Lianna Albrizio, Assistant Editor11.11.22
One man’s trash is another's treasure.
Sustainable K-beauty brand Krave Beauty brought a pop-up store to the Bowery section of Manhattan for three days earlier this month to alert the store’s 3,000 visitors about the hidden waste aggregating in the beauty industry with a Waste Me Not Campaign.
Sustainable K-beauty brand Krave Beauty brought a pop-up store to the Bowery section of Manhattan for three days earlier this month to alert the store’s 3,000 visitors about the hidden waste aggregating in the beauty industry with a Waste Me Not Campaign.
The campaign was launched following a production mishap that involved the brand placing a bulk order with a contract
Krave Beauty Founder Liah Yoo. After the brand reworked the entire bulk order, adding other ingredients, the result was a more lathery and foamy texture, which felt more like a body wash. In lieu of disposing of the waste, the brand practiced a little alchemy and packaged the originally fruitless cleanser, a $1.5 million snafu with a 1200-gallon botched batch, as a Matcha Hemp Body Wash.
manufacturing partner for cult-favorite Matcha Hemp Hydrating Cleanser to create a year-long supply. The move was prompted by the global supply chain crisis earlier this year. But production went awry and the cleanser’s texture suffered, recalled
“We started doing this campaign just because we were seeing so much wastefulness throughout the entire product development process,” explained Yoo. “A lot of the times when people think about the waste in the beauty industry, they immediately think about packaging, but what they don’t see [is what happens] before it hits the shelf.”
According to Krave Beauty’s estimates, between 20 and 40% of beauty products end up in the waste stream when one includes everything from pilot production to test packaging, and damaged labels to formula testers.
The Matcha Hemp Hydrating Cleanser is a gentle, non-stripping face wash packed with humectants like vitamin B5. Matcha is an antioxidant with purifying properties while hempseed oil, a fatty acid, works to remove oil in the acne-prone consumer. The cleanser helps clear skin, thus improving a compromised skin barrier as a result of inflammation or other products that may over-dry problem skin.
A Minimalist Approach to Skincare with Sustainability at the Helm
The brand’s newest product, Make Up Re-Wined, is made with upcycled grapeseed oil. The fragrance-free jelly oil cleanser is designed to make tedious makeup removal fun and effortless. The formula is said to gently lift and wipe away makeup, sunscreen and impurities without a greasy after-feel. Samples of Make Up Re-Winded were included in a Waste Me Not Kit, which also included the Matcha Hemp Body Wash and Great Barrier Relief, which were packaged in restaurant takeout boxes.
Sustainability is indeed a fast-growing trend in the beauty industry. According to a global survey conducted earlier this year by IBM Institute for Business Value, which polled 16,000 consumers, more than half of respondents said environmental sustainability is more important to them now than it was a year ago. What’s more, half of consumers said they paid a premium—an average of 59% more—for products branded as sustainable or socially responsible in the past year.
Big names in the beauty business are helping spread the word. According to Yoo, the brand’s campaign snagged high-profile attention from celebrities including podcaster Bowen Yang and model/entrepreneur Hailey Bieber, who this month posted Krave Beauty’s Waste Me Not campaign to her Instagram story visible for 24 hours for her 49 million followers.