How I Built This with Guy Raz - Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Working at a high-end beauty salon in the south of England in the early 1970's, Mark Constantine concocted natural shampoos and conditioners in a tiny room above his kitchen, and soon met another young entrepreneur who was eager to buy his products: Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. Their partnership flourished for a while, then soured; so Mark went on to start a mail-order cosmetics business with his wife and several others. After that business went bust and Mark was nearly broke, he decided to take one more leap to launch Lush, a cosmetics shop whose distinctive soaps and bath bombs developed a passionate following. Today, Lush has about 900 stores around the world and is adapting to pressures of a pandemic economy.Order the How I Built This book at:https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I need you to be there for me as well. And you can do that by supporting what I do and buying my book, how I built this. It is just out now and available everywhere. And it doesn't cost more than a few cups of coffee. And it's filled with wisdom and stories and ideas that will have you feeling inspired and fired up to take on the world. So please, if you love this show and what we do for you, do us one back and pick up how I built this wherever books are sold. You were a millionaire and you had lost all of it and you were also in debt and now you're 42.

You've got three kids. My eldest son took me to one side at seven and suggested, well, Dad, do you not think you should get a proper job? And what did you think? I said, well, I think I've got a skill set that's such that if I can market it, I can make a load of money again. And he sort of nodded sagely at seven and let me do it. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Mark Constantine and his partners emerged from a failed business

to launch a little cosmetics store that turned in a show. into a global beauty brand, Lush. Back in 1995, I was studying in London. My sister Karen came to visit me that year. She'd been to London before, so on her visit, she was the guide. We trawled through the market stalls at Camden Lock. We picked up some indie records at Rough Trade and made a special trip to Covent Garden to visit a newly open shop called Lush.

I hadn't heard of it, but my sister, Mr. had instructions from all of her friends back in L.A. Get me stuff from Lush. Now, at the time, it was one of two lush locations in the world. And this is before e-commerce, so unless you went to the store, you couldn't get the products. I remember the overpowering smell of roses and lavender and honey and lemon. I remember these long loaves of colorful soap laid out on tables where you could slice off a chunk and pay for it by weight. There were bath bombs and shampoos and lotions. It looked like the

produce department at a fancy grocery store. You didn't see a whole lot of plastic and packaging, and in front of each product, you'd find a bright, colorful chalkboard with a description. It was unlike any beauty product store I had ever seen, and it probably explains why back then there was a line to get in. Lush was part of a new wave of beauty companies that came onto the scene around that time. Many of them influenced by the Body Shop and its iconic founder, Anita Rodic, who, as you will hear, features prominently in this story as well. The main founder of Lush, Mark Constantine, had already seen incredible success and then catastrophic failure by the time he launched his venture. In fact, right before Mark opened Lush, he lost most of his money on a mail order business that went bust. But Lush turned his fortunes around, and today it's a brand with more than 900 stores around the world.

Now, in recent months, the pandemic has hit the company hard. For a time, all of its stores in the U.K., the U.S., and Australia were closed. But Lush has also seen a massive surge in online orders. And later on, we'll get an update on how Mark and the company have navigated the pandemic and the global economic fallout. But first, a little bit about Mark's background. He grew up in Weymouth, a seaside town in the south of England. When he was only two years old, his dad split from the family and went off to Africa. And Mark never saw him again while he was growing up.

And his mother, she took Mark and moved in with her mother, Mark's grandma. It was me, my mum, my grandmother, who really brought me up, and my aunt. So I was really brought up by three women, yeah. What did your mom do? She was a journalist in the local newspaper. And I knew my mom had to work in order for us to be okay. But it was a very, very comfortable life, full of love and hugs and security. My nan was always there and I loved my nan.

I looked after my nan. And so it was comfortable, very nice, a very feminine life. I felt spoilt, if anything, to be honest. Obviously, my nan drilled into me the proper values as well with proverbs and all sorts of other things. I had to write repeatedly, good, better, best, never let them rest till my good is better and my better best. Things like that.

But then I guess, like around the time, you were 12 or so, you, like you stopped living with your grandmother, like you and your mom moved out? What happened was there was a lodger, and my mother married the lodger, and we moved out and my grandmother died. And I didn't realize, probably until much later in my life, how much that had affected me. And I felt responsible, I think, from my grandmother's death for most of my life, because obviously I was important to her and I wasn't there anymore and I couldn't look after her and she died. And then my stepfather was very cold, I would say, and violent. You know, but that's a very typical upbringing in the 50s because they'd come out of a war.

Do you know what I mean? They'd lost their friends, some of them had seen their friends killed or relatives. And so it was, you know, not surprising that those people that were, bringing up my generation, we're not the best balanced people in the world. What kind of, I mean, what kind of kid were you? What do you remember about how you kind of responded to those circumstances? Did you, I don't know, retreat into yourself or did you act out? Did you fight with your mom?

What do you remember? I didn't fight with my mum, but I fought a lot with my stepdad, physical fights, and they would argue, we would all argue. it was just, I want to say, unsatisfactory, which doesn't sound like it, it sounds like a strange word to use, doesn't it? But certainly when I came to build my own home, I, for example, never locked the front door. You know, I make an effort on those smaller things

that tell people that they're wanted and cared for. What kind of kid were you at school? Were you a good student? No, bad. Was school difficult for you? Do I want to go into how bad? Not really. Was it just hard for you?

I mean... There were a lot of gangs. Gangs were normal in the 50s for everyone. There were lots of gangs. So I went to the grammar school, which was the better school in town. The top 10% students went to the grammar school. Everyone was surprised when I got in. And then I wasted it while I was there.

Except that I did make friends. And we were in a particular gang where we could make bombs and things like that. You can make bombs. Well, we were the nerds, weren't we? Like pipe bombs? They were, we killer and sugar bombs with potassium permangate and glycerin fuses and all sorts of things like. We weren't making them for the IRA. We were just using them for our own purposes to intimidate other gangs.

It was, was that when William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies at that period of time? So if you can imagine that style of living, when that's how it was. But for me, I'm not at all physical. Yeah. So I'm not going to fight anyone if I can possibly avoid. You're a fighter. No, I talk my way out. Mark, do you think sort of around the age where you kind of, you know, many of these things are happening, do you remember being sad when you were a kid or you do?

When I've seen people since, there was one girl who I went to school with called Elspeth Cox. And I saw her some 20 years later. and she said, I'm so glad your life worked out well. You were such a sad child. Wow. You know, I mean, I missed my father, even though I'd never known him. I think I was melancholy, to use the traditional old-fashioned word. Yeah.

I mean, my mother missed my father. I missed my father. I suspect I caught it from her. Do you know what I mean? As a meme, as it were. Up until I was 10, 12 or whatever it was, 11, it was fine. From then on, there were a five or six year period of my life, which was not fine. When you were in school as a boy, you at one point had some kind of argument or something happened with your mom and your stepdad.

Yeah. I think you were 16 and you left the house or you were locked out of the house. And that was it. Like you started living there. Do you remember what happened? So do I remember what happened? No. But what I do remember is the very singular way you feel when nobody cares.

It didn't matter what time I got in at night. It didn't matter whether I was there or not. Nothing mattered with regard to me. So when you're rebelling, obviously it's important that the other person has some feeling regarding you. Yeah? But there was no discernible feeling. I can't remember what happened physically. I remember the door being locked.

I remember it being the end of everything connected with that house. And I just took it as the ultimate rejection and went. I didn't try and fight back or go back in and later on and have a conversation or anything. I just went. And there was just this parting of the ways and that was it.

And I don't think I saw my mum again for, say, seven years or so on that. And I guess during that time, what, you slept at like different people's houses and I read you even camped out in the woods sometimes. Yes. So I couldn't afford the cheapest room in town. So basically I slept in the woods or I just couch surfed. So, you know, which wasn't a thing those days.

No, right. It didn't have a turn. And this isn't, this is, we're talking about the 60s now, sort of the late 60s. Yeah. Basically, I would sleep in one friend's greenhouse or I had a girlfriend who turned, who was now my wife and I would just go and stay her for a night. I'd stay with my friend Jeff, Osman, and quite often his parents will put me up. Other people, people were unbelievably kind. Yeah. By the way, were you working at the time? Did you have a job?

Yep. I had a job as an apprentice hairdresser and it paid two pounds, ten shillings, those days. So I don't know, you can come up with anything like that. That was a week. That was per week, right? a week. But then I decided I wanted to do theatrical makeup is what I wanted to do for a living. I wanted to make people up for the theatre. I'd done it at school. I'd done it for other schools. We were talking about the sheer excitement of being able to change appearances. And we were talking then about the excitement of being able to experiment with different products on your face. And I was buying these makeup items from the local hairdressing salon. So I was, I was would go there every Saturday. With whatever money I had, I would buy frothing blood capsules or

plastic, or the latest prosthetics that were coming in from the States. So I was really obsessed from that time. And then the hairdressing was just, for me, a means to an end. So it sounds like even at that point, like you had a plan, like a pretty clear ambition. I think when you have to survive from zero, obviously there's more drive, isn't there? I mean, I look at photos of myself on my early 20s, and I see this awfully driven person. I mean, just driven, absolutely driven. I think, I suppose, you know, if you're left, you know, if you've got to look after yourself, you know, it teaches you self-reliance. So you're between sort of around the age of 16 and eventually around that time you meet Mo, the person who would eventually become your wife, who you are still married to today, you meet Jeff who is, or you knew Jeff.

I knew Jeff already. From childhood who was a best friend. So talking about class systems, I lived in the middle class estate on one side of the road where people owned the houses. And Jeffrey lived on the other side of the street in the housing you rented from the council. We call them council houses. Hanselphlax, yeah. Yeah, so he would have been in the lower echelons. And the first thing I learned when they put me up, when they had absolutely nothing, was the

generosity of spirit of that in comparison to the other side of the street. Right, right. Yeah? The kindness and the care and the thoughtfulness and the charity, they were all great lessons for me. And they stayed with me all my life. So you were, I mean, you were training as an apprentice hairdresser. Yeah.

You, I think, you're 20 years old. You and Mo your then-girlfriend, Soon-to-Be wife, and Jeff, your best friend. You all move to London. And you get a job as a hairdresser in a pretty, actually a pretty relatively high-end salon, right? Yes. Well, that was Elizabeth Arden. I worked for Elizabeth Arden. So it was called the Red Door.

and it was a big salon with over a hundred staff, and had 200 staff in it. Wow. And you were working there as mainly just doing whatever, washing hair. Washing hair, wasn't doing much else. I was learning stuff, what they call an improver.

That was the term used at the time, an improver. So you weren't an apprentice, but you weren't a hairdresser either. So basically, I would accompany hairdressers when they had to go out to do the theater. Or I would go on a vogue shoot, but I would be the runner.

I imagine, I always think of like London in the early 70s, like the Rolling Stones living in Chelsea, you know, like that kind of world. Well, from my point of view, I was on that sort of below stairs angle. So I was in service really to the various people and saw that other side. Quite a lot of the people I was working with were drug addicts because nobody really understood the severity of the drugs. So they experimented and then they got the wrong side of. of it all and drug taking. It's what I remember predominantly and not the fun side of it. Yeah. I just remember a lot of, a lot of sad stuff going on, really. Did you ever, when you were, I mean, when you were, you know, a young guy living in London, did you ever experiment with drugs? No, because I couldn't afford them. You know, I had no money. I could sit next,

I could sit between two people. I mean, I would say, although there was a lot of generosity, There wasn't a lot of generosity with drugs. No, my education was purely observational. So I guess at a certain point, you move onto another high-end salon in London, and this is really where your career begins to take a turn, right? Yeah. Well, what happened was that I was working that the owner, because I was so nerdy, I think, he thought I would make a good tricologist.

And in those days in London salons, they had two or three qualified tricologists who checked the scalps for disease. They dealt with the hair condition and they made the products for the salon and things like that. And just to clarify, tricology is the study of hair and scalp.

Disease is really. But it's also the science of hair and scalp. So that whole thing of starting off doing my hairdressing apprentice, taking the qualifications with that, then going on and studying trichology. Another three years of nerdy study, all about hair and scalp and the skin. It's interesting because I don't think salons have trichologists anymore, do they? No. No, it was a 1970s phenomenon.

That's, okay, I got you. And most of us that did it, most of the tricologists, went on then to make products for other people. So we very much went into products. We made products for the salons anyway. and we developed our skills more and more in that area. So at some point, I guess, you returned to pool. Like you were in London, you and Moe are in London, you go back to pool. That's because I burnt out.

You burned out. And pool is in the south of England, we should mention. You burned out in London. Why did you burn out in London? He'll all caught up with me, I suppose. What did? The leaving home, the homeless period. I think I'd sort of got to a point where I was earning enough money to live.

And so the striving fell away for a while. So I think that I got to that point where it, well, the other thing that had happened to me, I'd got married. And as you know, as your listeners will certainly know, getting married is quite a big thing. And Mo, we have to bring Mo in at this point, who is much more stable than me. So is my partner, by the way. it's a great choice that you made. I know.

Well, actually, I realized she made the choice. And I'm very grateful. So I think that probably gave me some stability. I was still relatively optimistic, as far as I was concerned. But anxiety I had in space and panic attacks, especially about heart attacks, which is how my grandmother had died. That went into me at that moment,

and it stayed with me for an awfully long time. I'm not surprised, right? And here's the other thing. People didn't talk about these things in the 70s, right? There was no language to say, I have intense anxiety. The reason why I'm asking you about this is because of who you are today and what your success and will obviously get there. But this is important, right, that a lot of people don't talk about these moments in their lives because of shame or embarrassment or, yeah. At that time, I went to the doctors and I tried to.

to describe how I felt. And he said, I said, I just don't feel normal. He said, well, define normal. I didn't think I had heart palpitations. I thought I was dying of a heart attack every time. So I, you know, the joke was, I never had indigestion. I only had heart attacks. A very kind doctor that I still use said to me, Mark, you'd have been better off having heart attacks. They're less disconcerting. You were having, you were having, you were probably having panic attacks. Yes, that's exactly it. But it was all connected with the death of my grandmother, I think, because, you know, it entered me then in that very young age.

And I was hyperventilating even at sort of 11 due to the circumstances. So I think, yeah, it entered me then. It didn't really leave until I was in my late 50s. I mean, none of this is surprising given the things that you went through as a child, right? Like none of these experiences are surprising. I think it's the human condition. I think if you understand mortality and you're not anxious, what's wrong with you? Yeah?

Yeah. You know, I mean, once you understand, once you have a death like that of someone so dear, and you don't understand, then you've not got the hang of it. It's the human condition, isn't it? That's the point. That's, if we didn't have that, we wouldn't be driven. We wouldn't do the things we do. You know, you have to have a clear understanding of a thought.

finite period of time. You have to have it. So you and Moe returned to pool. You're in your early 20s. You've had this training as a tricologist. What did you do when you got back to pool in 74? I persuaded a large salon in pool that they needed a tricologist. And then I went and did the same thing for them that I had been doing in these West End salons. So there was a guy there called Mark Young who was very ambitious. He had 100 staff. So for a salon outside of London to be that size, that was good.

Yeah. And so lots of people would go there. He would train a lot of people. And I would assist him. And I was freelance. He didn't pay me. But he gave me a room and gave me a little attic space to make product for them in. And I made their shampoos and conditioners.

And I was really not earning any money. My wife was keeping me. No works in the courts. assistant to the clerk at the courts. And so she was working there. And that was good money. And then I was earning, you know, just a pittance. And you were what just, you were just making stuff in your kitchen and putting it in like glass bottles and selling it to people? I wasn't doing the kitchen. I've made a tiny room. My, changed my little tiny box room up in my bedroom into a little lab. Yeah? Yeah. It was above the kitchen. I'd got a basin in there.

I'd got taps in there. I'd got some vessels. I got on a big paddle. You know, I could heat water and I could heat oil and I could make products. And I was making stuff on the side for different people because I couldn't earn enough money in the salon I was working. And at that time, were you using, like, chemicals? I have an issue with chemicals. I know you do now. But, yeah. I know, but I always did.

I think it came in when I was about seven or eight. I went with my mum to the movies. and I saw a movie where rat poison got in some bread. And it was a frightening black-of-white movie. And I think it really made me frightened of chemicals. So I always had this leaning towards nature anyway. So I much preferred to be involved in herbs or alternatives. I was always very, very conscious of what was a safe chemical and what was not a safe chemical.

So that again informed what I did because now I make products with mainly natural materials. and what I consider to be safe synthetics, having studied that repeatedly all through my career. All right. So you're working at this salon and pool as a tricologist. And I guess you and Mo were living in the same apartment building as a woman named Liz Weir. Is that right? And who was she? And how did you meet her?

Well, we worked together in the salon. Oh, I see. Okay. She was the beauty therapist in the salon, and I was the tricologist. We were both freelancers, so we would spend our spare time chit-chatting about, well, hair and skin, basically. I always used to feel sorry. If we were on the train, the two of us, and someone fell asleep in front of us, we would just take them apart bit by bit. Right. You know, well, what you, you know.

Because you would just talk about hair and skin. Yeah, pretty obsessively. In meantime, you were making all this stuff, like, hair. care products and stuff in your apartment. And I guess around this time, you find a new customer for your products who would become a pretty significant person in your life. What's the story? What happened? What actually happened was that I had seen a little advert in Honey magazine for a salon in Brighton, not a salon, a shop. And I was making stuff on the side for different people.

And so basically, I found this woman's address and a phone number. I didn't have a phone at home. So basically I have to go to the phone box and phone her up and see if she would like any product. She'd started this shop called The Body Shop. Oh, yes. And it was Anita Rodic. Anetorotic.

And so, I'd like. I phoned her up and she said, well, yeah, come over and see me. By the way, she was in Brighton. You were in pool. Quite a long train journey. Okay. Because it's not direct. Right.

Okay. So I paid for the train journey. Met her. She'd opened her second shop by then. I went in the shop and it was just wonderful. Yeah. There was this charismatic woman selling the low packaged product that was genuine, young people buying small amounts of stuff.

for fun and experimentation. Everything about the shop really worried me. I just loved it. Very, you know, very simplistic bottles with very simple labels, no fancy stuff. Really suited me. And Mark, was it totally different than anything that was out there at the time when you went into that body shop? Was it just like, what is this? If I come and live with you now in San Francisco and we go up and down the coast, if we'd have done the same thing at that same time, We would have seen the body shop that inspired her in the first place. And we would have seen a whole series of mum and pop shops exactly like that, right up the West Coast from Seattle, right the way down through Portland. All of those people were making small amounts of products and packaging them simply.

You know, there was the cleansing bar and all sorts of different businesses. But there were none in Britain. We didn't have that at all. We had nothing. none of that innovation, none of that stuff. There was a shop called the Body Shop in San Francisco. In San Francisco. Which was a U.S. company, a totally different company.

It was a totally different company that inspired Anita Roddick to copy it and do it in Bright. And call it the Body Shop. And call it the Body Shop. But she, you know, you've got to get context on Anita. We have a dynamic, vital woman who's living in a fairly open relationship with an unbelievable blow. I mean, Gordon Roddock, poet, horseman. He'd just, he'd gone off to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. He was writing for the observer about his experiences while he did it.

He, well, he was just a, you know, bohemian. So, you know, we're not talking about everyday people here, which I definitely was, okay? And they'd had a hotel which they sold. And she just wanted to try this idea out that she'd seen in San Francisco. and so when I first went there, because Nita knew nothing about hair and skin, and I knew everything. Between Liz and I, we knew everything about hair and skin.

All right, so you go in the shop, you meet Anita, and you have brought with you a bunch of samples of what? I think I'd already sent them over. You sent them over, okay. And she then placed an order. Right then and there. She said, hey, I like this stuff. For a thousand two hundred pounds.

Now, just to clarify, because I've read her account of this, and this is what she said, and you may know this. She said, I remember that, you know, he called me from a payphone initially because he was feeding coins into the payphone. And that he was making henna cream shampoos that he sent to me. They looked like sludge and smelled like horseshed. And honey beeswax cleaner with black specks caused by bees returning to their hives with dirty feet. Those were the products you sent.

And then she ordered a thousand pounds worth of this stuff. A thousand, yeah, it was great. I mean, I couldn't, I'd had to borrow the money to get the train home. No, but I mean, the fact that, like, you were making these products, obviously herbal-based and natural products, but like, they were kind of, right, they looked kind of grimy at that time, I guess. Well, they were very authentic. Yeah, I tried them on anyone else. That's what they'd say to me. Yeah, well, we can see these are authentic, Mark, but we really don't think they're going to sell.

But she believed they were going to sell. And how are you getting the product to her? Was it in like bags or jars or what? Like, so she orders a thousand pounds. Or glass, glass jars. Oh, yeah. I wanted glass jars because of the environmental principles, okay? She hated the glass jars.

She wanted plastic jars because she wasn't so struck on the environment at that time. So there were quite a lot of arguments. There were lots of arguments like that. She was a very argumentative person. When she said, all right, I want a thousand pounds with this stuff. You had to go back to pool. $1,400. $1,400.

So you had to go back to pool and go back to this little lab in your apartment and start making a thousand pounds worth of stuff. Well, then I had to phone up the suppliers and ask for credit because I had no money. Right. So I couldn't buy the materials to make the order. They all kindly gave me credit. I then said to her she would have to pay cash on delivery. She then paid cash on delivery. I whizzed back afterwards and paid them all.

I didn't expect to get a second order. I thought that would be it. I don't know why. I obviously didn't have much confidence in my own product. Then when I had a second order and a third and a fourth, it was like, wow, I couldn't believe my luck. When we come back in just a moment, how Mark built a successful partnership with the Body Shop that worked pretty well until it totally fell apart. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1977 and Mark Constantine has just started to make beauty products for Anita Roddick of the Body Shop.

And both of them, of course, are just in the beginning stages of their businesses. Anita only has a few shops. And Mark is still making his concoctions in a tiny room above his kitchen. Well, it would be a henna cream shampoo, elderberry. conditioner, ladies' mantle heat filter, aerobotherapy scalp oil, herbal hair colors. How do they sell? Do they sell? Do they sell in their shop? Well, they sold really well. I mean, far better than I, you know, I could have imagined. I mean, we are talking about one of the best sales ladies I'd ever met. You know, she could sell anything. So obviously, she made them popular.

Yeah. So you have this cash coming in from the body shop. And I guess, right around this time you and Liz Weir, your colleague at the hair salon, you decide to use that money to start your own business. Yeah. And with that money, I started a little herbal hair and beauty clinic with Liz Weir. It was called Constantine and Weir's country cosmetics, good for your skin and good for your hair. And that's so hippie again.

And so I've been told by another business person, what you do is you buy all your raw materials, you make the product and you double that when you sell it. And then you don't spend that money on yourself. You then reinvest that back into your business. Why, just to add a curiosity, why did you bring Liz on? What was she going to bring to the equation? Well, it wasn't to do with making products. What we did was we opened a little clinic for me to treat people's hair and scalp

and to do Hennar colors on and she would do her beauty therapy. Yeah, and we'd share the room, you know, the third room, which was a reception store room. But the problem was that it was incredibly cold there and we didn't get much business. So we made money still by making product for other people much more than we did from our little clinic. So we went a year or so to try and make money there and we couldn't. And so I said to Liz, Liz, well, why don't you join me in the making the stuff? You know all about skin, I know all about hair, and between us, we can come up with the products. And then when I had to prepare a product for her, I mean, she was a really hard taskmaster.

So I had to work and work and work and study and read up and the, you know, the cosmetologies and other books until I got it right. I probably made better skin products than I did hair. You know, when I'd learned the hair stuff, it was just a technical skill I learned. Yeah. With the skin stuff, I had to really study and work on. Huh. And I guess you and Liz made these products and sold them to like a few shops or salons, right? But I mean, I'm assuming the body shop was still your big client, right?

I was their biggest supplier. You were the biggest supplier. I was their biggest supplier. And they had two shops. Well, no, but they started a franchise. Right. And before we knew where we were, they had the fastest growing Cosmlympic company in the world. Wow.

I mean, you know, and they couldn't even touch the U.S. So that was outside of the U.S. They had franchises in Sweden multiplying. They had franchises in Finland, in Germany, in France. Here's my question for you, Mark. I mean, how were you, I have to assume that very quickly you had to find another location to make your products. And then there was a certain point where you yourself could not make the products anymore, that you had to bring lots of people in to make the products.

So what happened was, I like working from my home. It worked for me, okay? So I found a bigger house with a nice garage and plenty of space at the back to make product. And then I managed to make product from there for seven years. Wow. Now, you're not supposed to do that in Britain because there's planning controls.

So I managed to make it without the planners catching me for seven years. And I can remember, off to see Return of the Jedi. And when I came back, my babysitter said, oh, a man's been around from the Planning Authority. So I think I'd got my business up to a half a million turnover by then out of my garage and out of the back of the eyes. So this is like 1982, 83, you're doing half a million dollars in revenue. Pounds. Pounds. Sorry, pounds. And in those days, that was nearly a million dollars. Wow. I mean, I mean, just, just, just pause on this for a moment because when you were dating Mo and then asked her, you know, for her dad for hand in

marriage, like you were not going to be, this is like within 10 years, you're making a million dollars in revenue. Yeah. I mean, did any of those people like her parents or Jeff's parents, they say, oh my God, like, wow, this is crazy. Not at the time. I was busy. You were busy.

I was getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning making the stuff. Yeah. If I saw someone, we certainly weren't talking about how well I was doing. We're talking about the English here, bear in mind. We don't do that kind of stuff. We don't admire each other. It's just not part of it. Well, here's what I'm wondering.

How did you know how to run the business? Like, how did you know how to price your products? How did you know how to do invoicing and purchase orders and all that stuff? Did you? Well, Gordon Roddick helped me a lot. I don't know where he learned. But basically, I'd been taught already by Mark Young's father to double the price when I sold it. So that put me in good stead.

By Mark Young, the guy who won the salon? Yeah, his dad had said to me, what you do is you buy the raw materials and then you double that to sell it. You have to have enough margin. Because as you add to the costs, do you know what I mean? Obviously, you know, I mean, I was probably making a lot more money per product when I just made it myself up in a room. than as things developed, because obviously, but if you've got enough margin there in your model, it works okay. We're going to talk a bit more about Anita Roddock

who's a very important, controversial and really kind of revolutionary figure, and certainly in the UK and around the world in entrepreneurship. Yes. But on the one hand, I can imagine, I mean, this was huge. She and Gordon transformed your life, right? Well, did you... Well, they also transformed an element of the cosmetic industry. Yeah.

They were unbelievably influential, charismatic. It felt very much like royalty, you know, in the sense that when they bless you with their presence, you were pleased. And when you weren't in their presence, it wasn't so good. We would have a fairly tempestuous relationship, I think would be the right description. I would have an argument with her on the phone. She would call me unprofessional. I would tell her that she couldn't call me unprofessional. She would then call me a very rude word, beginning with W and ending in R.

I would then say, yes, you can call me that rude word beginning in W and ending in R, but you can't call me unprofessional. Then about an hour later there would be knock on the door. I'd open the door, there'd be a florist with a huge smile on his face, giving me a bunch of flowers. And on the car, it would have the word W something, something, something, something. That's how it was all the time. It was chaotically wonderful. Yeah. She was driven, not quite menacle, but close.

you know, there was, you know, both were so afraid of dying, you know, I mean, she, she, we were very similar, very streety, not comfy in our lives, you know what I mean, there was no, we're not talking about a confident woman in the sense of accomplished and stylish and svelts, we're talking about a woman who, uh, was as driven as I was. I thought she was going to have a breakdown that I realized, no, I was going to have the breakdown. What was your relationship like with Liz, your partner? Well, she was always wonderful, very supportive.

You know, when you look at Lush and people admire Lush for its values, especially the way women are treated and things like that, that's all Liz Bennett, Liz, she married and her name became Bennett, Liz Weir. That's her. She was, she took me to one side. I mean, bear in mind, I had not had much of a social education. And she would take me to one side. And she would say, if we're going to build a business based on women, you can't

pat them on the backside when they walked by. Yeah. You do, and of course, she was fairly austere, so you didn't want to be told twice. Yeah. I absolutely took her word as, that was it. She told me, I did it. So those standards, you know, she had the standards all the time, which I probably lacked. Right.

All right. So you are just cranking it out and you're busy and you're expanding. And when you're doing a half a million pounds of revenue a year selling to the body shop, Do you remember how many people you had working with you at that point? Yeah, there was about five or six people working with me then. But what's very nice when we're talking about, well, how did you have the success later on? One of them was Carbribe, one was Rowena Hofbauer, as she was then, Burne. One was Liz Bennett.

Then all of those people, Helen Ambrosen, they are the team now. They're the elite team, the top team. They continue to learn. their skills. We still work together. Wow. All right. We are now going to get to a theme that is a recurring theme in your life, which is you get, you start to get itchy feet and you want to, you want to expand or move on to the next thing. Or, you know, you've got this business, which is Constantine and Weir and it's going well. But, you know, you kind of, you're doing well. And it's, and you get to a point, I guess, in the mid-80s where you want to kind of build something out.

And you decided that you wanted to maybe open your own little shopping. in the US. Yeah. So there was always much talk about, well, we would do something together rather than me be a supplier and then, you know, we would do something together. Like a partnership, okay. Yeah. So I said to Gordon, well, why don't I come up with a new concept in the States and we look at that, you know, because they couldn't do the body shop. So she would quite like, I've liked to have a different business that was not nicked from someone in San Francisco with all that complexity. So I did a new product, myself and my team.

we did something called Bodkins, which we opened in Seattle. You opened a store called Bodkins in Seattle. Yeah. This was like a body shop type or a skin care type shop. Yes. And you did this with Anita Roddick and Gordon? No. Anita didn't know.

I did it with Gordon. Wait, sorry, you did it with her husband and she didn't know? Yes. I don't know how that happened. I think Gordon said to me, look, why don't we do this? And I'll tell Anita later on. Right? Okay. So I don't know why I fell for that because that was definitely foolish. And I did all the work. I did all of the product. I, you know, we got the shop. My brother-in-law said he would run it. Why is Seattle, by the way? Because that's where my brother-in-law lived. Okay. It's a great city. It was a great city there, great city now. Bear in mind my image of the States, I hadn't traveled at all. So I'd been to Seattle a couple of times. But my, image of the States was very much formed off of the American comics I read as a little boy.

And also the American business books I'd read and the entrepreneurial spirit of the states. So, you know, that's what I felt good about. And so, yeah, so we opened this shop. I mean, when you describe it to someone, you think it's slightly lunatic, it gets worse because it didn't really make money. but then at Gordon decided he would tell Anita. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine, and then he thought he'd tell Anita.

And then he told me, I've never been more wrong in my life. Such a weird story. He said, she turned the tables over, she threw chairs. He said, I'm not frightened of any woman, so I didn't lock my bedroom door, but obviously he wasn't sleeping in the same bed as her that night. And from that moment on, really, our relationship wasn't so good, mine and Anita's.

But she was mad because she thought you betrayed her. She was like, that's my business. What are you doing? That was her perspective. I think she might have been, yeah. Which I'm not to, I mean, we should say Anita's, she passed away more than a decade ago. So she's not here to kind of give her side of the story. But I can kind of understand that.

I can not kind of, right? So can I, yeah. Right? Yeah. Well, obviously, I'm not straightforward. You know, I'm very, I just, I'm going for all the time. I'm not. You can't rely on me to stay still.

Yeah. You know, I don't become replete and sit back, even now in my 60s. You had to keep moving, and to you, it was like, this is the next step. I want to keep moving. I want to expand. I want to do the next thing. But it sounds like you kind of did it in a clumsy way that you, and I get it. I've done these things in my life, too.

Well, it didn't feel clumsy when I was doing it. But retrospectively, it obviously wasn't appropriate. And we should kind of, I think, put this into context, because Anita arrived. by the mid-80s, certainly by the late 80s, she was like hugely famous, like Princess Diana was buying her stuff. And she was all over the place. She was a big deal already by then. Yeah. And rightly so.

Yeah. I mean, you know how it is whenever you've had a very close working relationship with someone? You don't want to have to admit how much they taught you. I don't know. Maybe that's just a British thing. Yeah. But she must have taught me so much. didn't she? It's quite obvious.

So it's clear that your relationship with Anita is kind of damaged at this point. And probably you're not really going to, I mean, she needs your products, but there's too much tension between the two of you. And at the time, I mean, she basically made an offer to buy out Constantine and Weir. Yeah. And you did sell it to her. I mean, was that the reason that you knew that basically you just kind of had to move on? No. I basically drove that because it was very very, very.

very awkward. I owned these rights, but they didn't know what to do about that. They weren't taking any new product off me because they were frightened that I dominated so much of their business. And they just gone public and the city didn't know that I owned all the product rights. The city of, you mean the bankers, the financiers? Yeah, they went public. They were now a listed company. But they didn't own the product they were selling. I owned it. So they had to pivot. They had to start making their own product because. Well, it was my solution. I said to look, you're going to have to buy the rights. But I said, look, I make three million pounds a year from each of these product ranges.

So why don't you pay me $9 million over three years? You'll make the money back anyway by making it yourself. And I'll go off and do something else. So you walk out of that relationship with $9 million. It was in three trenches over two years. And by the way, what happens to Bodkins, that shop in Seattle? Is that still going at that time? I had closed that earlier.

And lost 200,000. All right. So you lose the money on Bodkins, but you've got 9 million pounds. And at this point, you can really kind of just live the life of Riley. Like, that's a lot of money. You can buy a nice country estate in the south of England and Liz gets a cut and you, you know, can do beekeeping or I know you're into birding. You can do that for the rest of your life. But obviously, that's boring.

I'm going to do that. So you just want to do that. You don't want to do that. So you decide, all right, I'm going to start a new business. and it's this concept called Cosmetics to Go that you again start with the same team, right? That you'd done Constantine.

Well, because I wanted, yeah, we were trying to keep the same people employed that we'd have before. Got it. But in a mail order business. Mail order cosmetics. So the same products that you were making, but mail order.

Yeah, because that, I didn't really want to, I didn't want to be going into competition with Anita and Gordon. And anyway, to get the money, I'd had to sign a thing saying I wouldn't open any shops for three years. Got it. So you had to do a mail order business. You couldn't have a brick and mortar.

But I wanted to anyway, so it suited me at the time. But here's the thing. You sold the rights to all of these products that you were making. You could not sell those recipes in your new business. You had to make brand new things. Yeah, but I had loads. I had so many new products ideas. We had shampoo bars, bath bombs, things that Anita didn't want to take. So I already had a catalog full of product. All right. I want to hone it on the bath bomb because this is a, this is a project. that's going to revolutionize your life, and this is what blush would eventually be built on. But when did that idea come to you?

Well, it didn't come to me. So basically, what happened was I was in the kitchen with my wife, Mo, a perfumer called Jeff Brown, a herbalist called Dr. Malcolm Stewart, another psychologist called Steven Smalls and a couple of other people. And we were talking about the problem of bubble baths creating urinary tract infections in young. children under seven. Wow. Yeah? Okay. So we were just chatting about that and how the problem was that kids love bubble baths so much. So what happens is it breaks down the capillary action and it enables microorganisms to get in the urinary tract and cause problems. That's how a bubble bath does that, okay? We wanted to come up with something that was better for the kids and wouldn't

cause that problem and Jeff Brown had worked making Alka-Seltzer with bicarbonate of soda and citric acid. So bicarbonate of soda is extremely soothing in the bath. Very, very good for you. It's, you know, a seltzer bath. It's really well known, all worldwide. And if you had chickenpox or something, you'd put a bit of baking soda on the bath. Very soothing. Right. Yeah. So then my wife went out into the shed and came back with a first bath bomb. But it was just a small disc, and we called them aqua-sizzlers. Let me just pause for a sec. She would take basically baking soda and some scents and

essential oils and herbs and like put it into a disc? Yeah. So she just came back in, there it was. So she had invented the bath bomb, really. But she didn't just do it in five minutes, right? This is going to take some time. She did. How do you make that in five minutes? Well, she just, she'd heard us talking about it. She just went out and did it. She's very practical, more than, she just came in, there it is. So then we, for a while, we sold these aqua-sizzlers in a little tube.

But then we found that the kids weren't using them, the grown-ups were using them. So then we thought, oh, well, if a grown-ups using it, we'll put a bit more, we'll make it a bit bigger. And we'll have a round thing. You know, we did a bomb. We actually did a bomb. We covered in black salafane, had a red wick out of the top, wrote bomb on it. And that was the Blackberry bath bomb and so on. So that's how they developed.

But it started off with my wife going in the shed, making one coming back. So at Cosmetics to Go, you were already selling these products? We started. Bathbottoms came along about two years into Cosmetics to Go. But things like shampoo bars, they were there right at the beginning. We had a patent for shampoo bars. Shampoo bars like a bar of soap, but instead of in a bottle, it was washing your hair. Unbelievable popular at the moment.

Yes. So everybody wants our shampoo bars at the moment because they don't want plastic. They don't want plastic, right? Yeah. You have this business, Cosmetics to Go, which sounds like a great idea, right? You've got it's mail order and mail order is a big deal in the late 80s, early 90s, and how's it going? How is it doing? Every time we send a pass light, we lose a pound.

Why? Well, you know how the dot-com business was? You know, you figured if you got to a certain size, you'd be okay. Right, right. So you were constantly trying to get to that scale. Yeah. But just like the dot-com businesses, we never made it to that scale. There's a joke there.

If you want to make a small fortune, you start with a large one. And lose a pound on every order. Wow. So Cosmetics to Go was a hell of a party. It was so intense. I have never been so stressed. We were producing these catalogs. The whole, every range had a different image.

I mean, it was just for people obsessed with cosmetics, which we all were. and our. It was a great party, but we just blew all the money and went bust. So this is like 1994, and I mean, you worked on cosmetics to go for like six or seven years before it went under and then really went under. And were like, were you broke? Well, I'd not been ever so clever. I basically still had a mortgage on my home. So I still had a loan on my home. I still had a loan for a small, factory unit I owned and I still had a loan on on this property in the high street that like where I have my lap so I still had these loans to pay off so I then was having to borrow money from

money lenders at usurice rates and then I managed to sell this house for half of what I bought it for I bought it for 200,000 pounds I sold it for 100,000 I paid off all the loan sharks I was left with 43,000 pounds. And I had three kids and no business. You had just a few years before. And again, I'm not trying to shame you at all. I just want to put this in context. It's important. It's okay. I've got plenty of shame. Shame is the word that I'm trying to avoid. This is a very important failure that you experienced, right? Yeah. You were a millionaire and you had lost all of it. And you were also in debt. And now you're 42, almost 43. You've got three kids. Yeah. My eldest son took me to one side at seven and suggested, well, Dad, do you not think you should get a proper job?

And what did you think? I said, well, I think I've got a skill set that's such that if I can market it, I can make a load of money again. And he sort of nodded sagely at seven and let me do it. Did you have anxiety about the future at that point, or did you think I'm going to recover? This is going to be fine. Oh, no, did I have anxiety? I mean, I've had anxiety most of my life. So I had plenty of anxiety, probably enough to, you know, fill a boat. Basically, I didn't want to do anything.

I wanted to stay home, lick my wounds. I felt very ashamed. Shame was the prevalent thing. I certainly didn't think I'm going to get up and do something else. But my colleagues, especially Helen Ambroseon at that time, Helen Ambrosen phoned me up and said, the receivers had all gone, right? Everyone had gone. I had an empty shop and an empty lab.

And Helen Ambroseon phoned up and said, I'm going to start going in nine to five. How about you? I'm like, doing what? With what? And she said, well, I just think it would be good. We can go in. We can see what there is there. We can make a few products, maybe sell a few here.

and there, let's get going again. And so all of the main team that I'd worked with, they couldn't find work either that they wanted. So bit by bit, they all came back. And I want to just name them all, because you all get together. Yep. Helen Ambrose. Liz Weir, Paul Greaves, your wife, Moe, Mike Bird, Rowena Hoffbauer. And you all kind of come together and this is the beginning of lush. Yep. So then we were all earning no money. Rowena ran all our credit cards up because she was the only one that hadn't already done that. And she started to fit the shop out downstairs and run that. And we started making the product upstairs. So me and Helen and Moe, we would make product, you know, just with, we got the green grocers and buy the avocados and the fruit and make the products. Then take it downstairs and she'd sell it. Here's what I don't understand. Yeah. That year, 95, you open a store in Covent Garden in London. How were you able to do that with 40,000 pounds?

Well, what we did was the first store was really the little store downstairs in Poole at 29 High Street. And that's what we did first. So we did a sort of mocky-up thing. And then basically we knew we'd done all of our money and we knew we had to get a backup. But quite a lot of people were approaching us, offering to back us. One of the guys, Andrew Geary and Peter Blacker, they were really nice. Peter Blacker just said, well, I'll do a punt for a couple hundred grand. And he put some money in for some shares.

And we started the retail business. And with his money, we opened a small store in Covent Garden and a larger one on the King's Road. So you had never really had to raise money for your previous businesses because they were all. But this one, you had to find some outside money. You had somebody, you had to find an investor. Yeah. And what I did with Peter, I asked him, what was the best investment you ever made, Peter? And he told me what it was.

He was a property guy. And so he'd bought some properties off the Army in Scotland, and he managed to sell them for 12 times the price. Wow. So I promised him, I said, well, this will be a better bet than that. When we come back in just a moment, why that turned out to be a pretty good bet. And later on, how Mark crossed power. with the Body Shop yet again, but this time as a possible buyer. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

And just one more thing. The How I Built This book is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with a ton of stories you haven't heard and how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out how I built this, the book, available wherever you buy your books. And please, if you support what I do on this show that support by picking up How I Built This, the book. And thanks. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1995 and out of the ruins of a failed

business, Mark and his partners decide to take one more leap by launch. a little cosmetic store they call Lush. And this time, things seem to click. So pretty soon, after opening their first location in pool, Mark opens another store in London. I remember that shop in Covent Garden. I was a student in London at the time, and it was a big deal. Oh, yes?

The bath bombs, I remember they were like these, and you still have them, these orbs. They kind of look like, they reminded me of sweet tarts. You know sweet tarts? Yeah. They look like giant sweet tarts. and some of them had like dried roses in them and things like that right like flower petals yeah yeah because i remember my sister came to visit me in london and she everyone wanted to go to lush

it was like all of a sudden was starting to people were talking about it what how did that happen i mean the stores just opened their doors and it was huge no one had ever seen anything like it before we would get a thousand inquiries a month for people to do business with us from the get go Well, pretty soon. We opened up the Kings Road shop, and within the first week we had Jean-Paul Gautier and Jasper Conran come in and commend us. Wow. And to be honest. And Jasper Conran is the son of Terrence Conran who opened up.

Terrence Conran, a designer in his own right. Terrence Conran, great retailer throughout the whole of Britain. But it wasn't just their status, but so many people were commending us. And to be honest, to have been that bad and to have been that bad, and to have. have everything that wrong and then suddenly to have everything that right was very tricky. I can remember having to go out the back of the shop and have a moment, you know. You can't be that bad and that good all in the in a short period of time, you know? Yeah. And by the way, how did you decide on the name Lush?

We did we had a competition and we said come up with a name for us and a lady called Mrs. Bennett in Edinburgh called us Lush Garden and we shorned it to Lush. So here's what's interesting. I've read that you kind of modeled these shops, the lush shops, after Neal's Yard Dairy, the cheese shop, right? Which is a famous cheese shop. It was various bits. I mean, Neal's Yard Dairy is lovely, a lovely cheese shop. Yeah, we have big truckles of shampoo and big truckles of soap, like cheese truckles, which we would slice and sell the product from.

And that, yes, it was partly that, partly grocery shops. like, you know, with apples. The bath bombs look like apples. To be honest, when I first did the King's Road, I thought I made an awful mistake. I'd done all. I just let my imagination, and everyone else's imagination run right.

We'd got this stainless steel basin full of ice with face masks in it that would only last a couple of weeks. And we just let everything go crazy. And then we had some bottle product on three little pyramids in the center of the shop. And when I was looking at it before I opened, I thought, oh, God, you've had this money and this investment. You've just blown it.

Yeah. You've done all this crazy stuff instead of just doing a much more understandable shop. The public won't get it. And then open the doors and the public came in and they just ignored all the bottle products and bought everything else. They were wonderful. They got everything. They just loved it. Yeah, because you're, I mean, as people now know when you go into Lush, and really was kind of baked in early on,

there wasn't a lot of packaging. I mean, you had the sort of the plastic tubs, but then it was tens of things and then just giant slabs of soap that were just sliced off and put in paper and you would walk out. Yeah, so that, yeah, well, because we, first of all, we didn't have the money for the

packaging, and secondly, we didn't want to do it anyway. If you've got a bottle of shower jar, when it went out from the factory, about two-thirds of the money went into the packaging and the labeling, and only a third into the contents. So if you If you can get a business model where you can get rid of that unwanted packaging, the customer doesn't want it, you don't want it.

If you can get rid of that, you've got far more money to put into the ingredients. Yeah. You can have a much better standard of payment for suppliers and so on, and you can have a bit more profit, and you can get a competitive price for the customer. By the way, the six of you who kind of got together to start lush, did you ever have to have an uncomfortable conversation about ownership? So the problem actually isn't ownership. Well, it is to an extent, but the problem is succession. Because obviously, if we, let's pretend we're not a cosmetic company and we're not British, but we're an American tech company.

Yeah. All those tech companies, the founders all had to either died and they had to be paid off. Their families had to be paid off or they have to have their enumeration, don't they, for these successful companies? And we didn't want to go public. You decided early on we don't ever want to go public. Well, we watched what happened with the body shop. You know, they'd gone public and Gordon Roddick says still today that that was the biggest mistake he made

because he was no longer in control of it and things that he thought were important wasn't what the... Shareholders wanted. You know, the city thought were important. Yeah. Yeah. They don't want you to spend money on high-quality products

and they want you to maximize profit. Exactly. So we dreamt up a scheme. You see, we're all, we're capitalists, straightforward what I am. I am a capitalist. And I believe in capitalism. But I don't believe in the forms of capitalism that I would call locust capitalism, where people are feeding off someone else without doing any work.

So we came up with this scheme where we valued our shares at five times the average. of the last three years profit. So that we capped it a little bit, but we only capped the greed, and that still enabled us to, if we want to build the business, we can build the business, we can build the profitability,

we can make more when we sell our shares. And then we gave part of the business to the staff, which we would like to see increase, so that the staff can buy those shares off the founders. And we put in an employee benefit trust to facilitate the sale of the shares as and when they're necessary. So essentially, you have said, you and the other founders have said, look, we're going to get rich enough, you know,

but we don't need hundreds of millions of dollars. We'll be happy with tens of millions of dollars. Yes, because we didn't do all the work. Yeah. Now, in Britain, we have something called the Living Wage, where a group of clerics peed off with the fact that there was so much poverty in their diocese got together and they dreamt up a living wage. This was a wage that was a fair pay. So we paid the living wage as decided by them. So we're lifting our skirts up at the

bottom to get people out of poverty, sharing some of the business with them, but still capitalists, and it's still capitalism. We can still increase the size of that business, the scale of that business, the profitability of that business, and get considerable benefit for ourselves, but not so much benefit that it's vulgar. I think, like, a lot of the entrepreneurs I've had on the show, it doesn't seem like you're wired to work for other people, right? Like, you are, you're clearly super driven, but I think you're a little difficult, right? I mean, in a good way.

No, I'm difficult in every way. But it doesn't sound to me like you are a control-free. that like actually the other partners involved in Lush had a lot of say over the look and the feel and the branding because you know when you're in a Lush store that you're in a Lush store. It doesn't sound like you were a control freak over every single aspect of that.

Am I right? I'm not, no, I'm not a control freak. I'm quite intuitive. I know when I see something that's wrong and I don't know how to describe that beforehand. So for a long time, Rona just banned me from the shop openings because all I could ever see was something that was wrong. Yeah.

So she just banned me. She just said, you can't come to the shop openings unless you improve your attitude. Yeah. We don't need that kind of miserable person pacing up and down outside when we're just greeting new customers, you know. And I'm allowed to go now, so I must have improved. Meantime, the business is growing. And I think by 2001, you actually put in a bid to buy the,

body shop and Anita Rodic would not sell it to you at the time. By the way, do you remember what you offered for it? Well, it was very straightforward. The management could raise about 360 million themselves to buy the body shop off of the strength of the body shop's figures. I could add my business to that and get up to about 450, something like that. that. Million pounds. Yeah. Then basically that someone like Laurel could get up to much higher than that. They eventually sold Body Shop to L'Oreal for 652 million pounds in 2006. At the time, Anita Rodic, was very, very sick. And, of course, is no longer alive.

And the body shop going to L'Oreal, to you and to some customers, meant something because L'Oreal's a huge multinational, and the body shop represented kind of, right? Their slogan was trade, not aid. L'Oreal had always been the arch enemy because of testing on animals. They represented those who wished to test. Body Shop represented those that didn't wish to test. And that was quite sort of fundamental. And I think at one point there were signs at Lush stores that said,

are you fed up with the BS, obviously referring to Body Shop and it's sale to L'Oreal? Not one of my best moments. If you had known how ill Anita was at the first. the time, I think you've said you would have responded differently. Yeah, absolutely. I had no idea. And, you know, I miss her. Yeah.

Difficult to know what to say. I mean, the weird thing was she always felt she had a very short length of time and she was right, you know, she did have a short length of time. But I think the truth was with the body shop that even if she hadn't been ill, I think they'd had it with it. I think they'd had their ride. And, you know, I mean, and they didn't want to carry on. You know, I've painted Anita Roddick as this dynamic, charismatic, fierce woman.

But when I once asked her, we were just messing about in a train or something, doing one of those psychological sort of quizzes, you know? And I said, Anita, if you were an animal, what an animal would you imagine yourself as? and she said a fawn. In other words, a young deer. Now, if she'd have said an eagle, that's what I would have expected her to say, a fawn.

And suddenly I could see then, I could see her as Gordon, her husband saw her, and how much he protected her and looked after her, and how much they were a couple. You never, because when you're in awe of someone, you don't see them as human beings. You see them as this great thing.

And of course, the truth was she was very human. With Lush, I think, like eight years into the business, you had over 200 shops in 29 countries. I mean, that's just an incredible expansion in eight years. How are you able to control the brand with all those shops around the world? Was it like was it just something that you weren't that worried about? Well, the brand is, our brand is very much based on the people that work in the shops and the people we attract. But I get asked a lot, how do you choose your staff, right? Yeah.

I don't know if you've ever watched High Fidelity. I have. When he talks about his staff, he says, well, I employed them for a couple of days and now they turn up every day of the week. You know, we employ and attract enthusiasts. people are really passionate about nature or animal testing or animal rights and then the brand tends to become that you know I mean we control the products you know my my children involved we've got a whole new set of inventors now the young people are coming on through the business so we do that that side that controls you know what you've got at home but then the people that sell it to you it just

just get attracted to the brand, you know? I mean, obviously, lush today, I think you have 900 stores, 12,000 staff around the world. But you know, this is a challenging business and retail is challenging and margins are thin. So, you know, you've had years where you've got, based on what I've read, I don't know if this is right, you know, 70 million pounds in profit. And then, you know, you had years where it's plunged to like 25 million pounds and still profitable the next year. So what explains those huge swings back and forth? Is it just that you pour more money into the business and that's why? Well, let's take from that height, when we got that height, that's when we introduced the living wage in parts of our markets.

Okay. So that's what we've decided we've got plenty here. We can share some. So that's quite often what's gone on, yeah, that we've changed the business model by introducing another element into it. I mean, we give huge sums in charity. I mean, we've given over 50 million pounds. Wow. And this is the lesson from Anita Rodick where she took just a small sum of money

and she turned it into that massive business which L'Oreal bought for all that money. That shows you that not all money has the same value. Small sums of money in hands of dynamic people who really care goes a long way. So when we give money, when we give, you know, a thousand or 2,000 or 5,000 to a group that wants to achieve something, Maybe they want to stop fracking or maybe they want to deal with some environmental issue. They will make that money go much further than if that money was in someone else's hands. So that's very much how we focus on it. I think it was around 2012 when your childhood friend Jeff Osmond located Treckton and your dad.

You found him in South Africa. And you were able to see him for the first time since you were two years old. Yeah. What was that like seeing him? Were you nervous going before that door opened? No. No, I wasn't nervous. I had a friend who told me he was the result of a one-night stand between his mother and an Italian on a beach, right?

And he still found his father and he said to me, if you're ever fortunate enough to find your father, go straight away. Do not mess about, don't even think about it. even think about it. So I didn't think about it. I just went. And I was met by my two sisters who I can't explain how similar they were to me. And then when I got to see my dad, he was apologetic and, you know, I didn't need any of that. I just said to him, Dad, also well that ends well. You know, just really pleased to be here with you. And we just had a couple of days together. Oh, they were just magical. And they, I can't just, it's very hard to describe such an emotional thing. But the best way I can find to describe it is if I had an empty half where my

heart was before, I now have a blazing fire. So a lot of the anxiety is gone. A lot of that stuff's gone with that. He died shortly afterwards. He died within weeks of me seeing him. I could not have been more welcomed. I could not have been treated with more sincerity or compassion. That was a great moment. Do you think, Mark, that because of your, and I think I know the answer to this question, because it must be the case, and I don't want to answer for you,

but it must be that your early life, you know, growing up with your grandma, your dad, not being part of your life, your grandma dying, and, you know, when you're 12 and falling out with your mom, and then, and we should say you did, you have reconciled and you have a relationship with her today, but, I mean, that must have driven you. All those things must have driven you in some way, right? I mean, how do you think about that?

How do you think about your story, your past and your childhood? I read an article in the Daily Telegraph, the British Daily Telegraph, and this particular, journalist had spent her life interviewing business people and this was her last business interview and she talked of something that she called the entrepreneur's wound and she said all of the really successful people that she had interviewed in business had these similarities where they had a death or a severe divorce or a sibling die something like that in their childhood they had an event now whether that teaches you about mortality and you know you've only got a certain period of time and so

you you get driven through that or whether you're trying to impress someone that perhaps is no longer here or maybe just you know I don't know did I want to impress my dad he didn't he was oblivious so I don't know but if you look at you know Steve Jobs or you look at any of those guys they've got a similar profile I mean the issues create the character. I really believe that very strongly. All of the founders have all got issues. Mark, when you think about all of the things that you've accomplished and achieved, do you think that most of it was because you just got lucky or because you're really smart and had the skills to make it happen? I think we've worked out that I'm not necessarily very smart,

haven't we? I see myself as a technical entrepreneur. I see I have the technical skills and I've made the most of those. I mean, you know, it's always ascribed to Churchill, isn't it, when he said, or we were supposed to say, that success is just stumbling from one mistake to another. One failure to another, yeah. And that, whoever originally said it before he stole it, that anyone out there who's in a business, they know that's how it feels. Do you know, it just depends. Sometimes I have really big challenges, and other times they're just challenges. But there's never a moment when you can really sort of say, wow, I'm great.

And that is pretty much how my interview with Mark ended back in February. But of course, just a few weeks later, everything changed. So a few days ago, I got back in touch. Mark. Yes, hello. How are you? Very good. I'm you.

I'm all right. Talking to you is like reaching back in time to a simpler moment in human history. And Mark told me that in the days just after the pandemic hit, Lush had to shut down lots of its stores and lay off or furlough some of its workers. And then, around the same time, his longtime business. partner, Liz Weir Bennett, passed away from cancer. But Marcus had some time to recover from that. And when I talked to him the other day, he sounded mostly upbeat and said the business has started to bounce back.

Well, first of all, obviously, selling soap in the time of COVID is quite sensible. So while those selling groceries seem to be doing exceptionally well, selling soap isn't so bad. Yeah. My point really is that while you may not go on a cruise and you may not, You may not be able to take the holiday you've always dreamt of. You can always take a bath. So worldwide, remind me, how many stores do you have right now?

Well, it's around 900. And can you estimate how many of them are closed right now? Well, 50 at the maximum close right now. 50? I mean, probably less. Oh, so most of them are back open. Most are back open and most of trading, not at the full level that they were trading before. Some are literally just kiosks where we've opened the door.

We put some sort of barrier in. People come to the staff there who are wearing masks. And then others where there's enough space where they can come in and socially distance while they're shopping. And we had between 200 and 300% increase in our digital business, in our, you know, mail business. And so that was one hell of a sort of swing round. So online sales have really,

boomed, but I'm assuming, like with many retailers, it hasn't fully closed the gap, the shortfall when it comes to overall sales, because I'm assuming. Yes. You're correct to assume that, but we're much more, that area of our businesses more profitable than the retail. So people moving on to the mail order, business is quite a help because we then generate more profit. So it sounds like overall things are okay.

Things are okay for much. Yeah, I think, I mean, for anyone in business listening, one of the things we've tried to do is to break things up into six-week periods because you can't really anticipate what the virus is going to do beyond a six-week period. And so, and then trying to work out within that six-week period, what do we think is going to happen? You know, it's very convenient for us because we obviously go from season to season, and we, so we'll have from now until what we call bonfire night,

which is a British tradition, which is November the 5th. And then we'll go to Christmas with another six-week period. And then we'll go to Valentine's another six-week period. And then it's Easter. And I think that's a good way to approach it, rather than trying to imagine what it's going to be like in a year, two years' time. We can do that. But you're not flexible enough if you do that.

You need to be very dynamic, I think, in these circumstances. Given that you will probably face fall in revenue this year, like many retailers, Yeah. Are you also being very careful with, you know, with how you're spending cash as a business? Yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, what's actually happened is that the bulk of the agony we took in the last financial year, which ended in June, this year just gone. So those figures are going to look pretty dreadful. And then as we've quickly adapted, so this year, this financial year will look a lot more positive and a lot of a lot of. stronger, you know. So we had a loss last year, but we won't have a loss this year. We'll have a reasonable profit. And at first, we used to talk about the new normal, but I've stopped doing that because I think that many of the things that are happening is what we wanted anyway. We wanted less air travel. We wanted less pollution. We wanted people to be more discerning in their

buying. We wanted better supply chains and better thought about the products. All those things are happening. Mark, in the episode we just heard, I mean, you've gone through so many difficult moments. I mean, from your childhood and going through dealing with anxiety and then, you know, selling your business to body shop and then starting a mail order company and then losing it all. I mean, you described you were broke in your 40s. Yeah. Do you think all of those experiences, those low points that you went through actually have helped helped you have the resilience to deal with what you're dealing with now?

Yes, I think so. I think that I think it's for all businesses. I think that vibrancy that you require, that flexibility, the ability to listen carefully and to make the appropriate changes and not be too, well, spoiled is the word, isn't it? I mean, in business we can get spoiled. we can get used to too much luxury. And I mean, for me personally, at the end of my career here,

to have to deal with this, I felt was really, really, really interesting. I'm far more interesting than running at a steady pace, especially when there was so much change we would like to see, you know, about climate change and other things like that. So I find this far more exciting and far more real than I found. when I last spoke to you. Wow. I love that. I love that you said that.

That's an amazing perspective. Well, it's the truth. That's Mark Constantine, co-founder of Lush. By the way, Mark told me that these days, one thing he's doing to chill out and help him sleep is to take hot baths at exactly 4 p.m. every day. He says that, in addition to being super relaxing, it's a great way to test out all of his products.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can write to us at HIVT at npr.org. If you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. And you can follow me on Instagram. That's at guy.org. This episode was produced by James Delahousie with music composed by Remteen Arablui. Thanks also to Dereth Gales, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Neva Grant,

and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Farah Safari. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.