Reduce
It’s heartbreaking how many manufacturers use excessive packaging to retail their products. Sometimes it’s required for safety but in the cosmetic world it’s often done to artificially inflate a products perceived value. The personal care business and the cosmetic world share some of the same mind space when it comes to retail so you find that same behavior bleeding over.
We get it. Who doesn’t love a pretty box with lots of textures and colors and pizzazz? Shinny shimmery glittery things sitting on a shelf capture anyone’s attention. But there is a cost to that and it’s one we all end up having to pay if we fall into that trap. There is an environmental cost with all that excess packaging in addition to the sting in the buyers wallet. Most people think of landfill load after consumer purchase. But that is not the only environmental impact. Take a moment and imagine all of the processes and chemicals that go into one package and then think of the downstream impact of all of those chemicals. The cascading effect grows exponentially.
Over a decade ago, we decided to ignore the market trend of excess and do our own thing. While we can’t get away from packaging, Très Spa uses minimal, recyclable, and/or or reduced packaging for the products. At one point we even made our own paper until it got to much to do. Our gift collections are not tiny sized either. They are full size or travel size and the box is just right to hold all of the product together.
And when we ship your order to you, the box is only large enough to hold your order together. We spend a little extra to get sturdy boxes rather than relying on over-sized flimsy boxes packed with cushions.
Reuse
We can reduce our carbon footprint by reusing packaging. We get the handiness of a tube for certain applications like deodorants. But we get tired of seeing so many tubes entering the recycle program. We wondered what if we made a stick to refill the tube. So we did. Now you can actually reuse the tubes by purchasing the stick refills. Just clean your tube and pop in a new one. We are currently evaluating other products for a similar concept or a buy a “bulk” refill option.
Re-purpose
Some of our packaging can be re-purposed for other things. We intentionally do not glue labels on our gift packaging so that it can easily be re-purposed for a multitude of other storage needs. They fold flat for easy storage as well. Once you’ve used them to the point of falling apart, they can go into your recycle collection bin.