 Helo, Llyfridog. Mae'n gwybod o'r wneud! Felly, dyma'r ysgol fyddwn gwneud o'r rhaglau arall, felly ddau'n gwybod, rhai'r Brexit. Mae'n ffrindio'n ddau'n gwybod o'r Lush, ond rwy'n gweithio'n ddau'n gweithio. Fy enw i'r cwestiynau'r gweithio i ddim yn ddim yn ddim yn ddim yn ddim yn ddau'n gweithio, ti'n ddim yn ddau'n gweithio i ddim yn ddau i ddim yn ddeg yn ddeg yn ddeg maes y cyfnodion yw'r cyfnod yma. Mae'n gwych yn yr ystod yn gwych ar hyn, ond mae gennym yn fydd yn ymddangos, mae'n gwych yn fydd yn fwy oedd. Mae'n gwych yn fydd wedi'u fyddiol o hynny o grannu cyfnod yn fydd. Mae'n iawn i'r ffynau yma sy'n gweithio'r cymhwys yma sy'n gweithio'r cyfnod yn y cyfnodion gyfnod o bwysig o'r cyfnod y maen nhw ac mae'n amser o'i gydag exciting in think what's the rest of it then. I think like that about people calling us ethical. God knows what the rest is like, because we struggle. Everyone else must be in the Maya. I was asked to talk a little bit about how the company started. Lush started in 1995 with one little tiny shop in Publ endorse it and we now have I think about 1,000 shops were in 49 countries, so a global business in 21 years, actually we became global in year two but by accident more than design. So I guess the, I'll say we when I'm talking about this but don't think that means I did it. I was lucky enough to get a job with Lash in the first month of their existence when they sort of thought they needed three or four staff to help them do this, I happen to rack along needing a job. So when I say we I mean they, I just like to take a bit of the credit. So I guess the five people, the founders of Lush started the company in 1995 but to explain it I really need to go back a bit further, quite a bit further, they're old. To I guess the kind of mid to late 1970s where Mark Constantine, one of the Lush owners, trained after leaving school he was training to be a tricologist. They don't really exist much anymore tricologists but they were often based in hairdressers, sometimes had separate salons, it was to do with scalp diseases so he was taught to identify, recognise and treat scalp diseases and part of that was making the products and the lotions and the creams and the shampoos yourself in those days to do that. So that's where his basic knowledge of products came from and then he was based in a very big salon doing that job after he'd qualified and he instantly became really concerned about the products that he was using on people's hair in those salons. It was the 1970s and we'd had the white heat of technology that governments were talking about so everyone was looking to science for answers and everything was getting chemically and sort of moving away from nature and he's a bit of a hippie. So he was incredibly concerned that the stuff that he was putting or that he was seeing being put on people's scalps, the perming lotions, the colours, those kind of things, even the shampoos in those days were quite harsh and were causing a lot of the problems he saw. So he started his own business very early and started making his own products and he started teaching himself all the more about herbs and essential oils and all the nice things in nature and they opened their own little beauty salon on him and he talked to one of the other girls that was working into giving up her steady job and taking a risk with him and they bought this or they rented a tiny little shop which we're still operating out of today in Poole and Dorset on the Key and they started a business called the Herbal Hair and Beauty Clinic and Liz did all the facials, Mark did all the hairdressing and he made all the products. And then I guess the next bit of the story is that Mark was reading a magazine one day and read an article about a lady who started a shop and she was just opening her second shop and she was concerned about the ingredients in products and she was getting the bottles, customers could bring stuff back and refill and he thought it sort of sounded a bit like him and Liz. So he tracked her down and went to see her and said look here's a bunch of stuff I make you might like to sell it in your shop and she liked it and she ordered some. I think she ordered about £300 worth and Mark tells the story that he got on the train after the meeting and he was on the train home thinking oh shit how am I going to make £400 worth of stuff he'd only ever done enough for him and Liz to last a few days. And apparently when he got to know the lady she said to him that as he was going away she was thinking shit where am I going to find £300 from to pay this guy for this stuff I've just recklessly ordered. But anyway she found the money he managed to make the stuff in the spare bedroom at home and a business relationship started that went on for about the next 15 years where he made and supplied products for her fast expanding chain of shops and that chain of shops was the body shop which went global as you know and was probably the biggest retail store in British history in our generation. So you can imagine from that tiny beginning to supplying the body shop was very big. As I said they probably supplied about 50% of what we all know on the shelves from those hey days and that relationship went on for a long time. It ended I guess when in the years running up to the body shop being floated they were having auditors in and advice coming in and part of the advice they got was that it was very dangerous for a company in their size and state to rely on one supplier for the invention and manufacture of their products for such a large part of their range. So at that stage the business and Anita did a deal and she bought the formulas off them and built a factory and started making the products herself and put in R&D and started inventing their own products. So the two companies went their own ways amicably. At that stage the old team that they had gathered around themselves since that early days with the body shop had got obviously rather larger decided to do their own brand but part of the deal with the body shop there was a restraint of trade that in that deal and buying the formulas they said that and had signed up to an agreement that they wouldn't open shops because obviously body shop don't want their supplier to go out in competition with them. So there was a restraint of trade for I think it was five years or so maybe ten years now I think it was five. So they started their own business and it was an amazing business they were able to put a lot of the products that had been rejected by body shop and had nowhere to go. They do the creation and body shop would choose what suited their range but obviously that means you invent a lot of stuff that has nowhere to go and suddenly that had somewhere to go in the new business which was called Cosmetics to Go which was just a paper mail order business in pre-internet days. It was a little catalogue that went out to people's letter boxes and they wrote you a check and a little list of what they wanted back. And that's an incredibly difficult business to grow and it went the way that so many businesses go it went bankrupt quite quickly. I think it was only about three years for the money to go and for the company to go completely bust and everyone lost everything. So those were tough times but what they had was a whole career of working for themselves and doing things the way they wanted to do it and having very strong opinions. What I should have also told you is that the owners of Lush Mark and his wife Mo were also environmental campaigners. They were activists in their teens, told you they were hippies so that's pretty obvious. They were taking part in sit down protests and that kind of thing. So they had those very strong concerns about the world and they built a business kind of expressing that through their products. So it was difficult when they went bankrupt to kind of think where do we go next. And I guess the only thing to do was to start another business but it was so difficult and for those of us that were joining them at that stage, right in the middle of the bankruptcy I came in. There was no money, there was no help, banks didn't want to touch them, there was no loans, we couldn't buy ingredients without paying up front because obviously all the cosmetic suppliers, the ingredient suppliers all knew they'd gone bust so no one trusted an order, a normal business order from them, everything was difficult. They didn't take any pay themselves, they could barely pay those of us that were the three or four of us that were working for them. So tough times to get a business off the ground. And sort of coming along at that time I thought I was just doing a little job making soap and originally I was making the soap and pressing the bath bombs. And I guess having seen the body shop and worked through that there was no way that they were going to build a little business and keep it in the shed. It was literally in the shed in the garden and this tiny shop in pool that we were making products out of the shed. So they had a vision but were very fearful and very damaged from the bankruptcy, lost a lot of confidence but really wanted to build it back up. But alongside wanting to build it back up they didn't want to, I think for the first time ever with the restraint of trade was just almost coming to an end. And without having to be restricted by only mail order or restricted by making products for someone else's vision of their brand. If they were going to start lush again from a bankruptcy and it was a very fearful step and I used to see the fear in their eyes every day when I went into work. If they were going to do that it had to be something that they believed in fully, that fully encapsulated everything that they wanted to do, all of their future wishes and hopes. Everything they wanted to do as a business and everything they wanted to have in their products that made them proud of their business. Because you're not proud of going bankrupt and everyone losing their jobs and people losing their cars and homes off the back of it which is what happened. So they wrote a we believe statement on the first day when they sat there and decided the five of them to open back up and try again. And they kind of run the company by that ever since. But certainly the products had to, we talk about, sometimes we ask each other are you able to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror in the morning at the moment. Because I think that's kind of, there wasn't a big strategy and there isn't a load of written stuff at lush. It's about us feeling comfortable with the business and comfortable with ourselves within that business and proud of the product. And I think if you're proud of your product you can talk about it enthusiastically and then everything else falls into place. The customer's going to love it because you've poured everything into it. The staff are going to feel happy making it and selling it to customers. So there's no inhibition about our product. We love it, we trust it, we believe in it and that's why the company's grown. We've never advertised, people are always shocked and often don't believe us when we say that we've never advertised and we've never had a marketing department. We always believe that if we made a good product people would buy it and they'd tell their friends and family and that is exactly what's happened. So the company has always been interested in fair trade, it's always been vegetarian, it's always hated animal testing from the start of Mark's career. He told Anita that his products weren't tested and they never would be and she should look at our other suppliers so that's where that all started. So all of those values are in there, they're all so intrinsic but then that sort of flows through to everything else. So the hiring of people I was also asked to bring into this was also something that Lush has never until recently actually, we've never had job titles and never hired for qualifications. People have come along and if they're enthusiastic they get taken into the company, it's about attitude and enthusiasm and later as people got to know the product about belief in the product it's great to have that in the staff when they come in. And no job titles, no job roles, no sort of contracts and job descriptions and things that tie you in to this tiny little box. People have been able to come in and sort of create their own roles by seeing things they think the company should do and just getting on and doing them. We are noticing that the new generation like job titles, I personally blame LinkedIn, I really do. I think people struggle to know how to describe themselves on it so we are suddenly finding there are quite specific job roles creeping in. People are writing them for themselves so fair do's but it's all a bit odd. So that was all part of the growth of Lush was this kind of loose bunch of people who came together because we all kind of believed in what we were doing and enjoyed it and we have a great deal of fun at Lush. We take the product seriously but not ourselves and I think that also comes through and hopefully you'll see that in the pictures behind as well that it's a great deal of fun on a day to day basis. As we got bigger they tried to buy us up. The bigger companies start, it's like having vultures coming around at a certain stage but part of how Lush has been able to keep itself on track doing the things we want to do is to not have outside shareholders dictating to us about how we make money and where we make the money. We can flash our cash wherever we want, we can buy expensive ingredients and over the years as we've got bigger we find that the values don't decrease, they increase because we have more money to carry out our beliefs. So we've gone from fair trade to working with our growers to do permaculture and then permaculture wasn't enough, we wanted to move into regeneration. So we're talking about making sure that the land where people are growing things is becoming more fertile, it's starting to grow a greater amount of things, giving more security to those communities. So those kind of things are progressing much more with Lush in the animal testing we're starting to, we give away a quarter of a million in prize money every year to the people inventing alternatives to animal tests. I think and another thing that we did is you know you kind of get to a stage where you look around you think oh my god you know did we really just build all that. Suddenly we had this huge huge company that we'd somehow you know we'd been beavering away and throwing ourselves into it and it had grown to this massive thing. And at that stage you turn around and think okay we've got these resources when we were activists when we were younger we'd have dreamt of this. These high street shops on the busiest streets in the world, we're right across the world. So at a certain stage in our history we turned those resources over to the activists and said what would you like in our windows if we gave the window to you for two weeks what would you like in there. If we could make a product who would you like us to give the money to. And we've been able to control that as well because it's not a marketing exercise we don't talk about it so we can make sure that the money goes to grassroots activists. It doesn't have to be some all singing all dancing thing that you know sort of we don't have to stick with big NGOs and big charities because we want to please our customer base and be bland and inoffensive. We simply don't care if we believe in it we'll fund it. So our money has been able to go to entirely different it's a different process. It gets us into trouble so often the things that we fund are quite controversial and we stumble along from one social media crisis to the next it was last week it was the Chinese had noticed that we were funding a lot of Tibetan freedom groups. So we had some millions and millions of hits on Weibo slagging us off the week before that we wouldn't put a Christian poster on one of our notice boards in one of our shops so we have constant little battles to fight to keep on track so that we can keep supporting the things that we really care about. And I think I've run out of time probably. Do you want me to wrap up? One more one more thing. If I could say one more thing it would be that I was talking to a group of students a few weeks ago on World Peace Day and they asked me to challenge them with something at the end of my speech. So I kind of pointed out and I've been thinking about it a lot since it was a spontaneous comment that we all worry about politics and who's going to be in power and who's going to be making the decisions. But when you think about it we give about a quarter of our wages to politicians to make their policies and do their do their thing with the other three quarters of the money the hard earned money that we all have goes to companies. And they spend that money shaping the world in much more fundamental ways than the government do. The governments I think are kind of like a port authority. They control when the boats dock but those businesses are out there sailing those oceans uncharted so what they're doing out there is hidden away from view. How they trade you know they can crap all over the environment they can they can oppress and abuse minorities and they can they can use underdeveloped parts of the world to produce ingredients for us in a very unethical way. And I think that it's up to all of us to start thinking about those three quarters of our wages and holding them to account in the same way that we hold our politicians to account and then we can see some change.