A Booming Market
Driven by Sustainability

In recent years, the beauty and personal care industry has experienced a significant shift towards natural and eco-friendly products. Consumers are increasingly prioritizing sustainability, cruelty-free practices, and ethically sourced ingredients when making purchasing decisions. This trend has given rise to a thriving market for natural cosmetics, with global demand projected to grow steadily in the coming years. Major companies are adapting their strategies to meet these evolving consumer preferences, but few have been as successful as Lush, a pioneer in sustainable and handmade cosmetics.

It’s green, dense, and surprisingly light!

Fitting perfectly in the palm of your hand, it leaves a light, oily residue on your skin. It is fragrant ( just a touch of soft, alluring smell) and textured (like thousands of little worms squished together). It goes against everything we were taught by conventional strategy theory. And it is an amazingly powerful symbol of the new era dawning.

So what is it? Let’s take a close look.
A soap bar?
A spinach hamburger?
A sponge?
A sort of energy tablet?
An eco-macaroon?
A new-age vitamin pill?
A breakthrough detergent?
In front of you is the equiva- lent of not one, not two, but three bottles of shampoo — all squished into one solid bar. That’s the way to reinvent!

Now think about it. What do we sell when we sell shampoo?

What end benefit do the customers get? What is the value? Clean hair, indeed. What ingredient doesn’t need to be supplied at the time of the sale to ensure this desired outcome, as it is always available to the customer at home? Water, indeed. So why do we pump water, process water, bottle water, package water, store water, transport water, sell water, and waste plastic post-water just to wash our hair, when water is the only ingredient that we don’t need to provide?

That was the starting point for Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, a twenty-year old UK brand, when it started working on reinventing the traditional shampoo. According to the company, “Theinventors worked with Stan Krysztal” — one of the leading cosmetic chemists of Great Britain — “to create these very clever little bars; an effective, hardworking shampoo base with quality ingredients, beautiful fragrances, and, best of all, they require no packaging. Handy for traveling, compact, and easy to use, each bar is roughly the equivalent of three plastic bottles of shampoo. These humble bars are (probably) one of the greatest inventions we’ve ever come up with.”

Lush: A Leader in Handmade, Ethical Beauty

Founded in 1995, Lush has revolutionized the cosmetics industry with its commitment to natural ingredients, ethical sourcing, and eco-conscious packaging. Best known for its iconic bath bombs, skincare, and hair care products, Lush has positioned itself as a brand that not only delivers high-quality beauty solutions but also advocates for environmental sustainability and animal welfare. With over 900 stores in 49 countries, the UK-based company continues to lead the way in creating innovative, cruelty-free beauty products while minimizing its environmental impact.

The Lush team loves talking about it. But what about the customers? Naturally, some customers would refuse such a strange-looking sham- poo option. My baby brother is one of them. Whenever he visits us, I have to make a conscious effort to restock his bathroom. “I am a normal person,” he claims. “I like my soap solid and my shampoo liquid, and not the other way around!”.

Yet by any measure oth- er than my brother’s comfort zone, Lush’s solid invention has been a great success since its launch in 2007, capturing rave reviews and a solid (pun intended!) customer following. Here is one of such reviews from a rather conventional consumer — a Boston.com writer’s take:

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Trust me, I was sceptical, too. A rock of shampoo, eh? Sounds about as effective as a steel wool pad as a conditioner. But after trying it multiple times at an adult sleepover — don’t judge — I slowly became convinced. The stone of shampoo seems to last forever (if you keep it in a dry place after use), and it comes in a variety of scents. I recently picked up cinnamon and clove. But most important, it’s pretty damn effective. The shampoo itself lathers nicely, (sorry to sound like a Prell commercial. …Wait, do they still make that?) and at about $10 a rock, it’s a better deal than it appears.

The reinvention of LUSH shampoo

The glowing reviews and growing revenues are not the only business victories for Lush solid shampoo. On the other side of the business continuum, the company is doing well with its costs. As of 2019, Lush has avoided producing, bottling, and distributing 30 million plastic bottles globally in five years by selling shampoo bars — count in 2.6 ounces (or 75 grams) of plastic saved per shampoo bar, and multiply that by all the savings in energy and la- bor costs that would have been incurred designing, producing, bottling, and storing the bottles. Annual water savings from producing the solid shampoos are at least 120,000 gallons (or 450,000 liters) globally.

Transportation savings are beyond surprising: When calculated per wash, transportation costs are 15 times less than those of liquid sham- poo. Additional resource intelligence comes in a form of raw-material savings: The bar has no preservatives, as there is no liquid content requiring preservation. And with a scale of 930+ stores in forty-nine countries carrying the product, strengthened revenues and intelligent cost structure for the unusual product are a welcome performance out- come for the once-tiny underdog of the cosmetic industry. No wonder a 2018 Elle article declared that Lush solid shampoo is “Plastic-Free Beauty Product You Need To Buy ASAP!”

Lush solid shampoo is a story of true reinvention

While the traditional majority of cosmetic companies are fighting for a share of the difficult consumer market with more appealing packaging and stronger advertising campaigns, and while the eco-conscious minority is struggling with recycled plastic and third-party «green» certification, Lush goes well below the surface and delivers an entirely new way of looking at a product.

Once a barely known company that started with a sausage machine in a messy workshop of a nearly bankrupt husband-and-wife team, Lush has put into question the essential value delivered by traditional shampoos and paved the way for an entirely new way of thinking. Lush’s solid-shampoo bar exemplifies the company’s production standards. About 70% of the products sold require no packaging, much of the product range has no synthetic raw materials, and more than 70% of the range is totally unpreserved. For Lush, reinvention is simply business as usual. For most of us, it is anything but. Time to change?