Everist, a Toronto-based beauty brand that launched a line of just-add-water concentrated shampoos, conditioners and body washes in 2021, is taking on the big beauty industry’s wasteful habits and entrenched consumer behavior. After being named one of the environmental leaders on the 2022 New Innovators List, co-founders Jayme Jenkins and Jessica Stevenson spoke with canadian business about how they are convincing mainstream buyers to try their sustainable products.
Both are veterans of the business world. What inspired the journey to start a business together?
Jayme Jenkins: Jessica and I have been friends for a long time. We went to business school together and after school we both found our way into the beauty industry. I worked for about a decade at L’Oréal and more recently at The Body Shop. And Jessica’s background is from the professional hair care side at Revlon and, more recently, at Nude by Nature, a clean makeup brand from Australia.
We love beauty. We really love the products and understand how that industry works. And a couple of years ago, we started to see a shift in consumer awareness of the plastic waste crisis, and we also started to notice how much the beauty industry contributes to that crisis. We started talking about what we could do to solve this problem. What would a beauty business look like without single-use plastic? How would you do that? Everything is plastic. And beyond that, we wanted something that we really felt would have mainstream adoption, a product that we’d be willing to incorporate into our lives, something that felt like an upgrade, rather than a compromise.
So how did you get there?
JJ: We were very flexible and curious in terms of different alternatives. We went through tons of different business ideas, modeling them, looking at things like retail refills, milkman models, or shampoo bars. We finally came up with this idea of concentrated formats without water. We first saw it in the home cleaning space in the US, and we thought it made a lot of sense to apply it to beauty products. Most beauty products have water as the first ingredient, particularly shower products, which is crazy because you’re using them in your shower water. You are basically paying to ship plastic water bottles around the world. That made no sense to us.
Getting to the right solution was not easy. We kept pushing harder until we found a format that we thought was close to what people were used to using. That’s this innovative waterless paste concept, now patent pending for our hair and body products.
Jessica Stevenson: The product is a three-fold concentrate, so a 100ml aluminum tube is the same as your traditional 300ml bottle, but smaller and lighter to ship, with a lower carbon footprint. We really thought a lot about a closed circuit. We wanted to be free of single-use plastic and try to make sure we had circularity: our tubes are made from aluminum, which can be instantly recycled, and we have a cap take-back programme. We really wanted to take responsibility for all the packaging parts that are used.
It’s interesting. If you look back 50 or 70 years, a lot of the things that people bought were concentrated, not only in beauty, but also in laundry and cleaning products. Over time, with the retail boom, it became rewarding for brands to have these large, colorful plastic bottles taking up shelf space, to shout “buy me!” To customers. We believe that it has to come full circle, with our awareness of our current environmental crisis. It really makes sense to go back to concentrates.
Given their backgrounds, they both know that consumers are creatures of habit. What do you think is effective in changing their behavior?
JJ: I think coming from beauty has been helpful because we know a lot of the things that are important to people in the types of products they choose. Even when we developed the product, we knew how important it was to have the sensory experience in the shower: the product needed to lather without using sulfates and smell amazing with just essential oils. Those two things were super challenging, but they were really critical to recreating the conventional shampoo and conditioner and body wash experience that people love; to give them the things they’ve been waiting for, but in a more sustainable formula.
We also find it helpful to understand that not all customers are looking for the same things. Some people buy Everist simply because the environmental story is really compelling to them. Other people buy it for the way it makes their hair feel. Being primarily a direct-to-consumer brand, although we do have some retail partners, we really get a deeper understanding of our customer because we have that one-on-one relationship.
JS: We tend to lead with some of the performance aspects; the ecological benefits are almost like icing on the cake. We are really trying to bring more people into this sustainability fold. The perspective we take is that we want to be nonjudgmental and really welcoming. The ecological space can seem very intimidating. Clients who are more conventional may feel like they’re being hypocritical if they’re not doing it perfectly. We believe that by accepting everyone where they are on their sustainability journey, by making that core customer feel welcome enough to take baby steps, you can really make a big impact. Because it is not just a handful of people who must be part of the solution. It has to be millions and millions of people, because we really are in a crisis.
JJ: It is a good balance because it is a serious subject. We really need to move the needle here, but at the same time, I don’t think many people respond to fear. I think they respond to optimism and hope and solutions. We wanted the brand to feel shiny; We are not a brand of beige and plants, we have color and a sense of humor. We want to encourage action through positivity and solutions, rather than people being afraid to make a change because they think it’s too big a problem.
2021 was a great year for Everist with its launch. What are you most excited about in 2022?
JJ: I think now being in the market and being able to get feedback from our customers helps us really understand where they are struggling to do what we call “green upgrades.” How can we make it much easier? Having that conversation with real people who are using the products and trying to make these changes in their daily lives is inspiring and rewarding. I’m really excited to do more of that.
JS: What excites me is that sustainability is no longer a small category of its own. is the future. We are trying to create one of the many beauty companies of the future. And there no longer seems to be a divide between green companies and the rest. Everything is going in that direction, which is really encouraging. We are very happy that people are bringing new things to the market that are different and that change behaviors. We don’t see it as competition. We see it amazing.