Avoiding waste, avoiding risk

Creating thousands, or millions, of products plus the packaging to go with them only for them to go to waste is not just an environmental disaster, it’s a business disaster. “Despite launching game-changing products, we’re very risk-averse. We don’t want to be a part of the wider beauty market where brands buy thousands more products than they need, wasting resources and ending up almost giving them away,” says Charlie Vickery, Managing Director at Haeckels.

The brand’s Bio Restore Membrane eye treatment masks, launched in 2020, are grown in sheets in the Haeckels lab. Vickery refers to them as “fabricated biomaterials”, made from agar extracted from the cell walls of seaweed, and infused with hyaluronic acid and prebiotics. Among a sea of plastic-wrapped, plastic-based, pre-hydrated masks, the Haeckels product stands out for its all-natural ingredients, its end-of-life compostability, and its usage: the masks must be added to cool water before being applied under the eye. It’s a small shift but as natural deodorant brands like Meow Meow Tweet found out after marketing deodorant which needed to be applied with the fingers, even small behavioural changes can pose serious barriers to purchase. In growing only what was ordered and effectively crowdfunding the first batch, Haeckels was able to secure a paying audience before launch and be sure that there was an appetite for a product which sat outside standard issue boundaries.

“Making and growing to order ensures we’re not taking wild punts on products that mess up our buying forecasts and that we’re only utilising ingredients when they are required. The age-old mentality of ‘customers don’t know what they want until you show them’ contributes to our planet’s mess,” Vickery says.

Growing products to grow demand 

Launching the grown to order eye masks didn’t come without teething issues. The brand promised a growth time of two weeks, but the first batch took five weeks instead. However, it turned out customers were willing to wait. This was further confirmed in 2021 when Haeckels launched grown to order gift sets which came in Mycelium packaging grown over a two-to-three-week period, only after a customer clicked ‘buy’. “This was received really well initially by both our core customers and the media. We are lucky our customers are extremely engaged in our ideas around change, including time for effective products,” says Vickery.

Despite initial timing issues, the eye masks became a “sleeper hit” based on repeat purchases, and after around 12 months Haeckels had proof of constant demand and invested in proper lab equipment for scaled up production. That demand means that customers can now buy the eye masks instantly rather than having to wait as there’s a constant supply being grown, however the system offers the flexibility to reduce if things change. “Because we design and make all of our products, we have absolute control over our supply chain - the only minimums we have to hit are for our glassware,” Vickery continues.

The grown to order concept has been so successful in scaling demand in a sustainable manner that Haeckels is set to launch a whole new division of experimental products which will be grown or made to order. “It’ll only be available to our email subscribers and will be a sandbox for us to explore what products our customers want,” says Vickery.

Efficacy still reigns 

Though the Bio Restore Membrane eye masks are now such a success they’ve spawned an entirely new collection of products, it wasn’t always the case. “2020 was a wildly unpredictable year for Haeckels and some launches did extremely well, however this was one example of where we missed a beat,” says Vickery. How did the brand recover to reach a point of constant demand? It changed the focus of the marketing from how the product is made to what it can do.

The “intention-action gap” (also known as the “say-do gap”) is well known: consumers want to – and say they will – make more sustainable choices but ultimately factors like affordability, quality and aesthetics win out. For a plastic-free alternative to infiltrate the market in a meaningful way, it must answer to conventional consumer drivers, not just the ‘green’ ones. “Customers want to be told about the efficacy of a product rather than how it’s made,” says Vickery.

To persuade a customer to wait two weeks for a product, or pre-soak it (or any number of other small shifts sustainable alternatives tend to require), the product in question must not also pose a step down in quality. For many consumers, that’s one compromise too far.

“In practice, it takes a change to the consumer’s mindset and shopping habits - growing to order and making to order is a fundamental change of habit as it takes time and patience,” says Vickery. “I think it could work across industries - particularly fashion, which has become so wasteful - but in principle, that one thing holding back change is often our collective ability to want it.” Promoting efficacy, as Haeckels did, can uphold the ‘want’ during the behavioural transition.

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