Harvested in Hong Kong: why global beauty brand Lush is shopping local to make its products sustainable and environmentally friendly
- Hong Kong is a notoriously recycling-unfriendly city, which is a problem for buyers of beauty products who value sustainability
- Although small brands are often quicker on the uptake, it’s global companies that have the power to change the system
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a beauty brand out there that isn’t talking about sustainability. What was once seen as the realm of water-bottle-toting, straw-eschewing hippies is now everywhere. Companies claim to be planet-friendly because they’ve discovered that their consumers actually care about this sort of thing.
This change is often seen quickest in small beauty brands, which can react to volatile market trends almost instantly. Still, although larger beauty brands are comparatively slower on the uptake, the upside to being big is … well, being big.
Few independent labels, for example, are able to set up infrastructure that can enable systemic, industry-wide change. One global company that can do this, though, is Lush.
The British beauty company, which has nearly 1,000 stores in 48 countries, recently launched its first Asia-based Naked store in Hong Kong. The store is completely free of plastic packaging.
“Many of these [products] we invented [more than] 30 years ago, like the shampoo bar and bath bomb,” says Annabelle Baker, director of Lush in Greater China. “They’re products that solve wastage in the bathroom. [Our] shampoo bar is the equivalent of 3 x 250g bottles, so that is a significant saving. By shopping at Lush, customers in Hong Kong have saved 600,000 bottles from going to landfills or having to be recycled in the last year.”