Fighting Animal Testing: when activism is raised to emblem. A conversation with Hilary Jones, Lush ethical director

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While the Storm Eunice hits the Dorset, with gusts of wind exceeding 100 kilometres per hour, Hilary Jones keeps an eye on the large windows of the house. With the other one she follows the uncertain movements of her sister, who broke her leg falling from the stairs. The same idealistic young lady who left this green county in the south west of England some thirty years ago, one day came back, and now she sits just there, trapped by the power of nature. Quite a coincidence for her, who has struggled an entire life to protect it through the battles of Lush, the most famous brand of natural cosmetics. Hilary Jones is the ethics director hidden behind the miracle of Lush communication strategies. In a market worth of almost 350 billion before the pandemic, the only Lush turnover in 2019 summed 1 billion 180 million euro. With three big odds marking its difference between bigger brands like Avon, L’Oréal or Revlon. The first: fighting animal testing. The second, as a consequence: not selling a single soap, cream or shampoo in China, waiving 1 billion 389 million of potential consumers. The last: shutting down by choice every branded social media – despite coming back after the pandemic.

Each one of these three unique and courageous choices had your countersign.
Welcome to Ossigeno, Hilary Jones.
Thank you for having me. I’m in a small house surrounded by very big trees, and the last time the UK had a storm this big was 1987, so… I’ll try and ignore that, answering to your questions.

I would like to start from the beginning. Your story with Lush: when and why you did it start?
Well, I was actually a full time activist and I wasn’t working. And you know, at some point in your life you end up having to earn money. So, I basically looked around for a company that didn’t clash too much with my own personal values. And if you’re someone who cares about the world, it can be quite difficult. We’re talking back in the 1990s, when companies mostly didn’t have a mission. Their mission was – well, their mission still often is… – to make money, and nothing else. So, trying to fit into somewhere that really only cared about money was always going to be really difficult for me, as someone who had such strong views.

Because of your story as an activist?
I was an anti-war campaigner, an animal rights campaigner, an environmental activist. I was at protest camps and all of that kind of things, all the time. So, in order to switch from that to having to earn a living, and finding a place where I could make money to live on, not feeling like it was a massive compromise of my views, there were few options for me. And I just happened to be lucky enough that in the Dorset town, where I am now and where my family is based, there was this little cosmetics company just starting up as vegan. And I’ve been vegan since 1987. This company was very close to my ideals, and back then there were very few vegetarian companies.

You felt like home…
They seemed to care about the same stuff I cared about. So, I applied for a job. And that was the very beginning of Lush. Four members of staff were taken on at the beginning, and I was one of them. My friend Wesley, who invents products for Lush now, was one of the other three that was taken on. We’re both still with the company, and we’re both very strict vegans. And I was just really, really lucky to find a company that would have tolerated our nagging. We brought our values. They brought their values. But then, we always pushed for more. And the company grew, and grew, and grew. I mean… Lush success story is just extraordinary. It was really struggling to get off the ground. When I joined it, it just had two tiny little shops, and we were just starting to plan and build stock for a third shop in London. It was that small, but it just took off. It went international, and I’ve been there for that whole journey. You know, it’s like taking off in a rocket into space. It has been a journey into the unknown, especially for someone like me.

So, someone like who?
Well, I had no business background, no working background, but I had a lot of opinions that luckily the owners of Lush have put up with, over the years. So, as the company got bigger and I was less needed to do the hands-on stuff, they were able to give me a role just dealing with ethics. So, I guess I brought my own ethics to the business. But really, the ethics of the business are the ethics both of the founders and the owners.

Just like the fight against animal testing, which shortly became one of your main values.
They’ve been working on cosmetics since the 1970s. And since the early days, they used to invent products for the body shop, and they’ve had anti-animal testing values, which was very unusual. At that stage, no one was talking about the cruel testing involved in all cosmetics. These values of Lush were by all means my values. They were absolutely enshrined in Lush, which is why I joined them. And I’ve been able to influence that, as much as I possibly could.

Can you explain what does it mean to you guiding the ethics of Lush?
I guess, to me, it means my job… A lot of the time I view my job as summing up and up, sort of formalising the values of all of the company: the owners, the staff, the customers. It’s about condensing that down into policies – sort of like “cementing” it into our ethical charter, for example – and into those policies that will guide us in the future. It’s about summing up where we are, and where we’ve been, and what we believe. Making sure that as we push forward, we stick to all of that, and strengthen it. It’s all about improvement, at Lush, all the time.

It seems to be a never-ending challenge.
It is. Whenever we set ourselves a goal, if we get anywhere close to it, we set next goal and the next one, which is why we’ve always resisted in being called an “ethical company”. We’ve always really fought back against that. We don’t like being called like that, because we can see where we wish to be, fought back against that. We don’t like being called like that, because we can see where we wish to be, and we’re never right there. So we never want to go: «Oh yeah, we’re really ethical, look at us, aren’t we great?», because that’s never the place. It’s like training. I don’t know, like lifting, or something: no matter how much weight you’re lifting, you always want to put that extra bit on. And it’s the same for us. It’s a journey that you should constantly go towards, so that’s kind of what my job is. It’s just that constant summing up, and writing it into policies, and trying to encapsulate what everyone in the company is thinking.

So your role has been crucial, when Lush pull out from the social media and then came back?
We were trying to decide not to use them, then we went back on there through Covid. And it was somehow just galvanising. When the pandemic broke out, the digital department started saying: «This is becoming uncomfortable, it’s starting to feel wrong». And then it was my job to write that down, and try and form it into a policy that we can all abide by. That sums up what we’re feeling at the moment, but also how we could possibly behave in the future.

But there’s no “Hilary Jones at Lush” on social media. I didn’t reach you that easily.
I have to say, I have never ever had any social media. I’ve been refusenik right from the beginning, because I think of it as a way governments and big industries monitor our everything. I’m afraid I’m very, very much an old school activist…

Anyway, with Lush you set a new turning point in the way to communicate a brand.
I think our communications are a journey as well. In fact, I think probably the thing that we’re most critical about, internally, is the fact that we don’t communicate very well about what we do. We are so busy, that we often forget to tell people what we are doing. Because a lot of the time we’re doing it for our own personal values, and not because it’s a marketing tool. For us, it is not a mere marketing tool.

 

For example?
A classic one is lots and lots of companies announcing that they are going to remove microbeads within the next five or ten years. We’ve never used them. We have always produced all body scrubs with what we call shell blasting: it’s some ground up nut shells to exfoliate the skin, in face masks and others. We hate the idea of plastic as a bottle, let alone the idea of putting it into a product… And there are all these companies advertising and getting loads of publicity from the media speaking it up, going «Oh, this company announced that they’re going to phase out microbeads within five years», and we are sitting there thinking: «Why the heck they were in there, in the first place?». So we do know that people want to know, but it’s all about finding the right balance of informing without bombarding them, but also without making them feel like we are doing marketing, because to us it’s not marketing, we do care about this stuff, and we don’t want to push it so cynically in the way that we see some companies do. So, yeah, our communications could be better.

But was there a moment when you did understand that you could create a successful message thanks to your ethical values?
We started doing ethical communications, to be honest with you, when the body shop was bought out by a large company. And we very much felt internally that if a multinational would have owned the body shop, it would no longer have had that trusted voice on the high street, calling for an end to animal testing, talking about fair trade. Those issues were very much in the windows of the body shops all around the world, and it was great. We were a small company building up. And the day the news of that sale was announced, that was literally the day we started talking about it: «Ok, if their voices are potentially going to be much more silent and much trickier for people to hear, then it’s time for us to step up and start using our own windows and the resources we have». You know, to us it’s a bit like a privilege having built a business. We had this presence on the busiest high streets across the world. If it’s London, it’s Oxford Street. If it’s Italy, it’s the tourist streets in Rome. You look at it, and you think «My God, we’ve built this resource that very few people have. We’ve got this presence in the busiest places. And we should be using it, and we should be using those windows». As we started building websites: «We should be using these websites where all this traffic, all these human beings are coming to us». And we didn’t just want to talk about our cosmetics. We wanted to tell them the other things that weren’t getting through to them via mainstream media: charities, NGO’s and campaign groups. So, we looked at it like that, like putting in the voices of people that didn’t have that kind of resource. To lend them that resource for a week or two, to tell their story in their way. And that’s why Lush campaigns are other people’s voices. It’s their hashtags. It’s their websites. It’s their QR codes, and Lush takes a step back.

And when does Lush step forward, instead?
When it comes to animal testing, we’re willing to talk about that without a partner. Because we feel we should use our own voice. It’s industry doing this, and it’s industry that should be ashamed of itself for all the years testing products on animals. And we should speak up, and we should have a voice on that, and say: «No, here’s a company that isn’t willing to do it». We’ve built a business full of products, whole product ranges, from the very first day not tested on animals. So, if we can fill a shop with products, nobody can come to us and say «It has to be done like this». To try and pretend that there’s no alternative. Because we’ve proved it can be done. So, we will use our voice on that, because it makes us really damn angry that people hide behind industries saying it’s necessary. It isn’t necessary. It is disgusting.

And where did the first idea of your Fighting Animal Testing logo come from? It just changed the game of branding products, identifying Lush even without the Lush brand.
We were having a discussion. There’s a difficulty in some countries to say “not tested on animals”. Some countries challenge that, because if some ingredients have been tested in the 1960s and we’re using them nowadays, some countries may say: «Well, you can’t say it’s not tested on animals, because at some point, in that ingredient’s history, testing has been done». So, we were discussing all of these different terminologies, and I said: «But we’re not against it! We’re fighting it!». You know, it’s easy to say: «Oh, I don’t like that». Or «I’m against that, but…». We’re not merely against it, we’re damn fighting it! And we’re fighting it to death – until our death or its death, whichever comes first. And that’s what we’ve pledged to do as individuals and as a company. I just said that, and then everyone was just like: «Well, that’s it. Then let’s call it Fighting Animal Testing».

And the famous boxing hares logo?
Right after, our designers went off and did the boxing hares. That same day. Within hours of me saying Fighting Animal Testing. it was literally like a rapid fire. And it’s ever since unchanged. Because, you know, rabbits are used so much in testing that they’ve become the symbol of testing. They are passive recipients of cruelty, but we wanted to talk about the fight back, so that’s why we use boxing hares. We’re fighting back – and they would fight back if they could, too. So, we’re going to fight back on their behalf, and we wanted to depict them as fighting in their own right, with their own needs, and their own identity. They are fighting with us.

In the same years, you launched your first “shocking” campaigns…
The reason why we’ve done those so-called “shocking” stuff is, linearly, because they shouldn’t be shocking. Because if we’re willing to do those things, we are nothing but speciesists. If we’re willing to catch sharks on hooks and cut off their fins, why should it be unacceptable to do it to a human? And if we’re willing to inject animals with chemicals, and to shave their skin, and scratch it, and rub products on it, why shouldn’t we? Why does it become shocking when we do it to humans? We have the same pain receptors as a rabbit. Or a guinea pig. It’s horrible to die of poisoning either if you’re a rat or a human. Then why isn’t it shocking when it happens to an animal, but it is so when it happensto a person? Sometimes you have to make that connection for people, to make them truly stop and think: «Why should this be acceptable? Why have we been told that it’s ok, and we’ve all just gone along with our lives and we never questioned it?». So, when we do those shocking campaigns, we’re just trying to ask people to question it. And to do this, sometimes you have to push it down the route of Imagine if this was a human being.

May I ask you what was the short and long term reaction of the people? I can figure you also had a lot of bad publicity from that.
Yeah, we get attacked. We’ve had attacks in our shops. We’ve had them vandalised. We’ve had our staff threatened. You can figure it out, we’ve had it happened. I myself have been threatened, and we’ve even had anonymous phone calls to our shops saying: «We know what time your shop shuts. Be careful walking home. Because we’re outside and we’re watching you». So, proper threats. But I think in the long term, even people that hate us know that we say what we think, and we follow through. We ride the storm. And, you know, some people accuse us of doing it for the publicity. I mean, they have to be mad, if they really think that it’s an enjoyable place to be in the eye of a storm like that.

And what have been, so far, the results of your campaigns against animal testing?
There was the huge public victory in the formalization of the European Cosmetics Directive. Now, there’s a total ban on animal testing. And that has changed cosmetics testing around the world, because other markets raced to catch up. We were part of that. We were campaigning all that time, by ourselves, but in no way that victory just belongs to us. That was the public, the buying public demanding for a change, and demanding it of their legislators. Because it’s always two-pronged: you need to make sure that companies stop doing these things and, at the same time, to bring legislation. It’s the only way to stop the slide.

This brings me to a question about another company we hosted in Ossigeno: Tony’s Chocolonely. We talked to them, in our previous issue, about their anti-slavery effort in the chocolate market, and I was curious to know if ethic companies like Lush and Tony’s entertain sort of relationship. We could call it an Avengers League of ethical companies… For example, they pay particular attention to their supply chain, to look after every passage as not to be involved in the, uh, exploitation of people or resources in Africa, or in South America.
Very naively, when I first came into business, I thought that ethical companies should have been talking to each other, and share information. And, of course, it doesn’t really happen. Even on animal testing, you don’t get much swap over of, you know, saying: «Oh, we found a great supplier who doesn’t test, you should use them as well!». But certainly, with Tony’s we’ve spoken about supply chain, because we too have worked for years, as have they, trying to make sure that our cocoa butter is traceable, and that it has accountability. We do a lot of direct sourcing. We’ve even sourced cocoa butter from peace villages in Colombia and, you know, places like that, where we know the people picking and processing the cocoa beans. But cocoa is not the only ingredient. There are many of these ingredients that we have to constantly monitor. Tony’s are a great company, and they really do care about supply chain. So, yeah, we’ve had a lot of fruitful conversations with them.

Ultimately, why a company should stand for a value, instead of a product? How can others do what you did, in their market, if you should give them an advice?
I just think that sometimes things are bigger than your company. And it’s just a case of recognising that. The fight against animal testing is bigger than Lush. And its mission is more important than Lush mission. So we wouldn’t want to brand that. I think if you really care about something, you should care about it in its own right. Not everything is about the company. Not everything is about brand building and profit making. Some things supersede that, and if you really care about it, then push all of your experience into really pushing that.