Laboté fights cosmetics waste and hacks used packaging

Kristel Milet

15 March 2021

Laboté fights cosmetics waste and hacks used packaging

On-demand production, a model that is increasingly common in the textile industry, is gaining ground in the cosmetics world. Young French beauty brand Laboté adopted this concept four years ago: they now manufacture customized face & body botanical skincare products on request. The brand’s founder, Lucile Battail, was eager to keep the pharmacy’s original model and adapt it to a modern no-waste approach. To materialize this will to take action, she has launched the #Thebeautyhack operation for a month, inviting her customers to reuse their non-used cream jars, whatever the brand, so they are cleaned up and sterilized before being filled with a tailor-made Laboté formula.

If there is one field in which products should meet very personal needs, it is cosmetics. Based on this belief and on the fact that beauty’s industrialization often results in waste-generating dissatisfaction, Lucile Battail, PhD in Pharmacy, launched her brand concept Laboté in 2017. In her two Parisian laboratory-points of sale, every product is tailor-made based on a diagnosis made online or in-store.

“I wanted to customize the texture and the perfume, taking into account the customer’s environment, weaknesses, intolerances… I needed a lot of flexibility,” she explains. So, she developed a patented cold-emulsion process to make products in five minutes as soon as they have been ordered. The formulas are based on the active value of medicinal plants. Made by a team of chemists, they are fresh and free from any listed preservatives.

#Thebeautyhack until March 18

To Lucile Battail, this highly customized approach is an answer to overconsumption. “Waste is very little dealt with in the cosmetics industry,” she says. According to a study conducted by IFOP, 46% of French women say they do not finish their skincare products. This waste is believed to represent a volume of about 4 tonnes a day in France.

To raise awareness of this issue, last February 18, Laboté launched the operation called The Beauty Hack. “I needed an original idea to pass on this new message. Cosmetics waste is an issue few people are aware of,” explains Lucile Battail. In the laboratory located Rue Keller, in Paris, customers can bring back their old glass jars, so they are disinfected and repacked with a formula freshly prepared on-site, and of course, personalized.

Online, once their diagnosis has been made, customers can choose to purchase an ecorefill based on a material derived from apple peeling upcycling. The refill goes with a label bearing the batch number and the list of ingredients, as well as with instructions to clean up used jars, so they can be reused.

In addition, Laboté offers to retrieve the plastic packs that cannot be sterilized to have them recycled by their partner, Terracycle.

An informative video released on February 18 on the social media got a significant number of shares and views: over 100,000 views in a week.

“We are definitely legitimate in addressing this issue, and given how successful the operation is, we will do this regularly,” explains the founder.

As Laboté’s turnover has almost reached a million euros, they aim to go further with this concept. “I do believe an on-demand production model can be industrialized, and that is what we aim to do. Within the next two years, we will open a much larger, fully automated laboratory where products will still be made on request,” promises the founder.