20 years of the LUSH LIFE
Mark Constantine talks about cosmetics firm’s anniversary and the path taken to get there
It’s not a stretch to think that a man who has devoted countless hours to recording bird songs around the world might lean toward animal activism.
As part of the collaborative publishing group The Sound Approach, which he founded in 2006, Mark Constantine has written books about birds that include those bird sound recordings.
The company was recently awarded the British Trust for Ornithology Marsh Award for innovative ornithology and has the distinction of having discovered a new species of owl — the Omani.
But even though his wife, Mo Constantine, calls that work his second job, it is the activism he has fostered through Lush Cosmetics for which he would be best known.
(Oh, and perhaps the cosmetics, too.) Lush’s policy against animal testing and the Lush Prize — where the company gives away more than $750,000 annually to people working in various ways to end animal testing and cruelty — plus the support for environmental and human rights through its SLush fund and the signature Charity Pot, makes the philosophy of the privately held, world-renowned brand patently clear.
Mark Constantine, Lush managing director and co-founder, recently chatted in the U.K. about the company’s 20th anniversary, which was marked at the start of May 2015 with a reimagining and rendering of their London flagship store on Oxford Street, and a look back at Lush’s beginning, its present and future.
Before Lush, there was the Body Shop for the Constantines and Liz Bennett.
They created products for the company, but when they sold their formulas to the Body Shop, the team created an online natural beauty business that later folded.
Next up was Lush which was founded by Constantine and his wife Mo, Rowena Bird, Helen Ambrosen, Liz Bennett (recently retired) and Paul Greaves.
They opened the first shop on High Street in Poole, a town on England’s south coast. That building, where they made products upstairs and sold them downstairs, still houses their offices and a storefront.
“I had a clear vision of what was possible. I had a clear vision of what was necessary within the industry but I had just come from a business collapse so I really didn’t want to take it very far in a way,” Constantine recalls.
At 43, he was ready to start again but do it differently than the traditional beauty brands. “If you take any product out of the factory, something like seven parts of 10 will be the packaging, three parts of 10 will be the contents. That’s because they then have to pay for advertising. They have a lot of expenses,” explains Constantine.
“So for me to take away the packaging gives me a lot of power. If we innovate and come up with a bath product that has no packaging, we’re going to be seven parts of 10 stronger.
“We don’t advertise and we don’t package heavily.
“So we’ve got more scope: more scope for innovation and invention and a better discipline I think. So I knew that when I was doing those first products.”
Constantine admits there have been advancements in the challenge to eliminate animal testing and cruelty from when he first began working in the cosmetics business.