EP87. Sinking carbon while selling skincare - is this possible?

The whole beauty industry is currently talking about carbon neutral beauty formulations and brands that sink or sequester as many greenhouse gases as they emit. Now, arguably, there aren't that many brands achieving carbon or climate neutrality yet, and if they are, they're generally doing so through offsetting alone. But the subject is now firmly on the industry's radar screen, and even on this podcast we've already had multiple conversations about climate footprints. But is neutrality enough? If we want to create a sustainable and responsible beauty sector, shouldn't we be going further than neutrality? After all, we have many years of damage to compensate for. So are we talking about the right thing here? Or should we be looking to create a beauty sector that's carbon negative or climate positive? In other words, a sector that sequesters more carbon than it emits. And if we want to achieve climate positivity, what does that actually look like? How on earth do you set about achieving something like that? In this episode, we look at what is one of the beauty industry's biggest challenges and I talk to Bybee, a beauty brand leading the way in carbon negativity. 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 Dallmeher. 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 175 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 today. In today's episode, I'm joined by Elsie Rutherford and Dominika Minarovic, Formula Botanica graduates and the founders of Bybie Beauty, one of the hottest natural skincare brands on the market right now. Elsie and Dominika are on a mission to create affordable and clean skin care for all, supporting sustainability at the highest level to not only preserve skin health, but also the environment. In my opinion, they are two of the most forward thinking beauty founders of our time and I'm very happy to welcome them back onto the podcast today to discuss the way they've incorporated sustainability at the very heart of their mission. Welcome to the podcast. Elsie and Dominique, it's so nice to have you here.

Thank you so much. We're over the moon to be here and see you again, Lorraine.

Well, thank you. Well, let's dive straight in. Obviously, we're going to be talking about the awesome work that you're doing at Bybee, but I think before we start, let's set the scene a little bit. What does carbon negativity mean?

Yeah, that's a great question. And to be honest, it's one that I still feel quite nervous answering because I feel like the definition is still somewhat murky and we're still figuring out exactly what it means ourselves. But for us at Bybee, being carbon negative means that whatever our operations or our carbon footprint is becomes negative in that we end up absorbing more carbon than we release. That for us is focused on our supply chain. So from our earliest stage of raw material procurement right through to distribution, we're looking at how we can balance out external emissions, eventually coming to the point where our supply chain actually absorbs more than it releases. This is not through a carbon neutral process, so we will always have emissions. It's more about can we employ and develop more processes in our supply chain that can absorb carbon to essentially offset the emissions that we can't avoid?

Okay, wow. That's a very comprehensive answer. So why did you decide to go down this route?

When we first started byvi, we came into the industry with completely fresh eyes because we didn't come from beauty backgrounds. And we were pretty appalled by a lot of the practices that we saw across the entire supply chain. So things like manufacturing processes, a lot of the kind of distribution around raw materials, like raw materials being shipped all over the world before they ended up in the place of manufacture. And then of course, the big sort of a conversation that had already started to develop then around packaging materials, specifically within beauty, the recyclability, what was happening to them? End of life. And I think all in all, we just recognized that the beauty industry was operating in quite an archaic and old fashioned way. And there were changes that could be made that would have a more positive impact on the planet. We felt like those changes could happen fairly easily. So it was, for us, there was a real sense of that will be the mission of the brand. Everything that we do will be centered around not only creating great skincare, but doing it in a way that's really climate conscious. But there was no central mission to that, to that definition of climate conscious at the beginning for us. So we wanted to kind of do it all. You know, we wanted to reduce our use of plastics, we wanted to make sure that they were all recyclable, we wanted to use compostable materials, we wanted to reduce our carbon emissions. But we also wanted to support communities of people who were, like, putting together our raw materials. We wanted to make sure our packaging wasn't ending up in the ocean, we wanted to clear up the oceans, we wanted to help the rainforest, we wanted to do everything. And what that meant was, as we were coming to making quite critical business decisions, when we were putting together our products, we had no anchor to assess what the right thing to do was because we were trying to do so much. So that became a little bit problematic when we then started to kind of like really dig deep into the type of packaging materials that we wanted to use or manufacturing partners that we wanted to work with. And it also meant when we were trying to tell our customer what we were doing, we were just like, we just had this really broad scattergun. We do a bit of this, we do a bit of that. We're, you know, investing in this charity and we're offsetting this here. And they were a bit like, what? You know, it sounds like you're doing loads, but are you doing much at any depth? And I think the answer was no. So what we decided to do was take a pause before we grew any further as a brand. So this was maybe like back end of 2018, so we were like a year and a bit into the brand, do a huge audit, do a huge piece of education for ourselves, big bit of research into the industry and, and really identify where we thought beauty's biggest kind of negative impact was on the overall kind of climate crisis, and then center our mission around that. And really, we just kept coming back to the fact that greenhouse gases, you know, when combined with solar radiation, are heating up our earth and causing the climate crisis. We couldn't get away from that. It just kept circling back. Everything that we pursued, everything that we've been thinking about, it all came back to climate, really to greenhouse gases, and then more specifically within that, to carbon. And really we decided together that if we could lower our carbon footprint overall, that would have the best impact that we possibly could as a brand trying to do better. I will also say that I'm really trying to avoid using the word sustainable. And perhaps we can talk about this in a bit more detail. I know that you talk about this as well, Lorraine. We're trying to find out how to do things better, but we had to also accept that we're a brand producing consumer goods, which inherently is not sustainable. So really it was about, we're going to continue doing what we're doing, we're going to continue producing skin Care what is the way that we can do that, that has, can be more gentle on the planet basically. And really for us, that was about reducing carbon.

I love it. And I have to say I think what you're doing is, is absolutely incredible. I mean you are one of the most forward thinking brands on the market at the moment and obviously I've watched your evolution from 2016, 2017 to where you are today and it's been really exciting to watch and I love the messaging you're putting out. So absolutely wonderful. I think the one question that everyone listening will have is how do you plan to sink more carbon than you emit? Let's start with the basics. Well, it's not the basics. I mean it's very, very complex. But how are you actually going to achieve this?

This is the golden nugget, isn't it, to figure out what processes that we can implement in our supply chain that can actually absorb carbon. And there's a number of ways that we can approach this. So we can look at avoidance emissions, we can look at things that sequester carbon, so raw materials or materials that we can use for our packaging. We can obviously look at things like renewable energy which has zero carbon output. And then the big, big thing to tackle is distribution. How do you transport your goods in a low carbon way? So first and foremost, the way that we're currently insetting our emissions through various kind of practices that we have primarily around our packaging. So our sugar cane material, which we also use in a number of our raw material, some of our emulsifiers and some of our preservatives are derivatives of sugarcane as well. So the sugarcane plant itself is a, is a carbon sequester. So for every 1 kg of sugarcane grown, it absorbs 3 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. We've done a lifecycle analysis across the raw materials and the packaging to show that actually end to end, cradle to grave, that material is carbon negative. And we've been able to assess what that impact can be on our supply chain, which has been amazing. So we've done that work with the Carbon Trust and we also have a third party sustainability agency that we work with to kind of verify and re.

Audit all of this.

So we're spending a lot of money and time to make sure that the data that we're getting is really robust. But that is quite a big mechanism that we're currently using. We also are now using sugarcane for our cartons. We've worked with a packaging company, a small kind of startup packaging company in the UK to develop something truly compostable, which has been really amazing and quite challenging. We've only been able to implement it on the cap of a single product, which is coming out next year. Because the material is so new, we want to make sure that it still is safe and it provides best use for our customer before we kind of roll it out too widely. But again, using agricultural byproducts to make a biomass and a truly compostable material has been amazing to see and that obviously has amazing impact on our carbon emissions. So packaging is a big focus and then raw materials is probably our secondary focus. So sourcing upcycled materials is probably the primary objective there. Sourcing byproducts of either food waste or agricultural waste streams. We have a huge avoidance emission. And as long as that material is produced on renewable energy, it actually again has a carbon neutral output, which is just amazing that we can start to really almost like solve the waste crisis through beauty as well and then, you know, energy. So we are petitioning for all of our partners to switch to renewable energy. All of our main manufacturers have done so. We're now like taking one step further and contacting all of our raw material suppliers, even internationally, basically saying that we won't work with you unless you switch to renewable energy. Looking for proof for that as well. All of our carton suppliers, all of our packaging suppliers are on renewable energy as well. So that has just been an immediate massive decrease in our carbon emissions. But yeah, the way that we're tackling carbon negativity is really through sourcing materials at this point that sequester carbon. I think the packaging one is an interesting thing because while we're looking at the lifecycle analysis of these materials, the actual afterlife doesn't have a massive carbon output smaller than you would imagine, but it still has one. So ultimately, as soon as we're sending something to landfill, there's a carbon emission associated with that. So what we're now thinking about is obviously circular recycling, recycling schemes and refills, because that again, just removes any emissions at the afterlife of the packaging, which is super important, not only from a carbon emission perspective, but obviously a waste perspective as well. So there's really quite a lot that we're doing. The thing that we haven't solved for is distribution, in all honesty. So we're looking at things mainly cradle to gate at the moment, because as soon as you start transporting goods around the world, shipping, I mean, I saw your amazing article that you shared on LinkedIn with me about the dirty fuel that's used in sea freight, obviously air freight has a massive carbon emission associated with it. Even things like transporting by road across Europe still isn't done by electric vehicle. There's not enough charging points throughout mainstream European highways, we found out. So distribution is just continues to be a real challenge in terms of how we look to reduce our emissions there. Because at the moment we've got amazing things happening across raw material production and packaging, where actually our overall business output is quite negligible now in terms of carbon emissions. But the distribution just shoots it right up. Which really begs the question, and I'm going to say it like, should we be shipping goods around the world? But I mean it's kind of. We're a bit late now. But it does beg the question, you know, should we just all be a bit more local? But anyway, I'll end on that.

I think that there's something that we need to address when we're talking about carbon neutrality, carbon negativity, carbon positivity as it coined at the moment. Firstly, the reason that carbon negativity is quite difficult to define is because there isn't a standard universal definition at the moment and it's unregulated. So you will see brands using these terms in like different ways and they'll that, you know, there are slightly different. What we've described as carbon negativity is what carbon negativity means to us. But I'd also just like to add that what we're trying to build is a truly carbon negative supply chain and not a carbon negative supply chain that has been achieved through purchasing carbon credits. And that's a really important difference that we've seen like a lot of brands coming to market in the past 12 months who are achieving or claiming to achieve carbon negativity. But really all they're doing is continuing on with how they're running their business in terms of carbon emissions and then calculating that footprint and purchasing a carbon credit. I think carbon credits are great. That they are. They've received a little bit more airtime more recently and they provide a way of getting visibility to the fact that we need to be doing something about carbon. However, they are quite problematic for a number of reasons and I think like as an industry we're veering on them now being kind of used in a greenwashing way for brands to basically continue on like with their business as usual emissions not do anything to move towards actually reducing those, like reducing those emissions and instead just offsetting at the end of each year. And that doesn't solve the problem that we're in because everybody just continues on as they are and we're not reducing anything. And what we need to do is reduce our carbon emissions overall. We got to carbon neutrality at the end of last year and offset all of our previous emissions as a kind of like absolute. Like this is table stakes. This is like the very entry level thing that we should be doing as a brand. But for us, carbon negativity is about carbon reduction wherever possible. And then as Dominika has explained about insetting and sequestering. And we are, we have committed to trying to avoid, to use any kind of carbon credits where possible. And if we do, the carbon credits that we're looking at are in our dac, which is basically direct air capture, where I'm not a scientist, so I'll probably butcher this, but essentially there's technology set up to kind of directly capture carbon from the air rather than what a lot of carbon credits are more involved around a less direct way of capturing carbon. So planting trees, which obviously take like hundreds of years to grow and you're not going to actually like physically see the benefit of that carbon capture for a very long time. So I think we have to stop and recognize that carbon credits, whilst good in their intention, are now quite problematic because they don't turn the taps off. And also, I mean, there's loads, it's heavily commoditized now. Like it's a multibillion dollar industry, the carbon credit industry. So with that comes corruption. Unfortunately, that just is the way it is. And a lot of the carbon credit schemes are set up in kind of poorer countries. So it's actually like shifting like the burden of action away from the wealthy countries to the poorer nations who are the ones who will suffer like most from the crisis, but also who are contributing least to it. So it's quite problematic. So basically I just, that long thing was just to say that carbon offsetting is not the answer. Don't believe the brands that tell you that it is.

Yes, I quite agree. We've discussed this on various previous podcast episodes as well, because you're right, I'm seeing lots of beauty brands sort of go, we've offset our carbon footPR twice or three times. Yay us. But they're actually not telling you what they're actually doing to reduce their own impact in the, in the interim. And that of course is not going to solve anything in the at the end because if everyone's just offsetting and we're all just planting hundreds of trees and as you Say it takes hundreds of years for them to grow, to sequester the carbon that we need. We're not going to get anywhere. The global versus local discussion. Great one. I suggest we park that one for another podcast episode because I can see us going down this whole rabbit hole. But you're right, it is a really interesting question. The question that I have, because I have a ton of them written down here for you. But actually the one that I want to know the most, which I think a lot of people will be asking, listening to this, is how do you manage it all? Because you're running a global business, you don't have a huge team on your hands. I know you're producing over a million units a year, which is what you told us recently on Clubhouse Dominica. And how do you do it all? You've got two babies. How do you manage all of this and manage your car to and footprint and monitor it all and try and really make sure that you're doing the right thing.

The great question, I don't have the answer for you because I'm not sure how we do. It's something that Elsie and I are incredibly passionate about. I mean, even if you think back to where we started with Clean Beauty Insiders in the blog, it was all centered around, you know, dipping into your fridge, taking food that was just about to be thrown away and creating like beautiful one time use beauty products that you could get amazing efficacy and results from but then wouldn't have excess package packaging and no waste. So we've always been environmentalists at heart and I think in every thread of our brand we think about our impact on the environment. And it's not just, and I shouldn't say environment because socioeconomic and political and environment, they're all connected. So we think about our impact on communities, we think about our staff, we think about diversity and inclusion, we think about our environmental footprint. But there's so many, it's such a complex web of issues that we're trying to solve so that at times can feel really overwhelming. But I think passion drives us and it always has and it will give us energy. When we haven't slept, we wake up in the morning and I think it's just about being really focused. So I think what Elsie said about now, we're like crystal clear in what we're trying to achieve. It gives us a lot of focus and a lot of direction in terms of our milestones and our kind of like goals, our micro goals along the way. Obviously working with amazing partners is key. So I think the way that we've built the team now is that Elsie and I are fortunate enough to be running a size of business that we're not necessarily in the micro day to day operations of the business. So we can really take a step back and lead on some of these bigger projects, which has definitely meant that we've been able to make massive gains in the last six months in terms of what we're trying to achieve. And I think really just being really open and having conversations with peers, taking feedback, being really honest with what we're trying to achieve rather than pretending like we solved all. You know, I threw in quite a lot of curveballs when I was talking. Like, yes, we found a good solution, but actually it's not a good solution in the long term for X, Y and Z. Like I think we always have to be honest that there's no silver bullet when it comes to climate change and the climate crisis. And certainly as a beauty brand encouraging people to buy products, we are not the people to go out and say that we've solved the climate crisis. So I think we have to be just really honest with that. So sorry, that doesn't really answer your question about how we're managing it. I focus, passion and delegation is the way that we've been able to achieve everything. This is just one string to our bow. We sell into one of the world's largest retailers, we raise money, we build a team, we create and innovate in natural formulation. So there's a lot of challenging things that we do and this is just one of many. So I think just good management, but I think honestly, if you're going to create a business in 2021, it has to stand for something, it has to be meaningful and it has to be doing things better. Otherwise, just don't do it. Don't create another like crappy brand that's just gonna all end up in landfill. Like just we, we have the information, we're all educated people, we can see what's happening in the world. Like if you're going to create a brand, try and do something that's, that's going to improve things is what I would say.

And I think that answers the question perfectly because both of you are obviously so passionate about this, this subject, which is what drives you. And it's interesting because there is still a lot of beauty brand owners who haven't got on board with this and they're going to get left behind if they don't get on board with it. Even the other day I put something up on Instagram and someone commented and they got very upset with me. They called me unsavoury and I was like, oh, that's interesting. I'm calling you out on the fact that we need to be more sustainable and this is how you internally are responding because people are really struggling with this concept of I need to take this on board. But you two aren't, you're driving this forward and that is what will ultimately really make you and Bybe a massive success. Yes. So I've got a question about how you're doing this because I know you have your internal sustainability measurement and auditing system, your SUSTY score. So can you tell us a bit more about that? What is it, how does it work?

Yeah. So we're doing this in two ways. We use our SUSTI score and I'll talk to you about that in more detail. But I would just like to say that we also work with external auditing bodies to basically audit our, our full supply chain emissions and business emissions. We wouldn't be able to like you have to work with an external auditor. Like there's no way of doing this if you don't because you have to understand your footprint to be able to make changes to it, reduce it. Well, you could try and assess that yourself if you had some like really robust, like carbon, like experts internally, but you probably don't. And also as anything, if you get your accounts audited, like you have to have an external body to come in and do that to make sure that you're not like cooking it, basically just making it all up yourself. So that is like absolutely best practice to be able to do that. But what I would say, unfortunately it's incredibly expensive. Currently working with the Carbon Trust, who are one of the more well known bodies to do what we call a full life cycle analysis of each one of our products. So they basically take every single by the product, they, they rip it apart, they work out the footprint of each individual ingredient, each individual componentry piece, they work out the distribution based on historic cells data, they work out how it gets to where it ends up and then as Dominica said earlier, we work to either you can do cradle to gate or cradle to grave. So cradle to gate is to point of like your warehouse basically before it then goes on and your customers buy it, whoever the customers might be. Cradle to grave is the full, full life cycle. So we have the data like for both basically. Unfortunately it's really expensive which is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of brands, particularly brands of our size. You really have to understand why behaving in this way but trying to be more climate conscious can have a positive impact on your brand because it has to be baked into your P and L. Like you have to invest into, into sustainability. And whilst there will be a commercial benefit to that, as you've said, like it will become hopefully something that people, people will purchase us for, you won't see that commercial benefit right away. So it kind of sits more like in terms of where we would put it on our P L. It's more kind of like high level branding to be honest. It's like that's probably where you would sit it in that you won't see a return from it and you have to be comfortable with that as a brand to be able to like, you will have to make an investment and like to be totally transparent and hopefully this is helpful. Working with the Carbon trust for something like this is in upwards of £20,000 and that's like, like their kind of entry level, like basic and they are like stacked. They basically like couldn't get us in for like six months or something. It was crazy. That's really problematic and that really upsets us because it makes the barrier to entry incredibly high for brands like ours who are trying to do a good thing. But also it means that none of us can have. If you're not doing it, as I said earlier, you don't have the true picture of your footprint so you can't make positive change that will actually have an impact. And that actually is quite concerning. Like we really believe that, you know, this should be a service that's available to like pretty much every brand. You know, we think that it should be a government backed thing that allows, you know, every new brand that starts in the UK to have, you know, a certain, have access to a certain auditing body who can help them understand their carbon footprint so that they can build their supply chain in a better way. That really should be the way that the government is thinking when we're linking, when we're looking at innovation within the startup space. But we're not there yet and we will do everything that we can to help us get there anyway. That's the external stuff that we do. So that's, and that's, that's retrospective. So at the moment carbon trusts are helping us look back at everything and then you have a better understanding of each, the footprint of each product and you can use then, then it becomes a bit more assumptive if you're using the same packaging You've already got the footprint for that packaging, like, and so on. But then we developed another internal auditing system, and we developed this before we could afford and really knew more about the carbon trust. This was, you know, this was actually a couple of years ago that we put this together to help us when we were formulating, because we were thinking there's no point us coming out with a load of products and then figuring out that their footprint's really high. Like, what we should actually be doing is as part of the formulation process, as you would test efficacy, we should be testing the climate footprint of these products as well, and then not releasing anything that has a poor footprint, basically. So the Sasty score looks at three components of our supply chain. It looks at packaging, it looks at raw materials, and it looks at manufacturing. It basically has, like a score for a number of different kind of subcategories within each of those three pillars. So with raw materials, for example, it will look at where they're grown and how they travel to point of manufacture and the emissions tied up in that. It will look at how they're harvested and the energy consumption required for that. It will also look at, like, additional factors that aren't so directly linked to carbon. So it might look at the kind of CSR of the supplier, you know, how they operate, what they're doing to support local communities. And then it will add up all of those. You get a score for each one, and then it will give you a weighted score for raw materials. You do each of that for raw materials, packaging and manufacturing, and you have a weighted score for a product. And it's a traffic light system. So green, amber, red, everything. For us, obviously, we aim to get into the green. If anything has come back amber or red, actually, we've never had anything red, which is good. If anything's come back amber, we reformulate and we start again and we look at what's driving it up and we look at what we can do to make that better. And often we've kind of cracked the packaging thing now. So often it is a raw material issue, and then distribution is kind of later on, but raw materials will make changes. If there's a raw material that we've been relying on that's actually sourced from the south coast of Korea and it's only grown like once every three years, and it's an endangered species, then we'll say, like, do we really need that? What other ingredient will give us a rejuvenating property that is equal to that? That will still be great.

For the skin.

The Sassy Score is open source, so we welcome any brand to use it and I will share it with you after this so that you can share it with anybody on the Formula Botanica platform. We really believe that the only way we will make difference in this entire crisis is through a collective voice. And we're a small brand, but we are many small brands and, you know, between us we have a platform and we can be heard and we think that other brands, you know, helping other brands is what we should be doing. We should join hands in this. So we open source all of that information and we'd also be really happy to share. Obviously we can't share like the actual audit itself, but we would be really happy to share our process and more about the Carbon Trust, if anybody's got any questions as well. Because if you're thinking about investing in it, I know it feels quite punchy, so, like, really happy, happy to be like super open with that as well.

That's amazing. Well, thank you so much. I'm sure there'll be lots of people listening, thinking, I want access to this dusty score. So we'll. We'll see if we can add that into the show notes with it.

Yeah.

I wanted to come back on something you said, actually, which was that you at the moment, all of this investment, you don't think you're going to see a return in finances. I'm going to challenge you a bit on that because I wonder how are your customers responding to all of this? Because surely it's something that makes you stand out in 2021, because let's be fair, there are not that many beauty brands sticking their neck out. And I stand for sustainability. There's a lot of people paying lip service to it, but there are very few who go to the level that you're going. And I would imagine that actually that's attracting people to you. So how have your customers responded to all of this?

I think that we have a proportion of customers that this is really important for and have either found us because of it or when choosing us versus another skincare product. This was a driving factor of their purchase decision. That is still quite a small proportion of our audience, if you think about where. How we position the brand very intentionally, we've gone after a mass audience because we really believe the only way we'll make a difference is if we're doing this at scale, the places that we're stocked. You know, Target in the US, there's 1800 stores there, you know, the likes of, look fantastic feel. Unique ASOs here in the UK boots like they are destinations for beauty and skincare. They're not destinations for sustainably minded brands and therefore the customer there probably isn't as far along in their journey, or certainly the ones that are of a much smaller proportion of the overall customer. So we've done everything that we can to attract customers first and foremost for the performance and what they believe that we'll do for their skin and delivering it in a way that's really accessible through price point and distribution, making sure that we're really easy to get hold of. But I think that it will change, I think the weight of things will change. But as it stands at the moment, we don't really acquire people because of our climate mission. That might be a reason that people will stay with us. So there's definitely a retention piece there. So we might acquire someone because they've picked up a, you know, one of our moisturizers and it's under 20 quid and it's got ingredients in that they really believe in and they really like it, they like our packaging. And then when they dig a bit deeper, you know, when the bottle is nearly finished and they come to buybi.com to buy another one and they actually, or they start following us on Instagram and they find out a little bit more about what we're doing in that, in that arena, that will be a reason that they stay with us, because they're really bought into that and perhaps it's, you know, on their minds they want to be doing better, they want to be making purchasing with intent and making better decisions around their purchasing. But I think that we are probably still a few years off people buying purely on sustainability if we ever are there. And I don't think that's a bad thing because I think that you can create products that are really highly efficacious and perform well as well as being climate conscious. So there doesn't have to be a. They don't have to be mutually exclusive. And I think if we look at brands outside of our industry, we see really good examples of that in fashion, food and drink. If we look at reformation, Allbirds, Stella McCartney, Tala, like, they all produce fantastic, like, high fashion goods that you don't think, oh, because this is done in a way that's more sustainable.

I'm.

I'm compromising on how it looks and that's who we're really inspired by. We don't want people to feel like they're compromising. So I think that, yeah, it's it's a retention piece, it's a piece that people will stay with us, but at the moment it's not, it's not driving people to purchase by these. So we have to work hard to make sure that people understand how and why our products really work, as does any skincare brand. And I don't know if we will ever get to a point because it might actually just end up that by the time people are thinking about that, you know, all brands are, are behaving in this way and it's no longer a competitive, competitive edge for us. And that's just something that we have to accept, I think. Like, but to my point earlier, like, we don't do this expecting a return. We do it because we believe in it. And yes, there will be commercial upside from it, but it's not going to be as directors, people are literally going to buy us because we're doing this. Like, our products have to work and that has to be like the first and foremost. That's the message that they see, first and foremost.

I love it though, because you are changing hearts and minds in the process and that is very, very powerful.

I would just add to that as well. And you mentioned it in the question, Lorraine, when you said people are playing lip service at the moment to this topic. And I think it's really difficult for a consumer to discern which brands are doing things with authenticity and really good intentions and those that are just kind of jumping on the marketing trend. And I think even as consumer myself, you know, I would consider myself a more educated consumer in this capacity. But I see a lot of environmental talk from brands and I go to their website and I have to really, like, peel back the layers. Like they come up with their own terminology, they come up with their own data and statistics and you're like, I'm trying to understand whether this is actually good or they are just playing lip service. I just also don't think that consumer understanding is there of, you know, we're all saying, oh, we know these brands are just offsetting and becoming carbon negative and they're doing this and what does climate positive actually mean? But consumers just see these terminologies and think, yeah, actually that sounds good. I'm going to buy into that brand because I believe they're doing better. But also I love their product. I think it's just really difficult for us to prove that we're doing better than other brands in a lot of instances.

Yeah, I understand that and I see a lot of it and we've tackled quite a lot of this on the podcast here as well. I mean, recently we've been doing episodes on biodegradability and circularity and really unpicking what these terms mean because. Because they're just being sort of thrown around the industry without anyone explaining them properly. And people get very hung up on. On concepts like waterless beauty. But what does that actually mean? I mean, you're still using water to grow ingredients. There's a lot of greenwashing going on. But I have to say, I think it really shines through in what you two are doing that you don't have that. You don't have that greenwashing element to your branding. It is very, very strong. So I'm sure that people are seeing that and I. And I hope in the long run that consumers will start to buy more based on those sustainability principles. So I have one final question for you, which is, and we've touched a little bit on this already, but I think it's a good one to end on. If other indie brands or formulators are listening, and that's obviously our main audience here on the podcast, what would you recommend to them if they want to really start to embrace carbon negativity, climate positivity, sustainability? What would you recommend to smaller brands just starting out?

I think it's a really big arena to play in. So I think just having a really specific focus in terms of what you're trying to tackle is probably the best piece of advice. So it doesn't have to be around carbon. There's many global issues that we're currently facing. We've got a huge waste problem. We've got plastic in the ocean. We've got communities that are suffering incredibly from, as a Elsie said, the actions of the wealthy West. We've got marginalized communities, we've got neocolonialism reing its ugly head again. I mean, there's just so many issues in the world. So I think it doesn't have to be that everyone just plays in the carbon space. I think just owning a socioeconomic and political issue, really believing in that, having the issue that resonates with you as a person in your brand, and then doing something to improve that situation, whether it's the livelihoods of those people, whether it's the climate, whether it's the oceans, whether it's the fish in the oceans or, you know, whatever that is, and just having a mission that you can actually have like a tangible impact in and then just being really bold and communicating to that, that's your consumer. Don't try and do it all and pretend, as I said, like you've solved the climate crisis by selling your beauty products, because we all know that that is is not the case. So just being really open and honest with the limitations of what your positive impact can be, but say that you are wholeheartedly believing and committing to this cause and you're doing everything that you can to support it, is what I would say.

Yeah, and I think I'd say think about your entire supply chain and ask questions and don't just accept what you're told. You know, in our journey over the past kind of 12 months or so, as we've really started, started to nail down on this reducing carbon, we've asked a lot of questions to our suppliers and the beauty supply chain is incredibly complex. We just accept a lot of the stuff that we're given. Like, you know, this ingredient does this and we just, okay, fine, we'll use it. Like, where is it from? How does it do that? How has it got here? Whose hands has it traveled through in order for it to get here? I think just asking questions a little bit more. Like, we started to find out there was an instance of an ingredient we were looking at that's grown here in the UK and we were wanted the seeds of it. So we're really excited because we produce in the uk, so obviously that helps us in our, our footprint. And then when we started to dig a bit deeper and we asked, so obviously you've got the distributor, distributor acting on behalf of the raw material, like actual supplier, who Often, then the supplier isn't the actual person. Often that's actually like growing and producing it. So there's a lot of like layers there. And actually what we found was the seeds, rather than being refined and then pressed here, they're sent to Poland, refined and pressed there and then they come back here and then they're sold as uk, as produced in the uk. And like, I know that that's just a small example, but like, nobody, they took a lot to us for us to really like dig deep and, and get to the bottom of that. And we only because we asked the question, you know, first of all, we asked the people that we're buying it from and then they went and asked the people that they were buying it from and they went and asked the people that they were. But, you know, and it just. And then it's like, well, why is that happening? Like, oh, because there's not the infrastructure here because the labor is cheaper, cheaper there. Like really? Okay, well, can we not change that? You know, and so I just think questioning things, like, don't. I know that you feel like because you're a small brand working with big manufacturers, big ingredient suppliers, you don't have a voice, but you really do. And I think pushing a lot of these suppliers to think about this actually kind of really opens their eyes as well. So we really pushed one of the manufacturers that we were working with to start investigating a lot of this, and now, you know, they're rolling it out across their other brands. You know, that, you know, we've, we lobbied our manufacturers to switch to green energy at the beginning of this year, a fairly easy switch. And now one's so excited about that, they've installed solar panels over the entire factory and they're selling back to the grid. But because we asked the question we pushed, we didn't just accept your voice is big. Like, don't think that because you're a small brand, you can't have an impact like you really can. But you have to question and really push things because that's the only way that we'll make any kind of change in this industry.

Fantastic parting words and I'm sure will inspire many people listening to the podcast today. So thank you both so much for your input, for sharing everything that you've been doing, for sharing your journey. Because ultimately, sustainability is a journey, not a destination, as both of you have said a number of times today. So thank you so much. If people want to learn more about Bybie and about what you two are up to, where can they find you?

They can find us on bybie.com, bybie beauty or Bybie Founders on Instagram, which is a new. Our new kind of behind the scenes follows us around Instagram, so come find us there.

Love it. And both those, all those links will be with the show Notes. Thank you both so much. It's been really lovely chatting to you.

Thank you, Lorraine, thank you so much.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope it's made you think about the way that the whole beauty industry should approach the impact it has on the environment. I'd love to hear what you think about the whole topic. Please do come and leave us a comment on our social channels as the Formula Botanica team. And I love hearing from you and make sure you take part in the sustainable beauty polls and chats I run over on my Instagram channel. Lorraine Dallmeier, thank you for joining Elsie, Dominika 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 this podcast on itunes or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is, and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica at Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, Clubhouse, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.