Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - Page number 36 - November/December 2021

SUSTAINABLE BEAUTY Nigel Brooks from the Bath House talks about the company’s sustainability mission and how it’s bouncing back post-pandemic Tell us a bit about the business. Bath House is a fragrance and natural skincare brand founded in 1997. We are a creative team of artists and designers who live and work in the Lake District and we share a passion for the arts, which is represented in the fragrances and skincare we make. We have six stores that are a tailored showcase for our products creating a sensorial world of fragrance and skincare. Here we focus on customer service offering a distinctive personal shopping experience. For those who join us on our journey, our ethos continues to develop through artistic creativity, sustainable artisan methods of production and love of natural beauty. When did you start and why? We began Bath House in 1997 – next year will be our 25 th anniversary. We wanted to create a product that would allow us to explore our creativity in both a visual and a poetic way. Perfumes and fragrance products seemed to offer us this opportunity. Our artistic collaboration started from humble beginnings. The kitchen cooker was our lab, the table our design studio. Here we experimented with the world of fragrance, exploring ways in which to harness the healing power of natural ingredients. We were keen to learn from experts and so began working with a small number of fragrance creators and skincare formulators. Their specialist knowledge helped to bring our ideas to life. Everything we made we designed and packaged with care and meticulous attention to detail, teaching ourselves as we went along, always focusing on high standards. Listening carefully to our customer’s needs, orders were soon plentiful and we found ourselves requiring new premises to keep up with demand. We converted a former grain store in Sedbergh into purpose-built making rooms and design offices. In 2003, we opened the first of our fragrance and skincare stores in the rural market town of Kirkby Lonsdale. This represented a leap into the unknown, but we had great support from our local customers and those who regularly visited the area and our stores have proved to be a huge success. What challenges have you overcome? We have always been very strong on the packaging side of things but also very passionate about the quality of what we make, the ingredients we use, and its benefits to the skin. We have often had remarks that the products were too beautiful to use. To counter this, we have recently rebranded and packaged the entire collection with a much more stripped-back, functional aesthetic. This new look has helped to reinforce a link between what is inside the bottle and what it does. We have applied clear simple messaging to the front ‘Natural, Vegan, Sustainable,’ made in Cumbria and are very transparent about ingredients and recycling on the back. Another big challenge recently was to dump the plastic. Like a lot of beauty brands, we had also been using plastic extensively across our collection. With so much information on television and in the media about the growing problems of plastic pollution in the world we decided as a small business, it was time for us to act and not keep adding to the problem. Our solution was to swap to aluminium and glass bottles, both of which are easy to recycle and, better still, we have introduced refillable options so customers can keep topping up their favourite body wash or lotion time and time again. In the past 18 months, we have managed to reduce our use of plastic containers by over 90 percent. Our refills do use plastic, but compared to a normal plastic bottle they use about 85 percent and we have partnered with Terracycle to recycle these for the customer. This system is something wholesalers are beginning to take up with us. It’s not easy for a brand to change direction like this in order to pursue a more sustainable pathway, and these kind of changes inevitably cost money, which does affect the bottom line, but if as a society we are really going to make the changes to our lifestyles and our practices that help the environment, it will of course take a big commitment. In 2020 we joined the “Green Small Business Initiative.” This has helped us to focus on how to become a more 36