26 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, 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,
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