Lush looks to the cloud to maintain its sustainability record

Lush is a successful UK handmade cosmetics company headquartered in Poole. Known for its campaigning efforts on environmental issues and reducing its environmental impact in product design, manufacturing and selling, it is also against animal testing and the use of animal fats in its products. It has built its privately owned business of 102 UK stores and an online shopping website over 17 years maintaining this strong ethical stance.

Running a truly ethical business has always been a core mission for Lush. It is known for its stance or animals and the use of preservatives, as well as its efforts to educe the environmental impact of its manufacturing and packaging processes.

For Lush, these efforts start with the sourcing of ethical suppliers of raw materials that do not use animal products or those tested on animals. Palm oil is another product the company is looking to remove from its manufacturing process completely while the use of cocoa butter is currently under review, says Ruth Andrade, Lush environmental officer.

“Then there are the products, which go on up the supply chain, and all the waste produced and energy consumed in our factories and stores,” she says. “As both a manufacturer and retailer we are privileged to be allowed to try new things, like starting our own sustainable oil project or promoting local organic agriculture.”

All of these operations and initiatives need to be monitored somehow, which is why the company recently started to use CloudApps software. “We measure 100 indicators across over 100 stores,” Andrade explains. “We were getting into having thousands of spreadsheets, but this was highly manual and painful process. We can now collate all of this data through CloudApps as a single source.”

The CloudApps’ Sustainability Suite captures and discloses the company’s ‘environmental footprint,’ which includes measurements on water and energy use, travel, waste generation and packaging across all of Lush’s 102 stores, eight main offices and eight factory sites in the UK.

The company only signed up for the software as a service a few weeks ago, so have yet to fully harness all of its benefits. But Andrade says the very fact that CloudApps will centralise all of the data Lush generates in relation to sustainability will help it not only optimise the efficiency of its manufacturing, supply chain and retail operations, but also aid in the day-to-day running of the business.

“Having a central place to collect data, reports and analysis that compares one indicator to another means we can track indicators like our store energy use per square metre,” she says. “It also means our store dashboards contain the name of the manager, the annual rent, utility bill and everything else I need to know about each shop.”