Lush founders Mark Constantine and Liz Weir started out in the industry by supplying one of the company’s biggest rivals. Until 1995, the pair were the biggest manufacturers for the Body Shop and formulated many of its best-selling products.
After growing increasingly uncomfortable with creating but not owning the products they were producing, Lush’s soon-to-be founders sold their cosmetic manufacturing business to the much larger Body Shop brand in 1991. As part of the sale, they were prohibited from competing with the company until 1994.
Lush was therefore launched in 1995, with the first store opening in Poole, UK. Before long, it had expanded Its presence with new locations in London’s Covent Garden and Kings Road. By 2003, Lush had over 200 retail stores around the world, including in the UK, Croatia, Brazil, Australia and Ireland.
Driving this growing popularity and rapid expansion was the company’s vision to provide simple, natural products with minimal packaging and as little impact on the environment as possible.
To bolster its natural and ethical credentials, Lush operates a Supplier Specific Boycott policy, which means the company will not buy any ingredients from a business that tests any of its materials on animals. Natural ingredients also account for 65% of the company’s raw material spend, with the other 35% spent on safe synthetic materials. Finally, each Lush recipe is vegetarian, with 85% also vegan.
Today, Lush produces and sells creams, soaps, shampoos, shower gels, lotions, moisturisers, scrubs, masks, and much more in over 950 stores across 49 counties. This global reach regularly translates to over GBP 800m in annual turnover.
