Founded in 2015, Credo, the world’s largest clean beauty retailer, has been spearheading sustainable beauty since before it was a buzzword. Credo’s Vice President of Environmental and Social Responsibility Mia Davis, and Kelly Kovack, Founder and CEO of BeautyMatter, hosted a conversation on the clean beauty industry’s future, shortcomings, and potential at Credo’s NoLita location.
The conversation opened on the topic of skeptics who might accuse the words “clean” or “recyclable” of being marketing terms made for fear mongering. A familiar refrain in the honest conversation, Davis opened with, “It depends,” going on to explain that a word is only as strong as the claims it substantiates. For a brand who has taken “clean” not as inspiration for an endcap or aisle, but as an animating mission, the words are backed by meaningful guidelines, known as The Credo Clean Standard. This, alongside its Dirty List―a file of over 2,700 chemicals Credo prohibits or restricts―allows ultimate alignment among the 150+ brands that make a home in this retailer’s walls.
Kovack noted that as with any high-growth category, pioneers and opportunists abound in clean beauty. Paired with the genius of beauty marketers, the combination can easily land brands somewhere between greenwashing and misinformation. “The onus is on brands to be honest and transparent about what these terms mean to them,” she says.
Credo co-founded Pact, a nonprofit beauty packaging collection program for hard-to-recycle materials, with over 300 collection bins across the country and 150+ beauty industry members. As one of Pact’s co-founders, Davis, noted that confusion related to what can and can’t be recycled starts at the beginning of the supply chain. This leads to something she calls “wishcyling,” or the consumer dropping their landfill-bound empties in the recycling bin with hopes of it finding its way to a postconsumer life. In actuality, it clogs the recycling system. Kovack mentioned the importance of considering the supply and demand economics behind recycling. “For changes to be made, there has to be a market for the recycled material. For a while, things were being recycled but no one wanted to buy the postconsumer recycled (PCR). Now everyone wants it, and you have the opposite problem.”
Davis and Kovack discussed packaging options with real staying power. “Everything has its own issues. But metal and aluminum are infinitely recyclable,” noted Davis. The conversation took into account the carbon footprint of shipping, the durability of packaging, and the hidden math behind what makes a refillable option a more eco-conscious one. Performing a life-cycle analysis to make an informed decision versus blindly subscribing to the notion that a certain kind of vessel equals sustainable beauty, is key.
At the end of the day, Davis urged that reducing is the most optimized form of beauty sustainability. “We have to stop perpetuating that more or taller or heavier is more luxurious or has more value. It’s just more stuff.”
“We have a plastic problem, but we also have a perfection problem in beauty,” noted Kovack, “Expectations create waste.” She cited Krave Beauty’s initiative to sell a whole run that wasn't perfectly printed through a pop-up model. Davis explained the idea of obsolete inventory, or the additional packaging baked into expense sheets that most manufacturing writes off as simply a part of the product development process. This excess is then thrown out when it’s inevitably deemed unusable or excessive.
Where do brands fit into this? “They have to tell the truth and they have to be completely transparent,” according to Kovack. “I see a lot of goals put out there by national-level consumer packaged goods (CPGs) that will never be met and were never intended to be met. This is called “goalwashing.” Both agreed that scale, conversations, and measured commitment are all integral.
Both experts finished the conversation with an optimistic tone. Technology, and the role it's already playing in forcing brands from hiding behind IP, was on Kovack’s mind. And just as Credo’s definition of clean has been industry-leading since its inception, it’s also continued evolving. Ethics, or the question of how workers are being treated, is its latest frontier. However the definition of “clean” continues to change in the beauty industry, Davis imagines it as moving from a “nice-to-have” or “point of differentiation” to the core of business and direction of the industry as a whole.
