In this interview, Brianne West, founder of Ethique, explains why it’s so important to always stick to your values and beliefs and the difference a great team can make, especially for a small business.
If you are passionate about the environment and limiting your plastic consumption, you probably already know Brianne West’s brand, Ethique. An ethical, waste-free beauty company that focuses on eliminating plastic and “putting a bar of soap in every person’s shower”, as the entrepreneur told us during the recording of our podcast, Pretty Good Business.
In this interview, Brianne opens up about starting her business when she was a university student in New Zealand, her mistakes and what she learned from them, and how your ‘why’ should always be more important than profit.
Can you tell us more about Ethique?
We call ourselves the world’s most sustainable cosmetics company. We produce products such as shampoo, conditioner, moisturisers, all in bar form that are entirely plastic-free and waste-free in general. But it goes a bit further than that, in terms of sustainability.
We believe in social sustainability. To have a truly environmentally friendly world, we have to bring everyone along on the journey and ensure that many inequities in society are addressed. To do that, we ensure that all our ingredients are sourced fairly.
We work directly with many producers in countries like Somalia and Rwanda, to source oils like coconut oil and moringa oil. We donate 20% of profit to charity per year; we pay our team a living wage at the absolute minimum. We try to operate a business as humanly possible.
How did you find the producers you work with?
I just did a lot of googling in the early stages. I didn’t have the money to travel and see them back then, so there was a lot of trust involved and a couple of phone calls. There was nothing overly formal about them or our working relationship at the time, but we managed to make the process a bit more formal now.
There are all sorts of requirements to make sure that they are fair and equitable nowadays. I’ve got a supply chain team now, but back then it was just googling, finding people talking to them and seeing how we got on.
What pushed you to start your business?
A couple of things. From a selfish point of view, I don’t like working for other people. I find rules for rule sake irritating, and I struggle to follow them so I would never make a good corporate employee. However, I’ve always believed that business is the key to creating long term sustainable change – if you wait for governments, you will be waiting forever.
Unfortunately, nonprofit organisations struggle because of the cash flow problems and the reliance on donations and grants. So I believe business is the key to change.
I’ve always been very passionate about the environment and equally passionate about science. So I wanted to combine my passions and create a business that had a purpose beyond making money.
I had done quite a bit of chemistry with my science degree, so it was easy enough to self teach myself a bit of cosmetic chemistry. I taught myself a lot in a previous company I have worked that was also a cosmetic company. I can tell that it’s an industry that is anything but beautiful. The supply chains are dirty and opaque and full of things like child labour, and oddly enough, and horrifically enough, child trafficking. So I wanted to see if I could make a difference.
Was it scary to jump straight from being a university student to being a business owner? Did you feel overwhelmed at the time?
I know this answer will surprise people, but not at all because I started really small. I did little steps at a time. People think that starting a business is an enormous leap, but it doesn’t have to be and probably unless you’ve got an extended plan and planned it down to the ground, you’ve got a lot of money and a big team, it shouldn’t be.
It only takes a decision: I’m going to start a business. So now, what’s my first step? I need a product.
Brianne West, founder of Ethique
I probably did things against conventional wisdom, and we still do that today, and it works out quite well for us. I’m not a big believer in following all the steps that you may read in a business book. If you are looking to start a business, take one step at a time.
My first step was making products that people liked. Because at the end of the day, if you don’t have something people like you don’t have a business.
Did you start making products for yourself or did you start making them with the idea that you were going to sell them?
I always knew that I was going to have a business. I wanted to experiment with solid products and start seeing what it was like to make them in the kitchen. But it was never just for myself; I always wanted it to have a commercial aspect.
What was the process of building your business like?
It didn’t go fast in the first two years. For the first year and a half, I was still in my kitchen, making products whilst finishing university. It got too much for me, so I hired a wonderful friend who became the first member of my team. About 18 months in, it had taken over her home and life, and it had taken over my house and life – it was pretty overwhelming.
I entered a university competition, a pitch competition, where you were given a mentor, Dragon’s Den style. I was given two mentors – maybe they thought I needed the most help! We didn’t win, but we are the only business still standing.
One of the mentors has since become my business partner and invested in the company as well. And with that, we were able to move into our first (tiny) factory. After that, things happen a little bit quicker. We did our first crowdfunding round, and raised $200,000, through 152 shareholders, we hired a couple of staff, and we started to get quite a lot of press.
That’s really when the company took off internationally and when we started hiring a bigger team, a COO that played a significant role in our international launch. We moved into a new factory, and from then on, it has been crazy growth.
How long did you take to take your brand out of New Zealand?
We started exploring international possibilities at the end of 2016, and the only reason we did was because of a Huffington Post’s article. That catapulted us onto the international stage to use, and all the interest came from offshore, coming dramatically from America – so I thought we would take advantage of that.
You usually don’t leave your country until you’re profitable in your home base. And I understand why they say that, but it’s not what we win with. Look at 2020 – this is a global pandemic, of course, but it has affected every country differently. If we had been reliant on one market only, we would be in a lot worse position than we are now. Going offshore was almost exploiting our risk as well, even though it involves capital outlay.
We officially signed a distribution agreement with Amazon, which is where we started in the USA. Since then, we’ve added probably ten countries a year almost – it has been a fast international expansion.
How did you find a solution in the short term to find the money to start the production and then satisfy the orders?
We didn’t really; we struggled for about 18 months. We were out of stock of a lot of things pretty consistently, it was pretty frustrating for customers, but they stuck by us whilst we built a proper manufacturing hub. Now we work with third-party manufacturers in New Zealand to help us.
This type of product was rare at the time, so everything had to be built from scratch, massive mistakes have been made, and then we had to figure out why they happened. It took a long time for us to figure that out, it wasn’t fun.
The money came from a subsequent crowdfunding round – we hit 352 shareholders at our greatest height, and we did a couple of private angel investor equity raises too.
There are different types of crowdfunding. I’ve talked to other company owners that have gone through the crowdfunding route, but never the shareholder crowdfunding. Can you explain why you chose it?
There’s a couple of reasons. I know quite a few people who’ve run project campaigns and regretted it because they haven’t made the money they thought they would. Some have even lost money.
More importantly, crowdfunding appealed to me because you can bring people on a journey with you and they become your number one supporters. When we did our first crowdfunding round, we had 152 shareholders telling everybody about us – you can’t buy that kind of marketing.
I like the social aspect, the fact that you can bring people on who maybe can’t usually afford to invest. And I guess a small part of me believes that if you are asking people to invest in your company, you need to give them something that’s a bit longer lasting than just a product. That’s just my opinion.
Many brands create solid beauty products now, but why do you think it takes longer for big corporations to make the leap to produce more sustainable products?
Well, there’s a couple of things at play there. One is, they cannot take the risks a smaller company can because they have an enormous cost associated with new product development. And number two is that it takes them two to four years to get a new product out.
For all we know, they’ve been working on this for years and years and years, especially as it’s something so different from what they usually used to manufacture. They wouldn’t have the context of the manufacturer, or they wouldn’t have their factories to do that.
I applaud them for giving it a go, and I hope that is the way of the future in terms of personal care and beauty.
Are you not too worried about big companies jumping on the bandwagon?
I’m not because we can’t do this on our own, we can’t clean the world of plastic bottles entirely on our own. We have a completely different product with a completely different story and a much stronger values and supply chain.
How many liquid shampoos are out there? If we have ten solid shampoos in the supermarket, it’s not a big deal, because each one is different. Competition is not a bad thing.
I don’t think the same kind of people that buy from you would buy from a massive corporation that is not sustainable anyway.
You’re exactly right. The people that will buy a bar from a massive brand are different from those who buy Ethique. And that’s exactly what we want because not everyone is going to buy Ethique.
How many prototypes did you have to make to get what you wanted from the first product?
Mintasy, which was back then called ‘damage control’ which is exactly the same formula as it was back then – it’s never changed. I wouldn’t know how many prototypes but there were many formulas, a lot of tweaking and a lot of testing on friends and family.
What did you learn while building your brand?
That’s a annoying sentence, but you learn something every day. I am a completely different person to how I was even three years ago, to be honest.
I guess one big thing would be that many business owners are frightened of being transparent and honest with the customers, and that’s the wrong way to do it. Consumers worldwide want transparency from the brands so even if you’re doing something that’s not perfect if you explain why you’re doing it and how you’re working towards a better solution, that will be much more appreciated than greenwashing.
I have also learned that the team makes a business. It doesn’t matter how fantastic the idea is, it’s completely irrelevant if you don’t have a good team around you. And it’s not just from an execution perspective. Having a good idea is the easy part of building a business. Building a business is incredibly tough and can be quite lonely, and you’re nothing without your team.
Do you ever look back and think, ‘Oh my God, why did I even start this, it’s so hard’?
I may have done in the first couple of years, but certainly not in a long time now. Yes, it’s challenging, but you become more resilient as you go on. For example, four years ago, something would have been catastrophic for me, and now maybe it’s just annoying. I’m not devastated about things happening like I would have been before.
What would you say is what keeps you going and makes you happy to go to work?
Coming into such a beautiful team atmosphere was always a big help. It’s lovely to go to work with what feels like a family every day. We’ve got a really lovely team culture. But the big thing is feeling like you’re doing something that has a purpose beyond making money, something that I know will outlive me. It’ll undoubtedly outlive my career within it. I know it’ll go on, people will take it into different areas of impact, and it will be a vehicle for change. And that’s pretty cool.
How do you see the future of your company?
I like to think that there will be a bar in every shower around the world. I do want to take Ethique to the level of a globally trusted brand. When you think about it, you think about transparent supply chains, fairness and doing the right thing. A brand that encourages other businesses and consumers to do more.
Do you have a product, a project or an achievement that you are most proud?
The company in general. We’ve saved almost ten million plastic bottles – I find that brilliant. When I started it back in 2012, I thought that, hopefully, we could save a million bottles by 2020. Well, we are almost at ten million plastic bottles saved. It has been wildly more successful than I ever imagined.
How do you choose what’s going to be the next thing you’re working on? How do you get new ideas?
I know lots of companies have big strategic plans a,nd I’m sure we will in time, but we don’t plan very much. New products development is not approached very strategically at all.
The ideas sometimes come from customers – they tell us what they would like us to make. Sometimes from random thoughts, I’ve had in the shower. Some of them come from the team. It’s not hard to find inspiration for things that need to be made more environmentally friendly.
So are you working on something specific now?
Lots! We’ve got about 72 new products in various stages.
What the product you use the most?
Pinkalicious, mostly because the smell is delicious.
Do you have any advice for a business owner or even just someone who’s thinking about starting a business and wants it to be sustainable? Anything you wish you knew when you started?
It’s important to have an eye on the future. Still, it’s more important to be dealing with what you have now and operating within your current constraints and not finding that frustrating because that’s part of growing a business and that should be looked at as almost an exciting thing.
What are the little steps you can take every day that you think are so irrelevant, but will build the foundation upon which your business will grow? Focus on what you’re doing now, on the little steps that will get you there.
Also, it’s important to say that ‘unicorn companies’ don’t exist. I assure you, every company would have put in a lot of hard work initially, and you wouldn’t have seen it. It’s very dangerous to just show a company’s success without really talking about what happened before and all the mistakes.
Talking about mistakes, is there a mistake you regret?
I’m quite an impulsive person, so I don’t like planning, sometimes I rush into decisions that we should have made a little more slowly and that cost us money. So definitely rushing into things too quickly and trusting people too fast.
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