In 2004 Lush has an ingredients crisis

Since Lush's inception one of our promises was to use pure and natural materials where ever we could. We also wanted to create our own fragrances so we knew exactly what went was going in them and also for the joy of making fragrance. Through out this time Mark Constantine, my Dad, was creating fragrances with pure and natural essential oils as well as safe synthetics with the help of Helen Ambrosen.

At this point I had joined the company after leaving college and begun to help out in our fragrance room, pouring the finished fragrances to be despatched all over the world and making the fragrance from recipes. Mike Honor, the department manager at the time, and myself began to notice that strange things had begun to happen to the oils we were using. Some were much more liquid than they ought to be and others had much less odour than we were used too. Then an old friend of Lush's Jeff Brown, the perfumer who had worked with the co-founders of Lush in previous business lives at Cosmetics To Go ,offered to help us with our quality issues by taking a few oils for testing.

Essential oils are quite complex things and can be very expensive ranging from £30 to £3000 for a litre of the precious stuff. The machinery he used breaks down the essential oils and takes a look to see if anything has been added to water it down, Using the Gas Chromatograph or GC machine, he came back to inform us that in fact our essential oils were adulterated with cheap synthetics. Some so badly that they only contained 30% of the original ingredient we thought we were buying. 

When we investigated this further our suppliers who were guilty of this insisted that we should have know because we could never have bought these products at the price we had purchased them for.

It was then that it became clear how important good buying makes to products.

From this point on Lush made it a policy to make thorough investigations into the materials we buy and to exactly what it is that we are buying. I worked closely with Agnes who took the role of fragrance buyer and between us and the fragrance team we worked on improving quality of our materials and our knowledge of them.

We began by visiting our suppliers, building up a good working relationship with each other and having open dialogue over things like quality, price or supply for example. We also implemented a clear quality control system that meant we were checking everything for purity and quality. During this time we visited Turkey, Morocco, India, Tunisia, France, Italy and more in an effort to build up our knowledge of our materials. Returning from these trips we also brought with us tales of smuggling, hijacks, environmental issues and a fascinating 'behind the scenes' of the world.

The inspiration from this bought about the conception of the Creative Buying department (the phrase was coined by Rowena Bird). As Lush has grown we have that the materials we buy and where we buy them from can have an impact socially, environmentally and ethically. In taking responsibility for this in a practical way our Creative Buyers have visited numerous countries and suppliers building a concise knowledge of our materials. It's a large and complex role that encompasses environmental, social and practical issues. The Creative Buyers have to strike a fine balance buying good quality ingredients that are affordable and ethically sound, not always an easy task and one we all take seriously.

This blog had been devised to offer an insight into the problems and solutions we encounter in our efforts to adhere to the promises we make to our customers.

Simon Constantine