Rowena Bird knows a thing or two about how to run a successful business, as co-founder of one of the biggest beauty brands on the planet: Lush. Here she shares the biggest lessons she’s learned along the way, why having a moral compass is key – plus yes, a genius tip for what to pack on your next holiday to really make it memorable…
Unless your nose has been living under a rock, you will have heard of – or definitely smelled – Lush. You can often smell their sweet stores before you see them. And with stores now dotted across NZ – and the world! – they’re a brand that’s hard to miss.
In 2024 the company had a global turnover of £803.8 million – that’s roughly NZ$1.82 billion – with more than 860 stores in 50 different countries. They’re a company who not only make memorable products, but they use the brand to bring awareness to different causes, or, fundraise for them. Their turnover is great enough, that just closing for one day – like they did last year in support of a ceasefire in Gaza – sent a message to the UK government who lost a day of significant tax revenue from the retailer.
The company is owned by its six co-founders (although 10% of its shares are owned by an Employee Benefit Trust, holding the shares on behalf of its employees to protect the company’s independence and ethical values): Mark and Mo Constantine, Rowena Bird, Helen Ambrosen and Karl Bygrave. Sadly, one of the original founders, Liz Bennett passed away at the beginning of the pandemic.
Late last year Rowena paid NZ a visit and we had the wonderful pleasure of getting to sit down with her – learning all about what she has learned about business (especially after a previous business went bankrupt), how she makes it work, why a moral compass is key and a genius tip for what to pack on your next holiday.
‘It Failed, But it Wasn’t a Failure’: The Business Lessons Rowena Lives By
Before Lush, the original Lush founders together owned a different cosmetics company, named Cosmetics To Go – a mail order company that existed “back when mail order wasn’t such a big thing,” says Rowena.
But, due to a number of different issues (including the final straw, which was a devastating flood at the premises!), the company closed down in January 1994.
Deflated, they all went out looking for new jobs.
“But early on, when we were out there looking for other jobs, we realised we were probably unemployable by anyone else because of the way we worked and the fact we weren’t able to conform,” says Rowena. “I mean, Paul went to work for the National Health Service and lasted two weeks. We all tried to do something else and realised, actually, we really loved working together as a team, so let’s have another go. Although Karl had to go get a proper job because he couldn’t take the risk of starting something new, he had a young family, but he joined us again two years later. We started again. We didn’t have any money.”
And even though the last business had come to a rather disastrous end, Rowena says they soon learned that it was a great foundation for starting Lush.
“Although Cosmetics to Go failed, it wasn’t a failure,” says Rowena. “It was a great platform for what was to come with Lush and it created a huge fan base.
“We were all a bit shot away from losing Cosmetics To Go, but there was a lot of lessons learned there, and so when we started again, we were putting things in place, not making the same mistake again. Like, perhaps the biggest two – putting a proper accountant in this time and not just promoting people from within for specialised roles.”
Rowena says three of the other major business lessons she’s learned over the years are:
- Leave your ego at the door. “You can’t let your ego get in the way – you can’t go thinking that you’re the one that’s always right,” she says. “No one’s perfect!”
- It’s never a failure, always a lesson. “I never think of something as being a mistake or failure,” she says. “It’s just something that’s happened and you move on. Sometimes you go, oh, we probably shouldn’t have done that – maybe we priced something wrong or opened a shop in the wrong location, but… it’s a lesson learned, isn’t it? If you move on and you do something different with it, it’s all education.”
- When it’s your business, you better love it, because you’re always ‘on’. “I know I don’t have boundaries,” she says. “If I’m on holiday, I’m still checking my emails – although I check it at the end of the day. You keep an eye on it, because you don’t want to come back to a completely full inbox. Also, if someone needs me, I love to be there. And it’s our business! I love it. I did recently take a trip where we didn’t have any connection with the outside world for six days and that was great – I didn’t get FOMO!”
Taking a Stand
What really binds together the founders of Lush is their desire to do good and really stand for something. Rowena says that’s what attracts people to work at the company now as well.
“We’re activists,” says Rowena. “We’re not just selling stuff, we’re doing things as well.”
In September last year Lush closed all 140 of its Uk shops, factories and its online store for a day to protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Their closed stores featured banners hung up in every window reading ‘Stop Starving Gaza – We Are Closed in Solidarity’. Later in the month, when NZ’s largest rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza took place, Lush closed all New Zealand stores for the day, hanging the same banners in the windows here.
In 2025 Lush also brought back its Watermelon slice soap, which retails for $13 with a whopping 75% of the purchase price (minus the taxes) going towards funding medical services, including organisations that are gearing up to provide prosthetic limb services to adults and children injured in Gaza, Palestine.
Rowena says initiatives can come from any direction within the business, but the Gaza one came directly from staff worldwide. “They were asking us, ‘what are we going to do?’” she says. “They were looking to us to do something, because they were upset by seeing the news every night. It was like, ‘come on, we’re Lush. What are we going to do? What stand are we going to make? What message are we going to send?’ So it was our staff, then one of our PR’s Ru and one of our managers, Ramshire – they put their heads together to come up with the suggestion of closing the stores.”
The store closures were one of the bigger initiatives, but Rowena says the causes they back are often smaller ones, that wouldn’t otherwise get a great deal of attention.
“Activists come to ask for support and then we can sell a product and raise money for them and what they’re doing,” says Rowena. We’re always looking after the people who have the same level of passion for what they do as we have for what we do.
“Sometimes they’re small causes where they’re only looking for a few hundred dollars to print a leaflet, or they want new blankets for their rescue centre. Other times they want to use our windows as billboards to put a message out there so people can hear what they’re doing.”
Of course as well as supporting charities and causes, Lush uses its own spending power to only buy ingredients for their products from sellers who meet a strict criteria. The company is passionate about only sourcing ethical, natural and often organic ingredients, prioritizing regenerative agriculture to restore ecosystems and using fair-trade practices. Their soaps are free of palm oil, and the majority of products come ‘naked’ without the need for plastic packaging.
“We take great care when buying our raw materials,” she says. “There are big growers and producers, like the company that grows roses in Turkey, to smaller, indigenous groups in the Amazon who are picking up Tonka beans as they fall to the ground. So when you buy one of our products you’re actually supporting those initiatives as well and the regeneration – we buy from people who are regenerating their land, who are keeping forests alive, who are growing more than one crop in an area to not have mono cultures. So when you’re making a purchase you’re not just buying a beautiful product for yourself, you’re supporting lots of regenerative projects, supporting small communities and giving those people a fair wage.”
On The Go
The Lush team find themselves on the go often, visiting the places where they purchase their raw ingredients from to make sure they’re really as ethical and sustainable as they’re told they are. That means they all wrack up a lot of frequent flyer miles!
To finish up, here’s the four things Rowena ALWAYS travels with:
- “A solid shampoo bar for sure, because you can get them through on hand luggage. It’s not going to spill all through your things. You can wash your hair – or even your knickers in the sink – with it, and it lasts longer than most relationships, because you can get about 80 washes out of one of those.”
- “No Drought, the dry shampoo. If you haven’t got time to wash your hair in the morning it really does the job. Or, if you’re somewhere muggy and sticky then your hair can feel really flat quite quickly. I always carry it with me so I can put it through my hair and give it a bit more oomph and make it feel less yucky.”
- “A lip scrub. I love a good lip scrub because it gets rid of the dry skin that you get when you’re on a flight and it moisturizes, you get both.”
- “A piece of soap. I always take a different sort with me and then that soap fragrance becomes my trip. Then, whenever I smell that fragrance again, it reminds me of that trip or holiday.”