THE Daily Echo took a tour of the Lush factory in Nuffield Industrial Estate to have a look at what goes on behind the scenes at one of the conurbations best-known businesses.
Employing more than 665 manufacturing staff in Poole and Hamworthy the Lush factory is made up of 16 departments across nine locations in the area, with sites designated by ingredients rather than cosmetics.
From Poole the products get shipped out across the UK and to 13 countries across the globe from Mexico to the Middle East and South Africa.
Stepping into the ‘Fresh Department’ you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a commercial kitchen, with a huge fridge filled with fruit and vegetable and giant mixers used for their face masks.
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In the fresh section all manner of treasures can be found including mud from the Atlas Mountains, citrus fruits from Italy and Henna from Iran.
The fresh section of the factory creates ‘ultra fresh’ items that have a self-imposed freshness date of 28-days and are made and shipped on the same day.
Elena Gronlund, learning and development manager for manufacturing said: “Lush has a commitment to leaving the world lusher than we found it.”
She explained this means the company uses high quality sustainable materials and ensures businesses they buy from are in line with Lush’s ethics of providing fair pay for workers and not testing on animals.
“The foundation of Lush is creativity,” Elena said, with new product lines created all the time.
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There are around 10 ‘creators’ who work within the Poole site that create and experiment with new products and variations.
Elena explained that having the creativity hub in the same place as the factories enables products to be created, tested, scaled up, and on shop shelves within a month.
Perhaps one of its most iconic and exciting products, Lush bath bombs are created in a huge warehouse that’s a bustle with energy.
Known as the ‘ballistics room’ the bath bomb factory is filled with colourful powders and people singing along to loud music on the production lines putting each bathbomb together by hand.
202,000 bombs were made in one day at Christmas and the factory makes and sends out 12 million bath bombs a year.
Elena said workers are paid the "real", independently-set living wage, which is higher than the government's national living wage, and are supported to follow their passions, saying “happy people make happy soap”.
Activism is a large part of what makes Lush individual, with the company fighting against animal testing and giving more than £60million to grassroots charities across the globe.
Asked why this was so important to such a large brand, Elena simply said: “It’s just what businesses should be doing.”
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