EP89. Pioneering talk with Pai Skincare

I talk a lot about sustainable beauty on this podcast and we've unpicked all sorts of topics to do with biodegradability, biodiversity, carbon neutrality. After all, a sustainable beauty brand is one that thinks about its environmental footprint and social responsibility. And these topics are of vital importance in the drive towards bringing such a monstrously unsustainable industry, the beauty industry, in line with our responsibilities in the 21st century. But one aspect in this sustainability discussion is often overlooked, and that's the fact that a sustainable beauty brand is also one that has financial longevity and can stand the test of time. Pie Skincare is that brand. Having started as a tiny one woman startup in Sarah Brown's garage out of a personal skin need, Pie now manufactures over 1 million units of natural skincare per year and helps millions of people all over the world with their natural skincare needs. Last year look fantastic named Pie the fifth most popular skincare brand in the world with almost 5 million global searches in Google. So in this episode I learn all about Sarah's inspirational story which I promise will inspire you to settle in because you don't want to miss this interview. 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 Dallnayer. 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. In today's episode, I am thrilled to be joined by Sarah Brown of Pie Skincare. Sarah launched Pie in 2007, a certified organic skincare line for sensitive skin. Pie formulates and manufactures all products from its custom built facility in London and is taking the world by storm. Sarah is on a mission to create formulations that are so natural, so ethical and so sustainable that they have goodness built into them. Although, as you'll learn in this interview, Sarah still feels that Pie is in its infancy, the brand has achieved global recognition and is a highly respected and praised natural skincare brand loved by millions worldwide. I'm so pleased to be joined by such a powerhouse in natural skincare on the podcast today. Welcome to the podcast Sarah.

It's so lovely to have you here Lorraine. Thank you so much for Having me. I'm so glad we finally got this in the diary.

Me too. I can't wait for this conversation. So let's dive straight in. I want to know more about your journey of starting and growing Pie Skincare. So first, let's start off with the beginnings. Why did you start and what was it like when you first started?

Well, I have to cast my mind quite far back. I think not everyone realizes that we've actually been around for quite a while. So I launched this business very back end of 2007, 2008 really, and it's been quite the adventure since then. But why did I start the business? I mean, I think we are a classic tale of a business born out of a problem. Sometimes they're the best businesses because you're fixing something. My problem was my skin. I developed a skin condition called chronic urticaria. I still have it. And it was my experiences managing well, trying to manage this condition that brought me here, brought me to do this business. I can give you a little bit of the kind of snapshot of what happened. But, you know, my condition, this is a very common condition, it's never talked about. It affects a lot of people. I, it onsets very quickly. So onset in one night. I had extreme hives over 80% of my body. I was referred to Charing Cross Hospital. I was in and out of their dermatology clinics. And after a flurry of tests and meetings, appointments, I was sent on my way with some high, very, very high strength antihistamines to take 24, seven for the rest of my life. And that was it. And I think, you know, this is 20 years ago. I think at that point we didn't think about skin in the more holistic way that we do now. So we, we know it's so closely linked to our gut and our mental well being too, and stress and management of stress. But I instinctively knew all that and I knew that while it wasn't the cause, it was often a trigger. But nobody was speaking that language, so I was sent on my way. And I think that the kind of long story short is that I lived with it for a very long time. I actually saw an autoimmune consultant this summer, so almost 20 years later, and said, what's the latest on this understanding of this condition? And he said, we're no further along. And it's one of those conditions that's actually most closely linked to depression. It's really interesting because it's so unpredictable. It just flares and it flares in the Quite a. It can be in quite a kind of volatile way. Yeah. So I think it was my. I had to join the dots myself and I lived with it, as I say, for a long time. But I did reach a point I was like, actually this, I can't sustain this and I need to understand what's going on. And I know I realize I'm going to have to do this by myself. So I did. So I kind of literally documented my life. I unpicked ingredient lists because one of the issues with chronic urticaria is for me, it would make me hyper reactive to anything that I put on my skin, having never had to think about what I put on my skin. And that was the big change and that's what got me into this world because I started looking at ingredient lists for the first time ever on my skincare products, you know, and I think it's really hard when you work in this industry and you know, you know your inkey lists and you know your ingredients, but we have to sometimes take ourselves back to your average consumer and remember that they don't know how to read an ingredients list. It's absolutely impenetrable. And for me, as somebody who absolutely needed to know what was in the bottle and I had to do it myself, unpick it. And I think it's, you know, it is a tale of frustration and exasperation that how I was marketed to and mismarketed to. But the positive story at the end of it is that it unlocked something in me that I didn't know was there. And I kind of say hooray for hives because had that not happened, I wouldn't be here. I just suddenly got so interested in cosmetic ingredients and from there, particularly the therapeutic and remedial properties of plants and from there when they're organically grown and cultivated and harvested and it was just love really. I just fell in love and that was it. And so I started the business out of a very drafty garage in Ealing Broadway with absolutely negligible cash, was totally self funded for many years. And I often say to people, I only feel like I'm just getting started, to be honest, because we've been so chronically underfunded and cashed off for so long. But yeah, I started the business, ran out of money in three months, went back to work, worked three days a week, paid four days a week on pie, and just over a long, long time learned to make six products. I launched six products. But the kind of what I wanted to do with pie was I guess give people products that they could trust, rely on that would really help with their skin, but could trust from how I presented ingredients was rooted in those sort of sustainable values actually even then. And that people, but also that we're a joy to use. And I think that's the crucial thing. When you have a skin condition, you are sent down the pharmacy aisles. Often you're presented with aqueous creams that cost, you know, five pounds and don't have any fragrance and they're quite oily emollients and not very pleasant to use and actually do nothing for a lot of people. That's how pie was born out of a garage. No money and. But we've come a long way.

You certainly have. And well, obviously we're going to cover that some of that in this podcast episode. I mean, what an incredible beginning you had. And well, as you say, hooray for hives.

I suppose.

I would love to know what pie skincare is like nowadays and I'd love to know some numbers, like how many units do you sell, how many staff do you have? Or how many countries do you sell in?

Just so we get a bit of.

An idea of the scale because what you've built here is phenomenal. So can you give us an insight into how big the business has got?

Well, we think, I mean, it's funny because I think it's the classic entrepreneurs sort of curse that your harshest critic. So we think we're still tiny, we still got, I mean, honestly, I, I say it a lot, but I do feel like we're just getting started and we're just figuring out. And to that point, for anyone listening, you know, I think we're 13 years young. It takes a long time sometimes. You know, you do see these brands that become overnight stars, but you know what, they are called unicorn businesses for a reason. They are very few and far between. And most businesses, it's a long, hard slog. We still make our products. It's the thing I'm always most proud about and that we can talk more about that. But it's, it's such a passion that we manufacture and I'm very, very proud. With about 63 people now, we, I'm pleased to say we've moved out from the garage and we now have. So we operate in about 12,000 square foot in London. We have our own custom built production site there, but all of our headquarters is there. We've outgrown it. So we're looking at another 18,000 square foot to move into which would just be the production site so that we'd move just that out and keep both buildings. We manufacture about a million units a year. There you are. There's some vital statistics.

Amazing. Yeah, amazing. And I know that a lot of the smaller brands that we work with are just often one woman in a garage or in a shed. So they're listening to you thinking, oh, my goodness, this is huge. But I totally get what you're saying, because I have it, too. With Formula Botanica, we've been going for 10 years, and you look at it and think, oh, there's still so much to be done. And I suppose you never stop feeling.

That way, but I think that's the mark of maybe a good business owner and founder, is that there's always more. I don't know. I mean, in our world of formulation, it's such an exciting place to be. You know, it's what we love, is the creation process, is what we love. And. And, you know, as we've grown, we've been under a lot of pressure to outsource that piece, particularly the manufacturing piece. And, you know, I always said, well, that's fine, but we wouldn't be that. We wouldn't be PI anymore. And we've always felt it's so integral to who we are and our passions. So formulating is an exciting place. There's so many amazing ingredients coming on the market all the time. There's a lot of fun to be had and there's a lot of innovation to be had, and we want to be at the. At the forefront of that.

Absolutely. And by the sounds of things, and we'll come on to this a bit more. By the sounds of things, you are tying more into your ethics and the ethos that underpins pie. You have very firmly and proudly stayed loyal to the organic label rather than feel the pressure to. To jump on the bandwagon of clean, green, vegan, any other categories that we're seeing finding traction, and, you know, every single month, Formula Botanica is approached by a new certification scheme. And we sit there and it all sounds great, but there's just too many of you now. So why organic?

I. I've sort of been waving this flag for the Soil association for a really long time. I have huge respect for what they do, and. And they're now kind of formed part of Cosmos, and it's a much more, you know, harmonized European standard, and it's its first beauty only standard, which is so important and I think brings it a lot more credibility as well. When I was starting out, I think when I. What I think people still don't understand, I didn't understand until back then was just the broad ethical dimensions of organic certification. You know, people think about, it's how the ingredient is grown. It is, but it is one tiny part of what organic certification means. It's how it's grown, it's how those farmers are treated. It's how that farmer's community is looked after. It's making sure that we're minimising impact on their environments, not draining their soils, not contaminating their local water supplies. It's, it goes on and on. It's not, it's making sure that ingredients, you know, we need to think of end of life, not just of packaging, but what's in the bottle. What happens to those ingredients when you wash them down your plug hole? What happens when they go into our waterways and lakes and rivers and oceans? It's about not using, sorry, not using endangered plants. And I think that's the one that, that we would have been really tripped up on completely inadvertently had we not been certified. Because they give you counsel there and say, do you know what, maybe you shouldn't use rosewood because that actually is an endangered tree. Did you know? No, I didn'. Know. So it's, it's this. They also look at how much plastic you use and that's always been part of the audit that they do to make sure not using excess packaging. It's, it's such a, it's such end to end sustainability. And it's the thing that now has a name. You know, when I started, we didn't really talk about that word. And I don't think if we did, I don't think people had any idea what it was. But organic absolutely embodies it. And I think having being certified organic and making our own products gives this, this very unique view of our supply chain. But yeah, it's a great standard. But above and beyond all of that, which is, you know, I feel very passionately about, the number one thing is really the quality, the quality of organic ingredients. If they are, well, because they are certified organic, they have, they've been really, really meticulously grown and that due diligence has been done on how they're extracted and we then make sure that those beautiful ingredients are looked after. So we make sure they're stored very well and we make sure that in the production process they're handled respectfully and not overheated. You know, there's no, you can't miss any of these steps but when you look and protect, you look after and protect that ingredient through to the very end and it sits in that end formula. The concentration of, of properties and benefits and antioxidants and fatty acids and it's just poetic. They are beautiful, beautiful ingredients. You spend a lot on them so why wouldn't you look after them? But you know, they are, it's a bit like cooking. You know, if you cook with really high quality ingredients, you're going to have a highly nutritious and delicious meal and if you don't, you're less likely to. So you've got to invest in the core ingredients. And for me, you know, above all of it is the quality. I think you get an unrivaled quality with organic. But it brings this other ethical piece that for me starting out as a business owner, they were the values that I wanted underpinning my business. You know, we wanted to be a good business. We to wanted. God, we don't get everything right and there's masses we still need to do. But fundamentally at the core these values were things that we wanted to speak to and was part of being a responsible business. So that's why I chose organic. We are vegan too, you know, we just happen to be. But and I think, you know, it's really interesting because you use the word clean and it drives me absolutely bonkers because, and I speak very vocally about this too but it's just, it's a meaningless term and, and it's made greenwashing. I mean I've always got very het up about greenwashing but it's 10 times worse now. It's really sad. It's getting progressively worse, not better. And terms like clean have not helped. And I know there's lots of great retailers that are trying to do a lot around this and improve things but fundamentally it's a self referring standard. Fundamentally a brand can say I'm clean because I don't use this ingredient. So why that ingredient and not these other 10 or where do you draw the line? And it's so. And I think coupled with that it sort of went down a slightly dark place with the kind of vocabulary used around it which was non toxic. I was just like you can't. I really object to that word implying that if you don't use a clean brand that you've self referred, you know, a standard that you've self referred here is somehow toxic. I mean of course it, it's not and I think it's, it's selling through fair which I have a hugely objective and I think when I launched, when I first launched, actually, interestingly, there were lots of sort of, not lots, there were a few brands in our kind of midst of natural and organic and actually it was quite fashionable then. It's just not quite the right word. But the way to market was often, know this. So no parabens, no mineral oils, no whatever. And it was no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no on the pack. And we never did it. And we said, you know, that's fundamentally. It's a negative marketing and why not talk about what's in it? That's great. And so we've never gone down that route of, no, no, no, no, no. We've always gone. And unless it's in the specific product that is completely relevant to why we made that product that way, focus on the amazing ingredients and the positive story because there's masses to say about them. Absolutely.

This is music to my ears because this is exactly what the ethos of Formula Botanica is as well. We don't use clean, we don't use non toxic. In fact, I even put it in our brand standards that no one's allowed to use it because you're right, it is all about lifting up the positives of these incredible ingredients that we can use. And it clearly shines through in the brand that you've created as well, because it's very much what. What PI skincare, at least how I perceive it to stand for. So let's talk a bit about your overall brand, because I know that you've rebranded during the pandemic. I mean, that must have been a whole fun exercise in itself. Obviously you had it planned. You've got different packaging, you've renamed some of your formulations. Can you talk us through why you made that decision and what the main drivers were?

I couldn't bear the packaging that we had. I couldn't even look at it anymore. I felt embarrassed by it. I really. It was felt really out of date. It wasn't distinctive in the market. It didn't embody our. It didn't embody us as a brand and personality of the brand, I think we have got some personality. And it just didn't, you know, going back to the point that we make our own products, every product has an amazing story to tell. We weren't telling those stories. We weren't telling our. We weren't communicating our values. So it's all these reasons. And we tried to rebrand for many, many years and this was sort of probably second or third attempt, but we hadn't quite landed it. And I thought. And we kept going. And so this particular outcome we'd spent two years sweating the details over, I mean, was a long, long process. But we're re, we love it. And now I look at the brand, I go, this is, this is pie, this is who we are. And this is what I always envisaged but never had the money to do. And I think that's the other thing is, is that up until recently we'd never had a designer's eyes on the packaging in this complete kind of all encompassing way. Yeah, we finally could really put some thought to how do we communicate now in a much different market, I mean, to what I launched in. It was much more crowded market in the natural category, which is great. You know, there's room for all of us, that's the point. So, you know, I'm delighted that there's more competitors out there and the natural categories grown, but you've got to be clear on who you are. So it was a lot about that. There was a big sustainability push too, because we'd done quite a lot right. We'd never use laminate on our packs, we use vegan inks and we used lots of glass. We did quite a lot right. But fortunately the market had moved on. So the packaging, there's been a lot of advancements and we said, okay, well we need to evolve, we need to be at the forefront, not just catching up. And I think one of the things I've always thought about, and I think about a lot as a business is fundamentally I'm making lots of stuff, I'm putting more stuff into the world. And you've got to reconcile for me, I've got to reconcile that and be able to sleep at night. And I have a massive issue with landfill. For me, the concept of digging a hole in the ground and pushing your crap in there and then covering it up and leaving it to sit there for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years is just wrong. We can't do it. And actually when you're. And you know, this beauty packaging, very complex the componentry, very complex, very unrecyclable, much of it anyway. So we just said, okay, this is our opportunity. We're never going to get this opportunity again to look at the whole range, 25 SKUs and look at it and fix them all now. And we knew there were kind of certain products that just we could do better on. So we made a lot of improvements. I mean, we still use a lot of glass. It's about 50% glass, but we. All the plastic is now PCR and. Or bioplastics, like sugarcane. Not perfect either. Right. Because they're quite hard to recycle. All of our packaging, we use no adhesives. I mean, everything is thought through and we got rid of leaflets inside, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it goes on and on and on, but we did a good job. I think there's some. A couple of packs we're still not happy with, but they. It was reconciling. How do we protect the bulk and the formula inside and make sure it dispenses properly and all of that stuff. We've had a lot of years of glass bottles and dip tubes. Not a happy place because you leave half of it in the bottle. You have to think, but we've got some work to do. But we're several steps ahead of where we were and that was very satisfying.

Well, congratulations, because it looks very beautiful and obviously you've put a huge amount of effort into it and it sounds like a massive undertaking. So I'm sure you're all very proud of the results. So let's talk a little bit about manufacturing because you mentioned this a couple of times already and I think this is fascinating because I see a lot of people go to market and immediately outsource manufacturing, but there are some core brands on the market, such as PI, who say, right, we're going to keep this in house. So what made you decide to keep manufacturing in house and what do you feel are the pros and cons of doing so?

This is a battle we fought continually for 13 years. As we've grown and as we've scaled fundamentally, we've chosen to keep it in house because of the quality of the ingredients we're using. We source them so meticulously and they're so meticulously grown that we don't want anyone else to touch them and we don't trust anyone else to touch them. So that is at the heart of if we're going to maintain quality, we've got to have control over that. You know, we've got to be all over it. And it is the control freak in every founder. But it's crucial to end product, end product quality. So that was a big one. I think when you're starting out, there's lots of pros of doing it yourself because, I mean, you'll know you can do small ones, you can almost produce to demand, which is what we were doing. At the end of the day, we're still in this perishable goods space. You know, if you're making a cream, it's going to have a best before date on it and it is, it is going to have limited shelf life. And if you're going to a contract manufacturer that needs, you need to buy 10,000 units and you are just starting out, you are ending. You know, I've seen it so many times with kind of compatriots in the industry of having to just ditch products, send it to landfill or discount it out the door, which is terrible for your brand equity. So there's all sorts of great advantages when you're small, earn your formulas, you can make them unique, you can, going back to that point about sustainability, you can be much clearer, you can have much clearer visibility of your supply chain. It's very hard to do that when you outsource that manufacturing piece really. And the other thing is, I think so I'm talking about the pros here obviously, but I think you can move really quickly as well. So you can work very dynamically. And I think an example of that for us was we in March last year, you know, we could see the iceberg coming. We sent everyone home at the beginning of March and you know, looked at our empty building and went, what are we going to do? And I always remember Matthew Paris talked about having a. There needs to be coming together, we need to have a good wall. It was that sense. And we said, okay, well what can we do? And we turned over the factory and we started making sanitizer. We turned one around in two weeks. We had 13 formulas because of what we couldn't get our hands on certain emulsifiers and certain alcohol. And so we were just iterating continu manually just to get it out the door. And we were going on our bikes and delivering to tube stations, checkout staff on the supermarket. These people hadn't been thought about yet. It was really interesting. That's very early times, you know, nurseries staying open for frontline workers, you know, we were giving them. So we donated 23,000 units I think in the end, which was most of what we produced. But we could do that in two weeks. And that's just one example of how you can, you know, and I hate the word pivots because it's, it's been rather overused. But you can move really quickly, you can do really interesting stuff. And we have this now, this PIE Labs which is our kind of innovation hub now. And they, it's where kind of our cosmetic chemists have no brief, they can work to no brief, they just get to have fun and we can get, you know, that's when a new ingredient can come on the market. You can get something out quickly. That's one of the kind of great advantages of doing it yourself. Disadvantages, I'm afraid, outweigh. I think it's really important to be really honest about it because you don't do this, this is not for the faint hearted and you don't do it unless genuinely are passionate about doing this, about creating and, and running a factory. The costs are extraordinary. As you scale, it's fine when you're early stage, but it becomes as you get bigger and particularly if you're producing emulsions, the equipment you need, it's a million quid a machine, you need a lot. The footprint you need of space is huge. And also you've got to be thinking about this stuff. If you've got a plan and an ambitious growth plan, you've got to be thinking about what space you're going to need in 18 months time. You can't suddenly go, oh, we've run out of space. You've got to be planning because it takes so long to fit out factories, order the machinery, it's often custom built for you. But the costs are absolutely eye watering. And on that note, you can't really do it unless you're funded, I mean, unless you're extraordinarily rich. But we had to seek external investment to do that. And when you're having those conversations with kind of private equity houses, unsurprisingly, when you say I need a million quid for a machine, 2 million quid for a factory, out, fit out. And it's not really what they want you to be spending the money on. They want you to put that 3 million into an advertising campaign. And I look back at what we spent on scaling our manufacturing and if we put that into sort of marketing, we'd be 10, 20, 100 times the size we are. So it's a choice and it's not a choice for everybody and I totally get that. But fundamentally we love it. We love you come into the building and you know we're making cleansers today because you could smell it. It's just. And I think also and Covid's really affected, I think it sort of impacted our culture a bit because there's been no one there and we're kind of bringing everyone back and people are re feeling that culture of when you make a new product and you create a new product, we will bring everybody into a room and celebrate it, because everybody has had an. Everyone's been involved in that process, all under one roof, and it's something very, very special. And then, you know, our production team is just. They're so committed, they want every product to go out the door. Right. And perfect. So that that customer's first experience is great and that it's going to help them and help their skin. You know, that's why we do it. I think it just gets harder and harder as you grow because you've got lots of supply chain complexity and that can go very sticky very quickly. So you need a really good ERP system.

Well, thank you for sharing that so freely and openly. I mean, that's really interesting to listen to and I know that a lot of our listeners will be. Will be taking note as well.

But I love what you said about.

The quality of your ingredients being the overarching driver. I interviewed Mae Lindstrom on the podcast a few months ago and she said exactly. She said exactly the same. You know, they keep manufacturing in house. There are so many parallels between what she said and what you just said, and I love hearing that. So I want to talk about one of your products in particular because it's one that's come up in our communities quite often. It's one that I've used many times and absolutely love. It's your Rosehip regenerate oil. I mean, it is a phenomenal formulation and I think, but please correct me if I'm wrong, that it contains quite a lot of CO2 extracts, maybe quite high percentages, and I've never seen a brand do that before. Pie did. I think you guys are pioneers in this. Pioneers, no pun intended, in that respect. So how hard was it to pioneer this formula formulation when it first launched? Did you have any problems getting it to market because of that?

It's 10 years old now, so it's kind of hard to remember. But I mean, the first thing to say is the margins on it are absolutely terrible. So the raw material costs extremely high and it's probably the lowest margin product we have in the range. And even at the price point we sell that, it's not great, but we just wanted it to be a really accessible product. The heart of that product when we launched it was we knew what Rosehip could do. And we'd had a really bizarre story where a customer had been using our Chamomile and Rose Up Cream, now called the Anthemis. She'd had a very bad road accident and used it on scars and to relieve the Itching. And you know that. That horrible itch after when scars are healing. But it had been a very bumpy scar and she'd needed a lot of skin grafts and she'd used this product and said, oh, my God, it's amazing. Can you make me a bucket? I was still in the garage at this point, and I said, sure. So I made her a bucket. She literally bathed in it, went back to skin grabs a month later, and they said, you don't need them. And they said, what have you used? And she said. And she called me up, she said, patent it. And I said, I can't patent the formula. But she said, it's the chamomile. I said, it's not the chamomile, although that's lovely. I said, it's the rosehip, because rose, it's very healing and very regenerative. And so I always remember my partner in crime, who's also my husband in the business, said, bottle it. Bottle rose it. And I said, no, there's like millions of them in the market. But it was really interesting because the rose ups we saw in the market did not bear any correlation to what we saw. They were very pale, they smelt very flat and quite rancid. Rosehip in its purest form is peppery. It's. It's a lively aroma. It's. And I mean, it's got four amigas in it. Beautiful fatty acid profile. You know, it's just an extraordinary ingredient. So we, I always say, you know, never do a product the same. It's got to be better than what's on the market. And so we said, okay, well, we think we can do it very differently. And it was to go CO2 route and to. To use the whole hip, not just the seeds. And it's the most concentrated on the market by miles. But it's. It's in. You almost can't compare it to a cold press ratio. But she never should never compress that ingredient anyway. So, yes, it wasn't hard. It. I think it's just. It was a different approach of. Well, it doesn't. We just don't recognize what we see in the market. We don't recognize. And it's not our experience of that ingredient. It became just a cult product over the years. But it comes down to that point that we talked about the you earlier on in this conversation about. And you buy well and you invest in the ingredients, and those ingredients are so conscientiously cultivated. That's the magic that happens. I believe that really beautiful Organic ingredients can do magical things.

I love it and I agree with you and I have to say that is a fantastic formulation. And if any listeners haven't tried it, I do recommend you go and get your hands on some because it is stunning. And what's interesting is I spoke to a couple of safety assessors when I first came across your rosehip regenerate oil and I said to them, how high can I go in terms of CO2 extracts? And the feedback I had from all of them was so diverse, so completely, wildly opposite. Some of them went, well, as long as there's no essential oil in it, you could, in theory go as high as you want, and others were going no more than 1%. So I think it's fascinating that you've got this fantastic high percentage CO2 formulation out there, and I'm not surprised it's doing so well. So tying in with that, and I know that a lot of what pie skincare tries to do is tackle sensitive skin or help people with sensitive skin. And the number of people who identify as having sensitive skin is growing. So how do you think natural formulations can help people with those sensitive skin challenges?

It's a really interesting question because to be really clear, natural is always, not always best for sensitive. And that was part of my challenge when I was experiencing my urticaria. There's two different dimensions to this. Natural is not always best, and you've got to be really careful about things like essential oils and. And also natural is not always natural. So that was the other sort of dimension. I mean, I do think that you, from a personal experience, natural ingredients had a transformative impact on my skin, but it's not. I don't think you can. And also they're going back again to that point about the magical properties of plants. You know, I think certain ingredients can be extraordinary for sensitive skin, whether it's a beautifully. A really beautifully growing chamomile, right through to ceramides, which you can get from natural sources now, that can really perform, can really help build the barrier. You know, there's all sorts of. So I do think natural ingredients can. Can really play their part, but it's not. It's the formula, it's the. It's how you bring them together. And, you know, you can get brilliant natural base emulsion cream and put some chamomile in it. It doesn't make it great for sensitive skin. You know, really, interestingly, certain natural, more natural preservatives I can't go near. Whereas parabens, I was fine with, you know, the irony. So I don't think it's as simple as natural is great for sensitive. I think it's natural. Plus plus plus plus plus and I think you have to be. And also everyone's skin is different. So we really acknowledge that, that you've got to sort of think about the whole picture and you've got to know your own triggers because there can be natural ingredients that trigger you. So. But you know, generally speaking, I think to that point, when it's grown really well and you haven't got, you know, extracted well grown well, certain ingredients, you know, I think certain natural ingredients can be really beneficial. And I do think the skin can almost sort of, it's not the right word, but almost metabolize it better. You've got the sort of better affinity with the skin, but it's not a, it's not a clear picture. I think, and that's what I learned, is that I went full natural as a consumer and actually arguably had more problems. And a really interesting example of that, and this is more in relation to acne because I also struggled with adult acne. It's a joyous time. I went, you know, kind of full, full natural. And at the time a lot of beeswax was used in creams to I think give some, bring some more viscosity to it and it would just sit and clog my pores and break me out as just one example. But that's the point. It's not, it's not always the answer.

Very true. It's not clear cut, that's for sure. I remember those beeswax creams. Some people even tried to emulsify with them as well, which was always fascinating to watch because it never used to.

Get a lot of peanuts. It used to get a lot of peanut oils too. Is quite allergenic, obviously.

Well, you've been such a pioneer in the industry and I know you've seen massive change. I mean, you've already talked about, about it in this interview so far in how indie and naturals are perceived since you started your business. And we all know that the next big change to come to the sector is a need for brands to embrace sustainability. You've also talked about how you're bringing that into the organization. So can you walk us through a little bit more on how you're embracing sustainability at PI Skincare?

It's great to see the industry sitting up now because I think we have been historically a terrible, terribly polluting industry. Right now we're fixated on packaging and that's really, really good because we produce a lot. So when great. But it is. We've got to think about end to end sustainability. It's my biggest frustration is that people fixate on the pack and I touched on how we'd move to a PCR plastic and we'd move to bioplastics. And it is a step forward. But problem is that it's really complex because where do you just going back to packaging. We'll come back to the end to end bit. But if you think about packaging, you know, if people can't, can't recycle from their curb side, is that better? You know is. Does that not present different problems? And we, we have full recycling guides. We encourage people to go into their stores to recycle, we encourage them to send it back if they can't and we'll recycle it for them. So we have a full recycling service. But it's not perfect, is it? So there's a lot more to do there but. And then just. And it comes back to being organic again. And also owning the process is that you can have a better understanding of end to end sustainability and it goes back to what is in the bottle. How is that behaving in our environments? And that's what we've got to think about. So it's why I'm, I've been so passionate about organic certification for so long because it embodies it. It honestly embodies the sustainability piece and it's really helpful to as a brand owner to have that. So. But this masses, I mean it's such a. There's so much work to do. The challenges right now is if there is a big movement and it's not going anywhere and that's great but it's still relying on the minority. You know, you've still got the really often the indie brands pushing forward and driving the way. Not entirely, but until I think we have some legislation on it, you need retailers to apply pressure. So if retailers said we wouldn't accept any products that don't tick certain boxes on the sustainability front that would change. My concern is at the moment it's all moving the right direction. Honestly, I don't want. It's great. And, and what I'd say to any brand owner listening is something small is fine. You don't have to have it all sewn up. No one does. It's really difficult. But start and do one thing and be proud of that, but it makes a difference. But the problem is is that you know, I' patient. And, you know, I want to see meaningful change at a meaningful pace and certainly in my lifetime, but ideally in the next five or 10 years. But we're not going to get there if it's just relying on the moral compasses of independent brands who are driving a lot of it. I think you're only going to have impact if we have retailers applying this pressure and having set criteria what they'll accept, because that will change things and that will focus minds. And then the even better way is to bring some legislation around it, which is quite timely. Absolutely.

Well, I think it's really interesting you're raising these points. I mean, I recently put out a podcast on should retailers put in place principles for rejecting products that aren't sustainable? I mean, we talked a lot about biodegradability on the podcast. Couldn't agree with you more that everyone's fixated on packaging. And yes, it is an issue, but there is so much more to the beauty industry than just the vehicle that the formulations are supplied in. Let's talk a little bit about the industry as a whole. There are so many new beauty brands coming onto the market all the time now. I mean, you alluded to this earlier as well, and obviously we work with thousands of them here at Formula Botanica. So what advice would you offer to anyone entering the industry now, having been in it for 13, 14 years? How do you think you can break through the noise in 2021, 2022?

I mean, it is a hyper competitive space. I think the temptation is. I think there's lots of temptations. Well, let's start with the basic premise and then there's lots to advise here, but fundamentally, if you're doing it to make money, please don't do it, because trust me, there are much, much, much easier ways to make money. I gave up a really high paid, great job. It was a brilliant job and didn't take a salary for years. All our money goes back into the business. It's not a route to making money. So that's the first step. This is not a quick, rich scheme at all. Number two, I would say, is, I think, as I sort of touched on it earlier, but you've got to be contributing something that is genuinely new to the industry or innovative or better. It doesn't have to be completely innovative, but it has got to be bringing something better. And I think, particularly in this space, and I saw it a lot when I was starting out, a lot of my sort of competitor brands and friends who are competitors, you know, there's A that the world doesn't need more blended facial oils or more balms that are really easy to do from your kitchen, you know, and it's great. I mean, it's not to fault it because it depends on what your ambitions are. It's not that distinctive and it's not. We've got so many of them. Unless you can find a way to innovate there, that is genuinely a completely different lip balm. But you've got to think, does it actually meet a genuine customer need that is currently not met? Is it genuinely bringing something better to the market? If you cannot answer yes to those questions, stop and rethink and go away and think about how do I do something that's genuinely new? Because it is hard. I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie. It's really hard. So you. It really helps though, if you've got something that you age and really believe in. Passion's got to be there, but you're genuinely contributing something of purpose and value to the business. And there's. And as, and as I do think people are looking for really purpose led brands now and there's got to be purpose behind it. So that would be my kind of starting out advice of when you're trying to build a concept or brand or product. I think once you actually have started, I have made every mistake, I mean, literally everyone you could imagine. So learn from me. But the big one is focus. And my team listening to this would just laugh going, yeah, right, because we're not always very focused. But you'll see opportunity everywhere and a retailer might express some interest or you might see a new market you want to pursue. And we've made that mistake so many times. You just do one thing well and stay really, really focused and don't try and conquer the world because you won't have the money. Someone in Dubai, retailer in Dubai wants you. Great. But do you have any brand awareness there? Because if you don't, you're not going to sell. It's going to be a huge effort getting this stock there. You're going to have to take it all back. The temptations everywhere. Just to put that into context, in the very early days, I remember our bank manager came into a meeting and I. We'd had sort of 10 approaches from various places and I was like, and this. And we've got this opportunity and we've got this. And at the end of it, he was a lovely guy called James and he said to me, that's great, Sarah. So of those 10 opportunities, which nine are you going to turn down? And I've never, ever forgotten that, because he was right. He said, you can't do it all. How are you going to do it? You've got any people, you haven't got a salesperson, you've got two chemists and no salesperson. How are you going to sell it? So just stay really, really focused and do one market at a time. Don't try and take over the world. Get traction in one market first.

Focus, passion and purpose. Very, very good advice. Thank you. So, just to round off this interview, you've given us so much value in this. In the 45 minutes we've been going already, it's been lovely hearing about your story and everything that you do at pie. So look fantastic. Named you the fifth most popular skincare brand in the world recently. With almost 5 million global searches for pie skincare in 2020. I mean, that is a phenomenal achievement in itself. So many congratulations. And then on top of that, you recently raised about US$15 million in investment funding and debt for the company. Clearly, these are big milestones. You've built something incredible here. So what next? Where do you want to take PI Skincare moving forward?

Well, I mean, I said it at the beginning. We genuinely feel like We've been spending 13 years building some foundations and we're about to get going. And honestly, we feel like there's lots to do and that we are. We honestly do feel like we're only getting started and we are, you know, numbers wise, we are still a minnow in a big sea of very, very, very big companies and competitors. We have huge ambitions and really, ultimately, I want PIE more people to know about pie. Not enough people know about us. Everyone deserves to have PIE in their life, in their bathroom cabinet somewhere. Everyone should have rose up in their bathroom cabinet because it serves a multitude of skin purposes. But it's fundamentally that we just, you know, we need more people to know about us and then in more practical terms, you know, we need to be able to meet that demand. So. And again, I touched on it earlier, but we really need to grow our factory. We're in the throes of that now, so hoping to make that move next year because you've got to plan for the growth. But, yeah, just the sky's the limit, really, because I just also think we've been doing so much right for so long. You know, we've been so passionately committed to organic and sustainability for so long, and it feels like our time is now. I feel like we've never been more relevant. Time to make some hay. And you know, fundamentally, you know, why did I start this business? Because I knew there were lots of people like me who are struggling with their skin and weren't getting the advice they needed. We really want to grow our consultation service is a big part of what we do. I mean, we talked about product. Today we have a whole service piece to our business that's completely free for people and we. That's a. I want to help more people. I want to help people hold their hands and fast attract them to a. Not a complete solution because skin is never. Conditions are never easy to solve, but hold their hand and get them to a better place quicker.

Fantastic. Well, as you say, everyone deserves pie in their life and I can't wait to watch you on this journey of the next steps of you building upon, as you say, the foundations. Although I think most of us would look at what you built and think you're a little bit beyond that foundation stage now. So huge Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. It is wonderful to talk to you and to learn more about what you do. Where can people find out more about you? I mean, we'll put all the links to Pie Skincare underneath here, but if people want to follow you personally and the business, where can they do that?

So on Instagram is probably best. Piskincare underscore Sarah, you can find me there. Come and say hello.

We will include that link with the podcast. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's been lovely chatting to you.

Thank you Lorraine.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope it's inspired you for what's possible in the indie beauty sector once you create an unstoppable and strong brand with focus and passion and purpose. I would love to hear what you think about this episode. 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 Darling, thank you for joining Sarah 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 Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram Club has Twitter, YouTube or link LinkedIn. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.