For many people, their career goal is to build their own company from the ground up, something that aligns with their passions and — naturally — makes some money. Building a company you can sustain for the rest of your life, however? That’s the hardest part. For Lush co-founder Rowena Bird, the dream happened almost by accident.
She was working at the ‘quirky’ British mail-order cosmetics business Cosmetics To Go when it all went tits up, back in 1994. She and five of her colleagues realised two things: they weren’t done making products together, and, in Rowena’s words, they were probably “too unemployable” to go work for anyone else. Soothey started again — this time under the name “Lush”, a name submitted by a customer in a competition.
That was 30 years ago. Today, there’s almost 900 Lush stores in 52 countries.
In person, Bird is warm, funny, and matter-of-fact, the kind of person who’ll tell you about business failures and activism campaigns with the same ease as recounting a practical joke in the office.
On a recent trip to Australia, PEDESTRIAN.TV caught up with Bird for the inside scoop on how Lush has survived three decades in an ever-increasingly competitive market, while staying true to the company’s ethical values — and how it’s surviving the digital age, despite not having a social media presence.
Hi, Rowena! Thanks so much for your time. So, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do for Lush.
So I’m one of the co-founders of Lush. And I’ve worked with the same team of people for 44 years. And I travel. I’m the one out of the team who when we first started said, “You know, if we started going abroad, I’ll go and sort things out”, because we weren’t originally; we were just going to open shops in London.
And then people from Canada and Croatia started coming in and saying, “You know, can we take your brand to our countries?” And so I immediately said, “Well, I’ll go.”
When we started, I moved up to London with my new husband, and we lived in London while we set the shops up. My co-founders didn’t want to travel, so I’m quite lucky, really. I work with a load of people who don’t want to go anywhere, which means I get to go everywhere.
That’s incredible. But let’s do a little bit of a history lesson. How did you get to where you are now?
Okay, so I got to where I am now because when I was a little girl, I used to really love makeup. And my mum only ever wore lipstick, but she had lots of friends that wore different kinds of makeup. They would give me the ends of their makeup, and I’d make up my granddad. He had a bald head, which was really good for painting faces on, which was really great; he was very patient.
And I didn’t know what I was going to do when I was younger. I went to a careers thing, and you go in and you have a one-to-one with a careers officer. And I had a wig on, coloured tights, each nail would have been a different colour — you know, the whole makeup thing.
He took one look at me and said, “Why don’t you be a beauty therapist?” and I had no idea what that meant. I’m 66, so when I was young, it wasn’t the thing that it is now.
I got into the college and went to study beauty therapy. From beauty therapy, I then went to work down with Mark (Mark Constantine) and Liz (Liz Bennett), who were the other co-founders of Lush. We had a business beforehand, Cosmetics To Go — there was only six of us working together then.
Beauty wasn’t such a thing that it is now. Customers were few and far between. You had your regulars and things, but it wasn’t like churning out. So I did lots of other jobs. I typed up invoices, I’d fill in essential oils, I’d make hennas in the evening. I think I was just brought up always to say yes and give things a go.
We managed to overtrade [Cosmetics To Go] for various reasons, and learned a lot of painful lessons. When Cosmetics To Go went down in 1994, it’s like, well, that’s it then, we’re all out of work, got to try and find a job. And Helen (another Lush co-founder) said, “I’m going to go back in and make products”, and I said, “Okay, if you go in and make products, I’ll come in and I’ll sell it.” So, I went in and redid the shop and made it look wasn’t a Cosmetics To Go shop anymore.
We ran a competition to see what we’d be called. Somebody wrote in and said, “Lush Garden”. We didn’t like the garden bit, but the ‘Lush’ bit we really liked. It was sort of almost organic, the same way as our growth has been organic, and getting back together was because we realised that actually we were unemployable by anyone else because we have all such strong characters, and with our own way of doing things, it’s not very easy for people to tell us what to do.
Being so high up in a business as a co-founder, like what does a typical day look like for you?
There isn’t a typical day; I could be poking my nose in wherever. Sometimes I might come in and I’ll go straight into the factory. A lot of the time I’m trying to make bridges and make everyone’s life a bit easier, because it’s it’s a hectic place. We’re not structured in a way that it doesn’t take us 18 months to get the next product out. We’re not working that far in advance. So, that puts a pressure on everything. So, conversation and communication is really important.
And while Lush is a cosmetics and a wellness brand, it’s also very vocal with like morals, values, and plays quite a part in the activism space, which I think is great that as a company, you’re standing up for what you believe in. But a lot of companies don’t do this. So, what made Lush like go against the grain?
Every product we’ve ever made from the whole 44 years has always been against animal testing. That was very important to us. For a long time, we supplied The Body Shop and put a lot of systems into their non-animal testing… And when they sold to L’Oréal and Anita died sadly, then we realised that their campaigning years had come to an end. And we respected all the campaigning that they’d done, and it was great, and we thought, right, well, we’re going to have to take over the mantle. And so that’s where it started.
We created the Charity Pot and all the money, apart from the tax, which has to go to the government, went into a separate bank account, and all that was spread out among grassroots [charities] rather than the big boys, because they get enough money anyway from one thing or another. But from grassroots, that’s like the lady at the end of the road who saves hedgehogs, or takes stray cats off the street and needs small things, or a small little charity, might not even be registered as a charity, but just needs £500 to get some leaflets done or whatever. We can sell a product for them and raise quite large amounts of money — at the minute we’ve got soap for Gaza.
And then another very prominent thing that Lush has done is in 2021, you stopped posting on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat as part of your “Big Tech Rebellion”. Can you give our readers who might not know what that is a quick explainer?
It was to do with when the Facebook exposé and it was all about how the algorithms are not working in the favour of the users. And so it became detrimental — especially to younger people and their mental health — and quite often leading them to self-harm and suicide. And we just thought, “You know what, as a company where we have a lot of younger users, we don’t want to be part of that.” I think the worst of it is is that they know what they’re doing and they don’t change it. And so they’ve got blood on their hands, really.
If you can narrow it down, what is the one thing you’re most proud of achieving since starting Lush?
Giving the £100 million to grassroots charities. When we first started it, Mark was saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could raise a million?”. And then 30 years later, we’ve got 100 million. And you just think, “Wow, that’s done a lot of things for a lot of people”, and that’s really lovely.
Beautiful. And if you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing?
I’d be running a boutique hotel in Botswana, and I would be flying to pick up my guests, flying them in and I’d be [their] safari guide.
What is the most unhinged thing you’ve seen at work that we can legally publish?
I suppose probably the most unusual thing you see is, you could, if you came into 29 High Street — which is where our head office is — you might well find the person who’s in charge of the business having a nap on the sofa.
And then the other thing would be Steve (Steve Brackstone) — Steve is one of the other guys that works [at Lush]. We’ve worked together for 40 years, I think. And Steve and I like to make each other jump. So, we have like a little video reel of different times where we’ve jumped out. It’s often outside the toilet. I always know when he’s in the toilet because he spends hours underneath the hand dryer. So, when it’s going on, I think “That’s going to be Steve.” So, I’ve got my video ready, and he comes out, I hide under his desk, or he hides behind one of my sofas, or behind a car.
Last question: how do you sign off your emails?
Usually “Love, Ro” and kisses, or “Big hugs”.
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