By Altia Bend

In the beauty industry, it’s very common to come across a lot of waste. Most consumers would assume all the waste is from packaging, but many would be surprised that some of that waste is from the product itself. However, for KraveBeauty, waste is no option.

At the beginning of this year, KraveBeauty was stuck with over 1,200 gallons of their best-selling Matcha Hemp cleanser that didn’t meet the usual standards. While the product was completely safe, the consistency would have been different than what customers were used to. In most cases, these mistakes can lead a company to lose a lot of money while also wasting products. But as part of KraveBeauty’s Waste Me Not campaign, they took a unique route. Rather than throw the face cleanser away, KraveBeauty repurposed the product and created a new body wash.

According to Liah Yoo, KraveBeauty’s founder and CEO, “that body wash was something that was never in our product pipeline… It just came from a problem-solving process: How do we make sure that we are not spilling this down into the wastestream and can still use this as an opportunity to also bring awareness to the public [about waste].”

In an article by Fast Company, Yoo further explained, “It’s hard to measure how much this waste totals for the cosmetic industry…companies don’t often quantify the waste that comes from testing or pilot batches. When KraveBeauty looked closely, it calculated that it had created more than $1.5 million in retail value (not cost of goods) of product waste in the past year. That includes those hundreds of gallons of face cleanser, the pilot batches of the new cleanser, and old packaging the company still had after a redesign.”

KraveBeauty’s Waste Me Not Campain “aims to bring awareness to the industry-wide hidden waste problem and to normalize talking about it. Through this campaign, [they] are peeling back the curtain on how we repurposed over $1.5M in retail value of unsaleable product waste we created in the past year.”

Hopefully, more companies in the beauty industry decide to take a similar route in hopes of eliminating waste.

You can help them spread the word with #WasteMeNot on your social media platforms.