Lush founder Mark Constantine on the recession and hypocrisy

Mark Constantine, the 56-year-old co-founder of Lush, the privately-owned cosmetics store, is trying to sound reassuring. Occasionally running a hand through the mane of white hair that gives him the air of a trendy academic, dressed in a pink corduroy jacket and blue jeans that, frankly, make him resemble something that you'd find on one of his shelves, he trots out a series of encouraging trading statistics.
“We are looking at £35million of sales in the US this year”; “Like-for-like sales in the UK are only down 4 per cent”; “The company has added 98 new stores in this financial year, since June”; “The company still has a long-term aim of expanding to 1,000 outlets”; “We anticipate increasing our profits by 10 per cent this year”; “Total sales will be around £240million this financial year, up from £194million last year”; “Things are very good in Japan, lovely in Russia, Europe's not too bad....”
But this barrage of positive news is punctuated occasionally with bleak remarks about how Lush is “on pause”; how the British retail scene is “a calamity”; how the US is “one of the trickiest markets in the world”; how “one British high street retail outlet in five will be empty by the end of the year”; and how he “wouldn't put money” on his company's long-term survival. There is a short pause after this last remark, as I digest it and ask if he really means what he says. “In the current climate, is anyone putting their money on anyone? No!” He laughs loudly, almost slipping off the sofa in the company's head office in Carnaby Street, Central London, in the process. “This is going to go down in the textbooks as the second depression! And no one should be smug enough to think that they're automatically going to survive.”
His happy staff - Lush is listed regularly in the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For - won't be encouraged by the comments. “What can you say, you know? We're in a boat, we're in a storm, we're all rowing like buggery. How much longer have we got to keep rowing? Probably 18 months. I think next Christmas is far more worrying at the moment, and the following March.” He leans back. “But what do you think?”
What do I think? Well, first, I think that Constantine sounds remarkably relaxed about it all. But then he has always had a notably philosophical, if not anarchic, approach to business. The Lush mission statement, after all, proclaims that “we believe in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again”. And Constantine's life has been marked by instances of wild success and resounding failure. Thrown out of home at 17 by his mother and stepfather, he lived for a while in the woods in Dorset before moving to London, where he became a hairdresser, started developing natural hair and skin products, became The Body Shop's biggest supplier, was eventually bought out by Anita Roddick for £6million, ploughed the cash into Cosmetics to Go, a mail-order company that went bust after two years, before finally making it big with Lush. As Constantine rather cheesily puts it: “I'm the epitome of Rudyard Kipling's If. I have met with triumph and disaster and treated those two impostors just the same.”
Second, I think I have absolutely no idea about Lush's prospects. I mean, in these straitened times you'd have to question whether people want to buy soaps that look like bird food, face cleansers that feel like coal and bath melt that will have you picking twigs and/or confetti from your plughole for months afterwards. Then there is the grating matter of the company's mission statement, which is plastered all over Lush's shop walls and makes you feel as if you're back at school, the relentlessly chirpy and youthful staff who make you feel jaded and old, and that smell, which is caused by the lack of packaging (supposedly good for the environment) and makes some people feel really quite sick. But, having said that, I wouldn't have rated Lush's prospects 14 years ago, and since then it has grown from a single store in Poole, Dorset, to more than 600 stores in 43 countries. So what do I know?
I evade the question by changing the subject, moving from the calamity that is the British economy to the calamity of climate change. Constantine, a keen birdwatcher, has long supported alternative causes: he doesn't drive a car; he cycles to work from his home near Poole to Lush's factory near by; he joined Friends of the Earth as a youth; he is so keen on alternative medicine that he didn't have his three children immunised (“I spoke to a homeopath who said you can always nurse children through tuberculosis,” he remarks, before correcting himself: “Actually, not tuberculosis, mumps.”) and from its inception Lush has taken a strong stance against animal testing and backed environmental causes. But Constantine's recent financial support of Plane Stupid, the anti-air travel group that in December staged a protest on the runway at Stansted, grounding several flights, has led to accusations of hypocrisy, given that he runs a global company and flies between shops, and given that Lush operates airport outlets.
It's a subject about which Constantine sounds less relaxed than trading numbers. “Look, I have flown to the US only twice in five years and taken one internal UK flight.” To where? “Leeds. God knows why I didn't take a train. And actually, as of this month none of our staff will be flying domestically in the UK mainland.” What about the airport shops? “I've got three airport shops. All my competitors have 50 airport shops.” That's not much of a defence. “Look... I am against whaling and yet I've got my most successful business in Japan, which is doing the whaling. Should I not have shops in Japan? You can't live in a perfect society. Who isn't hypocritical? Who out there leads a perfectly idealistic life?”
An answer to this question arrives in the form of a bunch of Hare Krishna devotees marching down Carnaby Street, their chanting and bell-tinkling suddenly audible through the office windows. The noise dissipates the slight tension and Constantine continues by saying that the sniping will not stop Lush from campaigning. He doesn't suggest that he'll be offering Plane Stupid further financial support, given that Ryanair is threatening to sue the group for £2.2million (“It is tempting to engage in fun and games with the man from Ryanair, although I think the threat is just sabre-rattling”), but at Easter he is launching an anti-aviation soap called Chocs Away (“The whole joke is that chocolate isn't terribly good for you in excess, and neither is flying”), and a pro-vegetarian campaign. “I don't think people realise how sausages can give you cancer,” he explains. “They worry about all sorts of little things in their cosmetics and other stuff, and don't worry about this basic stuff.”
So what form will this protest take? A bath melt that resembles a sausage? Or a foot cream that smells of pork? If you think this sounds facetious, by the way, you should bear in mind that last year Lush launched “Guantánamo Garden”, a “fizzing bath ballistic”, which, when dropped into the bath, produced a note urging customers to take action against the US prison by logging on to the website of Reprieve, the prisoners' human rights organisation.
There follows a slightly sheepish confession from Constantine that he is no longer a dedicated veggie: he eats fish. “We're not going to campaign against sausages. We're going to talk to the Vegetarian Society and talk about ideas.” Right. “And, you know, that Guantánamo Garden thing, yes, it may have been a bit crass. But for someone like you it's all right - if you feel strongly about something, you can write about it and influence people. For us, though, finding meaning in our jobs can be more tricky. My wife invented it and for her it was the highlight of last year. All the money went to Reprieve, and in fact my daughter is working for Reprieve at the moment. So how nice is that?”
Claire, Constantine's 18-year-old daughter, is, as it happens, the only member of the family who doesn't work for Lush. His wife Mo, whom he met at an all-night party when he was 17, designs cosmetics for the company, while Simon, 27, is head perfumer and Jack, 24, does online marketing. They are evidently a close family and Constantine informs me that he is “semi-reconciled” with the mother who threw him out of home when he was a teenager. “She lives up the road; I spent Christmas Day with her. But, you know, it doesn't change the facts.” That you were thrown out and forced to live in the woods? “She gets fed up with hearing that story - she told me off the other day, saying 'I think you were 21, dear'. But I was 17. And it was a bit of a big deal. But I suppose you could say, well, it made me who I am. I'm not a great grudge-holder.”
Despite the family closeness, Constantine, who is worth £50million according to the Sunday Times Rich List, rather admirably resists the idea of Lush being kept going for his family's financial benefit. He says that he is thankful he didn't sell the company, which is owned by seven shareholders who all work in it, despite approaches from the likes of LVMH; that he wouldn't consider listing because it would mean that it couldn't campaign so freely; and that he is examining the possibility of turning the chain into a John Lewis-style partnership in which Lush's staff would become partners. “We're looking at that, but the problem is that when you go into John Lewis, it's not a very dynamic operation. And you have to be dynamic.”
This remark is a rare example of Constantine speaking about Lush in business terms. It doesn't last. He needs to get away for a meeting and, with the Hare Krishnas making their way back down the street, he concludes by expressing his ambitions in purely ethical terms.
“We're in the middle of an economic bloody crisis, it's a mess, we knew it was coming, we all talked about it for bloody years but nobody did anything about it. Now we are heading into an environmental crisis, we shouldn't make the same mistake. I'd like to make a contribution.”