Keeping product Quality…

This principle is at the heart of doing good business. A balancing act to create value for customers, value for the communities our shops and factories are part of, and value for our suppliers, the earth and animals, to say the least. The way our current economy works is by externalising costs to those stakeholders, rather than creating value. However, in order to uphold our core values, a lot of those costs need to be internalised. Here’s a few examples of how: 

• We pay more for recycled packaging or renewable electricity; 
• We put our manufacturing where our largest consuming markets are, where labour rights and costs are higher; 
• We use high quality materials and things like fair trade and organic cocoa butter which also cost more; 
• We donate hundreds of thousands of products and a big chunk of money to grassroots organisations every year; 
• We even gave up being on social media, which can seem like a very uncommercial decision to make (read more in our Digital Ethics principle). 

This is what we mean when we say our products are good values for money, they aren’t the cheapest on the market and they aren’t filled with empty, meaningless ingredients. They are impactful to both our customers and our circle of influence.

Balancing profit, while internalising so many of these costs, can be quite tricky. In the last two financial years, while still recovering from COVID, Lush reported a loss — we got out of balance. In these two years and during the pandemic, we have had to make some tough decisions. We’ve had to close two manufacturing sites in Dusseldorf, Germany and Vancouver, Canada, become leaner and change the way we give. But we continued to campaign, create and sell giving products and back our core values with actions, all with a sharp focus on our customers. 

We continued our commitment, where we could during the limitations of a pandemic, to reinventing the high street with retail magic and experiences such as parties, spas, hairlabs and launching new products, surfing trends and collaborating with cultural icons. We continued our commitment to creating safe spaces on the high street where people can be themselves and find respite from an increasingly challenging world.

As this is a balance, it is a hard principle to measure. However, we have a few ways to show how we have prioritised product quality, core values, customer satisfaction and making a profit:

We are proud of our products and quality is checked every step of the way during manufacturing. Recently, we have given more power to our stores to curate what stock they want to sell, based on local needs. You can read more about our manufacturing under the Fresh & Handmade principle.

In FY2024 we had a group turnover of £690 million. We raised and set aside £6.6 million for various funds and donated £5.7 million to charities and other good causes. You can read more about our giving under the Campaigning Principle.

In FY2024, we had 1713 mystery shop visits across all our global stores and scored an average of 87% during these visits. Of all the ratings we receive on Customer Care tickets, 82% of them are good ratings and praise for our stores has increased by 6.67%.

We opened 9 new stores in an effort to be available to our customers in as many places as possible.