Interview with Brianne West – How Ethique is revolutionizing the cosmetics industry with plastic free packaging

Laura Scampion (Partner, Auckland) interviewed Brianne West, a New Zealand entrepreneur and founder of Ethique, the world’s first regenerative beauty and personal care brand. 

Why Ethique? How did you get started?

It’s important to know I am very idealistic. At 23, I had just sold my previous two companies and was completing my Bachelor of Science at university. I thought to myself – I love business, I love science but first and foremost I want to save the world. As grandiose and ridiculous as that sounds, that's been my career aspiration my entire life.

I had a think about what I could do with those three passions (business, science and saving the world) and ridding the world of plastic bottles seemed like a good idea.

The cosmetics industry is not only laden with plastic and unnecessary packaging, but the supply chains are mirky and filled with child labor. However, I believe in business being the number one way to make positive change in the world simply due to sheer scale and resource, so I didn't want to give up the business angle.

I thought if I combined those into a business that operated as ethically and humanly as possible – think clean supply chain, living wage, B Corp and so on but also the product had a purpose in that it decreased plastic bottles – then that was a winner.

It's a long-winded way of saying I wanted to save the world really!

Ethique is a plastic-free, regenerative, beauty brand. How much hard work is that?

At Ethique we started out like this so it’s difficult to compare it to a more traditional business. Obviously, our overheads are a lot higher with our living wage and other employee benefits. The cost of our ingredients and packaging is also a lot higher because we use only sustainably sourced and free trade ingredients.

Sourcing is a lot harder due to our choices like using palm oil free ingredients for example. Working with partners who don't “get it” can be challenging – as often they brush off your requirements. But as we’ve got bigger, more and more companies want to work with us and there has been quite the revolution within the industry as more cosmetics companies start to implement these values. ’Consumers are expecting business to do more, to be better. If you want your business to be here for the long haul, you have to walk the line between purpose and profit. Business is no longer here just to line shareholder pockets. I'm not saying all business needs to have some grandiose purpose but, if you want consumers to resonate with you, and build real brand loyalty, you need to have a purpose.

Growing a plastic-free business has not been without challenges, many unique to us. Growing any business at the pace we have grown is tough, and encouraging people to get behind an unusual product was, at first, very difficult. So having that purpose – protecting our environment and the people within it – have made that easier to understand.

How much plastic and waste has Ethique saved the planet from?

So far we’ve saved over 13 million plastic bottles from entering landfill, and we’re just getting started: our next goal is half a billion by 2030.

We also collect information on carbon emissions saved because by not using plastic we produce less carbon emissions in general. We’ve saved over 3 million gallons of water, we’ve planted over 340,000 trees and we have offset all carbon emissions we haven’t been able to minimize since 2015.

In your view, how much greenwashing is about? How damaging is it?

There’s an enormous amount of greenwashing out there. We hear claims like “we plant a tree for every order,” but if you look at the ingredients of that product, they are a direct cause of deforestation.

I guess there's two sides to it: you've got the greenwashing where people are massaging the truth or making something sound better than it is, and then there are the examples where they might have put in place a genuinely great initiative, but it’s completely useless because it is outweighed by something else they are doing – like my example above.

“Sustainable” is being able to continue doing what you're doing for an infinite period of time - - this is where you might plant a tree for every order for example.

“Regenerative” is about giving back far more than you take. So you ensure that all your products are made of ingredients that are sustainably sourced. And for every tree you cut down through packaging creation or ingredient sourcing, you plant 1.6 trees to ensure there is a fruitful forest forever for that ingredient.

Ethique has always embodied regenerative practices, but now we’re talking about it more, and doing more, to be a truly regenerative company. We’re certainly not perfect, but we’re always trying to do better.

Can you tell us about your Super Soap Project?

It would have been March last year when I was finally beginning to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic was an inevitability. I tried to ignore it for a while there. I wanted to do something beyond looking after the Ethique team and ensuring their friends and family were OK and expand some kind of initiative outside the team

We wanted to give back to the wider community. Around 2.2 billion people in the world don't have access to soap and clean water. During the early stages of the pandemic, handwashing was touted as the number one protection – something so many people simply didn’t have. So, if people can't access soap, they literally cannot protect themselves – something we all take for granted. So we just wanted to give away as many bars of soap to vulnerable communities as we could. In the end we donated around 50,000 bars to communities across the South Pacific and parts of New Zealand. -where soap just isn't easily accessed.

We partnered with Oxfam, who supported our South Pacific donations. We also worked with lots of smaller local grassroots charities that helped us reach communities in need.

At DLA Piper we have been partnering with Ethique for a little while now (across the globe). What is important to Ethique in its business partnerships?

We obviously have checklists for ingredient suppliers – anti slavery and sustainability checklists – you know the bare minimum. But it is also a feel, it’s about relationships, value sharing, understanding the driving force for your partners.

If a supplier doesn’t tick all the boxes, but they’re working really hard to try and “get it” because they really care and are trying to improve, that’s good. It's great to have policies and procedures, absolutely. But if you work with a company and help them reach a goal, then that is creating far greater change than if you didn't work with them in the first place and they never achieved that goal.