The importance of trust.

How the skincare industry/we have been failing:

Since we started, we have always tried to do things the ‘right’ way. Working with 100% natural ingredients, sourcing them from as local as possible, and making our products ourselves. To some extent, this is what used to set us apart. However, the last 10 years has seen every brand in the space make claims of ethics, sustainability, and efficacy that are by in large un-verifiable. An unfortunate byproduct of these claims and often marketed misinformation is customer mistrust, and for good reason. To the untrained eye, it’s incredibly difficult to pick out the authentic statement or fact. 

With 1/3 customers becoming more cautious about health/beauty products as a result of misinformation; we knew that couldn’t be us (Trustpilot, 2021).

The importance of trust between customers and something as personal as their chosen skincare or health brand cannot be overstated. We are particularly receptive of this intimate relationship, and for a period of time we struggled to know how to prove our sustainability claims and to stand apart from the industry noise. In the British Beauty Council’s incredibly insightful report ‘The Courage to Change’, they found 86% of customers wanted more information on what their products were made from, and where those ingredients came from (BBC, 2020). Being that we make our products in-house, we knew we had to communicate our unique position more effectively.      

What we’ve done.

Transparent ingredient labels

In 2020 we released an updated looking product range. The redesign was spearheaded with the intention of being as transparent as we could be. Almost all of our products were relaunched with ingredient breakdowns forming their individual labels, with each ingredient proportionately displayed as you can see below. It was imperative that no ingredient or component would be hidden or unspoken for. 

Price breakdowns

Alongside the release of our transparent ingredient labels we started publishing and talking about product price breakdowns. As pictured below, we outlayed the cost of the components that made up the product. Our industry is notoriously built on inflated prices built on hyperbolic claims. We believe the contrary, our customers should be able to see where their money is being spent and ultimately where the value in the product exists. We are not stopping at price breakdowns, we are currently working on a framework to do product emissions breakdowns, as well as social impact breakdowns in the future.   

What’s to come

Transparency remains at the forefront of our 2022 strategy. We have some very exciting developments in the pipeline that we can’t wait to share with you. We’ll be outlining more of our plans in our upcoming annual Impact report. Keep an eye out for it in the near future.

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Recommended reading:

British Beauty Council Report: The Courage to Change