Our Story

From the very first idea in 2017 we have been on a soapy journey to create fantastic alternatives to plastic bottled shower gels.

If you look on any social media platform you can be made to feel pretty guilty about your life and what you are doing to make the world a better place. For every eco-friendly choice there will certainly be a strong opinion that by choosing that product you are doing something wrong. 

Our eureka moment for Shower Bar & Shower PUK was not ultimately driven by sustainability, it was convenience & the ease of travel. Soap use comes with large elements of the keystones of sustainability built in and as our project developed so did our awareness and desire to make the difference. 

Call it sustainability with a sense of realism.

We have a simple strategy where the environment is concerned; less is more. 

PLASTIC 

Single use plastics are a huge problem. But many are targeting plastic itself, not how we use it. We know that plastic has many great uses and where its properties are applied to give a product a lasting function then what’s not to like. Its clean, safe, hardwearing and long lasting. 

When it comes to single use plastics all the properties above still apply but often the plastic is required for just a few hours then it is discarded. 

Imagine your family kept every plastic item from your bathroom for a year - Every wrapper, bottle, tube and brush. 

With tooth brushes, moisturiser, toothpaste, shower gel, deodorant, make up, hair products, shampoo, conditioner, medication, mouthwash and all of the other bits we buy you could be looking at 300+ containers for a family of four in a year. You can easily see how your street could fill skips worth of plastic waste in a very short time. 

Depending on where you get your figures estimates of shower gel bottles sent to landfill range from 60-120million a year in the uk with about half being recycled.

With the Shower Bar and Shower PUK ranges you can remove the gel and shampoo bottles from your bathroom.

Our packaging is either paper or card and always recyclable - in the case of Complet the box is the most basic cardboard we could get away with. 

We do use recyclable plastics in our original travel case and the PUK case but about 1gm of it in the former and 20gm in the latter. This case will last you many years - putting the properties of plastic to good use. We do also have a fabric only travel case, just incase!

Plastics will always have a use but it we can avoid using them with they are simply not required then happy days - less is more! 

PALM OIL

Palm Oil has had a very bad few years in the media, and in some cases for very good reason. Huge consumer demand of any product always results in corners being cut and people exploiting land, other people and the environment to make money. 

The Palm oil problem is not limited to cosmetics either, 90% of all palm oil goes into food production. Palm also has the highest production of any vegetable oil:

Consumption of Vegetable Oils 2020/21 crop year (million metric tonnes)

Palm 75.45

Soybean 59.48

Rapeseed 27.64

Sunflower 19.02

Palm Kernel 8.51

Peanut  6.17

Cottonseed 4.89

Coconut 3.67

Olive 3.1

As a result palm oil production has been attributed to a lot of deforestation and the loss of wildlife habitats.

We do use palm oil in our products - We only use RSPO palm oil.

The RSPO - Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil. https://www.rspo.org

The RSPO works to ensure a global standard for the production of palm oil. It assesses the production and distribution around the globe.

From creating palm oil farms that have caused no deforestation to ensuring every aspect of the production and labour is monitored to create a circular economy it certifies the producers, manufacturer and all in the production of pam oil is sustainable. 

We feel, the WWF who helped to form the RSPO that being part of the solution is by far better than being part of the problem and so by using only RPSO palm we hope to be contributing to the wider issue of making our production of raw materials more transparent. 

OTHER FACTORS WITH PALM

Other key parts of the decision to use plan include; Suitability, Yield, Consideration of alternatives ad cost.

Suitability:

Palm is excellent for making soap. It produces a strong hard bar of soap that lasts longer. Less is more!

Yield: 

Per hectare palm produces more oil than any other alternative, any other vegetable oil for that matter.

For example the main alternatives featured in soaps as the main production oil are olive and coconut:

Olive per hectare 1212

Coconut per hectare 2689

Palm per hectare 5950

So coconut oils requires more than double the land, olive oil requires nearly 5 times the land to produce the same quantity of oil. 

Palm accounts for 35% of all vegetable oils produced using less than 10% of the land allocated to oil crops. This figure is firmly a positive for palm but of course where you can grow crops also matters. Warm climates are required for palm production but they are also required for the alternatives so growing palm in large flat farmlands in the UK is not an option just as we cannot grow coconut or olive in any commercial quantity. 

So in terms of yield - less is again more!

Consideration of alternative:

As mentioned Olive and Coconut are the main alternatives we considered owing to their suitability. As part of our ultimate plan is scaled production you have to consider the effect of more and more people choosing these oils as ‘eco friendly’ alternatives. Moving more and more production to olive and coconut oils required more land to be cleared, more habitats to be destroyed and while there are bodies looking at sustainability in the production of these crops the simple maths of the land required to product the yield means more land will need to be cleared. 

Cost:

All consumers consider cost. Any business needs to consider cost. Palm oil is cheaper, the premium that comes with using RSPO is minimal for the benefits it gives us in terms of sustainability goals.

The more affordable the alternative product the more people are likely to use it. 

As Shower Bar & Shower PUK last a long time (see our how to use section) the cost per use is comparable with most middle end shower gels.