Bright, bold and brilliant. Lush products are much like one of the four founders, Rowena Bird. We sat down with the UK founder to find out the latest going ons in the company, where they get their inspiration and the product development process.
What’s the most exciting offering from Lush this year?
We’re having a year of new inventions, working on a lot of new patents at the moment. Probably the biggest thing we’ve worked on this year is launching Dirty Toothy Tabs – little tablets which you crunch between your teeth to clean them. One of the issues that we looked at was how many toothpaste tubes went into landfill and there’s over a billion a year - and that’s just in the states. They don’t break down, they’re not recyclable, there’s nothing else you can do with them. We thought, that is amazingly high and it’s quite appalling” - but toothpaste is something we do have to use, so we invented solid toothpaste.
We’ve got lots of new creations and never seen before product types for Christmas, we’re calling it Billy Bonkers. One of the inspirations we took was from New York, which was a lot of caramels and candy. There’s a nice caramel sweety sort of feel to it. We’ve been looking at being more creative and not just making another bubble bar or another shower gel.
What’s the product development process at Lush?
We’re unusual in the fact that we’re one of the few, if not the only, company of our size were the founders are still creating the products and still very much involved in the business. We each have a lab we work in, and we meet as and when we need to, depending on how creativity is going. When we do have a meeting everybody has to bring their creative ideas to it and the four of us [founders] sit down and we look at each of the suggestions. We do come up with a lot of ideas that there’s no way we could get to market, we just wouldn’t know quite how to do it on a large scale!
How does Lush test their products?
People from all the way around the company, they all look at the product, they have an opinion of it. Each product is very well looked at, torn apart, put back together to a point where we think it is good for the customer. And then the customer makes the final decision in the shop into whether they buy it or they don’t buy it! We’re very picky as to what we put out there. The amount of product that finds its way into a shop is probably only about 20 per cent of what we actually create.
Where do you get your inspiration?
At the moment we have an amazing chef in the UK called Heston Blumenthal and he creates wonders with food, he’s like a scientist and artist with food. We get inspired by what he’s doing. We get inspired by travel. Every year people from the company travel around the world to different events, Christmases with different seasons, parties, festivals and come back with the ideas that people are using there – raw material-wise, what they’re eating, packaging design. They bring back anything that’s inspirational and then we create product around that.
Is there much difference between product preference between the UK and Australia?
Australians tend to go for less bath product than the English - you are more shower focused. One of the things that is unique to Australia is your sense of humour is fabulous and it really matches some of the things that we do. We have a product called a Shower Jelly, it’s exactly like a jelly but you can use it in the shower, and Australians really get that because it’s fun, it’s effective, it really works. Australian’s are very good with their skincare, so our moisturisers do really well out here because you have that beautiful sunshine where your skin really takes a beating. The nice thing about the Lush moisturisers is that they’re man enough for the Australian summer to really look after skin. Hair treatments are also really popular because of your weather.