Podcast 81: Can the beauty industry ever be transparent?

Beauty is a half-a-trillion-dollar global industry, but beauty brands are only now starting to take part in the sustainability conversation. Largely, this is in response to greater consumer demands for transparency in how beauty does business all the way from its supply chains to the truth behind its claims.

We’ve seen this play out on this podcast. Over the past year, sustainability has featured in just about all our episodes in some form. We have covered topics such as circular, net zero, zero waste and climate neutral beauty along with the issues like biodegrability, sustainable retail and skinimalism.

But, there are plenty of brands, from multinationals to indie beauty, who are are out there using sustainability terms as a veneer; green-washing us in other words. How do we as beauty consumers verify the truth of a beauty brand’s claim that their packaging is made of recycled materials? Or that they’ve offset their last year’s carbon emissions? None of us can hold every single beauty brand to account on every single impact.

One ambitious entrepreneur is on a mission to change that by encouraging the beauty industry, as well as many other industries, to verify their claims and turn positive social and environmental impact into brand value; a win-win for brands and consumers. In this episode, Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier talks to Jessi Baker, MBE, the founder and CEO of provenance.org; a software solution house verifying sustainability claims to help empower shoppers make sustainable, ethical choices at the point of purchase.

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The dawn of transparency in the beauty industry? @FormulaBotanica podcast hears from @JessiBaker @ProvenanceHQ, the tech solution verifying beauty brands' sustainability claims. #blockchain #sustainablebeauty #greenwashing Click To Tweet

In this episode on transparency in the beauty industry, you will:

• Find out why consumer demand for greater transparency from beauty brands is arriving firmly on the beauty industry’s agenda now.
• Hear how Jessi’s mission was born of a personal frustration, as a manufacturing and software engineer, at seeing consumers facing a wall of silence from brands when it came to transparency about their business, product and supply-chain claims.
• Understand how blockchain technology provides the ideal platform to back consumer trust in brands. Provenance uses blockchain to notorise claims to issue digital ‘proof points’ that brands can use to good effect in their marketing.
• Why the Provenance.org model is signalling the end of brands largely writing their own sustainability stories, and how the era of digital proof is helping to update advertising standards legislation.

 

Key takeouts for indie beauty wanting to use Provenance to verify their own claims:

• Provenance provides the missing link – the credible, independent voice – that shoppers are demanding from brands. In this way, it can help ethically-minded beauty brands to be more transparent and build customer trust and loyalty in the age of sustainability.
• As an indie brand, you can use the Provenance ‘open framework’ – in effect, a list of claims they can authenticate – to plan a step-by-step approach to managing your brand’s drive for sustainability.
• Indie brands can start with the less complex claims to gain Provenance’s digital proof points, such as its female-founder-led or artisanal business categories.
• Provenance helps brands gather the digital data from all sorts of sources, from supply chains to well-known certification schemes like COSMOS Organic or the Vegan Society to collate and be authenticated on their system.

 

Meet our podcast guest

Jessi Baker, MBE, is the founder and CEO of provenance.org, the software solution for sustainability communications with proof. Provenance works with brands to be transparent about their impact, empowering shoppers to drive progress through purchase power. As a social enterprise and B Corp backed by impact investors, Provenance exists to make commerce a force for good.

Provenance is now working with businesses in the UK and across global supply chains, including The Princes Group, Pernod Ricard, Fonterra, The Co-op and Unilever, along with NGOs and certification bodies across the FMCG space.

Jessi has a Master’s in Engineering (Cambridge University) and Design (Royal College of Art) and founded Provenance while doing a Ph.D in Computer Science (UCL). She is an associate researcher at the Intel Institute for Sustainable Cities and a regular Forbes contributor.

Find out more about Provenance:
Website: provenance.org
View their open, free framework of claims, credentials and certified schemes that can be authenticated on the Provenance platform:
Jessi Baker on Linkedin.
Twitter: @ProvenanceHQ
Instagram: Provenance HQ

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Green Beauty Opinion – Podcast 82: The beauty industry has a problem with transparency

Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier shares her opinions on the episode interviewing Jessi Baker of Provenance, a software solution helping brands verify claims and communicate with transparency. Eradicating greenwashing requires us to ask beauty brands about their commitment to recycling, waste, the climate, their social footprint and about far more than ingredients. Lorraine challenges us to think about what is important to us in the beauty we buy. Listen in for a thought-provoking five minutes.

Listen to Lorraine’s Green Beauty Opinion:

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Formula Botanica Green Beauty Conversations podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share, subscribe and review this episode on iTunes, Spotify or Youtube so that more people can enjoy the show. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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