amazing. I mean, over 40 countries, that is a phenomenal achievement. So obviously you've been going for 15 years. Congratulations on your, your 15th business birthday this year. What would you say the biggest learnings that you've taken from that 15 year period? Because, I mean, you've seen a huge amount of transition in the sector but also in your own business in that time.

Yes, I think that there's been so many learnings just trying to capture a few of them, just trying to kind of boil that down. I think as an entrepreneur, and this might be relevant because I know a lot of your listeners are probably thinking about setting up their skincare businesses. What I learned is that when you're setting up a physical business, it does take time for your product to be tried and for people to have that organic word of mouth. And I think initially I thought things would happen very quickly and things took a lot longer than I thought they would. But then when I started looking into it, before the dot com boom and all of that happened and we thought things happen overnight, it took nearly 10 years for the second McDonald's franchise to open. When you think about that and how big the McDonald's is now as a business, you know, sometimes when you have a physical product, things do take time. The other decision I made with my business was not to take investment early in my journey and to really bootstrap the business and to try and do all the different roles myself, to really learn how I wanted things to be. And I think that that was a good decision because it took quite a while to get the product and the packaging right. So we had three goes at the packaging. The packaging is an incredibly important element, but it's a little bit of luck goes into it. It's a bit like trying to launch a hit record. You know, it might work, might not work quite hard to test. So I think that if you take money too early, you're then very sort of locked into having big targets from your investors. And I was lucky that we didn't do that. And we really bootstrapped. We were really, really tiny until 2015, and. And I think if we'd taken money in that time, we wouldn't be here today because we would have. You know, our investors would have closed us down by now because it took us a while and we made loads of mistakes, but we were able, because they were quite small mistakes, we were able to kind of learn from them and keep going. And because I've done every single role in the business myself at one point, I really do still have a very good handle what's going on. So, for example, I set the website up and I know how it's all configured, and I set the email system up and I know how that's all configured. So even though I don't do those roles now, I understand how they work and I can talk to those people in detail in my team. And so that's very helpful. And I think we learned a lot from being a business in 2015 of only three people, to now scaling the business up to a team of over 30 people. And that includes all the artisans. And then we have a wholesale sales team who manages distribution and the retail partnerships, and then also a marketing team. So I'm constantly learning in loads of different ways, but just learning how to put processes in place that are appropriate for a team that we are now that we didn't need when we were only three. So everything was very informal, and then we just gradually had to put processes and write things down a lot more, and that's been quite a journey. And then I think also just learning how to manage people and to make sure you're working with the right people and then how to lead and to inspire people has been a big journey. So there's just been so many. It's been my whole career, really, of things. And I've, you know, I've become a lot more confident along the way. And now I, I don't. I'm not scared of speaking in public anymore like I was at the beginning. So it's been an amazing journey and I feel so lucky to have been on it. We're not over yet either, so we're still continuing.

Far from it. I would say you've got a lot of. A lot of scope to do even more. And what you've created is. Is very inspirational. And I know that one of the things that our listeners will have picked up on, which is. Or something else that I've. I've picked up with a couple of other guests I've had on the podcast in the past is the fact that you manufacture in house. And that is not a common model when you get to your sort of size. So talk me through the decision process behind that. Why did you decide to keep it in house?

Yes, it seems quite counterintuitive because oftentimes as you get bigger, you tend to outsource things. But actually, because of my background and the fact that I'd worked on this other project Nude, I was able to work with a contract manufacturer from the very beginning of starting Evolve, and we had a contract warehouse as well. So actually the business was completely virtual back in 2009, which seems quite really modern now, doesn't it? But actually there were disadvantages to it. There were several different types. One was that we never really touched the physical product. So at one point the contract manufacturer put mint in as the fragrance rather than the vanilla it should have been. And we didn't know. And it was only when a customer said to us, oh, your product seems to have changed, we went, has it really? And we didn't know that it had happened. So there was a frustration around not being close enough to what was happening and not really having full traceability either about where things came from and what was actually going into the products that we were uncomfortable with. But the bigger reason was that it just restricted us in terms of innovation. So because of the minimum order quantities, which don't seem particularly big now, but at the time they seemed insurmountable. We had to order a thousand. And actually a thousand was quite lucky. I think now it's probably more. More like 2 or 3,000 that you have to order of each product from the manufacturer. We thought we were very good at innovation because we really got into the details and we were really thinking about the formulas and what was going in. But when we really looked at it, we realized the innovation cycle was very long because we had to make a thousand products that might have taken us at least a year to sell at the time for each of the products. If anything wasn't quite perfect about the idea that we had. It took a whole year of us selling it and trying to clear it before we could make any more products and use that money to make something else. So actually the first part of the cycle was short, but then the whole cycle was probably two years. We were able to really shorten that cycle when we moved to an in house model because we could make a hundred of something and we could just try it out and see if it worked and we could get signal from the market rather than sort of trying to test it, you know, before it was launching so we'd really know if something worked. And you know, we've tweaked quite a lot of things over the, over the years where we've realized that, you know, this could be slightly improved in a certain way. In fact, we're constantly tinkering with the products, trying to make them better because we are at heart product nerds. That's what we are. You know, having that ability. Instead of doing one thing and making a thousand, suddenly I had 10 things for the same money. I could sell 10 things to my customers, they could buy 10 things, suddenly they had a whole range to sell. So that really unlocked a lot of innovation and it just meant that the business could grow faster and without so much money tied up in stock in just a few things. And it could mean me to take more interesting product decisions. So the risk of doing something a bit more innovative when you're only making 100 is really low. Whereas if you have to make a thousand or something, you're thinking, oh, I'm going to play it safe. I don't want to, you know, do something too risky. So we were one of the first ones in the UK to really innovate with Sucra gel, which I know your listeners as well will know what is. And we were doing all kinds of interesting things with us. And actually the manufacturer said to us not so long ago, really, you do that with it. That's interesting. We didn't know you could do that. So we sort of played around with it and did all kinds of things. We had got started with it by buying a dough hook. So we actually had this machine in our studio which would normally be in a pizza kitchen because it's such a thick material, you need to use such when you start making it at any scale, not just in a beaker, you need to use so much force to make it go round.

That's true.

We'd mixed it with, we mixed it with chocolate, we mixed it with cocoa particles, we mixed it with gold sparkles, we mixed it with quartz particles, we mixed it with shea butter and turned it into a butter. We put it in the freezer and then we could set it quickly. So we did all kinds of funny things with it. And that has been an area of innovation where we became quite expert at using something that not many people were using at the time because we started using it in 2010.

Oh, I love that. Well, let's paint a picture for what your lab looks like now. How big is it? How many people have you got in there? Imagine we're coming to visit on our podcast. Talk us around in a short tour.

Visualize coming through the door and we go straight into the lab. So in the lab we have an area where we can do innovation. So we have some high shear mixers and all the things you'd expect in a lab. So, you know, the laboratory sized equipment. And our chemist creates all of our prototype formulas there. So we're now employing a full time chemist to do innovation for us. And in there we've also got our water purification system. So we have reverse osmosis water with a UV filter and we use that for all of our production. So we don't buy water in because that would be not a green thing to do. So it's added at the very last minute and it's totally pure. We also got all of our much more industrial sized looking dough hook machines. So they're now sort of 30 kilo vessels. So they're sort of, you know, as wide as you can span with your arms. And when we do a run of masks or anything that uses them, we've got sort of several of them all whizzing around all at the same time. And we also use those to do cooling. If we do smaller batches of a moisturizer or something like that that needs to be stirred as it cools down. And then as well as that, we've now got a pneumatic filling machine that can fill small scale tube production. So we started working with a green tube which is made from upcycled sugarcane waste. We use it for a few products, so we use it for a hand cream. We've also got a lip gloss that we use in it and we're launching some more products in it at the moment. So it can only seal four tubes at a time. So it's not one of these enormous great big things that, you know, does 10,000 tubes in a few minutes. So it's a sort of a small scale one. And then we've also got all of our weighing equipment in there, so kind of industrial sized skills scale so we can weigh out all of our ingredients. If you go out to the little lab, into the main part of the warehouse we put the lab in when we moved into our studio, which was in 2019. It was our new studio. 2019. You can see our process vessel. So we have a 250 kilo process vessel that has a side vessel. And the side vessel is used for heating oils and butters. And then the main vessel has a high shear mixer inside and it's jacketed so it can heat up the water. Then you can add all of your ingredients when you're making a cream. Or it can easily make things like shampoos without needing to to be heated up. And then it can also cool things down in a controlled fashion as well. So we got that second hand from sort of an agent, but actually originally it came from Tropic. So it says Tropic on the side, which is quite funny. I don't think Tropic know that we have it, but we ended up buying it. And then around that area of our warehouse you can see all of our raw materials. So we buy organic oils in quantities that look surprisingly big. So we'll actually have a ton of sunflower oil sitting there using some of our formulas and the MCT oil that you might put in your bulletproof coffee. We have a ton of that as well sitting there. So a ton is this great big IBC sized thing which looks like sort of like a meter cube, great big plastic thing. And then we also have lots of other amazing oils sitting there. So we'll have, you know, beautiful oils like rosehip and Argan and all of those. And then we have a special cupboard for all of our flammable materials. So things like, you know, amazing essential oils, so things like frankincense and vetiver and loads of other and organic rose otto which is £15,000 a kilo.

Oh my goodness.

That cannot be dropped. You have to be very careful with that. And then in our warehouse as well, we have all of our packaging and all of our finished goods. And there's a pick and pack area for our Internet orders, but we also pick all of our wholesale orders. And distributor orders from the same facility. And if you go through that area, you go into our filling room where our team work. And we were shocked to see that other manufacturers don't give their team a heated space. We were going, of course they have to be heated. What do you mean? So we put the wall in and that room is lovely and toasty. And our team work there. And we have a small little conveyor belt to do labeling. We have some semi automatic filling. We use a pneumatic filler for the really thick products now. But things are still hand cartoned and hand labeled as well at times because at our scale we're still making things under 5,000 units per run. It doesn't make sense to get a big cartoning machine. So we have a team of artisans who make the product. So some bulk specialists, because that's a really specialist role. You need to be highly trained to do that. And then the filling team have actually also highly trained at making it look beautiful when it's filled and putting the labels on straight. It sounds easy, but it's actually not easy at all. So that's the downstairs and then when you go upstairs are our offices and we have this area which has grass on the floor and it's a breakout area with picnic benches and that's where everyone has their lunch. But we also use it for training and meetings and, and things like that.

Also heated I would imagine.

And then once a month we have a team lunch and one of the parts of the team will make lunch for the whole team in a little group and we'll use one of our great big pots that we've got to make a big chili or something for everybody.

So one day it's making moisturizer and the next day it's making chili. There's a concept. So one thing you mentioned a couple of times in there actually is the word green. So sustainability is obviously incredibly important to you. How have you started to bring this idea around, environmental responsibility, sort of social equity into the products that you're making?

Yeah, it's something that we did from the very beginning. But over time we've managed to do more and more as we've grown and also as things have become more available. So we started off using recycled plastic when we first launched evolv and we were using recycled milk bottle plastic initially, which we were then coloring to take away sort of recycled, slightly muddy looking color. But we moved away from that in 2015 and now we use brown glass and when we use recycled plastic we're using recycled Pet. So that's the plastic you get in a water bottle. And we've actually recently moved to using pop, which is ocean plastic. So it's gathered from the coastline and the idea is that it stops the plastic from going into the ocean. And so all of our bottles for the shampoos and things which have to be in plastic for safety reasons, are made from this special ocean plastic for the bottles. And we actually buy it from UK plastic manufacturers because there are still two in the UK who make plastic. Whereas glass you can't really find in the uk, but you can find it from Europe. So our glass comes from Europe, our bottles come from the uk, our cartons come from down the road in Gerard's Cross. We have a very nice company we've been working with for quite a while who we know very well who make our cartons. And they're made out of grass paper. So that grass paper is sustainably harvested from the area around the paper converter, which is in Germany. And actually our Japanese customer asked us the other day, are there any animals that graze on the grass paper? Sorry, on the grass that the paper. And we went and found out, no, no, there were no animals, there's no poop on that grass, it's all nice. The other thing we've worked on with the packaging is trying to look at the componentry. So with the, with a product, what ends up being tricky is that the, the pump is a tricky component because it has to be precision engineered. If it isn't perfectly formed, it won't go, it won't go up and down properly. And so when you use recycled material, there's often a lot of different plastic grades involved and they can sort of expand at slightly variable rates. So the tolerance on plastic components can, when they recycle, can be a bit wider. So for pumps you can't really get recycled components and they're also tricky to recycle if they contain a spring in them. So we've looked into non spring options, but even if you go with a non spring option, they don't get collected at the curbside. So what we've done with those is we actually offer a recycled, sorry, a refill scheme. So for some of our products, the ones is actually more like the ones I'm looking on my shelf here. So. Yeah, so more like this product, which is a glass bottle, a 200 mil glass bottle. We'll offer it with a little transport cap, that's metal, so you don't need to buy the pump. Again, we'll give you the. Without the pump and then you can reuse the pump you've already got. And the nice thing about that is you've been using that pump, it hasn't then been contaminated by someone else. So there's not this issue around trying to wash this pump and make sure that it's free of someone else's bugs or germs. Because I think with refills that there is a bit of an issue around that. And how do you kind of properly do that? We've looked into take back schemes and things like that, but at the moment we think that it's not clear that the, you know, if you. All the carbon that would then be generated by things moving backwards and forwards doesn't really add up. So it's better if the product gets recycled, if it can be. You reuse the bit that can't be recycled and then you kind of put a new fresh product at the bottom of it. So we're doing things like that. We're working with hot offices, we work with the office group and Fora and we supply all of the washes and shampoos for all of their bathrooms. So we do things like that. We supply those in 5 litre refills as well. That's what we've been doing on packaging and trying to source everything locally. And then we've also looked at carbon footprinting. So actually we're one of only two companies in the world that we have found so far. But if you find more, let me know because we're looking for benchmarks who do a product level carbon footprint estimate and put it on the product pages of their website.

So yes, actually that's interesting you mentioned that. Actually I was going to ask you about that. You're one of the only brands I've ever looked at who's talked about Scope three emissions. So for anyone listening, Scope three is the emissions of the products once they leave the factory gates, effectively in the.

Consumer'S hands and before they leave. So what we've done is we've gone all the way from the ingredients from when they come out of the field to when they leave the customer's hands and tried to estimate that and the way we did it, we didn't. It was we're still quite small. So this was definitely an estimate. We took five different products, so we sort of took one wash, one cream, one oil and then a couple of other different textures and then we did those products in detail. So we looked at the ingredients that were in them. We got a carbon footprint for all of those, how they traveled to us, then when we made them, and then what would happen at the end of their life. So we kind of did like an LCA for those five products. We then looked at what the components of that which were related to the bulk of the product. So the packaging was easy because we had all the data for that, so we could do that in an accurate way. But for the bulk, we took these five products and then we said, cream has a carbon intensity of this much for every mill of the cream. So if you have a little one, we'll scale it down. If you have a big one, we'll scale it up. If you have a cream that's nearly the same, we use that data as well. So for these five, all the queens get the same and all the washes will get the same. And that's kind of how we've managed to do it in a sort of a sensible fashion, because otherwise it could have cost us, you know, tens of thousands of pounds to do it. That's the way we've done it. But at least it gives us an idea. And what was interesting that we learned was that actually whether the ingredient was air freighted was the biggest impact of all. So our big project is to gather a complete list now of where how everything travels to us and try and try and eliminate anything that's air freighted. And then once we get the complete list of how everything travels to us, we'll be able to be even more accurate than we are at the moment. But at least we've tried to estimate the scope 3. We've offset the scope 3 ever since we started doing it. This will be the third. We just finished our footprint and published our report for 2023. That will be the third year we've done the offsets. And the year before we only offset what we knew, which was scope one and two. So we've been working, you know, we're working with earthly and the project we're working on with them is cool because it's not just an offset on the carbon, it has a really nice biodiversity story as well. So we've done a bunch of stuff on carbon footprinting. We've also looked at the different packaging we have, and we've realized this tube packaging is actually less carbon intensive than anything else. Some people have said this sugarcane tube has a carbon negative footprint, but when we looked at the lca, we thought it's not quite as doesn't fully consider the full lifecycle of the tube. So it's a lower footprint from our perspective, and that's what we sort of have said about it. So. And then we're also now looking for regenerative ingredients. So the first one we've identified is Kalahari melon seed oil.

I was going to ask you about this.

Yeah, it's amazing. It actually helps to knit the soil back together. So if it's turning into desert, the roots of this plant help to knit it back together. It's a weed that grows in the Kalahari area. And what they've managed to work out is that it's one of the only things that will survive there. But if you can then profitably grow it and then you can extract this amazing oil from the melon seeds, which is great on the skin, it protects local incomes, it protects the soil and stops it from turning into desert. So it's regenerative, it doesn't have a certification. I'd love to have some certified regenerative ingredients. And we're constantly looking for them and as soon as they come to the market, we'll be looking at potentially swapping to those. And we're looking at things like the Union of Ethical Bio Trade Certification System to see what we can get that has some kind of data around it from a regenerative perspective. But at least we're starting to talk about it and starting to think about it. So beyond organic, it's really good for the soil when things are growing regeneratively because the healthier the soil is, the more carbon is captured by the soil, but also the more biodiversity is preserved. So in our sort of five areas I've sort of covered, we sort of think about zero waste, zero carbon biodiversity as well. We've made sure that everything is palm oil sustainably, if there's any palm oil, it's all sustainable. We've got all of our organic certification, and that's kind of the fourth area. And then the fifth one is kind to all. So inside that one, it's things like being certified vegan, certified cruelty free, a living wage employer. So we pay more than the minimum wage, we pay the real living wage, and then just being an ethical business. So we're a certified B corp, which kind of knits the whole thing together, really. It's a kind of an overall certification that the business is trying to be a force for good in all the ways that we are.

I love this. I mean, obviously you've put a huge amount of effort into this. And one of the things that really stood out to me when I went to your website for the first time, recently was your impact report. So you produce a sustainability report each year which summarizes many of the points that you've talked about. Now, arguably, I have to say, it is more transparent than we're seeing. For the larger corporations, the fact that you're measuring Scope three emissions is almost unheard of. Unilever's CEO was asked about this two years ago, and he said, I have no idea how to do that. You're really sort of trailblazing here, and you're being very transparent about it. How have your customers responded to this?

Our customers really respond to that. When I speak to them about why they buy, evolve, and what they think about all of this. There are two main kind of reasons for purchase that are sort of. Our loyal customers tell me. So one of them is they're looking for pure products. They're worried about certain synthetic ingredients they're thinking about avoiding. They would call them toxins. I wouldn't necessarily use that word because it's a bit of an emotive word, but they would say that. But they'll say to me, well, I don't want to have something like a paraben or a phthalate in my product. I've heard they may potentially disrupt my hormones. I'm worried about irritation. I'm worried about longevity. You know, I'm looking to avoid things, things that might be a body burden. And so they'll have a number of reasons why. It could be that they got pregnant, it could be that they have cancer, it could be that they're going through menopause and they're worried about the hormones. So for a number of reasons, they're looking to avoid these ingredients. They find it quite hard. I think all customers find it quite hard to identify a toxin if they're looking to avoid one. And it's because when you look at the ingredients list is everything's in Latin anyway. So you're looking at it going, wow, is that a plant? Is that a toxin? I have no idea. So there's a number of strategies that customers use to try and navigate a complicated sector for them, a complicated purchase decision to make. And so they'll do things like they'll try and research them online and try and learn what they, you know, what things to avoid. They might use an app like Yuka and get a score, which helps them understand, you know, whether something has any potential ingredients and they want to avoid. They'll buy from a trusted website partner. So someone like Natrisimo, who we've worked with for a very long time or Amazing health food store will have already curated a list of products that they think sort of are healthy and so customers can rely on them. But the other thing they do is they come to a brand like Evolve because they know they can trust us to act in their best interests. And they can also rely on our certification. Although not many customers fully understand that when a product is Cosmos Certified, every ingredient has been checked and a lot of the things they're looking to avoid are not allowed to be used in the product. So I often tell them that and they don't often necessarily know that before I tell them. So there's work to be done to educate around that. So that's kind of the primary purchase driver for probably about half of our customers, but the other half of the customers, that is important. But the primary purchase driver is that they want to lead an eco friendly lifestyle and they want to buy from an ethical business, an independent business. So those are the two most important things the customers tell me. And I think they're both important to most of our customers. It's just which one is more important. So there's a group where wellness and health is their primary thing and there's a group where sort of the ethical sustainability of it is their primary thing. But I think both of those two things will rank very highly for most of our customers.

And you're ticking both those boxes nicely by the sounds of things.

Yeah, I think that's what we do and they can trust us because that's kind of our main purpose.

Yeah, yeah. So with evolve turning 15 in 2024, what's next? Have you got any big goals on the horizon or any new directions that you're excited about?

Yeah, so I'm really excited about the work we've been doing to develop spa protocols. So we recently launched with Park House Spa, which is our first hotel spa partner. We can see that there's an opportunity to offer amazing organic treatments with using holistic, you know, highly effective ingredients in spa. So we've got an amazing rang of treatments for the body and the face. We're using all of our face skincare products, but then also for the body. We've developed this range of aromatherapy products which at the moment are professional only, so you can experience them in our massages. And we've used these amazing blends of essential oils. So we are kind of harnessing all of those amazing holistic properties of the oils. But as well as that the massages have got in the base, they've got things like ceramide, hyaluronic, acid by retinol in the actual base oil that's being used in the massage. And the movements are things like working with the vagus nerve system using kind of these holistic, quite advanced techniques. So that's really exciting. And we want to work with more spas in 2025. And we're also working on these blends that we've now got that we've used with the spa. We're working on, you know, what we might do with those so that we can offer them to end customers as well. So you can have a spa at home treatment. And that's a really exciting project. And then we're also doing some work with our packaging as well. So we're actually looking at whether we can make our cartons even greener than they already are by trying to remove one of the components from the carton. So that's a project that will probably hit the shelves this coming spring. So Yvonne will have a slightly different looking carton in a few months from now. We've taken the opportunity to tweak some of our products and during that time managed to get more product certified organic than ever before. So we're aiming for 95% certified organic and natural. We're at about 90. So we're trying to. It's just those last few that we want to push over the line and we've managed to get several of the big products that we sell certified. So there'll be the new versions of those will be launching in the spring and a few other sort of little product upgrades as well that we've been working on behind the scenes will be coming along.

You have been extremely busy and I absolutely have loved hearing all about Evolve, all about your story. What you're doing is really inspiring and I know all of our listeners will be feeling that way as well. So if anyone wants to find out more about you and Evolve Beauty, where can they do so?

So you can come to our website, evolvebeauty.co.uk you can find us on Instagram, which is evolvebeautyuk. You can also reach out to us even on TikTok now, so we've even got a TikTok channel as well. But if you go to the website, all of the links, links to all the socials are all at the bottom. You can always reach out to us. We are a small team of real people. If you email us, we will respond.

Amazing. Well, we'll include all of those links in the show notes. Laura, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been really lovely chatting to you.

It's been so lovely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Bye bye.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. How has Laura's story and Evolve Beauty Story inspired you? Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we covered today, please do delve back into the podcast archives. So, for instance, you can go and listen to episode 89 in which I interviewed Sarah Brown of Pie Skincare, who also shared her inspiring story of bringing manufacturing in house and driving forward a pioneering indie beauty brand. Similarly, episode 64, that's a way back already saw me interview Mae Lindstrom of May Lindstrom Skincare, another OG in the natural beauty sector. Much like Laura, much like Sarah Brown, May also keeps her manufacturing in house and told us all about her inspiring story of growing her brand. There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Laura and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations as well. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanicaormula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest we're everywhere and come and give me a Follow Lorraine Dallmeyer on Instagram and LinkedIn. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.

Sam.