It began with the planet
Don't be mean actually started life as "Don't be mean to the Planet." Before it was ever about your hair or your self-esteem, it was about one stubborn problem: plastic.
Germany's Umweltbundesamt: 3.04 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste in 2023, up from 1.63 million in 1991. Nearly doubled in a generation. Just 52.2% of it recycled, below the 55% the EU is asking for by 2030. And close to half of all packaging waste comes out of ordinary households. Nobody has ever counted shampoo bottles. But you don't need a bottle count to notice that liquid shampoo is mostly water, sold in plastic, shipped across a continent, so you can pay to move water around in a container you'll throw away. This is what we aim to change.
The planet is where all of this began, and it's still the beating heart of it.
Why it matters
Most shampoo is water in a plastic bottle, made and shipped at scale by very big companies. If a small brand like mine can pull even a slice of that away from plastic, convert even a few people, take even a sliver back from the big corporates, I think that's an achievement worth chasing.
You can never be fully sustainable
Here's where I refuse to greenwash. You cannot build a business and have zero impact, it isn't possible. Making and shipping a physical product has a footprint, full stop. I've genuinely wrestled with whether adding another brand to the world is the right thing to do at all. But I keep landing on the same answer: if I have even a chance of replacing some of the big, careless players with something more honest, that's worth the trade-off. Full sustainability is a place you never quite arrive at and I'd rather be honest about that than pretend I've cracked it.
Sustainability is the WHOLE picture
We look at sustainability far too narrowly. People fixate on one thing: one material, one buzzword, instead of the whole system. Real sustainability is holistic, and people are part of that system. Their wellbeing counts. So when I challenge toxic beauty norms and try to break those cycles for you, I count that as sustainability too: sustaining people, not just packaging.
People, planet, profit
And I have to be honest with myself, too: I need to make some profit simply to exist. So my approach is to weigh all three, people, planet and profit, every time I make a decision. Sometimes that means a compromise; you can't be perfect on all three at once. But if I can find a genuine balance between them, I think I'm doing this well. That's the goal, not perfection on any single one, but honest balance across all three.
