Jack Constantine (LUSH) on The future of retail: What Amazon can’t do | #TNW2019

Through our frustrations, we've actually found ourselves building our own technology in-house. You can't abuse the trust. If we don't start thinking like a tech company, we're gonna fall and crash and burn. And you need to get in there, get involved, get your hands dirty, and understand for yourself what's going on. Stop pretending that it's all okay and someone else is sorting it out. They're not. Get in there and make things happen.

Saying make things happen — so I thought I better actually kick off and tell you we've been making things happen, practice what I preach. So yeah, I'm Jack Constantine, I'm from Lush, and I'm going to talk through a few things that we've been up to at Lush to hopefully give you a bit of an idea as to what can happen in the world of technology, especially with the great theme for this year's Next Web, which is Tech for Better or Worse — and The Heart of Tech. And there's some interesting questions in there. So since the last time I was here, we've been building an app. It's the Lush Labs app, you can download it on iOS and Android, and what you get is a scanning tool for scanning unpackaged products using the camera in your phone. And with that, you can find out product information about the product — the ingredients, the materials used for it, and any other product information — to ideally replace packaging. So effectively, we already work on packaging-free products, and now we're developing a tool that can provide information for customers without having to have a label on that product. We launched this in Harajuku in Tokyo, November last year, in our first ever standalone bath bomb shop. We came up with the idea in August. We were already working on this Lush Lens app, which we'd worked on the concepts, and we wanted to introduce it here. We created fifty-four new bath bombs for the shop, and we opened the doors to a signage-free shop. So there's no way of understanding what the products are unless you scan a product with the phone. No sinks to put the bath bombs in — we're trying to look at water consumption. And we've built this bridge between the digital world and the retail world. It was crazy. Before we opened the doors in that shop, I was very nervous. We're expecting customers to come in and understand that when they walk in this shop, we're not going to tell them anything — they're going to need to use a phone to understand what the information is. There are staff, there are people you can talk to, and obviously that's a huge part of Lush. Everything we do is not about replacing people with technology; it's about how technology can support and aid people. We then went on to open the world's largest Lush shop, that's in Liverpool, and it spans over four floors. That is powered by our own till system that we built called Lush Pay. We built that in-house and it's powering the entire UK retail business right now. We took over seventy million pounds over Christmas, and we had a huge amount of transactions going through. So it's just been a massive push to get our own technology in place, where we've been looking at using open-source tools, we're looking at data and privacy, and we're looking at the ethical hardware that goes into these projects. Liverpool is an amazing experiential shop. If people want to know what retail can look like on the high street, this is it. We're investing in the high street, and customers love it. They want to go somewhere exciting and dynamic and interesting. Retail is only dying and dead because retailers are not thinking about what customers want when they turn up. This is a great example of what can be done. We've got hairdressing salons in there, we've got great experiences — you can see the crowds coming through the door. So it's been an exciting time for us. Then we made an announcement which kicked off. We started talking about social media and we put an announcement out saying that we were going to switch up our social. In the UK, we were going to shut down our main brand channels and start focusing more on people. We got some interesting reactions, slightly sensationalized by the press. My favourite is 'Lush is the new anti-social gang.' Stamped of good reason. Yes, so there was some interesting reactions to that, a few tweets on the way. Interesting. So not everyone was impressed by what we did. But I like this one: 'If all the brands could f*** off Instagram like Lush, maybe someone other than my mum might see my latest posts.' I imagine a meeting of ten old men. I mean, I'm old, I don't think I'm bad, but this is just an epic business fail. I think it's progressive, but also boozy — thank you. We did get a lot of comments on that perspective around Lush being quite bold in the movement that we did. From my perspective, the reason that we did it was that we were looking at statistics that were telling us that we were reaching less than six percent of the 1.5 million people following us, because we weren't paying. We've never paid for advertising — it's never been the way that Lush has grown. Lush has been community-based and will continue to be community-based, before social and after social. And actually, our customers do a hell of a lot better storytelling than we do when it comes to telling people what our products are like. I think the reality is that people want to hear from real people. So get out of the way and let them tell each other what they like or what they don't like.

That was our announcement at the end of doing the social switch-up, just to highlight and reiterate how much we care about community. And what you'll see there is a lot of people — humans — interacting, really connecting, being in locations, whether that's a shop, whether that's a protest, whether it's an event, whether we're all here together. And that's what I think people have lost a little bit in this whole world of digital and social — they're losing the connection with real people. That's what we're about and that's what we're going to continue to be about. And now we're here. We brought with us the Lush Labs concept, which we opened in Harajuku and now we're touring as a couple of shipping containers that have the concept shop inside them. It's just at the entrance — if you haven't seen it, get over there, go and have a little go at scanning products, buy some bath bombs. All the proceeds from this shop are going to Bits of Freedom, which is an NGO in Holland that is looking at digital rights. So please go buy a bath bomb and contribute to supporting some digital rights. We're here, we've got our Lush-eze out and about, go say hello. And these are the people who make the technology back-of-house, back in our head offices, that is driving our business. These are our in-house crew who are working on building the websites, building the apps for the shops and the tools, building all the different technology and features, including starting to explore looking at our own ethical tablet that we can have as a piece of hardware in our shops. So we've introduced the software into our shops, and we actually want to back that up with a new ethical tablet that could actually be something we can rely on and trust as a business and a brand — that we know what materials have gone in there, we know that it's conflict-free, we can recycle it or we can repair it. We're getting our first prototype for that within the next couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to seeing that, and hopefully we might see it in shops over the next year.

Just to reiterate, this is kind of everything that Lush is about. This is the factory, this is us making products by hand with fresh, handmade ethics. We've always been about people. There are shots in here of people in the lab making products, you've got the factory, you've got everything around what really drives us — right through to the fields we're buying our crops from, from the fact that we've got these relationships and communities all the way through the business chain. We invent and create our own products, we manufacture them, and we sell them. And every single touch point, there are people and communities and individuals, and we're working with those people every day. Those people are behind the scenes to everything that can often come across as polished, branded, faceless to other people — especially in a world where brands are plugging their products in whatever way that is. I just really want to reiterate that there are a lot of people working hard to make these great things that everyone gets to enjoy. And this is going back to how long we've been doing it — this isn't new to Lush. This is my parents. This is my dad, and my mum was in the previous shot. Basically, they founded the company with their friends, and this has been going a long time. There's this idea of innovating, creating new ideas — then, if you spotted, but the shampoo bar was in there. That was invented in 1988. That new innovation that everyone's talking about last year — so these things, they're not new. This is the way that we've been running our business for a long time. And it's really what I've been trying to bring into Lush, which is thinking about technology, thinking about digital and what we can be doing in that field, with the same mentality that we approach our product development with. And that's what Amazon can't do. They can't really do human. They can't really do people. They've lost touch of what that was. Jeff Bezos sat at that first desk that was made of a door with spray-painted Amazon on his wall — that is not the Amazon you see now. And if you're wondering how can we compete, one thing Amazon also can't do: they can't sell our products, because we won't let them. You can do that too. You don't have to Amazon and sell your stuff. And the other thing I want to say in context — the cosmetics industry is a 300 billion pound industry. Lush is a 1 billion pound company, which, you know, we're crumbs off the table. You could look at the size of that industry, but that's enough for us to grow, for us to be successful, for us to make a profit and have a good business. Don't be intimidated just because there are giants out there. What they can't do is be flexible, agile, and move through and do things quickly — and that's what we can do.

And with that, from the heart of tech, comes the statement that has been born from Lush from the beginning. We have a belief statement that the founders wrote very early on, and one of the lines is: 'We believe in the right to make mistakes, lose everything, and start again.' And the reason is — they did. They had a company, the company went bust, everyone lost their jobs, and my parents and a few key people got back together, they pulled together what they had, and they started Lush. And you have to be able to accept those mistakes as a part of where you can move forward, because if they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have Lush, we wouldn't have what we have now. So this statement is so true in terms of progress. You have to be able to start getting more confident in making mistakes, even if there's a risk of losing everything and starting again, because you will learn so much in that journey. Take control. It's something that we've stolen from Bits of Freedom, the charity that we're working with. They're focused on the abilities to be able to take control of your privacy and your data as a user. And I want to use this statement in a way for anyone who's working in a company or a business who wants to make an excuse why they can't do what I'm describing. And I know you're all gonna be — there's gonna be people here — 'It's all right for you, it's Lush, privately owned, you can do this, you can do that.' Take control. Come out of here and go and talk to your bosses about how you can improve things, what you could be doing. I think there's too much at the moment where we're looking at data and we're letting all these other things decide for us what we're going to do. We took control of the situation on social media — it wasn't working for us in the format that we wanted it to be, so we decided to make a change. Anyone can do that. And with that, we gave control back to our communities. We were actually shouting too much, and we needed to just slow down, let the communities have their say, and give control back to people. It sounds scary, and I know a lot of people will be thinking — I've had a lot of comments back to me about, 'Well, how can you control your brand? You can't.' Stop trying to. If you really trust in your brand, if you make good products, then you don't need to worry, because actually the community will do it for you. Which is another point: make products with purpose. If you're making products with purpose, your brand building, your storytelling, everything else around it will follow. Because if you've got something there that's actually going to have a reason, people will talk about that, they understand that there's a reason. And question if your purpose is actually right. If you set up a company and your purpose is your exit strategy, I'm not sure it's the right thing you should be doing. You might need to think about whether you're actually contributing to the world in a bigger way than what you're personally going to get out of that situation. And focus on listening more and talking less — I say, from a stage, talking to everyone. I hope you're hearing me. But I think one of the biggest things is that the mistakes at the moment that people are making is that they're listening to data but they're not actually just listening to people. And I think there's a lot more of that that could be going on. Go out there, listen to your customers. One of my favorite things about opening the Harajuku shop and having this digital retail experience is that normally when you're working in digital, when you're working on these projects and delivering products, the user is someone you don't see. They're at the other end, they're somewhere in their bedroom, wherever they are, they're on a computer, they're on the phone — you don't see them, you don't watch them interact with your products. Having the ability to have this retail experience where someone can go in your shop and you can just watch them and listen and learn and see how it's going — it's just so exciting, because you can take that feedback and improve your products with that. Stop chasing likes. Stop looking at this mentality around reach and this obsession with trying to spread as far as you can as quick as you can. Focus more on the passions, focus more on interests, focus more — and again, if you have a product and purpose, you're going to hit people's passions and they're gonna start talking for you. And I kind of want to end on this mentality that hopefully you've seen throughout the whole presentation. Really, people are at the heart of tech. When we're talking about The Heart of Tech and TNW and everything — you are all people who all have some influence or impact on what tech does. Tech does not make decisions. Technology is not making its own decisions. We are using it and making decisions with it. If you choose to make decisions that are actually not going to create a better world or to do something beneficial, then that's your choice as a person. And if we forget about the people that are in this industry or throughout the whole process around technology and what it's driving, you can't just expect people to build products for you because you've got a set of requirements and you're not listening to them. We need to be very aware of the fact that there are people throughout this whole process who can make decisions, and they can decide where the tech could be — for better or for worse. And we've got a journey ahead of us that's going to include some pretty big milestones around being able to make sure that we look after the planet, whilst having successful businesses, whilst being able to create ventures that feel exciting, that feel dynamic. And I think everyone in the room should be thinking about what they're doing to contribute to making things better or making things worse. Thank you.