12 eco-focused beauty and wellness brands on their current sustainability challenges

Like the science that powers it, being “sustainable” is a moving goalpost that requires constant attention and more resources, compared to brands that don’t prioritize environmental impact. This often includes investing in more expensive packaging, constantly analyzing the supply chain and finding the right messaging to market these endeavors to consumers. But beneath the surface, many brands are struggling with the same issues in pursuit of their differing sustainability goals. 

As part of Glossy’s Earth Day coverage, we surveyed 12 leading eco-focused beauty and wellness brands to learn about their current sustainability struggles. They included longtime leaders like Tata Harper Skincare and Rahua, as well as buzzy new brands like Ogee, Attitude Oceanly and Ethique. 

What we learned is that many brand leaders wish industry insiders were more forthcoming with their current hurdles. “We’re all working toward the same Earth deadlines that we cannot afford to miss. … [We need] more pre-competitive collaboration,” said Connie Norton, sustainability specialist at Lush, which operates 886 global stores and sells 47% of its products without packaging of any kind.

“All of [our sustainability endeavors] have been hard,” said Lindsay Dahl, chief impact officer at Ritual, which sells independently-tested supplements with 100% ingredient transparency sold DTC and in Target stores. “There is no part of doing what’s right that is easy.” 

Still, brands continue to target innovation, in the name of the environment. “There is so much to work on, it can get overwhelming,” said Jamie Wiecks, co-founder of Community Goods, a new DTC line of plastic-free bathroom essentials including toothpaste, deodorant and shampoo.

For the brands that get it right, it can pay dividends over time with increased loyalty from like-minded consumers: Forty-two percent of U.S. consumers say they consider the planet when making a purchase, and 51% say they do a “significant amount of research” on the ingredients in their products, said Anna Keller, beauty and personal care global senior analyst at market research company Mintel. 

Below, Glossy has rounded up the findings of our brand survey into the categories troubling the industry most. 

Pumps and packaging

Packaging is, by far, the biggest hurdle facing eco-focused brands today. 

“I’m able to beat all of my [environmental] goals [for packaging today], except for the actuators [because] pumps and dispensing units are really hard to recycle — that’s basically where the frontier is,” skin-care founder Tata Harper told Glossy. She said she’s seen some new packaging innovations, like airless pumps without coils, but noted that the materials used, like plastic, are often undesirable to her consumers. “This is still a work in progress,” she said. 

Harper launched her eponymous line of plant-based skin-care products in 2010 from her farm in Vermont, where she grows and processes some ingredients and packages her products into glass bottles. The brand was acquired by Korean conglomerate Amorepacific in 2022 and currently sells DTC and in Sephora, Bluemercury and Neiman Marcus.

Mini sizes are also challenging to create since glass, which Harper’s customers prefer, can be taboo for travel. Harper currently uses bioplastics made from corn or sugar cane for the brand’s minis, but is currently looking for industry innovation to present a better solution. 

“Sustainability is a journey; you’re never 100% sustainable,” said Irene Forte, founder of an eponymous line of skin care that sources ingredients from traceable farms in Italy. “Our pumps, overcaps and lids are made of regular PET [plastic] because we still haven’t been able to find a sustainable solution for these that works and doesn’t degrade.” Forte said she’s also been unable to find a good solution for sampling sachets, which are single-use and rarely recyclable. 

Minimum ordering quantity requirements (MOQs) on more sustainable packaging materials are also a hurdle, as they’re often priced much higher than virgin plastic and require more testing, brands tell Glossy. “Compatibility tests on packaging are very costly and can take up to three months,” Forte said. “And there is still a high chance of failure with sustainable materials.”

Abbott Stark, co-founder and chief product officer of Ogee, a line of USDA Organic color cosmetics and skin care, agreed, calling packaging the brand’s biggest hurdle. “There are a lot of products that we’ve been unable to launch because the only way to launch them would be in fully plastic packaging,” Stark told Glossy. “And so we just haven’t done it.”

Even brands that launched with an eco ethos years ago still spend a significant amount of time and resources looking for packaging that consumers will appreciate. Ritual supplements, as well as Rahua, a 16-year-old line of natural ingredients-focused hair care that supports the Amazon Rainforest, told Glossy that finding materials that are compatible with their formulas is a near-constant challenge. One bioplastic or refillable package may work great for one product and then fail for another, making a cohesive brand lineup and quick-to-market production impossible. 

For some brands, however, it’s the planning and execution of transitioning materials that have proven costly, not the actual materials. In 2021, Hum Nutrition, a line of independently-tested supplements sold DTC and in Sephora and Nordstrom, transitioned its entire packaging supply from virgin plastic to recycled plastic. Walter Faulstroh, CEO and co-founder, told Glossy that the cost was only a few cents per bottle, but the transition required an outside vendor. “There are a lot of details one has to get right,” he said, adding that the company hired engineering company Better Future Factory and Bantam Materials to tag-team the process. 

Educating consumers 

“Unfortunately, whenever we talk about sustainability our engagement rates drop significantly on our social media channels,” said Hum Nutrition’s Faulstroh. For most brands Glossy surveyed, speaking to consumers about a brand’s environmental policies — especially in only a few seconds on social media — can feel like a catch-22. 

According to Mintel’s Keller, “Seventy-seven percent [of consumers] think brands and companies have the responsibility to be more environmentally friendly.” But at the same time, “two-thirds of consumers are unsure about the genuineness of sustainability claims [from brands].”

To be successful and stand out, “brands need to be clear about their environmental initiatives and show how they are actively reducing their impact on the health of the natural world,” Mintel’s Keller said. 

Ogee’s Stark told Glossy that the brand has focused much of its marketing efforts this year on finding new ways to educate consumers on social media. That’s included enlisting influencers to share information on Ogee color cosmetics during “get ready with me” videos, as well as posting educational videos featuring Ogee staffers speaking about ingredients. 

“People see five different brands [on social] with the same clean marketing and think, ‘Oh, those are all the same’,” Ogee’s Stark said. “We just did a series of videos on Meta all about ‘us and them,’ where we didn’t get specific about brands, but we did call out ingredients [used by other ‘clean’ brands that we’d never use].”

Differentiating itself while staying positive is Ogee’s biggest challenge, Stark said, but efforts are working. He told Glossy that, since the beginning of the year, Ogee gained 50,000 followers on Instagram to reach 257,000. The brand tripled its sales in 2023. 

To break through the noise, many brands told Glossy they rely on third-party certifications, which Mintel’s Keller said “gives proof to claims and can help justify a higher price point.” 

The certifications available are varied and vast. Many brands executives we spoke to said they’ve focused on getting or maintaining EcoCert, 1% For The Planet, NSF Organic, Vegan OK, USDA Organic, Clean Label Project, Palm Oil-free Certification Accreditation Programme (POFCAP) and B Corp certification. 

Supply chain transparency 

A product’s supply chain stretches from ingredient sourcing to end-of-life for the packaging, leaving brands with mounting hurdles as consumers become increasingly more aware of the environmental nuances of supply chains. 

“Raw material lead times and component lead times seem to keep growing in length, which has made it challenging to properly gauge our supply chain,” said Allison McNamara, founder and CEO of Mara Beauty, which makes skin-care products made of ocean-derived ingredients like algae and plankton and is part of Sephora’s clean skin-care offering. Along with high MOQs on exotic ingredients, planning around ingredient freshness is a constant struggle, she told Glossy. “We have run into this several times where we love an ingredient from a specific supplier, but then have to find a swap with a lower MOQ,” she said. 

The environmental impact of global shipping can be undesirable for brands that are cognizant of their overall carbon footprint, so ingredient sourcing and the location of production are also top concerns. 

Among the challenges is buying ethically sourced raw ingredients, like mica mined from the ground, as well as oils and butters made from plants. “Shipping ingredients [from across the world] can have sustainability trade-offs,” said Clare Premo Perez, vp of strategy and marketing at Ethique, a line of shampoo bars, solid skin care and other water-free products packaged in cardboard and sold DTC. “We’re trying to balance the need for best-in-class quality ingredients with the supply chain footprint.”

“The only way around [some of our biggest roadblocks] would be to take all our production in-house, which would require serious funding and would come with its own challenges,” said Community Goods co-founder Wiecks. It’s something many brands strive toward and something that older companies like Tata Harper Skincare — which develops, formulates and fills products at the company’s HQ — credits as one of their biggest eco accomplishments. 

Regulatory compliance  

Finally, as regulation continues to shift globally, companies Glossy spoke to expresses the burden of reporting. 

“As a privately owned business, we are becoming increasingly subject to reporting requirements that we haven’t been in the past,” said Lush’s Norton. Record keeping is demanding for Lush, which is based in the U.K. yet sells into several global markets. “This often means understanding nuances and overlaps between regulations in [different markets]. Collecting and analyzing the stipulated data and reporting on it takes resources that we may otherwise dedicate to [social and product] programming.”

Because many of these sustainability-focused endeavors are at their early stages, predominantly led by first adopters, brands still have time to endeavor towards more earth-focused practices. U.S. consumers believe the environmental impact of other industries is far more detrimental than that of beauty and personal care, said Mintel’s Keller. That includes transportation, household care, and food and beverage packaging. “Only 11% of respondents said that the beauty and personal care industry has the biggest impact on the environment.”

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