From Waste to beauty, How Rescuing and Recycling By-Products Built a Global Brand

What happens to all those coffee grounds we use on a daily basis, most are thrown in the trash, some are composted, but others - well they are made into personal care products like face scrub. This is where UpCircle beauty comes in, rescuing and reusing by-products from various industries such as argan oil, juice, wood, and tea. In this episode we hear from Co-Founder of Up-Circle Anna Brightman on the inception of this concept and the amazing growth the company has had over the past few years.

Show Links:

https://upcirclebeauty.com/

Imperfect Show Notes

While these notes are not perfect (computer transcription is still a work in progress), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!

My conversation with Anna Brightman:

Morgan Bailey 0:02

Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host Morgan Bailey. And I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. I'm sitting here drinking my morning coffee, and just a few minutes ago, I had to throw the grounds out. I looked down at the trash which is conveniently right next to me, but opted to toss them in the compost bin, which is right outside. But is there another option, that's what Anna Brightman and her brother ask themselves is a sought tons of coffee grounds being thrown out from cafes in their hometown in London. Now, long story short, there was another option not just for coffee grounds, but for a whole variety of byproducts from industries such as Argan, oil production, juice, wood, industries, and tea. Now, this was the inception of circle, which her and her brother co founded, which rescues these byproducts from going into landfill and using them as core ingredients to face grubs, face creams and other beauty products. They were clearly on to something here as their business is rapidly grown, and their products are available across the globe. And I recently went to my local foods and purchase some of their face cream, which I'm loving, and I realized is actually the first specific face cream I've ever bought.

You know, but ultimately, this conversation really made me look at the opportunities, we have to rethink how we use our resources, what we consider waste from our home life to a global supply chain and manufacturing. Now, up circle has demonstrated that this not only has ecological value, and being smart about our resources, but it has a whole lot of business value as well. But that's enough for me. So let's just hear directly from Anna, how this all went down.

And what a fantastic opportunity to have this conversation. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for inviting me on. Yeah, of course now, and you've and your brother have created this company, up circle beauty where you used the circular economy to to take what was perhaps ingredients that may not have been used or may have been discarded. And you you're able to create beauty products with them, which I think sounds that meets sounds like an amazing use of resources.

And I'm curious, though, like, as your, as you've built this organization, what was the foundational elements that kind of allowed you to see this opportunity in the first place?

Anna Brightman 2:42

It's a great question. I think this essentially starts from birth, and is all to do with the character that you are, and your sort of ambition for the future, I would always say that both my brother and I have great ambition and want to achieve a lot in our lives. We're extremely determined people who are in no way afraid of hard work. But myself specifically, I'm also a very creative person. So if you were to look at the subjects at school that I enjoyed the most, it's easy for me to say that art was by far my favorite. And so combining those two things, you know, wanting to be super successful, and ideally, to have money in my future. But also being a creative. I'm quite a realist. So I know that that's not the easiest path to go down. So I think, you know, as a teenager, and as I went on to choose what I would do at college, I was afraid to go down the purely creative route, which left me in a position that in my early 20s, I was actually in a very corporate role, where I had to wear heels in a suits and makeup, which in itself was a bit ridiculous, every single day. But I would come home at the end of the day feeling like, oh, is this it? Is this my entire life? Like I'm still so young, I don't feel great about what I'm doing and being a tiny cog in a massive machine. So I think that's the foundation. And that's the kind of environment that I was in. And that also my brother was in, he worked in finance in the city, for big banks and hedge funds and that sort of thing where Sure, you've got money, but have you got fulfillment? The answer is definitely no. So we were both at that point, looking to create a work environment where we could come home and feel great about the impact that we're having.

Morgan Bailey 4:28

Wow. And yeah, I can imagine that, you know, having worked and actually we're currently working in corporate America, definitely understand that tension between wanting something that's fulfilling and feeling like you're kind of being caged in. And yeah, and I think so many people are struggling with that right now. And, and it kind of goes back to the single animals. It's like the great lie that we've been told is that work can't be fulfilling or work is not supposed to be fulfilling or you're really lucky. If work is fulfilling and appreciating the sorrow as you said.

Anna Brightman 5:00

And the interest that you bring out of like, you're also bringing in this like creative pragmatist. Like I love the creative side, but I'm also a pragmatist. Well, I think that's just summed up by the fact that when I went to college, I studied art history, you know, like, what a degree that basically saying, oh, yeah, I'm creative, but I also would like to earn money in my life. But, you know, it didn't help me when I came out with that with three years of, you know, pure studying on that one subject, with any sense of what I wanted to do as a career. So, you know, sure, I then had a college education, but, and I, you know, in theory, it was more academic, and therefore, should have been more employable. But I still wasn't one of those people who, you know, at the age of six was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to be a lawyer. And I, you know, I have quite a distinct personality, there are things that I'm good at, and there are things that I'm definitely not good at. So I've dabbled in all sorts of different jobs before finally deciding to start my own business. And I won't lie, the fact that I have the brand with my brother plays a massive part because we are the opposite of each other in every single way. So and neither of us nor any human being is the total package. So it's kind of nice that in our areas of weakness, we've got that other one that really shines. I think it's been a factor in our success so far. Amazing. I love that no one is the total package. Absolutely not.

Morgan Bailey 6:29

Okay, so. So you and your brother, you know, you're at this point, a little bit of soul searching and things didn't feel totally right. Talk to me about a, how did circle come to be?

Anna Brightman 6:40

Yeah, so it's a funny story. Actually, it was my brother who had that initial sort of realization of a problem that he wanted to tackle. And it was on his way to work at his previous job. So every morning, he would call into the same coffee shop, the same coffee house and get a coffee on his way to work. And one day, just out of curiosity, he asked the barista, what happens to the coffee grounds, you know, with the little cylindrical puck thing that they tap out with every cup of coffee that they make? He just asked, well, what happens to that? Where does that go. And he was really shocked when the guy told him that actually, that ends up in landfill and that the coffee shops have to pay the local government to dispose of those coffee grounds in specific trash bags. And so there was yeah, this big problem that is a problem both for the coffee shops themselves, but also for the environment. Because as my brother went away with this new information and began researching coffee waste, he discovered more and more that he didn't realize before, with regards to the negative environmental impacts of coffee, so it's one of those things that you would never imagine would be issue us. Because of course, if you're just making coffee yourself at home, with a cafeteria, you can just sprinkle the coffee grounds on your plants or in a park or in the garden or whatever. But when it's being used at an industrial scale, that's where the issues lie because it goes into trash bags, and then the coffee grounds rot rather than aerobic ly degrade. And when they watch they produce methane, which is obviously a greenhouse gas. So the more we looked into it, the more we discovered, this really was a big issue with regards to the environment. And so that was kind of where we thought, why well, businesses often are a problem where your service or your product provides a solution. So we decided that a good problem for us to try to tackle would be the issue of coffee waste.

Morgan Bailey 8:38

And so Alright, so you have all this, you have this, this knowledge that there's a bunch of coffee grounds out there and being used, where does the link come and how does that translate into skin products?

Anna Brightman 8:52

Well, we we rewind back to Creative bit scared teenage Anna, ie me who as as as I was growing up my dream job, or my slowly forming dream job was to become a makeup artist. So I used to watch hours and hours of YouTube tutorials before the age of Instagram and Facebook and all the rest of it. YouTube was my go to platform where I would, you know, look at what other people were doing. And I didn't have an older sister, I have a little sister but I was the first person in my family. My mom never wears makeup to kind of explore this. And it really was a an outlet for my creativity and I absolutely loved it. I love the way you could change your appearance. And everyone knows that the perfect basis for great makeup is great skincare, and through this passion. This obsession you might call it as a teenager with all things makeup and skincare. I knew that coffee had fantastic skincare benefits and that, for example, particularly in Australia, coffee scrubs are a massive thing that we're proving extremely popular. And it's not just you know, in the recent years that coffee has been a known skincare review. It's a It's a natural ingredient that is a brilliant exponent. It's packed with antioxidants. And I thought, Well, why not? Take this us coffee? And turn it into skincare products? Wow.

Morgan Bailey 10:13

And, and so Alright, so you've started working with coffee? And I imagine at some point you are you, you made the connection or you already have the connection or the idea that like, well, there's probably lots of other material that can be upcycled.

Anna Brightman 10:29

Yeah, and it was we in the, in the very early days of our brand, we were out at festivals and markets and trade shows and consumer shows as much as we possibly could every single weekend, my brother and I were usually at a different show each speaking to as many people as we possibly could and getting the word out there about what we were doing. And then it would be late nights that him and I would be cycling around London where we from actually collecting coffee. So we were absolutely slogging working all hours of the day and night beginning. But what was really exciting is that we built a name for ourselves in the city that we're from quite quickly because of this. And before you know it, we would have people coming to us at the show saying, Oh, I've heard about what you guys are doing. That's really cool. I've got this business and I make x out of x, and it leaves behind. Why do you want to use that in a future product. So we quite quickly were in a situation where we had people coming to us with their byproducts for their businesses. And of course, they wanted to bolster their own sustainability credentials for their own brand. So we we were able to be really experiment TATIVE in those early days and start incorporating lots of different byproducts into form range.

Morgan Bailey 11:38

Wow. So talk to me, what are some of the byproducts? Well, one

Anna Brightman 11:42

example of a brand who came up to us was the very the second byproduct that we started working with, which was Chai spices. So we're at a show called The London Coffee Festival, which also exhibits in New York, I think. And he came up to me and he owns a chai brand. So he sells Chai syrups to restaurants and cafes and bars. All over the country, I think I think it's an up brand. But he has these 10 Aromatic devices that he just pours boiling water through. So things like nutmeg, star anise, cloves, etc. They smell absolutely incredible. But once he's poured the water through them, they're kind of done. So he started sending us those wet spices. And we started grinding them down, drying them out and using them as a core soaps fragrance. Because for products, particularly in skincare and bodycare, where you want a strong scent, like a soap, that's when the most artificial and synthetic fragrance starts coming into play. And we don't want to use any of those. So an extremely rich and aromatic blend, Chai spices seemed like the perfect product to start powdering into a range of soap bars. So that was the second product that we started working with. And then we started really getting experimented with different textures. So we started grinding fruit pits, like olive pits that are left over from the olive oil industry, or even argon shells that are byproducts of the argan oil industry into extremely fine powders that we use and things like our face mask or our face moisturizer, before then experimenting with fruit waters, which are also a byproduct of the juicing industry. So we've got there, if proper exfoliants like the coffee grounds, then you've got powders, like the chart, like the argon. And then you've got waters, which we get from things like kiwi and bergamot and Mandarin. So yeah, I think the the possibilities really are endless. And there's an awful lot that you can do if you're willing to experiment. And if you're willing to keep your eyes open to inspiration every single day.

Morgan Bailey 13:44

Wow, that's amazing. I didn't know I had, I hadn't even thought about those byproducts. And it makes total sense. And I imagine Yeah, normally those things would be going into landfill.

Anna Brightman 13:55

Exactly, yeah, that's the problem. But there's still so much news to be gained from them. So we just intersect them at the point that the previous industry has no further use. And then we find the use that we have in our different industries. So that's kind of what we're all about.

Morgan Bailey 14:12

I love that. So I'm imagining I mean, you're you and your brother, you're launching this business off, not only are you starting a new business, but you're also starting in a different way. You're you're adding this complexity, that we're not just sourcing ingredients from a catalog or a company, we're experimenting. So what was the process like of not only building a business, but also trying to do it in a different way in which you're trying to take a circular approach to it.

Anna Brightman 14:41

In short, extremely difficult. And I think it's really important to make this point as well, because I think a lot of people look at our brand and they look at you know the age of our team, for example, we're all under the age of 35. We're still only 15 people and we've achieved a phenomenal amount in six short years, however, it is not without a huge amount of failure, and starting over from scratch and dusting off our shoulders and thinking outside of the box, and just basically, grit and determination and making it work, you could easily look on a brand's website or social media feed, or whatever and think, oh, wow, look how easy that is. But it's definitely not been that way for us. And I think the most important thing is finding a broader team that completely understand and are behind your mission. So we've not got massive investors or stakeholders that we have to answer to thankfully, because that's also been something where the advice that we have been given is very much that what we're trying to do is going to be too difficult. But we do have, for example, manufacturing, relationships and formulation relationships with people who are as determined as us to make this concept work, because it really is pioneering and therefore, you know, if we're able to do it, then we're leading the way. And that's when extremely exciting things can happen. So our manufacturers are a perfect example. Because way imagine coffee, no matter scaling that up from just my brother and I, in the evenings, going to a few coffee shops, to the situation where we're making 1000s of coffee scrubs every single week, is is a process which has taken an awful lot of trial and error. So you just have to be willing to pull your socks up and think outside the box and just keep trying until you find a way that works. But yeah, it's certainly not been easy.

Morgan Bailey 16:38

But it sounds like you know, a key ingredient is just having such a clear purpose and what you're doing, and attracting people who also have a similar purpose and working with partners who are as committed as you are. It sounds like without that key ingredient. This would just be a slog.

Anna Brightman 16:56

Yeah, and I think ultimately, it's that saying that nothing that's great in life comes easily. You know, there's a reason that if you look at the vast majority of skincare brands out there on the market, they're still hailing things like the fact that they are vegan, or the fact that they are in recyclable packaging as their key selling point. But to us, like that's, that's, that's honestly, just boring. Like, that's not enough anymore. And I think that's what we are good at, as a young and agile brand is pushing towards what's next. You know, we're never satisfied with what we've done. We're always looking back and thinking, Okay, well, that's gone well, but how can we make it better? And that goes back to products that we might have launched, you know, five years ago or right at the beginning, we'll go back to them and say, Okay, well, this has been launched. But now that we know what we know, well, now that certain ingredients might be more sustainable or less sustainable based on trends and things like that, how can we further refine it and push it to the next step? And I think we have all constantly.

Morgan Bailey 17:58

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm curious, I mean, it, it sounds like you're just chatting, you're challenging a lot of paradigms and doing this. And you're thinking to engage your team like everyone's less than 35. Do you? Do you feel like that? That youth and perhaps it's that you haven't been indoctrinated and for for decades and come what is business as usual? Do you feel like that? You know, do you feel like the the youthfulness or that mindset is really what allows you to try things that haven't been tried

Anna Brightman 18:29

before? Yeah, I'd certainly say that it helps. And it's helped by the kind of context of the average shopper these days as well. And the call for transparency from consumers, towards brands and this kind of vibe more broadly, that people won't just accept things at face value anymore, and they won't accept the status quo. I think young people are really pushing ahead much more than their parents generations towards making things better, because ultimately, we don't have a choice anymore. Things have to change the world has finite resources, we're using them up at a terrifying rate. So it's these younger generation moment that have no choice but to be kind of bold, and unapologetic in their approach. But that's not to say again, that we haven't faced serious drawbacks with that along our journey. So you know, in the early days, you have to get investment in one way or another. I mean, man, we use the small amount of savings that we had and borrowed and begged for friends and family and all the rest of it. But things like packaging, minimum order quantities on packaging are extremely cost prohibitive when you're in your first sort of six months of launch. So when it came to speaking with investors and talking about our ethos, and all the rest of it, and and I'm not gonna lie normally, you're talking about people that are in their 60s 70s class, who are saying, oh, yeah, like it's kind of a cool idea, but the industry is not ready and don't kind of rock the boat. Don't Don't rock the boat too much. And in those days, we thought, Oh, well, who are we, to tell these people who've been in the industry for decades? That, that they're wrong. But then, you know, we actually had to undergo a rebrand two years into our, into our brand journey in order to undo all of those decisions, because actually, I think we were right. I mean, we know we were right on day one. So it was a scary thing to do. But you know, I think that's, that's the whole point of being a disruptor brand, the path will always be bumpy, but it's ultimately worth it in the end.

Morgan Bailey 20:33

Well, that's, I'm just appreciating like, you know, years are saying, like, there's this idea to trust yourself what you believe this, right. And the last episode was talking with the founder of a teak, and she actually said the same thing. And that not trusting yourself in those early decisions, people telling you that you can't, you can't, that that's not possible, actually let her make decisions that she didn't want to make. So that sounds like honoring that, because it's because you're from your perspective, your experience, you're seeing something that that these people who've kind of been indoctrinated in business as usual, they're not able to see.

Anna Brightman 21:13

Yeah, and ultimately, they're kind of out of touch at this point. So I think it is definitely one of those things where you're not going to please everyone. And as hard as we work to be extremely careful in the words that we use, and the messaging that we have, and the kind of positive impact, we try to kind of surround ourselves with the gods to what we're all about as a brand. And the things that we say, you will always have people, you can talk to the blue in the face. And they'll just say, Oh, no, but you know, using upcycled ingredients is gross, or it's dirty, or you know that what you're using is old or unclean, none of which are true. And we can prove that in every single way. You know, the thinker benefits beat themselves through the 1000s and 1000s. of before and after pictures that we've received along the way. But you know, you do slightly limit your audience by having such a strong message. But honestly, that is absolutely fine. By me, I would rather have the tribe, the community, which is so passionate that we've managed to build of people who are absolute advocates of our brand, our products and what we stand for more broadly, then a much bigger audience, potentially, of people who are kind of indifferent about what you're doing. Yeah, sure they like it. But they're not obsessed with it, they don't love it. And that's absolutely fine. By me, I'd rather have that more core audience and a few people who don't love it. But that's, that's entirely their own choice.

Morgan Bailey 22:40

So on this end, particularly, I'm thinking to the marketing now. And I feel there are many brands that their marketing is led by the consumers, they realize there's a demand by consumers, they changed their business model a little bit, they put some marketing out there to appease the consumers. what it sounds like is your marketing and your business model, your leading consumers as opposed to consumers leading you?

Anna Brightman 23:04

Well, it's a tricky one, isn't it? I think just like everything in our brand, it's all kind of circular. I don't think we, we don't change our messaging to fit a specific customer put it that way. But we know that there are people out there who will just never get out, get what we're about, and they just ultimately won't care. And that's also fine. But I think what you have to do, and again, something that we've done really well is tick multiple boxes at the same time. So if we speak to kind of the Eco side of our brand, I look at so many eco brands out there who fall under that same trap of having everything they do look eco. So it's all green, or brown or just it just it's not pretty. And in the age of social media, you really cannot underestimate the value of aesthetically beautiful packaging. So that's the one bracket that I think broadens out your audience. So get branding that is super, super attractive. The second thing is products that work and having to prove that so using the kind of ingredients that people are looking for, but doing it in a sustainable and authentic way. And ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, if you've got dry skin and you want a very nourishing Night Cream, you're going to buy it because you want it to solve that problem. It doesn't matter what the story of the product is, if the product itself doesn't do what you bought it for. So that's like your second column. And then your third column is the price point, which is another thing that I think sustainable brands vary on a lot. But what you tend to see in most examples is that they are out there, they're expensive. They're not attractive to, you know, a wide consumer base. And I think that's really problematic. And I think that is the biggest hurdle in making sustainable options, the status quo and kind of moving forwards with sustainability as the norm. And this is one of the things I also vowed when I was 22 and I learned was brand, which was that I would never price my products at in such a way that I wouldn't have bought those products at the age that I launched. Because I think ultimately, you shouldn't be able to have, you know, a glass jar rather than a plastic pot. And then just triple the price, or, you know, have an ingredient that's organic. And again, just triple the price. I look at brands out there selling moisturizers for, like 200 $300. And the ingredients on the back of their packaging are identical to ours. And I just think, well, this is just that big. This is just that big facade that big lie, which again, is a catch 22. Because we also have people being like, Oh, I assumed your product wouldn't be good quality. So cheap. But hey, that's, that's another fight to have. So yeah, those are those are the three brackets that I think you have to tick all at the same time, in order that you are massively broadening out your pool of potential customers.

Morgan Bailey 25:56

Now, I'm curious with the beauty industry, it sounds like some are leading the charge. How, how mature is the beauty industry as a whole and moving in this direction of of creating truly high quality, sustainable products.

Anna Brightman 26:17

I think it's vastly improved in the last five to 10 years. I mean, it's mad to think that in relatively recent memory, things like plastic microbeads were very much a thing in huge sections of beauty and skincare products like toothpaste or exfoliators, generally, like the norm was that they will be made out of plastic, teeny, tiny plastic balls that will never ever come back out of the water systems. And now here we are, and that would just never, ever be seen pretty much anywhere on the world anymore. Which was great. So the ingredients, I think in particular, have come on leaps and bounds. There are big problems, particularly with one of the trends in the skincare industry at the moment of having products led by one hero ingredients. On the one hand, one negative of that is that it leads people to having to have skincare routines of like certified products in it. And then the other thing is that it puts huge strain on the growing of those ingredients. And if you follow that back to origin, particularly if you're still committed to organic, as soon as you have a failed crop or a failed harvest somewhere, it can cause serious strain on the actual people producing the parts at the beginning. So, yeah, I think ingredients come a long way. But I think the the major bad reputation for the beauty and skincare industry is packaging. And that's where more innovation is definitely needed.

Morgan Bailey 27:44

And talk to me about that in terms of packaging, what makes the packaging so hard.

Anna Brightman 27:51

So if you think about cosmetics or skincare genuinely what the primary issue is that the packaging is so small, and they use lots of different materials in order that they function properly. So a perfect example is like a dropper or a pipette in like a serum or an oil that's got glass in a small quantity, it's got plastic around the base, and it's got rubber, which you squeeze in order to pull the liquid up into the glass. So they are usually non recyclable, or you have to go as a customer out of your way as a consumer in order to find a specialist recycling plan or a collection point or whatever. So that that kind of reliance on these multi material elements to the packaging in very small size packaging is is the biggest hurdle when it comes to being a brand and wanting a product that still functions hygienic ly and so therefore requires that piece. So that's that's one of the things I've found most frustrating in my journey so far is that I don't produce packaging. So you have to use what is out there on the market. And again, going back to what I was saying about price point. If you are wanting to work with some of these things that are still only just been kind of designed at almost like proto type point in that timeline, the costs are insane. So it's difficult. And I think it comes back down to the brands to innovate in ways that you can try to alleviate these issues. Because ultimately for us, we still choose to use small amounts of plastic so we're 99% plastic free, but for a product like a serum or a toner which you would spritz across your face, a customer still wants to use the product properly, as it would need to be used you know, so you kind of rely on having to do that but you you can counteract that in other ways as a brand more broadly.

Morgan Bailey 29:42

And you started offsetting your your plastic use through repurpose global.

Anna Brightman 29:48

Yes, we have so it was one of our goals for 2022 with regards to our kind of sustainability objectives, and it goes back to what I was saying about always constantly evolving to become a plastic negative stuff five brands. And we've done that by partnering with repurpose global who are an impact project based in Goa and India. And what they do is they pay the wages through us now, of waste workers in in India, who collect MLP, which is multilayered plastic, which is non recyclable from within 10 kilometers of goers coastline. So we now pay those waste workers to collect that plastic. And we are recounting twice the amount of plastic per year that we produce as a brand through both our direct plastic ie the sorts of plastic that you get in the capacity of our serum, and also our indirect plastic, which is much harder for us to control, which might be through things like the shrink wrap that you get on a pallet that you received from a supplier.

Morgan Bailey 30:48

Now, in terms of like, when you're when you're looking forward with a business, and like it's going to grow and evolve, where do you see both the opportunities to continue to further your brand, your mission, your purpose? Where do you see the challenges?

Anna Brightman 31:09

Oh, that's a great question. So the challenges for us at the moment. So obviously, we've spoken a lot about circular ingredients. But another thing that we are extremely proud to have launched here in the UK is a circular approach to packaging as well. And that's something where we now have great ambition to launch that more globally. So what I mean by that is that we basically have a packaging return scheme. So you can, once you finish with the jars at home, our UK customers can purchase them as refills on our website. And then they send them back to us with a free post label, we sterilize that packaging, we refill that exact same packaging for that exact same customer. And we will return it, it's become one of the biggest packaging returns teams here in the UK. And it's something that we are widely widely praised for. But we're based here. So we have the infrastructure, they are people who work for our inner in a core team. It's not outsourced. So it's something that we have great ambition to rollouts further afield. But that comes with many, many challenges. And the same goes for manufacturing. So when it comes to our fulfillment, we have warehouse partners all over the world. So one in Ireland, we've got one in New Jersey in the States, which means that we can ship our products to those locations in bulk for them to then be disseminated from there, which means our carbon of our emissions is much, much less. But the next step that we would like to take is actually having local manufacturing in different countries for the products that will will then be sold in that country. And the US will be our next so we're about to move the sole the sales, sorry, no sales, we're about to move the manufacturing of our top three bestsellers into America. So that will make again another massive impacts on the shipping from our products from here in the UK where they're made by hand, across across the ocean. So those are some of the things that have been extremely difficult for us to put in place. But we are slowly, slowly slowly making progress. Another big challenge for us, which is, again, one that we are making progress with but it's proving difficult to overcome is the issue of certification. So to kind of give a bit of context on that what I mean is because of the complexity of our supply chain, again, coffee is such an easy example. But those coffee grounds come from hundreds of locations. So it's very difficult for us to trace or to kind of prove their source. So getting organic certification on a product like our scrubs, which is made up of well over 50%, repurpose coffee is impossible, because we would also have to get every single one of those coffee shops to get certified. And those certifications come with hefty hefty, hefty annual fees, and inspections and all the rest of it. So it's not a possibility for us. So you're almost penalized by the certification bodies, or just how sustainable you are and the fact that you are kind of the future of sustainability in the circular economy. So that's another thing that we are really hoping can get easier for us but working with the certification bodies more broadly, in order to refine their credentials, and they're kind of checkboxes for what they what they can use to prove that a brand is what they want it to be. And then in terms of opportunities, I think as I said, like the opportunities really are endless. So at the moment, I'm just about to launch a massive flower petals project it so that we can kind of move into the gifting category, which we don't have a huge amount of products for at the moment. So I've started rescuing flower petals from wedding venues and florists and event spaces, and then turning those into bath salts. So we are continuing to push ahead with product innovation and the sourcing of new byproducts ingredients so lots of exciting things to come.

Morgan Bailey 34:55

And I have this picture of you running behind someone like as they're walking to the altar and like You're like collecting all the petals on the ground? Yes. As the guests are throwing confetti in the bin, you're like, and they're like, Who is this woman? Crazy, crazy lady, here she is. That sounds hilarious. Well, I really appreciated this conversation. It's it's been informative and eye opening for me in terms of one IV, one, just your passion, your purpose, as well as the complexity that comes with this and the grit that you have to have to create something. But also the movement, the movement that you and others are creating that so that so many people are inspired by? Just really appreciate everything you're bringing to that. Yeah, of course,

Anna Brightman 35:45

that's I always think in these situations, I think I kind of pinch me when someone's that nice, and I think got really nice little mates. But if it's if it's something that you know, can hopefully inspire someone else who's young, and just to have a great idea, then I think that's really lovely. And I hope that, you know, the future can be better. And if you've got a fantastic idea, my advice is just absolutely run for it. And don't tell that don't let anyone tell you that it's not a good idea.

Morgan Bailey 36:14

Yeah. Unless it's going to destroy the planet then. But and other cases, yes, I'm totally on board with yet.

Anna Brightman 36:22

I hope that was implied.

Morgan Bailey 36:25

I always say that, like, yeah, you can do anything. And then I think about individuals who are like trying to develop the next thermonuclear weapon I'm like, but not them. Not that one. Not that one. Well, so if people want to find out more about you and your brand, how can they do so?

Anna Brightman 36:40

So all of our socials are at upcycle beauty. And it's still me, particularly if you message on the weekends, who's on the other side of the end, because I think that's such an important channel from from kind of brand to customer. So if you've got any questions or anything you want to ask me, feel free to hit us up on any of our socials where we're on all of them. And that's at upcycle beauty. And then our website is us stocked up circle beauty.com. You'll also find our products and stores at Whole Foods.

Morgan Bailey 37:07

Me Amazing. I am I am. I'm on the lookout for your products now because I am extremely curious and inspired. Well, thank you. Really, it's such a pleasure to have you on the commerce. I'll have you on the show and have this conversation with you. And looking forward to seeing how the organization grows and progresses.

Anna Brightman 37:25

The pleasure has been all mine. Thank you again. It's been really lovely to chat with you.

Morgan Bailey 37:29

All right. Thanks, Anna. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Prophet meets impact podcast. If you enjoy this experience. Please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and leave a positive review. You can also find out more about the podcast at www.profitmeetsimpact.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai