New year - New lines....

Much of last year contained product testing, costings and EU listings due to new cosmetics changes.  We had just tested and launched a range of products that went with the fruit soaps when we were forced to re-vamp our entire product range and focus on an entirely new product line.

To be honest I am not even sure we have had a chance to formally introduce them.  I must do that later next month.

In the interim period though we managed to experiment with a few new styles of soap-making and play around a bit with natural colours.  None of which excited Carla as much as this castile soap with alkanet and spirulina.  The colours where bright and in your face initially but just look at how it ended up.

Nothing short of stunning.

Now, for the skin conscious among you - what is in this bar and what can it be used for?

So for 5 months of last year we experimented and produced our main lines.  But the above little experiment opened our eyes to the wonderful potential of castile soap (soap made with just olive oil as opposed to a blend of oils).  We could make castile soaps for each of the lines, reduce our overheads, our costs and remain fairly traded.  It would help with postage and produce a hard bar (which when you blend the oils can make a moisturising bar - but one which is quite soft and doesn't last too long).

So, knowing that Castile soaps need to cure longer - we are already starting our batches for Christmas 2014 and in the interim are keeping our blended soaps which cure in a 6-8 week period - the debate for the minute is whether or not to use organic palm oil to keep the bars hard.

Its an ethical decision.  We had wanted to remain palm oil free but frankly, the soap suffers.  It can be a fabulous skin product without palm oil or lard - but without it the soaps don't last too long and go mushy far too quickly.

In the interim, we are opting for a sustainable and organic palm oil provided via Aromantic and Akoma both of which are business' we both trust and respect.  That said, despite our love of both companies the oil they sell is certified by the RSPO (Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil) which is not highly regarded by any environmental organisation that I'm aware of - you can find out more of the probems with it on this link http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests/palm-oil.  Whilst using these oils as a stop-gap we still anticipate being Palm free by the end of 2014.  One can but do our bit to save the wonderful Orangutan

Palm oil is in so many food and cosmetics products. Palm oil and its derivatives are used in a ubiquitous array of packaged foods, including ice cream, cookies, crackers, chocolate products, cereals, breakfast bars, cake mixes, doughnuts, potato chips, instant noodles, frozen sweets and meals, baby formula, margarine, and dry and canned soups. It can be labelled as anything from palm kernal oil to vegetable oil and is cheap and easily sourced. The difficulty is that rainforest are being devastated in order to make Palm Tree Farms and species, environment and people all suffer as a result. The Orangutan has become the face of this campaign through organisations such as Rainforest Action Network.  And, as we launched our products in 2013 we decided to not only go Palm Oil free but to ensure we used some of our income to protect rain forest from being exploited for more Palm Oil Farms and crucially, to protect the rights of the indigenous people who live in the rain forest - hence our support for both Cool Earth and Survival.  As Carla is native to Brazil who's ancestors were native to Brazil both the rain-forest and rights of the people are something we personally want to get involved with.

At best we can be palm free and use our profits to make a difference. At worst, if we really need to use palm oil then we can source it sustainably, ethically and organically/wild-crafted.

As a cosmetics business however - we think Palm oil is a wonderful product. Great for making a hard bar of soap which lasts. It just grates at our conscience however to claim to be an ethical company when we are aware of so much devastation and difficulty around this one ingredient.

Social Enterprise - Defined and ready to launch!

I'm so excited, I might just burst!

It is time!  We are as delirious as a bee in a nectar storm as we announce all the structural changes for us as ScENT in the coming weeks.

If you have been following the blog you will know we felt we were dealt a bit of a death blow a few months ago by the Consumer Safety Council - over a piece of legislation called the "food imitation policy".  It risked putting us as a company under the water long before it was deemed possible to fulfill our dream of becoming a social enterprise.

But, I'm pleased to say - it did the reverse.  It forced us into a dark corner where Carla and I talked and thought, and prayed about where to go and we figured that if we were going out - we would go out with a bang!

We looked at what we were doing and where we wanted to go and started to veer headstrong into the vision that we set ourselves all those months ago when setting out.  We decided that we didn't need to make massive profits before giving money away - we could just factor it into the costs of the soap.  We looked at our ingredients and made choices on ethics and quality rather than on cost and delivery.  And, importantly, we looked past the soaps that look like food (as wonderful as they are) into a range of cosmetics that could be made by people, like me (Garreth) who are a little less talented than Carla.  Products that could still be hand made but made in larger quantities.

I don't want to bore you with the detail - but there is a fair about of stuff we are passionate about and when it got knocked around a bit we were able to hone in on some things we think are important to us as pioneers. And it all boils down to ethics.  Its always been about transformation and justice.  We'd always wanted to focus on Organic and Fair Trade - but I think we may well have excelled ourselves.

Here are our 6 reasons to buy from ScENT

•  For every product purchased, we will donate 10% of our wholesale price to marginalised children in Nigeria through Stepping Stones (see below). 
• Every product sold will provide funds towards a weeks clean water for one person with Charity: Water.  We will keep you posted when we get to build our first well.
• 1 square metre of rainforest is protected for every bar of soap, bath salt, or candle sold by supporting CoolEarth.
• We will also make a donation to help fund micro-credit loans to other social entrepreneurs.
•  By purchasing organic/fairlytraded ingredients we are helping to improve the lives of the workers and communities who farm the raw materials.  We are proactive in abstaining from ingredients such as Palm Oil and hope to be Palm Oil free by the beginning of 2015.
• Lastly, we are still working towards is providing employment in disadvantaged areas of Northern Ireland and fully functioning as a social business.

Stepping Stones Nigeria:

We are big fans of Stepping Stones the charity – which is why we are choosing to give a percentage of each bar of soap we sell.  This charity focuses on children of the Niger Delta and works in the following four areas: 

•       Children’s Rights  
•         Child Witches 
•        Education  
•        Human Trafficking 

Interestingly, Nigeria has a long history with soap making.  When the slave trading ended in the 19^th Century the traders turned their attention to Palm Oil. West Africa used to be the centre of the palm oil industry but in the 1870s, British administrators took the plant to Malaysia. Now Malaysia is the world's leading palm oil exporter, based on huge plantations which are stripping us of one of the most valuable rain-forests in the world (but that's another story!).  Nigeria’s agricultural income has withered from almost 100% of GDP to 18%.  Perhaps this is just our way of giving something back.

Clean Water Program

Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.  Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses.

90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old.  The WHO reports that over 3.6% of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene. Source: Charity Water

It seems and issue that a soap company should be involved in.  Its also an equality issue, as is often the case, women and children who suffer most.  

But what can we do?  Well, we considered giving a bar for every bar as a strap-line of the business.  This would have been a good marketing tool but would have been yet another totally useless charitable gesture.  People don’t need soap.  Many of them have it.  They do not however, have access to clean water or the knowledge about the wonderful cleaning power that a bit of soap and clean water can have against some potentially life threatening diseases.  

So, that is where we step in. For every bar of soap, bath product, or candle purchased, we will donate 5p to Charity:Water.  That 5p, we calculate, gives one person at least a weeks supply of clean water. It may take us a while to build our well for 300 people but step by step we hope to raise enough to build our first well.

Sustainable, Organic & Fairly traded:

Each bar of soap is natural, biodegradable, and contains ingredients ethically harvested from sustainable resources.  Where there is an option we buy Fair-Trade as our first option, organic as second and natural/wild as third.  We have created what we consider to be the ethically conscious soap on the market today – preferring to avoid becoming a single issue product (say fair trade, organic or palm oil) and cover as many possible areas of interest and passion as we could.   

Our products are not currently certified by any particular body.  (It’s a money thing – it simply costs too much to get registered as Fair Trade by the FairTrade foundation , Organic by the Soil Association, and  The Social Enterprise mark.  In fact its the same story for most of our suppliers too!

However to reach these criteria one must prove the following:

Fair Trade Certification: Products must contain a minimum fairly traded ingredient set requirement of 2% for a wash off and 5% for a leave on products.

• Our soaps, on average, contain 25-60% Fair trade ingredients the lower percentage is because we also buy local organic ingredients, 
• Our body butters – 50 to 90% fair trade ingredients, 
• Our lip balms - 50%, 
• Body oils 30% 
• Hand salve – 60%. When others do the bare minimum, we strive instead for the maximum. We also actively pursue opportunities to work with suppliers and producers directly to ensure we can increase our percentages.

Organic Certification: Under the COSMOS standards there are two levels of certification: COSMOS organic and COSMOS natural. Products certified to COSMOS organic must have a minimum of 20% organic ingredients or 10% (hardly breath-taking!) organic ingredients in the case of rinse-off products.

• We can safely say that we can easily meet this requirement on all our products (one exception being our bath salts as salts are not minerals or plants.)  In fact almost every single mineral or plant that we use is certified organic by the Soil Association.

Cruelty free

We love animals and never test our soap on them.

Palm oil

There are many negative environmental issues that are derived from the production of Palm oil, even when organic.  86% of palm oil is produced in Southeast Asia. High demand for palm oil has lead to rapid clearing of tropical rainforests. The United Nations Environmental Programme predicts that by 2022 the palm oil industry could wipe out 98% of Indonesia's remaining forests.  Many orangutans and other wildlife are killed in the process, so that this one vegetable oil can be used in many of our everyday foods and products. Palm oil plantations are also directly linked to a decline in biodiversity, soil degradation, carbon emissions from burning forests, and a disregard for local communities and land rights. To find out more, please read this report from Friends of Earth or this link:  "Say no to palm oil"

While we DO NOT use ingredients, specifically palm oil, derived from cleared rainforest, we recognize that many other soap companies do.   As such, we are doing our part to stop the destruction of rain-forests by protecting just over 1sq metre of rainforest with each and every purchase.  We do however use some Palm oil in our cold process soaps sourced from two ethically renowned suppliers.  Even this we hope to abstain from by the beginning of 2015.  The co-operatives we buy from are Co-operatives and we try to source from Ghana or Nigeria as opposed to Indonesia where the Orangatangs tend to live and suffer from forest clearing.

Social enterprise

The foundation needed for sustainable economic growth, specifically in the developing world, are thriving small businesses'.  Scent is therefore helping to secure microcredit loans for local businesses to get up on their feet, or get the jump start they need. Offering a microcredit loan to a small business empowers the individual, which in turn, strengthens a community. For every product sold we will make a donation to a fund which will be set up to support other social entrepreneurs.  It may take a little bit of time to build but we have got to start somewhere.

Packaging

Sustainability means more than just providing eco-friendly soap.  We have had to think seriously about our packaging.  Having looked at carbon-offsetting we decided to proceed with our donations to Cool Earth in protecting the rainforest.  We then took the following decisions about our packaging.

Reusable, recyclable and sustainable.


To support local business we haven't been able to use recycled paper for our retailed soaps.  We have however ensured it is sustainable and recyclable.  The craft paper we use to protect the soap is fairly traded Nepalese Lokta paper.  The PET bottles are recyclable but hopefully, and importantly, people will much rather clean them out and reuse them.  That's why we have gone for the nicest looking cosmetics jars we could find anywhere.  We are also keen to look at sustainable & biodegradable innovative cosmetics packaging in the future as we grow.

So, What do you think of all that then?  No wonder we got excited.  Our desire and journey of wanting to see transformation through soap may well just be about to begin!

Ethical Make-up, cosmetics and a desire to fight Human Trafficking.

But before I talk about us, let me just take a moment to mention Radiant Cosmetics;


Radiant Cosmetics, and Nicole Marrett in particular; we salute you! In fact, we want to be like you! Thank you for honing in on exactly the type of business we want to become.




Here is one company I am particularly inspired by. I like it so much I may even be talked into wearing a bit of mascara and lip-gloss myself!

Their mission is simple, it reads:

"Our mission is to help garner awareness for human trafficking by raising funds through cosmetics, to provide resources for those on the forefront of change, as well as victims of trafficking."

Based in America, Radiant Cosmetics has begun to make a name for itself in the fashion industry for its high quality make-up and desire to help change the world by selling one lipstick at a time.




Nicole comments, "The cosmetics industry generates $170 billion annually. Women dominate this industry and of the over 2 million human beings trafficked each year, 80% are women and girls. My dream is to awaken a generation of women to not sit back and allow this injustice to happen to our fellow sisters."

And, in the process, she has awoken a few men too!

Its simple, its a quality product, and its making a difference to trafficking in the US. It is also something we, as ScENT would like to bring here some time in the future but aside from that, Nicole's story has been a little inspiration at a time when it was much needed, as ScENT walks through the difficulties of the last few months with silly EU nonsense. Nicole stuck to her vision, her expertise and has successfully been able to manage creating a change within a fickle and difficult cosmetics industry.

Radiant, like us, don’t believe non-profits are the only ones who should be working toward change, but firmly believe "for profit businesses" can and should be a part of transforming this world for the better. The driving force behind their products is a heart for justice and they want their customers to get on board with them.




So, to ScENT then, what model of social business are we going to use? This has perhaps always been our stumbling block. How do we do the social bit? Initially, we felt we needed to be profitable before being charitable. Our heart on this however has been changed of late - we feel we need to draw a line in the sand and just start being what we want to be and in the process recruit enough believers to buy from us so that we can be both profitable and charitable at the same time.

We have therefore taken the decision to strive to donate as much as possible to some children in Nigeria. Radiant is looking at Trafficking (something we have a heart for - and hope to support by stocking their products), we want to look at the idea of "The Fatherless" and to that end have chosen a little known charity called "Stepping Stones" (more about them in a later post).

Just like Radiant we have decided to donate a minimum of 20% of profits from each purchase. This means products bought from us will have 20% of the RRP profit margin and wholesale orders will have 20% of the wholesale profit margin. As our company grows, we promise to increase our efforts physically, financially and spiritually to continue.

And...

We are going a few steps further. We are also committed to ensuring that we are ethical from source right through to division of profits. We will only buy organic products where available because we believe the chemicals used are bad for the growers and local people - never mind your skin! We will buy fairly traded products were available and are actively sourcing new ethically sourced ingredients.

In Addition....

We are excited about committing to social enterprise helping locally. To that end, as we grow, we hope to offer apprenticeships, offer community group workshops, employment in deprived areas and become a local agent of social change. In fact we are looking at options in this area at this very minute.