On Friday, 18th January 2019, the Lush shop on 10 Market Street, Manchester opened its doors again after a renovation into the first plastic packaging-free cosmetics shop in the country.
With awareness of plastic pollution at an all time high, Lush’s newest Naked shop will host an abundance of innovative and plastic packaging-free alternatives to your favourite cosmetics – from the classics, such as solid shampoo bars and soaps, to new naked skincare innovations.
And, rather than scanning labels for information, visitors to the shop will instead be able to scan products directly using the recently launched #LushLabs app, replacing packaging with a digital solution. Lush Lens is an in development experiment feature which enables Lush to reduce their impact on the environment by using the phone’s camera and Machine Learning to recognise products through the user’s smartphone camera, and give the customer detailed ingredient information and ‘how to use’ demonstrations via the app.
The new Naked shop in Manchester follows the success of Lush’s first Naked shops in Milan and Berlin. Since opening in 2018, the solid shampoo bars have been their most popular products – with almost 8000 sold. That’s up to 616,880 hair washes that haven’t come from plastic bottles!
In Lush we work in an industry where the packaging costs the customer more than the product. Now, the customer needs to worry about how to recycle something they didn’t want to buy in the first place. This seems like a raw deal to us. If we can cut out all the plastic packaging, we can give our customers better value for money.
Mark Constantine OBE, Lush Co-founder and Managing Director
Reducing packaging is something Lush has been working on for many, many years. This shop aims to push the boundaries and is an exploration into what further things we can do, a discussion between us and our customers and a celebration of the fact that, after 20 years of development, we are able to fill up a whole shop with innovative naked cosmetic alternatives and offer a brand new shopping experience using technology alongside it.
