My experiences working in an ethical and environmental-friendly Cosmetics Company

When talking about fresh, natural, ethical and handmade, LUSH always pop into my mind. As I am one of the customers of LUSH, I’m so obsessed with the brand and with the product itself. In the summer of 2017, I applied for a part-time sales ambassador position in LUSH. I got accepted!! And I’ve been working there for a year now. I’m super happy working here as I can put my obsession and passion into this job. This job has provided me an opportunity to not just sell products but sharing my very own experiences and engaging with customers. The more I work for LUSH, the more I feel head over heels for this company.

LUSH is a cosmetics retailer company from the United Kingdom. Lush means fresh, green and verdant. Their products have so much variation that we as a Lush staff can tell customer that we have many products that can serve you from your head to toes. Lush products consists of shampoo, conditioner, creams, soaps, lotions, scrubs, face masks, cleanser, moisturizer, perfume and cosmetics. Apart from that Lush had invented the shampoo bar, massage bar, toothy tabs (toothpaste) which works like a typical products but don’t have packaging. The most popular product for Lush is bath bombs which make up of sodium bicarbonate and different types of essential oil. Each bath bomb have different shapes, smells and benefit.

Lush factories are called Kitchen which there’s Lush employees working there. All Lush products are handmade so having Lush kitchen help creating lots of jobs. Most of the ingredients like rose, lavender, grapefruit juice, vanilla beans, aloe Vera, tree three oil and everything that you can grow and cultivate, we buy it from local farmers with no intermediate merchants. Not only do we buy the ingredients from them, we also provide them more knowledge and help them building the communities. Lush products are 100% vegetarian and 85% of the products are vegan, With the mostly natural ingredients, it is always safe for humans, so there’s no need for animal-testing. Lush don’t do that and they are totally against that. As Lush have fresh ingredients and they don’t put chemical preservation, stores don’t sell products older than 4-5 months old and lifetime of the products on shelves is approximately 14 months depending on specific items.

Most of the products don't have packaging we called it naked product which can reduce tons of single use plastic or paper. But some of product need the solid packaging, we called it plastic pots. If customer collected 5 pots, they can exchange for the fresh face mask. Lush will recycled plastic pots so there will be no waste.

After lots of training, I entered the store floor. We work as a team and before every shift starts, it is Lush culture to have the brief before work so we can know our goal for today. They always find ways to make reaching goal more fun or challenging. Working in here never been boring for me. My responsibility as a sales ambassador in brief is to take care of the store, sell product (but not pushing), take care of customers and always engaging with customer no matter if they are going to buy or not. Lush teaches their employees to have the “Random Act of Kindness” which employees can give samples to customers and there’s no condition for doing that. You can giveaways the products if customer seemed to be interested but didn’t buy, you can give to a customer that you are engaging with and you like them, you can give it to customers to help them comparing or giving compliments items to the products they buy. The sample is just a circle pot with a diameter around 0.8 inches. In addition, this strategy is another way to promote new products too because Lush don’t advertise. Lush use the customer feedback and review instead.

After the shift done, every employee in that shift can provide feedback to each other no matter how long you work here. Feedback helps me a lot in improving myself and correcting my faults. There always one feedback that I always got is I have too much energy. Because in store floor, you need to match your energy with coworkers and customers. You need to adjust yourself so it will make you become more friendly and sometimes become less intimidating. With the same level of energy, two people can sync to each other better and the communication will be more flow and natural. This is things that Lush always emphasize to their customers.

One thing that I like about Lush is they give their employees and customers unlimited try. They believe that if their employees use the products they will know the features and effects of the products better so they can sell it more and more. Another thing I love about Lush is Lush always care for the environment. The campaign will be launched in every 6 months or every year, they will launch a newly limited products. The profit will go right straight to what they wanted to help. For example, the orangutans shampoo bar is palm-free which made from the extra virgin coconut oil mixed with universal soap base. Every purchase will go to Sumatran Orangutan Society. Lush created 14,600 Orangutan soaps with all proceeds minus VAT going to donations. The donation will help the organization to buy 50 hectares of Indonesia palm plantation and bring the forest back to life.

A little bit about the Author (of this blog)

I'm Guitar an exchange student at Western Washington University for 2019-2020 Academic Year. I'm major in Economics and Marketing. My home university is Thammasat University which ranked the First for Economics Studies in Thailand. I worked for Lush in Center of the Capital City which called Bangkok.