Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic of BYBI: Five Strategies Our Company Is Using To Tackle Climate Change & Become More Sustainable
Lead by example and create a sustainable lifestyle at home. I.e. growing food if possible, running the house on renewable energy, mending clothes and buying vintage clothes and furniture.
As part of my series about how companies are becoming more sustainable, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elsie Rutterford & Dominika Minarovic.
In 2015, these two London-based entrepreneurs bonded over a shared passion for clean beauty and lifestyle and launched the trend-setting blog, podcast, book, and Instagram account, Clean Beauty Insiders. They featured D.I.Y. recipes and touted an industry-leading natural perspective on skincare. Building on this partnership, they co-founded BYBI in 2017. In order to maintain the integrity of their Skin Positive, Pro-Planet beauty, the duo formulate every product in-house, supervising their own chemist and lab — using only high-quality, natural and vegan ingredients in innovative formulations to address overall skin health. BYBI’s mission is to make sustainable skincare easy and accessible for everyone. Elsie and Dominika believe that great skincare should not come at the cost of the planet and are not willing to compromise on either product performance or sustainability. At BYBI, sustainability is a need to have, not a nice to have and their goal is to become the world’s first carbon negative skincare brand.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
We both met in digital advertising and were obsessed with clean beauty and ingredients, so we started taking a closer look at our skincare labels. Instead of finding a high percentage of natural actives, we discovered a lot of water and ‘filler’ ingredients. Inspired by the lack of high-performance ingredients that weren’t in our favourite products and wanting to take control of what we were putting onto their skin, we created Clean Beauty Insiders (formerly known as Clean Beauty Co) in 2015, a DIY beauty blog.
Clean Beauty Insiders quickly became the UK’s largest natural beauty platform, with a growing Instagram profile to match. We created and shared DIY beauty recipes, ran workshops and hosted events whilst still working full time. To further our education in natural beauty and validate our recipes, we trained as skincare formulators, achieving a Diploma in Natural Skincare Formulation from Formula Botanica. In early 2017, we wrote Clean Beauty, a book published by Penguin containing over 100 natural beauty recipes. CBI is now a podcast and blog dedicated to business, beauty and sustainability.
Whilst whipping up a face cream in your kitchen is great for your skin, it’s not entirely convenient for a millennial beauty consumer. We were looking for natural, vegan and cruelty free skincare that delivered great skin, but that was branded, marketed and sold in places that spoke to us as mainstream consumers. We also wanted to support a climate conscious brand underpinned by industry leading sustainable ethics, a brand that looked as good as it made you and your skin feel, which is how BYBI was born.
What is the mission of your company? What problems are you aiming to solve?
Our mission is to bring great, sustainable skincare to the masses, via an accessible price point and formulations for all skin types.
Can you tell our readers about the initiatives that you or your company are taking to address climate change or sustainability? Can you give an example for each?
Our mission is to become the world’s first carbon negative beauty brand, via actual carbon reduction throughout our entire supply chain. We’re in the midst of a climate crisis, caused mainly by increased greenhouse gas emissions. The beauty industry and its infrastructure is typically carbon intensive. We hope to challenge the norm, creating a low-carbon supply chain for other brands to replicate and follow, positively impacting the planet. To help us do this, we created the Susty Score, an owned auditing system to help us determine the sustainability of the ingredients and materials we use.
INGREDIENTS
Harvesting Process:
The Susty Score looks to determine how carbon sensitive a supplier’s harvesting model is, specifically looking for things including low energy-intensive machinery and good quality.
Source Location and Transportation:
Ingredients are graded on their source location and mode of transport to point of production (the UK). We choose close to home source locations to reduce travel and, when this isn’t possible, ensure that the mode of transport is low carbon i.e. electric vehicle or boat.
Upcycled From Another Supply Chain:
We love upcycled ingredients at BYBI and use upcycled ingredients in over 50% of the range, including our Strawberry Booster. Our supplier works with juice manufacturers to collect seeds removed from the strawberries before they are juiced. As there’s no place for them in the juice, the seeds would normally be discarded into landfill, but when pressed they produce high quality oil that’s an amazing skincare ingredient. Our supplier thoroughly sterilizes the seeds and they are then cold pressed to extract oil.
Upcycling negates the need for a secondary supply chain to grow the fruit inorder to access the seeds (at which point the pulp would be discarded), meaning there’s no doubling up and therefore dramatically reduced energy consumption. Food waste is accountable for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions so stopping waste at any point in the supply chain has a hugely positive impact.
MANUFACTURING
All BYBI products are manufactured in the UK which gives us the visibility we need to truly understand the carbon footprint of this part of our supply chain.
We have two forms of manufacturing at BYBI:
In-House:
We formulate everything in-house at BYBI, meaning we have our own lab based in London which has the facility to produce small runs of products. The lab is powered entirely by green energy and our manufacturing machinery is manual, meaning it doesn’t require any energy at all.
Third party:
For larger runs we turn to our trusted manufacturing partners who are experts in their field and have the capabilities to safely produce some of our more complex products. The Susty Score grades these partners on their carbon output.
ENERGY — Our partners run large factories that produce products for many brands and use high levels of energy in order to do so. At the start of 2020, we declared that we would no longer work with any partners who didn’t run on renewable energy, and as such all have switched to a clean energy source.
WASTE MANAGEMENT — We must see proof of all partner’s waste management policies to ensure they are sending minimal amounts to landfill.
TRANSPORT — We ensure that once our products have been produced, they are delivered to their final destination in electric vehicles.
Packaging:
The part of our products that you can touch and feel, we scrutinize every material used to package BYBI products. The Susty Score audits the materials we use based on the carbon footprint associated with the production of that material. It also takes into account the material’s afterlife (less to landfill = less greenhouse gas emissions).
SUGARCANE POLYETHYLENE — Another upcycled material, this time from the sugar industry! A durable bioplastic that we use for all of our tubes. The sugarcane plant is crushed for its high concentrate sugar juice that’s used for human consumption, at which point it is usually discarded, despite the fact that it still has subsequent crushings of weaker sugar that can’t be used for consumption. It is this substance that is used to produce ethanol and in turn, a fossil-fuel free plastic. Due tosugarcane’s ability to capture high levels of Co2, the production of the sugarcane polyethylene is carbon neutral. This material is recyclable.
GLASS — Glass has pros and cons; it’s infinitely recyclable and not a fossil fuel based material (pro), but when created as a virgin material, it’s actually very energy intensive and it’s made from sand which is not a renewable source (con). Based on our audit of these factors, we choose to work with glass where sugarcane isn’t possible and are switching to recycled glass, where the carbon footprint is significantly reduced. We print directly onto glass using biodegradable plant-based inks that don’t interfere with the recycling process. All of our glass packaging can be recycled in our ReBYBI scheme.
GRASSPAPER — If you order from bybi.com, your products will arrive in a grasspaper box. Grasspaper is paper made from the pulp of grass rather than the conventional wood. It uses up to 80% less energy to produce than wood pulp paper, saving approximately 4.8 tonnes of carbon per tonne produced. It also has huge water saving benefits; using only a litre forever tonne produced vs 6,000 litres of wood pulp. This material is recycled.
How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?
It all starts with consumer demand, which has only increased during the pandemic. People have become more considered in their purchases, careful about where they are spending their money and want to invest in brands they truly believe in, to make themselves feel good too.
As consumer demand grows for sustainable businesses, so does the opportunity to tell your story, increase your market share and therefore become more profitable. In January of this year, BYBI launched into Target in the US, online and in-store.
The youth led climate strikes of September 2019 showed an impressive degree of activism and initiative by young people on behalf of climate change. This was great, and there is still plenty that needs to be done. In your opinion what are 5 things parents should do to inspire the next generation to become engaged in sustainability and the environmental movement? Please give a story or an example for each.
- Actively engage them in the conversation, telling them the facts and why it’s important to take action.
- Take them to marches and protests, to meet like minded people and be inspired by the wider movement.
- Follow young activists on social media to engage with particular topics within sustainability that are most relevant for them. Activists such as Mikaela Loach, Vanessa Nakate & Greta Thunberg all have informative social profiles.
- Lead by example and create a sustainable lifestyle at home. I.e. growing food if possible, running the house on renewable energy, mending clothes and buying vintage clothes and furniture.
- Teach them how to petition for change, i.e. conversing with their local government. @writetoyourmp is a great place to start.
What are your “3 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Driving sustainable change within the beauty industry is much harder than you’d expect, but it’s all worth it.
- Surround yourself with experts from early on and don’t be afraid to delegate.
- You will have a bigger positive impact within environmentalism if you focus on doing one thing well, as opposed to trying to achieve great things across multiple areas. Focus really is key.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Both of us have incredibly supportive husbands, who have been our number one brand fans from the off. From cheering us on at every market in the early days, through to being guinea pigs for formulation samples and not having an issue with sharing their wife with another person (each other!).
You are a person of great influence and doing some great things for the world! If you could inspire a movement that would bring the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If we could inspire companies to create low-carbon supply chains across all industries that would be incredible. In addition to this, we’d love to inspire someone to create a universal carbon analysis tool that both businesses and individuals can use for free.
Do you have a favorite life lesson quote? Can you tell us how that was relevant to you in your own life?
Not a quote — but we truly believe not to wait for perfection! Take the plunge and go for it.
What is the best way for people to follow you on social media?
You can follow us @bybifounders!
This was so inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic of BYBI: Five Strategies Our Company Is Using To Tackle… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.