Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine

Working at a high-end beauty salon in the south of England in the early 1970's, Mark Constantine concocted natural shampoos and conditioners in a tiny room above his kitchen, and soon met another young entrepreneur who was eager to buy his products: Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. Their partnership flourished for a while, then soured; so Mark went on to start a mail-order cosmetics business with his wife and several others. After that business went bust and Mark was nearly broke, he decided to take one more leap to launch Lush, a cosmetics shop whose distinctive soaps and bath bombs developed a passionate following. Today, Lush has about 900 stores around the world and is adapting to pressures of a pandemic economy. Order the How I Built This book at: https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings. And you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 3:36Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 4:21Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 5:06Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, everyone. So I have a request. If you value this show, if you value the stories, the lessons, the wisdom and inspiration we bring to you, if you think of me as your friend, which I am, because even though millions of you are listening, I'm actually talking just to you right now. I need you to be there for me as well. And you can do that by supporting what I do and buying my book, How I Built This.

• 5:51Guy Raz?

  It is just out now and available everywhere. And it doesn't cost more than a few cups of coffee. And it's filled with wisdom and stories and ideas that will have you feeling inspired and fired up to take on the world. So please, if you love this show and what we do for you, do us one back and pick up How I Built This wherever books are sold.

• 6:19Guy Raz?

  You were a millionaire and you had lost all of it. And you were also in debt. And now you're 42.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Guy Raz?

  You've got three kids.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  My eldest son took me to one side at seven and suggested, "Well, Dad, do you not think you should get a proper job?"

• 6:39Guy Raz?

  And what did you think?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I said, "Well, I think I've got a skill set that's such that if I can market it, I can make a load of money again." And he sort of nodded sagely at seven and let me do it.

• 6:58Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Mark Constantine and his partners emerged from a failed business to launch a little cosmetic store that turned into a global beauty brand, Lush. Back in 1995, I was studying in London. My sister Karen came to visit me that year. She'd been to London before, so on her visit, she was the guide. We trawled through the market stalls at Camden Lock.

• 7:39Guy Raz?

  We picked up some indie records at Rough Trade and made a special trip to Covent Garden to visit a newly opened shop called Lush. I hadn't heard of it, but my sister had instructions from all of her friends back in LA. "Get me stuff from Lush." Now, at the time, it was one of two Lush locations in the world. And this is before e-commerce, so unless you went to the store, you couldn't get the products. I remember the overpowering smell of roses and lavender and honey and lemon. I remember these long loaves of colorful soap laid out on tables where you could slice

• 8:19Guy Raz?

  off a chunk and pay for it by weight. There were bath bombs and shampoos and lotions. It looked like the produce department at a fancy grocery store. You didn't see a whole lot of plastic and packaging, and in front of each product, you'd find a bright, colorful chalkboard with a description. It was unlike any beauty product store I had ever seen. And it probably explains why, back then, there was a line to get in. Lush was part of a new wave of beauty companies that came onto the scene around that time, many of them influenced by The Body Shop and its iconic founder, Anita Roddick, who, as you

• 9:02Guy Raz?

  will hear, features prominently in this story as well. The main founder of Lush, Mark Constantine, had already seen incredible success and then catastrophic failure by the time he launched his venture. In fact, right before Mark opened Lush, he'd lost most of his money on a mail order business that went bust. But Lush turned his fortunes around, and today, it's a brand with more than 900 stores around the world. Now, in recent months, the pandemic has hit the company hard. For a time, all of its stores in the UK, the US, and Australia were closed. But Lush has also seen a massive surge in online

• 9:46Guy Raz?

  orders. And later on, we'll get an update on how Mark and the company have navigated the pandemic and the global economic fallout. But first, a little bit about Mark's background. He grew up in Weymouth, a seaside town in the south of England. When he was only two years old, his dad split from the family and went off to Africa, and Mark never saw him again while he was growing up. And his mother, she took Mark and moved in with her mother, Mark's grandma.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It was me, my mum, my grandmother who really brought me up, and my aunt. So I was really brought up by three women, yeah.

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  What did your mum do?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  She was a journalist in the local newspaper. And I knew my mum had to work in order for us to to be okay. But it was a very, very comfortable life, full of love and hugs and security. My nan was always there and I loved my nan, I looked after my nan. And so it was comfortable, very nice, a very feminine life. I felt spoilt, if anything, to be honest. Obviously, my nan drilled into me the proper values as well. With proverbs and all sorts of other things, you know. I had to write repeatedly, good, better, best. Never let them rest till my good is better and my better best. Things like that, so.

• 11:08Guy Raz?

  But then I guess, like around the time you were twelve or so, you like you stopped living with your grandmother? Like you and your mom moved out?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  What happened was, there was a lodger. And my mother married the lodger and we moved out and my grandmother died. And I didn't realise, probably until much later in my life, how much that had affected me. And I felt responsible, I think, for my grandmother's death for most of my life. Because obviously, I was important to her and I wasn't there anymore and I couldn't look after her and she died. And then my my stepfather was very cold, I would say, and violent. You know, but that's a very typical upbringing in the fifties because they'd come out of a war. Do you know what I mean? There was a they'd lost their friends, some of them had seen their friends killed or relatives.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  And so it was, you know, not surprising that those people that were bringing up my generation were not the best balanced people in the world.

• 12:10Guy Raz?

  What kind of, I mean, what kind of kid were you? What do you remember about how you kind of responded to those circumstances? And did you, I don't know, retreat into yourself? Or did you act out? Did you fight with your mom? What do you remember?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I didn't fight with my mum, but I fought a lot with my stepdad. Physical fights and they would argue. We would all argue. It was just, I want to say unsatisfactory, which doesn't sound like it. It sounds like a strange word to use, doesn't it? But certainly when I came to build my own home, I, for example, never locked the front door. You know, I make an effort on those smaller things that tell people that they're wanted and cared for.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  What kind of kid were you at school? Were you a good student?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  No, bad.

• 12:59Guy Raz?

  Was school, was school difficult for you?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Do I want to get into how bad? Not really.

• 13:04Guy Raz?

  Was it, was it, was it just hard for you? I mean.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  There were a lot of gangs. Gangs were normal in the 50s for, for everyone. There were lots of gangs. So I went to the grammar school, which was the better school in town. The top 10% students went to the grammar school. Everyone was surprised when I got in and then I wasted it while I was there. Except that I did make friends and we were in a particular gang where we could make

• 13:31Speaker 01

  bombs and things like that.

• 13:32Guy Raz?

  You can make bombs?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, we were the nerds, weren't we?

• 13:36Guy Raz?

  Like pipe bombs?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  They were, we killer and sugar bombs with potassium permangate and glycerin fuses and all sorts of things like that. We weren't making them for the IRA. We were just using them for our own purposes to intimidate other gangs. It was, was that when William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies? That period of time? So if you can imagine that style of, of living, when that's how it was. But for me, I'm not at all physical.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So I'm not going to fight anyone if I can possibly avoid that.

• 14:08Guy Raz?

  You're not a fighter?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  No, I talk my way out.

• 14:12Guy Raz?

  Mark, do you think, sort of around the age where you kind of, you know, many of these things are happening, do you remember being sad when you were a kid?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:22Guy Raz?

  You do?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  When I've seen people since, there was one girl who I went to school with called Elspeth Cox, and I saw her some 20 years later, and she said, "I'm so glad your life worked out well. You were such a sad child."

• 14:36Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, I missed my father, even though I'd never known him. I think I was melancholy, to use a traditional, old-fashioned word.

• 14:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  I mean, my mother missed my father, I missed my father. I suspect I caught it from her, do you know what I mean, as a meme, as it were. Up until I was 10, 12, or whatever it was, 11, it was fine. From then on, there were a five or six-year period of my life, which was not fine.

• 15:05Guy Raz?

  When you were in school as a boy, you, at one point, had some kind of, some kind of argument, or something happened with your mom and your stepdad?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  I think you were 16, and you, you left the house, or you were locked out of the house, and that was it. Like, you, you started living there. What, do you remember what happened?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  So, do I remember what happened? No. But what I do remember is the very singular way you feel when nobody cares. It didn't matter what time I got in at night, it didn't matter whether I was there or not, nothing mattered with regard to me. So, when you're rebelling, obviously, it's important that the other person has, has some feeling regarding you, yeah?

• 15:56Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  But there was no discernible feeling. I don't, I can't remember what happened physically. I remember the door being locked, I remember it being the end of the, of everything connected with that house, and I just took it as the ultimate rejection and went. I didn't try and fight back, or go back in and, you know, later on, have a conversation or anything, I just went. And, and there was just this party of the ways, and that was it. And I don't think I saw my mom again for, say, seven years or so on that.

• 16:24Guy Raz?

  And, and I guess during that time, what, you slept at, at like, different people's houses, and?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:31Guy Raz?

  I read you even camped out in the woods sometimes?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yes. So, I couldn't afford the cheapest room in town. So basically, I I slept in the woods or I just couch surfed. So, you know, which wasn't a thing those days.

• 16:42Guy Raz?

  No, right.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  It didn't have a term.

• 16:44Guy Raz?

  And this isn't, this is, we're talking about the the sixties now, those sort of the late sixties.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Basically, I would sleep in one friend's greenhouse. So I I had a girlfriend who was now my wife, and I would go and stay her for a night. I'd stay with my friend Jeff Osman, and quite often his parents would put me up. Other people, people were unbelievably kind.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. By the way, were you working at the time? Did you have a job?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yep. I had a job as an apprentice hairdresser, and it paid two pounds, ten shillings those days. So I don't know, you can come up with anything you like.

• 17:25Guy Raz?

  That was a week, that was per week, right?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  A week.

• 17:27Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  But then I decided I wanted to do theatrical makeup is what I wanted to do for a living. I wanted to make people up for the theater. I'd done it at school, I'd done it for other schools. We were talking about the sheer excitement of being able to change appearances. And we were talking then about the excitement of being able to experiment with different products on your face. And I was buying these makeup items from the local hairdressing salon. So I would go there every Saturday with whatever money I had, I would buy frothing blood capsules, or plastic, inner nose plastic, or the latest prosthetics that were coming in from the States. So I was really obsessed from that time. And then the hairdressing

• 18:11Speaker 01

  was just, for me, a means to an end.

• 18:14Guy Raz?

  So it sounds like, like even at that point, like you had a plan, like a, like a pretty clear ambition.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I think when you have to survive from zero, obviously, there's more drive, isn't there? I mean.

• 18:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I look at photos of myself in my early twenties, and I see this awfully driven person. I mean, just driven, absolutely driven. I think, I suppose, you know, if you, if you're left, you know, if you've got to look after yourself, you know, it teaches you self-reliance.

• 18:49Guy Raz?

  So you're between sort of around the age of 16 and eventually around that time you meet Mo, the person who would eventually become your wife, who you are still married to today. You meet Jeff, who was, or you knew Jeff.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I knew Jeff already, yeah.

• 19:02Guy Raz?

  From childhood, who was your best friend.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  So, talking about class systems, I lived in the middle-class estate on one side of the road where people owned the houses, and Jeffrey lived on the other side of the street in the housing you rented from the council. We call them council houses.

• 19:18Guy Raz?

  Council flats, yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he would have been in the lower, in the lower echelons. And the first thing I learnt when they put me up, when they had absolutely nothing, was the generosity of spirit of that in comparison to the other side of the street.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah? The kindness and the care and the thoughtfulness and the charity, they were all great lessons for me. And they stayed with me all my life.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  So you were, I mean, you were training as an apprentice hairdresser. 1972, you, I think, you're 20 years old. You and Mo, your then-girlfriend, soon-to-be-wife, and Jeff, your best friend, you all moved to London. And you get a job as a hairdresser in a pretty, actually a pretty relatively high-end salon, right?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, that was Elizabeth Arden. I worked for Elizabeth Arden. So it was called The Red Door, and it was a big salon with over 100 staff. It had 200 staff in it.

• 20:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you were working there as mainly just doing whatever, washing hair?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Washing hair, wasn't doing much else. I was learning stuff, what they call an improver. That was the term used at the time, an improver. So you weren't an apprentice, but you weren't a hairdresser either. So basically, I would accompany hairdressers when they had to go out to do the hair, the theatre. Or I would go on a Vogue shoot, but I would be the runner.

• 20:41Guy Raz?

  I imagine, I always think of like, London in the early 70s, like The Rolling Stones, living in Chelsea, you know, like that kind of world.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Well, from my point of view, I was on that sort of below-stairs angle. So I was in service, really, to the various people. And Saw that other side. Quite a lot of the people I was working with were drug addicts. Because nobody really understood the the severity of the drugs. So they experimented and then they they got the wrong side of it all. And drug taking is what I remember predominantly and not the fun side of it.

• 21:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  I just remember a a lot of a lot of sad sad stuff going on, really.

• 21:21Guy Raz?

  Did you ever, when you were, I mean, when you were, you know, a young guy living in London, did you ever experiment with drugs?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  No, because I couldn't afford them. Um, you know, I had no money. I sit next, I could sit between two people. I mean, I would say, although there was a lot of generosity, there wasn't a lot of generosity with drugs.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  No, I my education was purely observational.

• 21:48Guy Raz?

  So I guess at a certain point, you move on to another high end salon in in London. And this is really where your career begins to to take a turn, right?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what what happened was that I was working, uh, that the owner, because I was so nerdy, I think. He thought I would make a good trichologist. And in those days in London salons, they had two or three qualified trichologists who checked the scalps for disease. They dealt with the hair condition and they made the products for the salon and things like that.

• 22:24Guy Raz?

  And just to clarify, trichology is the study of.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Hair and scalp. Diseases, really.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  But it's also the science of hair and scalp. So that whole thing of starting off doing my hairdressing apprentice, taking the qualifications with that, then going on and studying trichology, another three years of nerdy study, all about hair and scalp and the skin.

• 22:45Guy Raz?

  It's interesting because I I don't think salons have trichologists anymore, do they?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It was a nineteen seventies.

• 22:52Guy Raz?

  I see. Okay. That's, okay, I got you.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  And most of us that did it, most of the trichologists went on then to make products for other people. So we we very much went into products. We made products for the salons anyway, and we developed our skills more and more in that area.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  So at some point, I guess, you returned to Poole. Like, you were in London, you and Mo were in London.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:19Guy Raz?

  You go back to Poole.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  That's because I burnt out.

• 23:20Guy Raz?

  You burnt out. And Poole is in the south of England, we should mention. You burned out in London. Why did you burn out in London?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  It all caught up with me, I suppose.

• 23:31Guy Raz?

  What did?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  The leaving home, the homeless period. I think I'd sort of got to a point where I was earning enough money to live. And so the striving fell away for a while. So I think that I got to that point where it... Well, the other thing that had happened to me, I'd got married. And as you know, or as your listeners will certainly know, getting married is quite a big thing. And Mo, we have to bring Mo in at this point, who is much more stable than me.

• 24:02Guy Raz?

  So is my partner, by the way. It's a great choice that you made.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  I know. Well, actually, I realized she made the choice. And I'm very grateful. So I think that probably gave me some stability. I was still relatively optimistic, as far as I was concerned. But anxiety I had in space and panic attacks.

• 24:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Especially about heart attacks, which is how my grandmother had died. That went into me at that moment, and it stayed with me for an awfully long time.

• 24:33Guy Raz?

  I'm not surprised, right? And here's the other thing. People didn't talk about these things in the 70s, right? There was no language to say, "I have intense anxiety." The reason why I'm asking you about this is because of who you are today and what your success...

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  And we'll obviously get there. But this is important, right? That a lot of people don't talk about these moments in their lives because of shame or embarrassment or... yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  At that time, I went to the doctors and I tried to describe how I felt. And he said, "I said, I just don't feel normal." He said, "Well, define normal." I didn't think I had heart palpitations. I thought I was dying of a heart attack every time. So I, you know, the joke was, I never had indigestion. I only had heart attacks. A very kind doctor that I still use said to me, Mark, you'd have been better off having heart attacks. They're less disconcerting.

• 25:29Guy Raz?

  You were having, you were having, you were probably having panic attacks.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly it. But it was, it was all connected with the death of my grandmother, I think. Because, you know, it entered me then, in that very young age. And I was hyperventilating even at sort of 11, due to the circumstances. So I think, yeah, it entered me then. It didn't really leave until I was in my late 50s.

• 25:54Guy Raz?

  I mean, none of this is surprising, given the things that you went through as a child, right? Like, none of these

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  experiences are surprising.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I think it's the human condition. I think if you understand mortality, and you're not anxious, what's wrong with you? Yeah?

• 26:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, once you understand, once you have a death like that, of someone so dear, and you don't understand, then you've not got the hang of it. It's the human condition, isn't it? It's the, that's the point. That's, that's, if we didn't have that, we wouldn't be driven. We wouldn't do the things we do. You know, you have to have a clear understanding of a finite period of time. You have to have it.

• 26:38Guy Raz?

  So you and Mo returned to Poole. You're in your early twenties.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  And you have this, you've had this training as a trichologist. What did you do when you, when you got back to Poole in, you know, in 74?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I persuaded a large salon in Poole that they needed a trichologist.

• 26:54Guy Raz?

  Uh huh.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  And then I went and did the same thing for them, that I had been doing in these West End salons. So there was a guy there called Mark Young, who was very ambitious. He had a hundred staff. So for a salon outside of London to be that size.

• 27:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  That was, that was good. Yeah. And so lots of people would go there. He trained a lot of people and I would assist him and I was freelance. I didn't, he didn't pay me, but he gave me a room and gave me a little attic space to make product for them in. And I made their shampoos and conditioners. Uh, and I was really not earning any money. My wife was keeping me.

• 27:31Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Mo worked in the courts as a assistant to the clerk of the courts. And so she was working there and that was good money. And then I was earning, you know, just a pittance.

• 27:40Guy Raz?

  And you were what? Just you were just making stuff in your kitchen and putting it in like glass bottles and selling it to people?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I wasn't doing the kitchen. I'd made a tiny room, my, changed my little tiny box room up in my bedroom into a little lab. Yeah.

• 27:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  It was above the kitchen. I'd got a basin in there. I got taps in there. I'd got some vessels. I got a big paddle. Um, I, you know, I, I could heat water and I could heat oil and I could make products. And I was making stuff on the side for different people because I couldn't earn enough money in the salon I was working in.

• 28:15Guy Raz?

  And at that time, were you using like chemicals?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Um, I have an issue with chemicals.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  I know you do now, but yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I know, but I always did. I think it came in when I was about seven or eight. I went with my mom to the movies and I saw a movie where rat poison got in some bread. Um, and it was a frightening black and white movie. And I, I think it really made me frightened of chemicals. So I, I always had this leaning towards nature anyway. So I much preferred to be involved in herbs or alternatives. Um, I was always very, very conscious of what was a safe chemical and what was not a safe chemical. So that, that again informed what I did because now I make products with mainly natural materials and what I consider to be safe synthetics, having studied that repeatedly all, all through my career.

• 29:06Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're working at this salon and pool.

• 29:11Guy Raz?

  As a trichologist and I guess you and Moe were living in the same apartment building as a woman named Liz Weir. Is that right? And who was she and how did you meet her?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Well, we worked together in the salon.

• 29:28Guy Raz?

  Oh, I see. Okay.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  She was the beauty therapist in the salon and I was the trichologist. We were both freelancers, so we would spend our spare time chit chatting about, well, hair and skin, basically. I always used to feel sorry if we were on the train, the two of us, and someone fell asleep in front of us, we would just take them apart bit by bit.

• 29:50Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  You know.

• 29:51Guy Raz?

  Because you would just talk about hair and skin.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty obsessively.

• 29:56Guy Raz?

  In the meantime, you were making all this stuff, like hair care products and stuff in your apartment. And I guess around this time, you find a new customer for your products who would become a pretty significant person in your life. What's the story?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  What happened, what actually happened was that I had seen a little advert in Honey magazine for a salon in Brighton, not a salon, a shop. And I was making stuff on the side for different people. And so basically, I found this woman's address and a phone number. I didn't have a phone at home, so basically I had to go to the phone box and phone her up and see if she would like any product. She'd started this shop called The Body Shop.

• 30:47Guy Raz?

  Oh, yes.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And it was anita erotic.

• 30:50Guy Raz?

  A neater erotic.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  And so I phoned her up and she said, well, yeah, come over and see me.

• 30:56Guy Raz?

  By the way, she was in Brighton. You were in Poole.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Quite a long train journey.

• 31:01Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Because it's not direct.

• 31:03Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  So I paid for the train journey, met her. She'd opened her second shop by then. I went in the shop and it was just wonderful.

• 31:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  There was this charismatic woman selling a low packaged product that was genuine, young people buying small amounts of stuff for fun and experimentation, everything about the shop. Really wowed me. I just loved it. Very, you know, very simplistic bottles with very simple labels, no fancy stuff. Uh, really suited me.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  And Mark, was it, was it totally different than anything that was out there at the time? When you went into that body shop?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:43Guy Raz?

  Was it just like, what is this?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  If I come and live with you now in San Francisco and we go up and down the coast. If we'd have done the same thing at that same time, we would have seen the body shop that inspired her in the first place. And we would have seen a whole series of mom and pop, uh, shops exactly like that. Right up the west coast from Seattle, right the way down through Portland. All of those, those people were making, uh, small amounts of products and packaging them simply. You know, there was the cleansing bar and

• 32:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  You know, all sorts of different businesses, but there were none in Britain that just, we didn't have that at all. We had nothing, none of that innovation, none of that stuff.

• 32:23Guy Raz?

  There was a shop called The Body Shop in San Francisco.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  In San Francisco.

• 32:27Guy Raz?

  Which was a US company, a totally different company.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  It was a totally different company that inspired Anita Roddick to copy it and do it in Brighton.

• 32:37Guy Raz?

  And call it The Body Shop.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And call it The Body Shop.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  But she, you know, you've got to get context on Anita. We have a dynamic, vital woman who's living in a, a fairly open relationship with an unbelievable bloke. I mean, Gordon Roddick, poet, horseman, he just, he'd gone off to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. He was writing for The Observer about his experiences while he did it. He, well, he was just a, you know, bohemian. So, you know, that we're not talking about everyday people here, which I definitely was, okay? And they'd had a hotel which they sold and she just wanted to try this idea out that she'd seen in San Francisco. And so when I first went there, of course Anita knew nothing about hair and skin and I knew everything.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Between Liz and I, we knew everything about hair and skin.

• 33:28Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, you go in the shop, you meet Anita and you have brought with you a bunch of samples of, of what?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  I think I'd already sent them over.

• 33:37Guy Raz?

  You sent them over, okay.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  She then placed an order.

• 33:39Guy Raz?

  Right then and there. She said, hey, I like this stuff.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  For a thousand two hundred pounds.

• 33:44Guy Raz?

  Now, just to clarify, because I've read her account of this and this is what she said.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:48Guy Raz?

  And you may know this, she said, I remember that, you know, he called me from a payphone initially because he was feeding coins to the payphone.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:57Guy Raz?

  And that he was making Henna cream shampoos that he sent to me. They looked like sludge and smelled like horse shit. And honey beeswax cleaner with black specks caused by bees returning to their hives with dirty feet. Those were the products you sent. And then she ordered a thousand pounds' worth of this stuff.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  A thousand, yeah. It was great. I mean, I couldn't, I'd had to borrow the money to get the train home.

• 34:23Guy Raz?

  No, but I mean, the fact that like you were making these products, obviously herbal based and natural products, but like, they were kind of, right, they looked kind of grimy at that time, I guess.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Well, they were very authentic. I tried them on anyone else. That's what they'd say to me. Yeah, well, we can see these are authentic, Mark, but we really don't think they're going to sell. But she, she believed they were going to sell.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  And, and how were you getting the product to her? Was it in like bags or jars or what? Like, so she ordered a thousand pounds?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Pots or glass, glass jars. She hate, I wanted glass jars because of the environmental principles. Okay? She hated the glass jars. She wanted plastic jars because she wasn't so struck on the environment at that time. So there were quite a lot of arguments, lots of arguments like that. She was a very argumentative person.

• 35:11Guy Raz?

  When she said, all right, I want a thousand pounds worth of stuff, you had to go back to Poole.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Thousand four hundred, thousand four hundred pounds.

• 35:18Guy Raz?

  So you had to go back to Poole and go back to this little lab in your apartment and start making a thousand pounds' worth of stuff?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, then I had to phone up the suppliers and ask for credit because I had no money.

• 35:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  So I couldn't buy the materials to make the order. They all kindly gave me credit. I then said to her, she would have to pay cash on delivery. She then paid cash on delivery. I whizzed back afterwards and paid them all. I didn't expect to get a second order.

• 35:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I thought that would be it. I don't know why. I don't, I obviously didn't have much confidence in my own product. But then when I had a second order and a third and a fourth, I think, wow, I couldn't believe my luck.

• 35:58Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Mark built a successful partnership with The Body Shop that worked pretty well until it totally fell apart. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 36:17Guy Raz?

  Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts, Stripe is built to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce

• 36:55Guy Raz?

  and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York, Pacific Life Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  The NBA's back on PrizePicks. Pick a shootout in the West and a boards battle in the East. PrizePicks is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePicks, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePicks is available nationwide. The NBA's on PrizePicks. What you want?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Download the PrizePicks app today and use code WONDERY. That's code WONDERY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePicks, run your game.

• 38:49Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1977, and Mark Constantine has just started to make beauty products for Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. And both of them, of course, are just in the beginning stages of their businesses. Anita only has a few shops, and Mark is still making his concoctions in a tiny room above his kitchen.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Well, it would be Henna cream shampoo, elderberry conditioner, ladies mantle heat filter, aromatherapy scalp oil, herbal hair colors.

• 39:27Guy Raz?

  How do they sell? Do they sell? Do they sell in their shop?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Well, they sold really well. I mean, far better than I, you know, I could have imagined. I mean, we are talking about one of the best sales ladies I'd ever met. You know, she could sell anything. So obviously, she made them popular.

• 39:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you have this cash coming in from The Body Shop. And I guess, like, right around this time, you and Liz Weir, your colleague at the hair salon, you decide to use that money to start your own business.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And with that money, I started a little herbal hair and beauty clinic with Liz Weir. It was called Constantine and Weir's Country Cosmetics: Good for Your Skin and Good for Your Hair. And that's so hippie again. And so I'd been told by another businessperson, what you do is you buy all your raw materials, you make the product, and you double that when you sell it. And then you don't spend that money on yourself. You then reinvest that back into your business.

• 40:27Guy Raz?

  Why, just out of curiosity, why did you bring Liz on? What was she going to bring to the equation?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't to do with making products. What we did was we opened a little clinic for me to treat people's hair and scalp and to do Henna colors on, and she would do her beauty therapy. Yeah? And we'd share the room, you know, the third room, which was a reception stall room. But the problem was that it was incredibly cold there. Uh, and we didn't get much business. So we made money still by making product for other people, much more than we did from our little clinic. So we went a year or so to trying to make money there and we couldn't. And so I said to Liz, Liz, well, why don't you join me in the making the stuff?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  You know all about skin, I know all about hair and between us, we can come up with the products. And then when I had to prepare a product for her, I mean, she was a really hard taskmaster. So I had to work and work and work and study and read up and, you know, the cosmetologies and other books until I got it right. I probably made better skin products than I did hair. You know, when I'd learned the hair stuff, it was just a technical skill I learned.

• 41:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  With the, with the skin stuff, I had to really study and work hard.

• 41:46Guy Raz?

  Huh, a- and, and I guess you and Liz um made these products and, and sold them to like a few shops or salons, right? But I mean, I'm assuming the body shop was still your, your big client, right?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  I was their biggest supplier.

• 41:59Guy Raz?

  You were the biggest.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  I was their biggest supplier.

• 42:01Guy Raz?

  And they had two shops.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Well, no, but they started a franchise.

• 42:05Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And before we knew where we were, they had the fastest growing cosmetic company in the world.

• 42:10Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, and they couldn't even touch the US. So that was outside of the US. They had franchises in Sweden, multiplying. They had franchises in Finland and in Germany and France and.

• 42:24Guy Raz?

  Here's my question for you, Mark. I mean, how were you? I have to assume that very quickly you had to find an, another location to make your products. And then there was a certain point where you yourself could not make the products anymore. That you had to bring lots of people in to make the products.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  So what happened was I like working from my home. It worked for me, okay? So I found a bigger house with a nice garage and plenty of space at the back to make product. And then I, I managed to make product from there for seven years.

• 42:58Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Now, you're not supposed to do that in Britain because there's planning controls. So I managed to make it without the planners catching me for seven years. Uh, and I can remember I went off to see Return of the Jedi. And when I came back, my babysitter said, oh, a man's been rang from the planning authority. So I think I'd got my business up to a half a million turnover by then. Out of my garage and out of the back of the house.

• 43:27Guy Raz?

  So this is like 1982, 83, you're doing half a million dollars in revenue.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, pounds, pounds.

• 43:33Guy Raz?

  Pounds, sorry, pounds.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And in those days, that was nearly a million dollars.

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. I mean, I mean, just.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Not like these days.

• 43:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, let's just pause on this for a moment because when you were dating Mo and then asked her, you know, for her dad for hand in marriage, like you were not gonna be. This is like within 10 years, you're making a million dollars in revenue.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:52Guy Raz?

  I mean, did any of those people, like her parents or Jeff's parents, they say, oh, my God, like, wow, this is crazy.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Not at the time. I was busy.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  You were busy, yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I was getting up at five o'clock in the morning, making the stuff.

• 44:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  If I saw someone, we certainly weren't talking about how well I was doing. We're talking about the English here, bear in mind.

• 44:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  We don't do that kind of stuff. We don't admire each other. It's just not part of it.

• 44:20Guy Raz?

  Well, here's what I'm wondering. How did you know how to run the business? Like, how did you know how to price your products? How did you know how to, like, what, you know, how to do invoicing and purchase orders and all that stuff? Did you?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Well, Gordon Roddick helped me a lot. I don't know where he learned, but basically I'd been taught already by Mark Young's father to double the price when I sold it. So that put me in good stead.

• 44:48Guy Raz?

  By Mark Young, the guy who owned the salon?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, his dad had said to me, what you do is you buy the raw materials and then you double that to sell it. You have to have enough margin.

• 44:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Because as you add to the costs, do you know what I mean? Obviously, you know, I mean, I was probably making a lot more money per product when I just made it myself up in a room.

• 45:08Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  As things developed because obviously, but if you've got enough margin there in your model, it works okay.

• 45:16Guy Raz?

  We're gonna talk a bit more about Anita Radek, who's a very important, controversial and really kind of revolutionary figure, and certainly in the UK and around the world in entrepreneurship.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:27Guy Raz?

  But on the one hand, I can imagine, I mean, this was huge. She and Gordon transformed your life, right?

• 45:35Guy Raz?

  Did you-

• 45:35Speaker 01

  They also transformed an element of the cosmetic industry.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  They were unbelievably influential, charismatic. It felt very much like royalty, you know, in the sense that when they blessed you with their presence, you were pleased, and when you weren't in their presence, it wasn't so good. We would have a fairly tempestuous relationship, I think would be the right description. I would have an argument with her on the phone. She would call me unprofessional. I would tell her that she couldn't call me unprofessional. She would then call me a very rude word, beginning with W and ending in R. I would then say, yes, you can call me that rude word, beginning in W and ending in R, but you can't call me unprofessional. Then about an hour later, there would be a knock on the door. I'd open the door, there'd be a florist with a huge smile on his face,

• 46:22Speaker 01

  giving me a bunch of flowers, and on the card it would have the word W something, something, something R. That's how it was all the time. It was chaotically wonderful.

• 46:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  She was driven, not quite manical, but close. You know, there was, you know, both of us were frightened of dying. You know, I mean, she, we were very similar, very streety, not comfy in our lives. Do you know what I mean? There was no, we're not talking about a confident woman in the sense of accomplished and stylish and svelte. We're talking about a woman who was as driven as I was. I thought she was gonna have a breakdown, then I realized, no, I was gonna have the breakdown.

• 47:04Guy Raz?

  What was your relationship like with Liz, your partner?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Well, she was always wonderful, very supportive. You know, when you look at Lush and and people admire Lush for its values, especially the way women are treated, things like that. That's all Liz Bennet, Liz, that's she married and her name became Bennet. Uh, Liz Weir, that's her.

• 47:24Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  She was, she took me to one side. I mean, bear in mind, I had not had much of a social education. And she would take me to one side and she would say, if we're gonna build a business based on women, you can't pat them on the backside when they walk by.

• 47:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  You do, and of course, she was fairly austere. Uh, so you didn't wanna be told twice.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  I absolutely took her word as that was it. She told me, I did it. So those standards, you know, she had the standards all the time, which I probably lacked.

• 47:53Guy Raz?

  Right. All right, so you are just cranking it out and you're busy and you're expanding. And when you're doing a half a million pounds of revenue a year selling to the body shop, do you remember how many people you had working with you at that point?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was about five or six people working with me then.

• 48:12Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  But what's very nice, when we're talking about, well, how'd you have the success later on? Is one of them was Carla Bygrave, one was Rowena Hoffbar, as she was then, Birdnay. One was Liz Bennet. Um, then all of those people, Helen Ambrosen, they are the team now. They're the elite team, the top team.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  Who are with you.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  They continue to learn their skills and we still work together.

• 48:37Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right, we are now going to get to a theme that is a recurring theme in your life, which is you get, you start to get itchy feet and you wanna, you wanna expand or move on to the next thing, or you know, you've got this business, which is Constantine and Weir and it's going well, but you know, you kinda, you're doing well and it's, and you get to a point, I guess, in the mid eighties where you wanna kinda build something out. And you decided that you wanted to maybe open your own little shop in the US.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there was always much talk about, um, well, we would do something together rather than me be a supplier and then, you know, we would do something together.

• 49:15Guy Raz?

  Like a partnership, okay.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I said to Gordon, well, why don't I come up with a new concept in the States? And we looked at that, you know, because they couldn't do the body shop. So she would quite like have liked to have a different business that was not nicked from someone in San Francisco with all that complexity. So I did a new product, myself and my team. We did something called Bodkins, which we opened in Seattle.

• 49:38Guy Raz?

  You opened a store called Bodkins in Seattle?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:43Guy Raz?

  This was like a body shop type or a skincare type shop?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:47Guy Raz?

  And you did this with Anita Roddick and Gordon or?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  No, Anita didn't know. I did it with Gordon.

• 49:55Guy Raz?

  Wait, sorry, you did it with her husband and she didn't know?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yes. I don't know how that happened. I think Gordon said to me, look, why don't we do this and I'll tell Anita later on, right?

• 50:06Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  So I don't know why I fell for that because that was definitely foolish. And I did all the work. I did all of the product. I, you know, we got the shop. My brother in law said he would run it and.

• 50:20Guy Raz?

  Why Seattle, by the way?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Because that's where my brother in law lived.

• 50:23Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  It's a great city. It was a great city then, a great city now. Bear in mind, my image of the States, I hadn't traveled at all. So I did, I'd been to Seattle a couple of times, but my image of the States was very much formed off of the American comics I read as a little boy. And also the American business books I'd read and the entrepreneurial spirit of the States. So, you know, that's what I, I felt good about. And so, yeah, so we opened this shop. I mean, when you describe it to someone, you think it's slightly lunatic. I, it gets worse because it didn't really make money. But then Gordon decided he would tell Anita. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine and then he thought he'd tell Anita.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  And then he told me, I've never been more wrong in my life.

• 51:13Guy Raz?

  Such a weird story.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  She turned the tables over, she threw chairs. He said, I'm not frightened of any woman, so I didn't lock my bedroom door. But obviously he wasn't sleeping in the same bed as her that night. And from that moment on, really, our relationship wasn't so good, mine and Anita's.

• 51:31Guy Raz?

  But she was mad because she thought you betrayed her. She was like, that's my business. What are you doing? That was her perspective.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  I think she might have been, yeah.

• 51:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Which, not to, I mean, we should say Anita's, she passed away more than a decade ago. But so she's not here to kind of give her side of the story, but I can kind of understand that. I cannot kind of, right?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  So can I, yeah.

• 51:52Guy Raz?

  Right? Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Well, and obviously, I'm not straightforward, you know, I'm very, I just, I'm going for it all the time. I'm not, you can't rely on me to stay still.

• 52:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, I don't become replete and sit back, even now in my sixties.

• 52:08Guy Raz?

  You had to keep moving and to you it was like, this is the next step. I want to keep moving, I want to expand, I want to do the next thing. But it sounds like you kind of did it in a clumsy way that you, and I get it, I've done these things in my life.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Well, it didn't feel clumsy when I was doing it, but retrospectively, it obviously wasn't appropriate.

• 52:27Guy Raz?

  And we should kind of, I think, put this in a context because Anita Roddick, by the mid eighties, certainly by the late eighties, she was like hugely famous, like Princess Diana was buying her stuff. And like, she was all over the place. She was a big deal already by then.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And rightly so.

• 52:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I mean, you know how it is whenever you've had a very close working relationship with someone? You don't have to admit how much they taught you. I don't know, maybe that's just a British thing.

• 52:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  But she must, she taught me so much, didn't she? It's quite obvious.

• 53:02Guy Raz?

  So it's clear that your relationship with Anita is kind of damaged at this point. And probably you're not really gonna, I mean, she needs your products, but there's, there's too much tension between the two of you. And at the time, I mean, she basically made an offer to buy out Constantine and Weir.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:19Guy Raz?

  And you did sell it to her. I mean, was, was that the reason that, that you knew that basically you just kind of had to move on?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  No. I basically drove that because it was very awkward.

• 53:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  I owned these rights, but they didn't know what to do about that. They weren't taking any new product off me because they were frightened that I dominated so much of their business. And they'd just gone public and the city didn't know that I owned all the product rights.

• 53:45Guy Raz?

  The city of, you mean, the bankers, the financiers?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they went public, they were now a listed company. But they didn't own the product they were selling. I owned it.

• 53:54Guy Raz?

  So they had to pivot. They had to start making their own product.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's what, that, it was my solution. I said to them, look, you, you're gonna have to buy the rights. But I said, look, I make three million pounds a year from each of these product ranges. So why don't you pay me nine million over three years? You'll make the money back anyway by making it yourself and I'll go off and do something else.

• 54:15Guy Raz?

  So you walk out of that, that relationship with nine million pounds.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Oh, it was in three tranches over two years.

• 54:24Guy Raz?

  And by the way, what happens to Bodkins, that shop in Seattle? Is that still going at that time?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I had closed that earlier and lost 200,000 pounds.

• 54:31Guy Raz?

  All right. So you lose the money on Bodkins, but you've got nine million pounds. And at this point, you can really kind of just live the life of Riley. Like, that's a lot of money. You can buy a nice country estate in the south of England and Liz gets a cut. And you, you know, can, can do beekeeping or I know you're into birding. You could do that for the rest of your life, but obviously that's boring. I can do that.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Who's gonna do that?

• 54:55Guy Raz?

  You don't want to do that. So you decide, all right, I'm gonna start a new business. And it's this concept called cosmetics to go that you again start with the same team, right? That you'd done constantly.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Well, because I wanted, yeah, we, we were trying to keep the same people employed that we'd had before.

• 55:10Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  But in a mail order business.

• 55:13Guy Raz?

  Mail order cosmetics. So the same products that you were making, but mail order.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, because that, I didn't really wanna, I didn't want to be going into competition with, with Anita and Gordon. And anyway, to get the money, I'd had to sign a, a thing saying I wouldn't open any shops for three years.

• 55:27Guy Raz?

  Got it. So you had to do a mail order business. You couldn't have a brick and mortar.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  But I wanted to anyway, so it suited me at the time.

• 55:33Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing, you sold the rights to all of these products that you were making. You could not sell those recipes in your new business. You had to make brand new things.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I had loads. I had so many new products, ideas. We had shampoo bars, bath bombs, things that Anita didn't want to take. So I already had a catalog full of product.

• 55:54Guy Raz?

  All right, I want to hone in on the bath bomb because this is a product that's going to revolutionize your life and this is what Blush would eventually be built on. But when did that idea come to you?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  It didn't come to me. So basically, what happened was I was in the kitchen with my wife, Mo, a perfumer called Geoff Brown, a herbalist called Dr. Malcolm Stewart, another trichologist called Stephen Smalls and a couple of other people. And we were talking about the problem of bubble baths creating urinary tract infections in young children under seven.

• 56:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:31Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  So we were just chatting about that and how the problem was that kids love bubble baths so much. So what happens is it breaks down the capillary action and it enables microorganisms to get in the urinary tract and cause problems. That's how a bubble bath does that, okay? We wanted to come up with something that was better for the kids and wouldn't cause that problem. And Geoff Brown had worked making Alka Seltzer with bicarbonate of soda and citric acid. So bicarbonate of soda is extremely soothing in the bath, very, very good for you. It's, you know, a seltzer bath. It's really well-known all worldwide. And if you had chicken pox or something, you'd put a bit of baking soda in the bath.

• 57:12Guy Raz?

  Just baking soda in the bath, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Very soothing.

• 57:14Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then my wife went out into the shed and came back with a first bath bomb. But it was just a small disc and we called them Aqua Sizzlers.

• 57:24Guy Raz?

  Let me just pause for a sec. She would take basically baking soda and some scents and essential oils and herbs and like put it into a disc?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yep. So she just came back in, there it was. So she had invented the bath bomb, really.

• 57:41Guy Raz?

  But she didn't just do it in five minutes, right? This is going to take some time.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  She did.

• 57:46Guy Raz?

  Well, how do you make that in five minutes?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Well, she'd heard us talking about it. She just went out and did it. She's very practical, my wife.

• 57:52Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  She just came in, there it is. So then for a while, we sold these Aqua Sizzlers in a little tube. But then we found that the kids weren't using them, the grownups were using them. So then we thought, oh, well, if a grownup's using it, we'll make it a bit bigger.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  And we'll have a round, you know, we did a bomb. We actually did a bomb. We covered in black cellophane, had a red wick out of the top, wrote bomb on it. That was the BlackBerry bath bomb and so on. So that's how they they developed. But it started off with my wife going in the shed, making one, coming back.

• 58:22Guy Raz?

  So at cosmetics to go, you were already selling these products?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  We started, bath bombs came along about two years into cosmetics to go. But things like shampoo bars, they were there right at the beginning. We had a patent for shampoo bars.

• 58:38Guy Raz?

  Shampoo bars like a bar of soap, but instead of in a bottle.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  For washing your hair.

• 58:42Guy Raz?

  Brushing your hair. Okay.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Unbelievably popular at the moment.

• 58:45Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  So everybody wants our shampoo bars at the moment because they don't want plastic.

• 58:49Guy Raz?

  They don't want plastic, right?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:51Guy Raz?

  You have this business cosmetics to go, which just sounds like a great idea, right? You got it's mail order and mail order is a big deal in the late eighties, early nineties. And how's it going? How was it doing?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Every time we send a parcel out, we lose a pound.

• 59:09Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, you know how the the dot com business was, you know, you figured if you got to a certain size, you'd be okay.

• 59:16Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  So you were constantly trying to get to that scale.

• 59:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  But just like the dot com businesses, we never made it to that scale. There's a joke there. If you want to make a small fortune, you start with a large one.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  And lose a pound on every order.

• 59:33Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  So cosmetics to go was a hell of a party. It was so intense. I have never been so stressed. We were producing these catalogs, the whole, every range had a different image. I mean, it was just for people obsessed with cosmetics, which we all were and are. It was a great party, but we just blew all the money and went bust.

• 59:55Guy Raz?

  So this is like nineteen ninety four. And I mean, you you worked on cosmetics to go for like six or seven years.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Guy Raz?

  Before it went under and then really went under. And were like, were you broke?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Well, I'd not been ever so clever. I basically still had a mortgage on my home. So I still had a loan on my home. I still had a loan for a small factory unit I owned. And I still had a loan on on this property in the high street that I where I have my lap. So I still had these loans to pay off. So I then was having to borrow money from money lenders at usurious rates. And then I managed to sell this house for half of what I bought it for. I bought it for two hundred thousand pounds. I sold it for a hundred thousand. I paid off all the loan sharks. I was left with forty three thousand pounds and I had three kids and no business.

• 1:00:50Guy Raz?

  You had just a few years before. And again, I'm not trying to shame you at all. I just want to put this in context because it's important.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  It's okay. I've got plenty of shame.

• 1:00:57Guy Raz?

  No, the

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Shame is the word that I'm trying to avoid.

• 1:01:00Guy Raz?

  This is a very important failure that you experienced, right?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Guy Raz?

  You were a millionaire and you had lost all of it. And you were also in debt. And now you're forty two, almost forty three. You've got three kids.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. My eldest son took me to one side at seven and suggested, well, Dad, do you not think you should get a proper job?

• 1:01:26Guy Raz?

  And what did you think?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  I said, well, I think I've got a skill set that's such that if I can market it, I can make a load of money again. And he he sort of nodded sagely at seven and let me do it.

• 1:01:38Guy Raz?

  But did you have anxiety about the future at that point? Or did you think I'm going to recover? This is going to be fine.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I had. Did I have anxiety? I mean, I've I I've had anxiety most of my life. So I had plenty of anxiety, probably enough to, you know, fill a boat. Basically, I didn't want to do anything. I wanted to stay home, lick my wounds. I felt very ashamed. Shame was the prevalent thing. I certainly didn't think I'm going to get up and do something else. But my colleagues, especially Helen Ambrose at that time, Helen Ambrose phoned me up and said, the receivers are all gone, right? Everyone had gone. I had an empty. Uh shop and an empty um lab.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  And Helen Ambrose phoned up and said, I'm gonna start going in nine to five. How about you? I'm like, doing what? With with what? And she said, well, I just think it would be good. We can go in, we can see what there is there. We can make a few products, maybe sell a few here and there. Um let's get going again. And so all of the the main team that I'd worked with, they couldn't find work either that they wanted.

• 1:02:52Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  So bit by bit, they all came back.

• 1:02:56Guy Raz?

  And I want to just name them all, because because you all get together.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yep. Helen Ambrose.

• 1:03:00Guy Raz?

  Liz Weir, Paul Greaves, your wife, Mo.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:04Guy Raz?

  Mike Bird, Rowena Hoffbauer. And you all kind of come together and this is the beginning of Lush.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Yep. So then we were all earning no money. Rowena ran all our credit cards up because she was the only one that hadn't already done that. And she started to fit the shop out downstairs and run that. And we started making the product upstairs. So me and Helen and Mo, we would make product. You know, just with the, we go up the green grocers and buy the avocados and the fruit and make the products. Then take it downstairs and she'd sell it.

• 1:03:36Guy Raz?

  Now, here's what I don't understand.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Guy Raz?

  That year, ninety five, you open a store in Covent Garden in London. How were you able to do that with forty thousand pounds?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Well, what we did was the first store was really the little store downstairs in Paul at twenty nine High Street.

• 1:03:53Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  And that's what we did first. So we did a sort of mucky up thing. And then, basically, we knew we'd done all of our money. And we knew we had to get a backup, but quite a lot of people were approaching us, offering to back us. Uh one of the guys, Andrew Geary and Peter Blacker, they were really nice. Peter Blacker just said, well, I'll do a punt for a couple of hundred grand. And he put some money in for some shares and we started the retail business. And with his money, we opened a small store in Covent Garden and a larger one on the King's Road.

• 1:04:29Guy Raz?

  So you had never really had to raise money for your previous businesses because they were all. But this one, you had to find some outside money. You had somebody, you had to find an investor.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what I did with Peter, I asked him, what was the best investment you ever made, Peter? And he told me what it was. It was, he was a property guy. And so he'd bought some properties off the army in Scotland and he managed to sell them for 12 times the price.

• 1:04:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  So I promised him, I said, well, this will be a better bet than that.

• 1:05:01Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why that turned out to be a pretty good bet. And later on, how Mark crossed paths with the body shop yet again, but this time as a possible buyer. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 1:05:24Guy Raz?

  And just one more thing, the How I Built This book is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with a ton of stories you haven't heard and how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out How I Built This, the book, available wherever you buy your books. And please, if you support what I do on this show, you can show that support by picking up How I Built This, the book. And thanks.

• 1:06:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1995 and out of the ruins of a failed business, Mark and his partners decide to take one more leap by launching a little cosmetic store they call Lush. And this time, things seem to click. So pretty soon after opening their first location in Poole, Mark opens another store in London.

• 1:06:35Guy Raz?

  I remember that shop in Covent Garden. I was a student in London at the time and it was a big deal.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:06:39Guy Raz?

  The bath bombs, I remember, they were like these, and you still have them, these orbs. They kind of looked like, they reminded me of Sweet Tarts. You know Sweet Tarts?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah, they were like giant Sweet Tarts. And they, some of them had like dried roses in them and things like that, right? Like flower petals.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:56Guy Raz?

  Because I remember my sister came to visit me in London and she, everybody wanted to go to Lush. It was like all of a sudden was starting to, people were talking about it. What, how did that happen? I mean, the stores just opened their doors and?

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  It was huge. No one had ever seen anything like it before. We would get a thousand inquiries a month for people to do business with us.

• 1:07:16Guy Raz?

  From the get-go?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Well, pretty soon. We opened up the King's Road shop and within the first week, we had Jean-Paul Gaultier and Jasper Conrad come in and commend us.

• 1:07:26Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  And to be honest-

• 1:07:27Guy Raz?

  And Jasper Conrad is the son of Terence Conrad who opened-

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Of Terence Conrad, a designer in his own right. Terence Conrad, great, great retailer throughout the whole of Britain. But it wasn't just their status, but so many people were commending us. And to be honest, to have been that bad and to have everything that wrong, and then suddenly to have everything that right was very tricky. I can remember having to go out at the back of the shop and have a moment, you know? You can't be that bad and that good all in a short period of time, you know?

• 1:08:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And by the way, how did you decide on the name Lush?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  We had a competition and we said, come up with a name for us. And a lady called Mrs. Bennet in Edinburgh called us Lush Garden and we shortened it to Lush.

• 1:08:17Guy Raz?

  So here's what's interesting. I've read that you kind of modeled these shops, the Lush shops, after Neils Yard Dairy, the cheese shop. Right, which is a famous cheese shop.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Well, it was it was various bits. I mean, Neil's Yard Dairy is lovely, a lovely cheese shop. Uh, yeah, we had big truckles of of shampoo and big truckles of soap, like cheese truckles, which we would slice and sell the product from and and uh and that, yes, it was partly that, partly grocery shops, like, you know, with with apples, the bath bombs look like apples. To be honest, when I first did the King's Road, I I thought I made an awful mistake. I'd done all, I just let my imagination and everyone else's imagination run riot. We'd got this stainless steel basin full of ice with face masks in it that you would only last a couple of weeks and you know, every, we just let everything go crazy.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  And then we had some bottled product on little, three little pyramids in the center of the shop. And when I was looking at it before I opened, I thought, oh, God, you've had this money in this investment. You've just blown it.

• 1:09:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  You've you've done all this crazy stuff instead of just doing a much more understandable shop. The public won't get it. And then I opened the doors and the public came in and they just ignored all the bottled products and bought everything else. They were wonderful. They got everything. They just loved it.

• 1:09:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because you're, I mean, as as people now know, when you go into into Lush, um, and really was kind of baked in early on, there wasn't a lot of packaging. I mean, you had the the sort of the plastic tubs and and but then it was tins of things and and then just giant slabs of soap that were just sliced off and put in paper and you would walk out.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that, yeah, it, well, because we, first of all, we didn't have the money for the packaging and secondly, we did, we didn't want to do it anyway. If you've got a bottle of shower gel, when it went out from the factory, about two thirds of the money went into the packaging and the labeling and only a third into the contents. So if you can get a business model where you can get rid of that unwanted packaging, the customer doesn't want it, you don't want it. If you can get rid of that, you've got far more money to put into the ingredients.

• 1:10:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  You can have a much better standard of payment for suppliers and so on, and you can have a bit more profit, and you can get a competitive price for the customer.

• 1:10:38Guy Raz?

  By the way, the the six of you who who kind of got together to start Lush, did you ever have to have an uncomfortable conversation about ownership?

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Um. So the problem actually isn't ownership. Well, it is to an extent, but it the problem is succession. Because obviously, if if we let's pretend we're not a cosmetic company and we're not British, but we're an American tech company, yeah. All those tech companies, the founders all had to, they either died and they had to be paid off, their families had to be paid off, or they they have to have their remuneration, don't they, for these successful companies? And we didn't want to go public.

• 1:11:17Guy Raz?

  You decided early on, we don't ever want to go public.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Well, we watched what happened with the Body Shop. You know, they'd gone public and Gordon Roddick says still today that that was the biggest mistake he made, because he was no longer in control of it and things that he thought were important wasn't what the

• 1:11:36Guy Raz?

  Shareholders wanted.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  The city thought was important.

• 1:11:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Guy Raz?

  They don't want you to spend money on on high quality products and and they want you to maximize profit.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. So we dreamt up a scheme, you see, we're all, we're capitalists, straightforward what I am. I am a capitalist. And I believe in capitalism, but I don't believe in the forms of capitalism that I would call locust capitalism, where it's where people are feeding off someone else without doing any work. So we came up with this scheme where we valued our shares at five times the average of the last three years' profit. So that we captured a little bit, but we only kept the greed and we still, that still enabled us to, if we want to build the business, we can build the business, we can build the profitability, we can make more when we sell our shares.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  And then we gave part of the business to the staff, which we would like to see increased, so that the staff can buy those shares off the founders. And we put in an employee benefit trust to facilitate the sale of the shares as and when they're necessary.

• 1:12:45Guy Raz?

  So essentially, you were, you have said, you and the other founders have said, look, we're going to get rich enough, you know, but we don't need hundreds of millions of dollars, we will be happy with tens of millions of dollars.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yes, because we didn't do all the work.

• 1:13:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Now, in Britain, we have something called the living wage, where a group of clerics Peeed off with the fact that there was so much poverty in their diocese.

• 1:13:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Got together and they dreamt up a living wage. This was a wage that was a fair pay. So we paid the living wage as decided by them. So we're lifting our skirts up at the bottom to get people out of poverty. Sharing some of the business with them, but still capitalists and it's still capitalism. We can still increase the size of that business, the scale of that business, the profitability of that business and get considerable benefit for ourselves, but not so much benefit that it's vulgar.

• 1:13:47Guy Raz?

  I think like a lot of the entrepreneurs I've had on the show, it doesn't seem like you're wired to work for other people, right? Like you are, you're clearly super driven, but I think you're a little difficult, right? I mean, in a good way.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  No, I'm difficult in every way.

• 1:14:06Guy Raz?

  But it doesn't sound to me like you are a control freak that like actually the other partners involved in Lush had a lot of say over the look and the feel and the branding and because you know when you're in a Lush store that you're in a Lush store. It doesn't sound like you were a control freak over every single aspect of that. Am I right?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  I'm not, no, I'm not a control freak. I'm quite intuitive. I know when I see something that's wrong and I don't know how to describe that beforehand. So for a long time, Rowena just banned me from the shop openings because all I could ever see was something that was wrong. Yeah. So she just banned me. She just said, you can't come to the shop openings unless you improve your attitude.

• 1:14:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Just, we don't need that kind of miserable person pacing up and down outside when we're just greeting new customers, you know? And I'm allowed to go now, so I must have improved.

• 1:15:00Guy Raz?

  Meantime, the business is growing and I think by 2001, you actually put in a bid to buy the body shop and Anita Roddick would not sell it to you at the time. By the way, do you remember what you offered for it?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Well, it was very straightforward.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  The management could raise about three hundred and sixty million themselves to buy the Body Shop off of the strength of the Body Shop's figures.

• 1:15:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  I could add my business to that and get up to about four fifty, something like that.

• 1:15:39Guy Raz?

  Million pounds.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Then, basically, the, you know, like, someone like Laurel could get up to much higher than that.

• 1:15:47Guy Raz?

  They eventually sold Body Shop to L'Oréal for six hundred and fifty-two million pounds.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Guy Raz?

  In two thousand and six, at the time Anita Roddick was very, very sick. And, of course, is no longer alive. And the Body Shop going to L'Oréal, to you and to some customers, meant something because L'Oréal's a huge multinational and the Body Shop represented kind of, right, it was, their slogan was trade, not aid.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Laurel had always been the arch enemy because of testing on animals. They represented those who wished to test. Body Shop represented those that didn't wish to test.

• 1:16:24Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  And that was quite sort of fundamental.

• 1:16:26Guy Raz?

  And I think at one point, there were signs at lush stores that said, are you fed up with the BS, obviously referring to Body Shop and its sale to L'Oréal. And that was-

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Not one of my best, not one of my best moments.

• 1:16:41Guy Raz?

  If you had known how ill Anita was at the time, I think you've said you would have responded differently.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I had no idea. And, you know, I miss her.

• 1:16:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Difficult to know what to say. I mean, the weird thing was, she always felt she had a very short length of time and she was right, you know, she did have a short length of time.

• 1:17:07Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  But I think, I think the truth was with the Body Shop, that even if she hadn't been ill, I think they'd had it with it.

• 1:17:15Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  I think they'd had their ride and, you know what I mean, and they didn't want to carry on. You know, I, I painted Anita Roddick as this dynamic, charismatic, fierce woman. But when I once asked her, just, we were just messing about in a train or something, doing one of those psychological sort of quizzes, you know, and I said, Anita, if, if you were an animal, what animal would you imagine yourself as? And she said, a fawn. In other words, a young deer. Now, that, if she'd have said an eagle, I would have, that's what I would have expected her to say. A fawn?

• 1:17:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  And suddenly I could see then, I could see her as Gordon, her husband, saw her. And how much he protected her and looked after her. And how much they were, they were a couple. You, you never, because when you're in awe of someone, you don't see them as human beings.

• 1:18:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  You see them as, as this, you know, this great thing.

• 1:18:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  And of course, the truth was, she was, she was very human.

• 1:18:20Guy Raz?

  With Lush, I think, like eight years into the business, you had, you had over 200 shops in 29 countries. I mean, that's, that's just incredible expansion in, in eight years. How were you able to control the brand with all those shops around the world? Was it, like, was it just something that you weren't that worried about?

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Well, the brand is, our brand is very much based on the people that work in the shops and the people we attract. But I get asked a lot, how do you choose your staff, right?

• 1:18:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  I don't know if you've ever watched High Fidelity.

• 1:18:55Guy Raz?

  I have.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  When he talks about his staff, he says, well, I employed them for a couple of days and now they turn up every day of the week.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  You know, we employ and attract enthusiasts. People are really passionate about nature or, or animal testing or animal rights. And then the brand tends to become that, you know?

• 1:19:21Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  I mean, we control the products. You know, my, my children are involved. We've got a whole new set of inventors now, young people coming on through the business. So we do that, that side, that controls, you know, what you've got at home. But then the people that sell it to you, it just get attracted to the brand, you know?

• 1:19:44Guy Raz?

  I mean, obviously, Lush today, I think you have 900 stores, 12,000 staff around the world. But you, you know, this is a challenging business and retail is challenging and margins are thin. So, you know, you've had years where you've got, based on what I've read, I don't know if this is right, you know, 70 million pounds in profit and then, you know, you've had years where it's plunged to like 25 million pounds and still profitable the next year. So what explains those huge swings back and forth? Is it just that you pour more money into the business and that's why?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Well, let's take from that height, when we got that height, that's when we introduced the living wage in parts of our markets.

• 1:20:24Guy Raz?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  So that's what we've decided, we've got plenty here, we can share some. So that's quite often what's gone on, yeah, that we've changed the business model by introducing another element into it. I mean, we give huge sums in charity. I mean, we've given over 50 million pounds.

• 1:20:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  And this is the lesson from Anita Roddick, where she took just a small sum of money and she turned it into that massive business which L'Oreal bought for all that money.

• 1:20:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  That shows you that not all money has the same value.

• 1:20:55Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Small sums of money in hands of dynamic people who really care goes a long way. So when we give money, when we give, you know, a thousand or 2,000 or 5,000 to a group that wants to achieve something, you know, maybe they want to stop fracking or maybe they want to deal with some environmental issue, they will make that money go much further than if that money was in someone else's hands.

• 1:21:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  So that's very much how we focus on it.

• 1:21:21Guy Raz?

  I think it was around 2012 when your childhood friend Jeff Osment located, tracked down your dad. He found him in South Africa.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Guy Raz?

  And you were able to see him for the first time since you were two years old.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Guy Raz?

  What was that, what was that like, seeing him? Were you nervous going before that door opened?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  No, no, I wasn't nervous. I I I had a friend who told me he he he was the result of a one night stand between his mother and an Italian on a beach, right? And he still found his father and he said to me, if you're ever fortunate enough to find your father, go straight away. Do not mess about. Don't don't even think about it. So I didn't think about it. I just went. And I was met by my two sisters who I can't explain how similar they were to me. And then when I got to see my dad, he was apologetic and, you know, I didn't need any of that. I just said to him, Dad, all's well that ends well. You know, just really pleased to be here with you. And we just had a couple

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  of days together. Ah, they were just magical and they, I can't just, it's very hard to describe such an emotional thing. But the best way I can find to describe it is if I had an empty half where my heart was before, I now have a blazing fire. So a lot of the anxiety is gone, a lot of that stuff's gone with that. He died shortly afterwards. He died within weeks of me seeing him. I could not have been more welcomed. I could not have been treated with more sincerity or compassion. That was a great moment.

• 1:23:15Guy Raz?

  Do you think, Mark, that because of your, and I think I know the answer to this question because it must be the case, and I don't want to answer for you, but it must be that your early life, you know, growing up with your grandma, your dad not being part of your life, your grandma dying and, you know, when you're 12 and falling out with your mom and then, and we should say you did, you have reconciled and you have a relationship with her today. But, I mean, that must have driven you. All of those things must have driven you in some way, right? I mean, how do you think about that? How do you think about your story, your past and your childhood and?

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  I read an article in the in the Daily Telegraph, the British Daily Telegraph. And this particular journalist had spent her life interviewing business people. And this was her last business interview. And she talked of something that she called the entrepreneur's wound. And she said, all of the really successful people that she had interviewed in business had these similarities, where they had a death or a severe divorce or a sibling die, something like that in their childhood, they had an event. Now, whether that teaches you about mortality, and you know you've only got a certain period of time, and so you you you get driven through that, or whether you're trying to impress

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  someone that perhaps is no longer here, or maybe just, you know, I don't know, did I want to impress my dad? He didn't, he was oblivious. So I I don't know, but if you look at, you know, Steve Jobs, or you look at any of those those guys, they got a similar profile. I mean, the issues create the character. I really believe that very strongly. All of the the founders have all got issues.

• 1:25:09Guy Raz?

  Mark, when you think about all of the things that that you've accomplished and achieved, do you think that most of it was because you just got lucky or or because you're really smart and had the skills to make it happen?

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Think we've worked out that I'm not necessarily very smart, haven't we? Uh, I, uh, I see myself as a technical entrepreneur. I see I have the technical skills and I've made the most of those. I mean, you know, I think it was, it's always ascribed to Churchill, isn't it, when he said, or we were supposed to say, that success is just stumbling from one mistake to another.

• 1:25:47Guy Raz?

  One failure to another, yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  And that, whoever originally said it, before he stole it, that, anyone out there who's in a business, they know that's how it feels. Do you know what I mean? I, you know, it just depends. Sometimes I have really big challenges and other times they're just challenges. But there's never a moment when you can really sort of say, wow, I'm great.

• 1:26:15Guy Raz?

  And that is pretty much how my interview with Mark ended back in February. But of course, just a few weeks later, everything changed. So a few days ago, I got back in touch. Mark?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yes, hello.

• 1:26:30Guy Raz?

  How are you?

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Very good. And you?

• 1:26:32Guy Raz?

  I'm all right. Talking to you is like, it's like reaching back in time to a simpler moment in human history. And Mark told me that in the days just after the pandemic hit, Lush had to shut down lots of its stores and lay off or furlough some of its workers. And then, around the same time, his longtime business partner, Liz Weir Bennett, passed away from cancer. But Mark has had some time to recover from that. And when I talked to him the other day, he sounded mostly upbeat and said the business has started to bounce back.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, obviously, selling soap in the time of COVID is quite sensible. So while those selling groceries seem to be doing exceptionally well, selling soap isn't so bad.

• 1:27:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  My point really is that while you may not go on a cruise and you may not, you may not be able to take the holiday you've always dreamt of, you can always take a bath.

• 1:27:29Guy Raz?

  So worldwide, remind me, how many stores do you have right now?

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's around 900.

• 1:27:36Guy Raz?

  And can you estimate, can you estimate how many of them are closed right now?

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Well, 50 at the moment, maximum, closed right now.

• 1:27:45Guy Raz?

  50?

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  I mean, probably, probably less.

• 1:27:47Guy Raz?

  Oh, so most of them are back open?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Most are back open and most are trading, not at the full level that they were trading before. Some are literally just kiosks where we open the door. We put some sort of barrier and people come to the staff there who are wearing masks. And then others where there's enough space where they can come in and socially distance while they're shopping. And we had between 200 and 300% increase in our digital business, in our male business. And so that was one hell of a sort of swing around.

• 1:28:20Guy Raz?

  So online sales have, have really boomed. But, but I'm assuming, like with many retailers, it hasn't fully closed the gap, the shortfall, when it comes to overall sales? Because I'm assuming.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yes. You're correct to assume that, but we're much more, that area of our business is more profitable than the retail. So people moving on to the mail order business is quite a help because we then generate more profit.

• 1:28:47Guy Raz?

  So it sounds like overall things are okay, things are okay for much.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, for anyone in business listening, I, one of the things we've tried to do is to break things up into six week periods because you can't really anticipate what the virus is going to do beyond a six week period. And so, and then trying to work out within that six week period, what do we think is going to happen? You know, you know, it's very convenient for us because we obviously go from season to season. We, so we'll have from now until what we call Bonfire Night, which is a British tradition, which is November the 5th. And then we'll go to Christmas with another six week period, and then we'll go to Valentine's, another six week period, and then it's Easter.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  And I think that's a good way to approach it rather than trying to imagine what it's going to be like in a year, two years' time. We can do that, but you're not flexible enough if you do that. You know, you need to be very dynamic, I think, in these circumstances.

• 1:29:45Guy Raz?

  Given that you will probably face a fall in revenue this year, like many retailers.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Guy Raz?

  Are you also being very careful with, you know, with how you're spending cash as a business?

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, what's actually happened is that the bulk of the agony we took in the last financial year, which ended in June, this year just gone. So those figures are going to look pretty dreadful. And then as we've quickly adapted, so this year, this financial year will look a lot more positive and a lot, a lot stronger, you know. So we had a loss last year, but we won't have a loss this year. We'll have a reasonable profit. And at first we used to talk about the new normal, but I've stopped doing that because I think that many of the things that are happening is what we wanted anyway.

• 1:30:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  We wanted less air travel. We wanted less pollution. We wanted people to be more discerning in their buying. We wanted better supply chains and better thought about the product. All those things are happening.

• 1:30:48Guy Raz?

  Mark, in the episode we just heard, I mean, you've gone through so many difficult moments. I mean, from your childhood and going through dealing with anxiety and.

• 1:31:00Guy Raz?

  And then, you know, selling your business to Body Shop and then starting a mail order company and then losing it all. I mean, you described you were broke in your 40s.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:31:10Guy Raz?

  Do you think all of those experiences, those low points that you went through actually have helped you have the resilience to deal with what you're dealing with now?

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so. I think that, I think it's for all businesses. I think that vibrancy that you require, that flexibility, the ability to, to listen carefully and to make the appropriate changes and not be too, well, spoilt is the word, isn't it? I mean, in business, we can get spoilt. We can get used to too much luxury. And I mean, for me personally, at the end of my career here, to have to deal with this, I felt was really, really, really interesting. And far more interesting than running at a steady pace, especially when there was so much change we would like to see, you know, about climate change and other things like

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  that. So, so I, I find this far more exciting and far more real than I found when I last spoke to you.

• 1:32:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. I love that. I love that you said that. That's an amazing perspective.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's the truth.

• 1:32:26Guy Raz?

  That's Mark Constantine, co-founder of Lush. By the way, Mark told me that these days, one thing he's doing to chill out and help him sleep is to take hot baths at exactly 4:00 PM every day. He says that in addition to being super relaxing, it's a great way to test out all of his products.

• 1:32:50Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can write to us at [email protected]. If you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis or at Guy Raz. And you can follow me on Instagram. That's at guy. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye with music composed by Rameen Arablouei. Thanks also to Derek Gales, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Farah Safari. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.