Case Study: Lush

Lush is a brand that is known predominantly for their good ethical concerns and practice in their products. Their practice is to be honest, supports fair trade, cruelty-free, gender-neutral, sustainable and use fresh products.

Lush actively campaign and protest against ethical issues, sometimes controversially. One campaign against animal testing involved displaying naked volunteers in an existing popular Lush shop window and showed what happens to animals during testing.

As my Critical Writing piece focuses on gender-neutral packaging, I had emailed to ask more about their ethics concerning their packaging. The simplicity and monotone of their packaging appears to be and/or support gender-neutrality as it does not conform to gender stereotypes.

Their response was:

'At Lush our packaging is gender neutral as all of our products are gender neutral, none of them are targeted specifically to men or women or certain demographics. Certain products may be slightly more useful for people of one gender than another but they are there for everyone to use. So no this is not to conform with social issues (although we are glad to see that other companies are finally starting to recognise this as a current social issue). This is something that has been one of our policies since the company was founded. So they are a result of the ethics behind the brand yes, as we believe everyone (no matter of gender, race, culture etc.) should be able to use our products.

So every year at Lush we partner with/run various campaigns to tackle ethical issues across the globe. So currently we have partnered with Humane Society International to tackle the use of real fur in the clothing industry that is incorrectly labelled as fake fur. As this is quite a topical issue that we want to clamp down on. We also link some of our products with fighting ethical issues, for example with our Charity Pot body lotion, all of the proceeds from this go to small grassroot organisations across the world. Then our 'New' shampoo bar has a set of hashtags on that we use to in online petitions to get involved with the conversation of being 'Cruelty Free'. See more about some of our campaigns below: 

https://uk.lush.com/tag/campaigns.'

In-store research

Apart from Lush's limited Christmas collection packaging, all of their in-store labels, packaging and 

products are gender-neutral. They use simplistic, monochrome, standard packaging to promote and display their products.