The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview with Juice Beauty founder and CEO Karen Behnke now on iTunes and Spotify.
GLOW JOURNAL: I know that you have always been quite athletic and you were certainly an athlete growing up, so I imagine you have always had something of an interest in health and wellness- but can you recall your very first memory of beauty, specifically?
KAREN BEHNKE: Well, given my age, my first memory of beauty was looking at Cher on TV! I was born with jet black hair, she was my absolute idol, and that was my first real image of beauty because she had jet black hair like I did. Then, it was the Clinique counter and, you know, all of those things in high school.
When you were younger, what did you think you might be when you grew up?
I grew up in a small town. For girls in my high school, even though it was after Title IX and everything which is a legislation in the US, if you did well in science and math (which I did) you either went into health education or you became a nurse. My bachelor’s degree is in health education. And then if you did well in English, you became a teacher. So that was really all that was on our horizon at that time.
Right after I graduated from collage, I moved to California for all the reasons that have nothing to do with a career- it was sun, fun, boys etc. But I quickly realised that I could do a lot out here. It was kind of the land of entrepreneurial opportunities.
I understand that it was while you were studying at Western Michigan University that you became a vegetarian. Now, I know there’s a bit of a story here. Can you talk me through it?
In high school and in the early 70s, this disaster went all the way through [my time at] high school and almost up to 1980, when I left there. It was the largest PBB (polybrominated biphenyl) spill in North America. There was a chemical spill, and it got into the feed of cattle and chickens. It was kind of a rural area where I grew up, a small Midwestern town, and all of a sudden when we were driving around we would see cattle lying dead on the roadside and chickens tremoring. It was a really, really, awful, awful chemical spill. Emory University is still studying that area. It really was one of the worst chemical spills ever.
Then, fast forward to the late 70s. Researchers were still drawing blood on all the campuses to see how much PBB was running through all of our veins. Long story short, apparently it lasted in Michigan residents quite long.
It had a huge impact on me in that, first, I became an environmentalist very early on. That was when I read Rachel Carson’s book- she singlehandedly got DDT off the earth and was just a phenomenal scientists. Secondly, I became a vegetarian. In the heart of that Midwest, that is not a popular thing to do at all- you know, when you’re dating and everything and you try to go out, people don’t want to know that you’re a vegetarian in the Midwest. So it was kind of funny.
And I have uncles that are camel farmers! So you could imagine how popular I was.
Then I started reading more about plant based diets, and later I opened it up to eggs, I certainly love cheese and some seafood, but I went pretty strict for a while. It really had such an impact on me from an environmental point of view, a health point of view, and just every aspect of it. It was one of the things that spurred on my health and wellness interest.
Did it prompt you to start looking at other parts of health and wellness too? Obviously you’ve mentioned a few things there that it did change for you, but is that when you started to look at what you were putting on your skin or did that come a bit later?
Not only later- later later, like 20 years later. I was really focused on fitness and nutrition at the time. When I moved to California, I started Get Fit Aerobics- I can’t believe you found that name! That was in the early 1980s, and I ended up getting the army contract for Northern California. I taught so many aerobics exercise classes a day, and it was in the era of Jane Fonda. When she came to San Francisco to teach an aerobics class for teachers, I thought I was just going to die! Her legwarmers, her striped leotards, the belt and all that, it was just awesome. Great fashion.
But that was really my first entrepreneurial endeavour. I was teaching a million classes in a day, having shin splints in every aspect of my lower legs, but I really fell in love with business and then wanted to expand it to the entire wellness arena of nutrition, fitness, stress management, mental health etc. I still never thought anything about my skin though. But then I started the first corporate wellness company in the country.
I would love to spend a little bit more time on that first business endeavour, because you were only 22, 23 when you founded it. This is one of my favourite stories that came up when I was researching you. I read that the bank would only give you a business loan if you had a husband to sign off on that loan, so you had to open up something to the tune of 17 credit cards.
That’s very true! With Get Fit Aerobics, there was really no startup capital because I could just pay a percent of the classes to the gym and it was on government property and all that. But when I expanded it to my corporate wellness company, that’s when I started to buy bands and we went to the corporate work sites and did health education programs and body fat testing and all those types of things- so that’s when I needed capital. I was about 25 when I started the corporate wellness program. I wrote an extensive business plan and was even accepted into the business plan contest by Stanford. So I had a pretty tight plan, and I started going around to the banks and they did all tell me that it was great idea, and if I would just bring my husband in to sign, it would all be fine. So every time I’d walk out and I’d look around- “I think I have to rent a husband!” I clearly needed to rent one, because I didn’t get married until my late thirties. So that was my first endeavour with banks.
You couldn’t do this now, but back when the internet wasn’t there, I figured out if I opened as many credit cards as I could… I opened 17 credit cards all in one day and ended up with a two to three thousand line of credit with each of them. It was a lot of money back then. I juggled all those credit cards as my first line of credit. It was crazy! It was legal- maybe?!
It’s funny that you went through all of that, and then in 1987 you won San Francisco’s Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award. During your speech, you told that story and you talked about how difficult it had been to secure funding initially for your business, and then after the speech, another woman approached you and said “Come to my office tomorrow. I can help you secure a loan.” I would love to hear more about that time and the fact that you finally secured that funding thanks to another woman in business.
That’s exactly right. It was a jam packed ballroom in San Francisco in Union Square. I was getting the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award from then mayor Dianne Feinstein, who’s now Senator Feinstein. I did tell the story about banking, and afterwards Wanda Alfaro, who’s retired now but she ran the largest Bank of America branch on the quarter missionary market in San Francisco, she came up and said “Come see me tomorrow.” So she set me up with my first line of credit, and we had a great relationship right up until she retired.
Things are a little different now and I don’t think we can open 17 credit cards, but what would your advice be to anyone who is looking to secure funding for a startup now?
I had nothing to my name with my aerobics company and my wellness company, so it was quite a different situation. When I started Juice Beauty, I had already had successful businesses had been on several boards, so I raised the money in the first round in about 24 hours. I was very careful though. I went to people that I knew well, that I’d worked with, that were mission driven, that would share some portion of my mission. That was super important to me, because I didn’t want just money. I wanted people that were passionate about my mission. And then lastly, I went to people that were of high net worth because, at that stage in life, I didn’t want to worry about someone not making a mortgage payment or something. So those were kind of my criteria.
But some people will say to me “How can I raise money?” And my first piece of advice is put your own money in first. I don’t care if you have a thousand dollars or a million dollars, put your money in first because you have to be the lead investor. Put up as much as you possibly can, because then people will trust you. And if you don’t trust yourself, then why even start it? So that’s my biggest advice. Then, try to go to people that you’ve worked with who are more business acquaintances. Some friends and family are fine, but it’s hard to mix money, friends and family sometimes. My business is all mixed up with my family now, but I didn’t ever go to family members to raise that money.
Having founded two highly successful businesses so young, those businesses being Get Fit and Execu-Fit, what were some of the biggest learnings? Was there anything in particular that you learned during that time that you find you’re still applying to your work now?
I think the positive of starting businesses young, or being an entrepreneur young, is you don’t know what you don’t know. You have no idea that you’re taking a lot of risks, and that you’re sticking your neck out and sometimes making a fool of yourself. You just don’t even know, nor do you really care most of the time. That’s the benefit of it. I always thought “What’s the worst that can happen?” I didn’t have kids until much later, so the worse that could happen to me was I would have to go get a corporate job. That didn’t seem that bad to me. Or I’d have to go teach health education somewhere. Nobody was pushing me off a cliff. So that’s what I always thought about.
A lesson that I learned over and over and over is to listen to your gut. I mean, you would certainly want to have all the intellectual data. You can surround yourself with the smartest people, but you really never want to ignore those gut feelings. Because every time I do, I get into trouble. My now my husband will say “I can’t believe you did that, because you kept saying you were worried about it.” And he’ll remind me that I, early on, said “Oh, I don’t know if this is the right decision.” Oftentimes if my gut is telling me no, but I go ahead and do it because of some intellectual whatever, it backfires.
Blind optimism and naivety are very powerful tools as it turns out!
And being poor! My first and second businesses, when I started them I was poor. Poor in the beginning and poor a second time around, because I came from very humble beginnings.
So if we fast forward a little bit, it was when you were pregnant with your first child that you began to really start examining your cosmetics labels. You already, obviously, had an understanding of health and wellness and a lot of the pieces of that puzzle, but what you were putting on your skin came much later. What was some of your biggest findings?
I was really into nutrition and fitness and yoga and all those things, but really it wasn’t until I was pregnant when my babies in my early forties, that I just stopped dead in my tracks one day. I was slathering things all over my body and my belly and I suddenly read a label. At that point, with my wellness company, I had worked with Stanford and Berkeley and a lot of leading researchers, so I knew a lot about ingredients in food, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Way back then it was methyl, butyl and pro propyl parabens, which I knew were being studied for being carcinogenic. I knew there were some ingredients in there that were lead based. There was a lot of formaldehyde, synthetic dyes and synthetic fragrance. And it was just coming out then that synthetic fragrances, particularly, are endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruptors can be carcinogens. Synthetic fragrance is in everything- it’s in our mascara, it’s in our lipstick, of course it’s in perfume, but it’s in everything.
So when I started reading all of this, I thought “Oh my god.” And I really stopped dead in my tracks. I started putting organic olive oil on my belly, which worked by the way! I then went on a desperate search for luxurious products too. I was never really into makeup that much, but I was really into skincare, and I went on a desperate search to find products that were luxurious but worked. And I really found very little.
So that was in my early forties. I was on a couple of boards and consulting, then fast forward to my late forties, and that’s when I bought the name Juice Beauty. I thought about it that whole time. I came up with the premise of how I wanted to formulate and then bought the name Juice Beauty which fit my premise of filling with organic botanical juices perfectly. And then in 2005 I started the company.
I am glad you mentioned that, because that did come up in my digging that you had the name Juice Beauty in your head for quite some time and you were just sitting on it for a little while before you actually launched the business. What prompted that? Why do you think Juice Beauty popped into your head? Women’s intuition?
Well, it wasn’t so much the name that popped into my head is as it was the formulation aspect. I really spent a lot of time researching formulations. My husband is a cardiologist, but as a scientist, I kept yelling out to him, day and night, going “Oh my God, you mean this is how conventional chemical brands formulate?!” They start with butylene and propylene glycols, and they put powerful ingredients into it, but a lot of petroleum derivatives and things that are laced with dioxane and things. But the products work, often because they do put very powerful ingredients into it.
Then, I was looking at natural products. It starts with water, then they put some ingredients in it and they’re very diluted and they didn’t have a reputation of working, or as being as efficacious. So I became obsessed with organic botanical juices, and I thought “What if we started out with grape seed and aloes and sheas and jojobas and filled with that first,” not thinking about how expensive it would be of course! But we would start out with vitamin rich, antioxidant rich babes, and then we added a vegetable hyaluronic acid, or olive derived squalene, or rice peptides, or things like that to make it even more powerful- that every organic drop would feed your skin.
And that’s the premise that I became obsessed with. I talked to a lot of scientists and a lot of manufacturers, and then when I decided I wanted to get going, then I started searching names. When Juice Beauty came up as a trademark name, I was like “That’s what I need.” So I bought the name and started it from scratch. I so overpaid for the name, by the way!
Worth it I think! So that was 2005. You had clearly identified a gap, you’d been thinking about what you wanted to do for quite some time- but where to from there? How did you go about finding a manufacturer, sourcing packaging and deciding what you would launch with? There’s a lot to it!
There is a lot to it. I did hire a couple of consultants, and I started knocking on doors of manufacturers, and really no one wanted to work with me because they kept saying we either use petroleum, or we use water. And all your crazy juice? Forget it already. We’d need a freezeer.
So I finally found a manufacturer and scientists that would work with me- if I bought a freezer. And so I’m like “Fine, I’ll buy a freezer.” And so we were off to the races with that! But it was very, very difficult in the beginning. The juices were separating. They would turn colours, because I wanted to use natural food grade preservatives. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
But we just persisted to today, where we have luxurious products that you can’t tell when you are putting… for instance, our Steam Cellular CC Cream on your skin, we have mimicked the feel of silicones and dimethicone with grape seed and coconut alkane, and the zinc just melts in. It’s not a chemical sunscreen, but it melts in. We’ve been able to really mimic the luxury that comes from a lot of synthetics, and things that you don’t want either in your body or on animals or on the planet. That was my goal- to make it luxurious, but to meet or exceed conventional chemical efficacy.
You’ve absolutely succeeded in that- they do feel so luxurious. Although Juice Beauty really does sit within wellness in a wider sense, it was still a bold move to transition from fitness over to beauty. Did that present many challenges? Beyond having to buy a freezer?
Yes. I could no longer say I was young and naive, because I was in my late forties, but I was still just… I don’t know, there’s something about being an entrepreneur. You just blast forward if you think you have a good idea. It’s that blind faith.
Here was was the conversation with my husband, honest to God. He’s very supportive, but he said “Wait a minute. You’re telling me you’re leaving being a highly paid consultant in private equity to just find health and wellness deals, you’re on a bunch of boards etc etc. And you’re just going to put a tonne of money into Juice Beauty and start all over from scratch again?” And I said “Yeah, of course.” He said “Okay. Alright. Fine.” It was crazy. I just said “The market needs this. I know we could do well.” And that was it. I just blasted forward.
But I knew nothing about packaging. I knew a lot about ingredients, I knew a lot about what we wanted to do, I knew a lot about science, I knew a lot of scientists, but I knew nothing about packaging and the beauty industry.
I think this is why it takes so long to bring really beautiful products to life, because it’s one thing to have the great idea, but there’s so many different elements that then come into play.
There are. We will be 15 in July. Cosmo and Elle and Forbes are calling us the OG, and we did pioneer a lot of things and it took a while for consumers to accept that these types of products were good for you but could work better and were also great for the planet. So it did take a while. It was step by step building, but we did build and escalate step by step for the first seven or eight years, and then we’ve grown much more dramatically in the last, you know, six or seven years.
I did want to ask you about that, because today the natural beauty category really has reached mainstream popularity, but 2005 was such a different time for beauty, for digital, for a whole number of things that come into play when you’re launching a business now. So what was that reception like when Juice Beauty first launched?
There’s conventional, chemical and natural, and we were pioneering “organic” beauty. So the conversations were “Huh? Well I already have natural.” And I’m like “No, no no!” When you go into a grocery store, think about a pile of green apples and another a pile of green apples- one says natural, conventional or naturally grown, and one says organic. What’s the difference? People say “Oh, one’s grown without pesticides, and through organic farming to protect the earth and to protect humans.” And I’m like “Exactly.” Those are the ingredients we use. We use those ingredients to not only protect humans, but to protect the earth. And it’s been shown in many studies that organically farmed ingredients can have up to 20 to 30% higher antioxidant levels than conventionally farmed ingredients. So you’re getting a higher concentration.
That’s one reason why our clinicals, the outside clinical labs that measure the efficacy of our products, have stacked up so well against conventional chemical efficacy- because those organic ingredients pack a punch.
Which products did you launch with?
I’ll talk about one of our heroes- our Green Apple Peel. That was one of our first hero products.We launched with a basic cleansing milk, a mist, some moisturisers and an SPF using zinc- but I won’t even tell you about the zinc, because zinc in 2005 does not feel like zinc in 2020. It was heavier, but now it’s luxurious.
Our Green Apple Peel was really a cult favourite from day one. It was the power of organic fruit acids. It’s a mask. You put it on as a mask on your face, neck and décolletage. I use the tops of my hands as a palette. If you use the tops of your hands as a palette for everything, for masks, peels and moisturisers, that will really help you where some of the first signs of ageing appear. So face, neck, décolletage. Let’s say you leave it on at night, in the evening for 10 or 15 minutes, however long you can tolerate it. Some tingling and some redness is fine. It is a powerful peel. It’s a spa grade peel. We have a full strength and we have a sensitive [version] in Australia. And then you wash it off with warm water.
First of all, a couple of stories. I would go around to the magazines in New York, all the beautiful, well known magazines. They would say, in the beginning, “Karen, I know you had some success in fitness, but really? Organic beauty? Is this going to be a thing? I know the ingredients are good for us, but…” and I would leave our full strength peel. I’d say “Just try this.” They all expected that it would fall off your face or that would do nothing. They would inevitably write me and say “Oh my god, that’s powerful!” And it really helped get past the efficacy, the “Do these really work?”
Then, something else happened. Kate Hudson, who is near and dear to our hear, wrote about our Green Apple Peel in 2007 and 2008 in Harper’s and Elle magazines. You would’ve thought we had won the lottery when she did that, we were jumping up and down! It was very exciting. We’ve developed a relationship over the years. She was very helpful in getting our name out there.
I’m not surprised that that was the first cult product for you, because that was the first of your products that I tried too. It just completely quashes that old belief that natural products were just kind of nice smelling waters.
That’s right, it got us over that hump. Our Green Apple Peel also bridges the gap between Blemish Clearing and Age Defy. It’s really for everyone. Of course our Stem Cellular collections are more for age defy, and our Blemish Clearing collections are obviously skincare for blemish clearing and oil control, but the Green Apple Peel really spans all generations and skin types.
Someone else who has undoubtedly been instrumental in popularising the natural beauty movement is Gwyneth Paltrow. You have collaborated rather extensively with Gwyneth and the Goop team, but I’d love to start with Phyto-Pigments. Gwyneth joined Juice Beauty as Makeup Creative Director in 2016, and remained in that role for about three years, and worked with you to launch the Phyto-Pigments range, your first colour cosmetics collection. What lead you to launch a colour range, and what drew Gwyneth to the brand?
The idea for makeup really came from our customers. It started with our Blemish Clearing customers. I (not right now) spend a lot of time in the stores, talking with customers all over the country- and all over the world really! I love listening to them because they give us honest feedback, they give me ideas and they really inspire me.What happened is I started talking to a lot of our blemish customers, as well as our age defy [customers]. They’d say “Okay, great. You cleared my skin, you’re helping with my lines and wrinkles, but I don’t have any foundation to wear because now you’ve set the standard for me. My skin can breathe. It’s not occluded. It feels fresh. I’m glowing. And then I put on XYZ foundation that’s loaded with petroleum.” That was really bothering me.
So I became obsessed with it. We started thinking about it, and I thought “A lot of skincare brands don’t do well going into makeup, and vice versa.” They’re not accepted. So I thought that if we had someone that was authentically real, a celebrity, but one who authentically stood behind this, it would be great. One of my board members said “I know Gwyneth Paltrow. I’d be happy to introduce you.” So that was that!
Everybody always asks what we were eating- I think it was a seafood a glass of wine. And over a seafood salad and a glass of wine, we decided to work together.
We had a little bit in common. We both have a son and a daughter. We both had dads that died from smoking. We had a lot in common, and we also wanted to have products that worked and that made us feel luxurious, but didn’t compromise our health or our kids’ health or animals of the planet. So we shared all that in common.
She wanted products that would stand up for her on the red carpet, under lights and things. And so that’s what we set out to do. In a moment of insanity, we came out with 75 products in one year. It was insane, in a very small team. But we survived, and we did it.
Kudos to our chemists, because the products were great. Kudos to Gwyneth, that people trusted her taste. They know she has beautiful, beautiful taste, so that was very helpful with people thinking “Oh, well Gwyneth is wearing it, so I can wear it.” She is a great partner. We used to work more closely together when she was our Creative Director, which she was for three years. Now we’re shareholders in one another’s companies.
That huge collection that worked on together, the Phyto-Pigments collection, gets its pigment from plants. In as much or as little detail as you wish, because I imagine there’s quite a lot to it- how?! How does it get pigment from plants?!
We only use sustainable farms. The Healdsburg Lip Crayon is a great example- named after our farm, by the way! These bright colours actually came from me thinking about fall harvest in Healdsburg and Sonoma County, because there’s so many bright reds and hues and pinks, and it’s just a gorgeous depiction of that. We crush roses, we crush eclipta daisy, for our mascara we crushed deep black and argan husks, and then we also extract the purple from purple carrot to get the deep black in the mascara as well as our liquid liner. We put henna in our liquid liner for a little colour and a little stay. It’s all sustainably sourced plant pigments and not synthetic dyes, because we don’t believe in them.
So that colour launch took place in January of 2016, and then a couple of months later, in March if my research serves me, Goop by Juice Beauty was launched, which is Goop’s own skincare line obviously created in collaboration with your brand. Where does the Goop line differ from the signature Juice Beauty line?
It’s very similar technology. We developed Goop by Juice Beauty products, and it was designed to really be a capsule collection for Gwyneth for a limited period of time. But some of the products are still selling on Goop! They’re just beautiful, beautiful products with an amazing flower technology as a base of them. It’s our basic chemistry that we work with, with organic botanical juices and active plant ingredients to really nail it with efficacy.
I love that it started off as a limited edition capsule collection, and three and a bit years on it’s still selling! I would love to hear more about the collaborative process. How did you and the Goop team work together to develop everything that we’ve just touched on?
It was really Gwyneth and a few people from Goop, but Gwyneth really lead the creative process. For instance, we would bring the concepts, the ingredients and the base formulas to her in a various colour palette, and she would narrow down the colour palette to the colours that she really thought would do well and sell that she loved. And then she went through and named every single product. So for our blush, it was Last Looks Blush. “Last Looks,” after what the director calls on the set when the camera’s about ready to roll, and they come back in for a little blush touch up. She named our Liquid Lips, after she curated them, after her friends. So there’s Kate, Cameron, Drew, Apple (her daughter), Gwyneth, Blythe and Reese. And if you look at those colours, you could probably see how it fits the name. She spent a lot of time on them, she was very creative in that process.
Our chemists, of course, did all of the development and the formulations and all the ingredients, but Gwyneth did all of the finishing touches with colour palettes, and the final slip and feel, the naming of it, and she helped design all of the packaging. She was amazing.
I love hearing that, because it’s almost commonplace now, with celebrity collaborations, to just pick a formula off the shelf and then the name goes onto it- but I get the feeling that this was about as authentic as it gets.
It was very authentic! I mean the mascara, we went through so many rounds. For our concealer, Gwyneth wanted it to swirl a few times before it loosened up the plant pigments. I was happy with not swirling a couple of times, but it was fine, it was all good. But we both drove everyone crazy with the Phyto-Pigments mascara. I thought our chemists were going to kill both of us because we kept sending them back. It was not staying on the lashes enough, no no no! Until we finally got a formula that we both absolutely fell in love with. That was the hardest to formulate.
What do you believe is the key to a successful collaboration?
Certainly if you’re collaborating with an A list celebrity, you have to have all your ducks in a row. With the formulation process, we would show up at her house or her office with complete palettes and complete ingredient stories. We were prepared. I think that is absolutely key- to make it easy for someone of her stature. That was critical.
It would be remiss of me not to briefly touch on the current health crisis we find ourselves in the midst of, as it’s presenting a new list of challenges for those looking to start their own business. You, and Juice Beauty, survived the 2008 stock market crash and subsequent recession, so what would be your advice to anyone looking to launch a brand in the current climate?
The Covid times. They’re really hard. Of course we want a vaccine out, we want everyone to get back to normal. That aside, I think use it to your advantage. Take the time to see how you can reinvent a little bit, or work on the areas that need to be worked on. With us, we’re expanding our marketing team. We’re really focused more on digital now. We’re doing so well on Mecca’s site, because we shifted to telling more stories and working with people like you- which is a lot of fun, by the way! We’ve also been doing live streamings from the Juice Beauty Farm.
It’s about really taking advantage of… where does your business need to be shored up and what can you do? What’s the future going to hold in this no touch environment? We’re used to being in stores, touching people, doing mini facials and doing makeovers. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and coming up with ways that we can do well in the future in this new world.
Let’s talk about the Juice Beauty Farm!
It’s so exciting. We spent a lot of wonderful years focused on the Phyto-Pigments and Gwyneth being our Creative Director, but I wanted to make sure that we got back to our roots and that people really knew the authenticity of our brand. We’re a Northern California brand. We are very close to our organic farmers. We are manufactured in the US, we buy most of our ingredients from North America. We still buy a lot of ingredients from a tonne of farmers- our organic green apples from Washington State, all the way down with our pomegranate into the Valley of California etc.
The Juice Beauty Farm is going on two years, I think. We really wanted a place that would scream our brand. So Gemma, next time you come to Northern California, you will absolutely be our guest, and when you stay at our sustainable organic farmhouse, which is sustainable and organic from top to bottom, sleeping on organic mattresses and drinking out of recycled glasses and drinking our Juice Beauty wine (which we don’t sell), we want you to feel like you just dove into a Juice Beauty bottle from top to bottom. It’s a 20 acre vineyard. We have beautiful grapes, hundreds of olive trees and we’re about two thirds of the way of converting it to organic. So we will eventually be sourcing all aspects of our grape and olive there. Right now we’re doing a lot of research, a lot of science on the farm to really grow the super of super-est grapes known to humankind for the skin.
But it’s a stunning place to relax, to entertain our retailers, our social media contacts, our PR contacts and our employees. The first year was awesome with entertaining. Going into this summer, obviously things are looking a little different during COVID times, but we’ll figure it out!
You have been part of the beauty industry for 15 years now and obviously part of the wellness landscape for even longer. What are the biggest changes you have seen within the beauty industry over that time?
There’s certainly growing acceptance for indie brands, or independent brands. Everyone thinks they’re having their moment now with natural, clean, etc, but they’ve had their moment. It’s been growing and growing and growing. In 2006 and 2007, there was an explosion of natural brands, and then the recession took it down so it took a while for them to come back. But it’s not the first time that this has surged. But every time this whole movement furthers, which is exciting, it escalates. So that’s been very exciting. Consumers become more aware of ingredients, they become more discerning and they become smarter about ingredients, which is an awesome movement.
You do sometimes see more greenwashing or organic washing or whatever you want to call it. So that’s kind of disconcerting, but I do love that consumers are becoming so smart about ingredients. The greenwashing and all that though- it’s hard to sift through what’s real and what’s not.
I’ll hear a statistic that will say “We are going to save X amount or tonnes of this or that over the next decade.” We hired some Duke University students, and we actually did the math, so we can say things like “We’d have a 2.6 million square inch in paper just this year with our sustainable packaging efforts,” or “We have avoided the use of three tonnes of pesticides over the last decade”.
Avoided- not we’re going to avoid. So that’s exciting for us. The whole sustainability movement is very exciting.
And, of course, organic farming is sustainability. It’s one of its highest forms because you’re avoiding unnecessary pesticides on the earth and animals and humans. It’s just all big circle release.
What changes do you think we can expect to see from the industry over the coming years?
I think there’ll be a continued focus on sustainability and packaging. It is interesting to me, that. Again, consumers have to be really savvy because they’ll say “Oh, this is in a recycled tube.” And yes, but it’s also a chemical sunscreen that is killing our reefs, your reefs. They can do better. We’re moving all of our tubes to bio-resin, which lowers our carbon footprint. So I think there’s going to be more sustainability, but the consumer does have to be savvy to say “Ooh, you know, does it come full circle or is it their first step?”
My final question- what is next for Juice Beauty?
Higher and higher efficacy, more research coming out of our Juice Beauty Farm, cooler and cooler ingredients.
We have always stood for innovation. We were one of the first, I think we were tied with Chanel, for bringing CCs to North America. And the Stem Cellular technology, and how we’ve revolutionised zinc, so we plan on staying on the cutting edge. [We have] our Prebiotics collection, which is protecting the skin microbiome. Protecting the skin microbiome is so critical. We did that with a prebiotic collection of ingredients of viola, fermented bamboo, chia, lactobacillus from coconut. It launched in March, in Mecca. It’s really pollution protection, really protecting the skin microbiome, because when your skin microbiome and all of the micro flora and everything gets out of balance, your skin isn’t healthy. It’s the perfect moisturiser for everyone from teens to forties. It’s just an absolutely perfect and beautiful gel-like moisturiser. We put kumaru in it, which is an interesting ingredient because it reflects light. It absorbs and reflects light, so you get a beautiful luminescence wearing it.
We’re a science based brand, so more science, higher efficacy, and better and better skincare all the time.
To listen to the full interview with Juice Beauty founder Karen Behnke, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify
