Driving Change
As the founder of a premium natural aromatherapy brand, Peigín Crowley wants to make consumer choices that count. Here, she explains how she’s delivering on her promise with the BMW 330e plug-in hybrid.
Mindful choices are important to Peigín Crowley. As a leading spa consultant, aromatherapist and the founder of Ground Wellbeing, she wants to create products that work in harmony with our planet, just as she wants to align herself with brands and producers that take sustainability seriously.
Peigín, who lives and works in Cork, developed her innovative skincare and body care brand Ground Wellbeing at the start of the pandemic. Projects she was working on at the time were suddenly halted and she was faced with a choice: pause or pivot.
“My work is quite private, and when I do projects for other people I don’t shout about it,” says Peigín, who has developed spa experiences for Mount Juliet Estate and Adare Manor, as well as private label brands for the likes of Mink Hand & Foot Spa. “But I knew I needed to protect myself for the future, so I got brave and came out from behind the curtain.”
When Peigín sat down to develop the concept for Ground Wellbeing, she already knew she wanted to incorporate her background in aromatherapy. “Essential oils are the most beautiful plant messages and they speak to our biology,” she says. “These oils, when they live beside your bed, become your toothbrush-and-toothpaste moment when you think,
‘I just need to breathe for a minute.’”
She also knew she wanted to create a range that was clean and sustainable. “Everything from our glass jars to our branding is locally sourced and fully traceable,” she explains. “We’ve got a refill initiative with our spa partners and our customers will soon be able to bring back their empty containers in order for them to be recycled.
“My awareness of sustainability has really come into focus in recent years,” adds the mother-of-two. “When you have children, you really become aware that you are passing on the planet to the next generation and you suddenly feel more responsible than you possibly did before.”
Sustainable Delivery
As Peigín develops her brand, she’s taking a personal approach to customer relationships. She runs online self-care workshops for her customers on the last Sunday of each month and handdelivers product orders to clients such as Brown Thomas.
“Not every company has the owner going out and delivering the products, but I just felt, in the early stages, how lovely it would be to meet my clients and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint,” she says.
Sustainable delivery is very important to Peigín, but so too is sustainable driving. As a friend of BMW, she drives a 330e plug-in hybrid to help reduce CO₂ emissions and reaffirm her commitment to a fully sustainable product lifecycle.
The pioneering car brand recycles and reuses 99 per cent of the waste they generate from their global internal production each year, and supplies their sites worldwide exclusively with electricity from renewable energy sources. It’s a far-reaching sustainability strategy, says Peigín, and it inspired her to reconsider her own one.
“Aligning with BMW, and seeing the lengths they have gone to in the whole lifecycle of a product, was a huge turning point for me,” she says.
“BMW is now showing me how you can use reduced materials in production and how you can document the lifecycle of a product throughout your whole supply chain,” she explains.
“There’s a lot of greenwashing going on in some companies, but when I did my due diligence on BMW, I was blown away. They’re doing it from the inside out. It made me look to my own suppliers and mail them questions, and I was so glad to discover that my supply chain was standing up.”
BMW has a commitment to offer 25 electrified vehicles by 2023. At least 13 of the new models will be fully electric, including the upcoming BMW iX3, BMW iX and BMW i4, due later this year.
Peigín drives a BMW 330e plug-in hybrid, but in time she’d like to move to a fully electric vehicle. “You can feel it and hear it when you’re in electric mode and then, when you rev up, you move into petrol,” she explains. “I know I’m helping the environment when I’m driving that little bit slower, and that brings about a consciousness that I can be accountable and responsible.”
“It’s a really good feeling to be on the green team on the road,” she adds. “Plus, there’s a huge pride in meeting my clients and delivering my products in a more sustainable way.” bmw.ie