Naked Packaging
At Lush we believe you should get what you pay for
PACKAGING IS RUBBISH
We price our products carefully to reflect the cost of the ingredients inside. We don’t hike the price of our products year round to cover the cost of holding regular discount sales. We don’t have special offers, two-for-one tempters or free gifts. The only time we discount our products is our clearance sale of seasonal Christmas specials. We sincerely believe proper product advice and a personalised service can bring greater savings to a customer than gimmicky offers.
Most bathrooms are full of unwanted product bought in error because the packaging was eye-catching or there was a tempting offer at the shop. All of them bought from endless aisles carrying a bewildering array of products. With nothing to guide you but generic packaging descriptions, you get home and find it’s not what you had hoped or that it doesn’t suit your skin, hair or lifestyle. You end up with bathroom cabinets, window sills and shelves full of unwanted stuff, taking a pit-stop in your bathroom on its way to landfill.
Providing personal service is the best environmental practice. If we can get you connected to the appropriate product for your needs, you get really good value for money, we get a regular customer, the consumption of unneeded product falls and money is no longer wasted.
It’s an old fashioned idea of service that we have always practised at Lush. We listen to your needs to find out how you like your skin and hair to feel, to learn how and when you like to bathe or shower, and then recommend the products that are best for you. This style of service fell out of use with the rise of self-service and supermarkets. Personalised shopping gave way to aisles of products that customers have to browse and choose from, with only as many words as can be crammed onto the packaging as the guide to which product would best suit them.
We went back to basics at the start of Lush – we stripped away the packaging and we put larger numbers of highly knowledgeable staff on the shop floor, to bring back the art of conversation and specialised service.
MARK CONSTANTINE, LUSH CO FOUNDER
Some time ago a TV company asked us to cost a typical shower gel for a consumer programme. In doing this it became obvious that the packaging was a larger part of the manufacturing cost than the contents, and that the bottle, label and lid cost more than twice the shower gel itself.
With very little packaging, solid products like soap, bath bombs and massage bars need very little to protect or contain them. This is what makes Lush different:
Bottled products contain a lot of water, which is cheap to buy.
Naked products contain effective ingredients that cost more.
Not using expensive packaging gives us a big saving.
So we can invest that into extra staff and training.
No water helps make the product self-preserving…
Neither you or the earth want a lot of worrying preservatives.
We use Fair Trade, natural and organic ingredients.
This puts the cost up.
We spend the savings making high quality fragrances.
This means using essential oils, absolutes and concretes.
The Insider documentary 2007
