25 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. �uite 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.
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