June 29, 2021

Rowena Bird | Co-Founder of Lush

52 minutes

In episode sixty nine of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Watts talks to the co founder of Lush, Rowena Bird.

There are few brands, and in-store experiences, as universally recognisable as Lush. Having now spoken to Rowena and knowing just what went into Lush’s creation, it’s unsurprising that the brand is the icon that it is today.

Rowena is surprised, however, telling me that she and her five Lush co-founders hadn’t expected that the brand would explode in the way that it has- and she certainly didn’t expect that, as of 2020, Lush would boast some 951 stores globally.

Rowena has always loved beauty and, after completing her studies as a beauty therapist in the early 1980s, she took a job at a beauty clinic in Dorset. It was here that she would meet all five of her future Lush co-founders, a group she tells me each had completely different skills. She also tells me that she believes this is the secret to Lush’s success- that, and the fact that all six of them really do get along.

Lush was launched in 1995, and despite opening stores in London, Croatia, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand and Ireland within only a few years, Rowena describes the brand’s growth as “really organic”- another part of the Lush story that she believes was integral to its success, explaining that if they’d launched with the intention of going “zero to sixty” too quickly, they’d likely have failed. She tells me that what they really wanted to create through Lush was fun, theatre, experience and an escape through beauty, and that is precisely what they have done.

In this conversation, Rowena shares the catalyst that led to the inception of Lush (and a wild coincidence that took place on the very same date as our interview), how Lush led the sustainability charge by launching packaging-free products over 25 years ago, and why OVER staffing their stores may have been one of the best business decisions they ever made.