Lush hooks customers with gruesome window display
By Kate Pritchard, published 1 year ago in Sales & Marketing.
It’s a brilliant PR stunt cum animal rights campaign. In a dramatic illustration of shark finning, former Lush employee and performance artist Alice Newstead has been piercing her skin with shark hooks and suspending herself from the ceiling of Lush stores. Her first stop was London’s Regent Street. A few weeks ago, it was Paris. Next up, New York.
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Painted silver from head to toe, Newstead spent 15 minutes suspended in the window of a Parisian Lush store earlier this month, with oversized shark fishing hooks speared between her shoulder blades.
It’s part of an ongoing campaign which has seen Lush team up with the Sea Shepherd environmental organisation to put an end to overfishing. Over 100 million sharks are killed every year for their fins, flesh, cartilage and oil, and 90 per cent of the world’s shark population has already been wiped out.
Alongside the shocking "window display", Lush has created a new product called shark fin soap, made with seaweed and sea salt with a cardboard shark fin sticking out the top. Lush will be making 11,416 bars of the soap (the number of sharks killed each hour), with all proceeds going to Sea Shepherd.
The cosmetics company has also written to restaurants across the country asking them to remove shark fin soup from the menu, to GNC asking for them to remove shark supplements from their shelves, and to the National Federation of Fish Friers asking them to urge their members to stop selling shark – also known as “rock salmon”.
“We’re wishy-washy liberals,” says Lush founder Mark Constantine. “We like to support climate change groups, human rights groups, that sort of thing.”
The entrepreneur behind Lush is also trying to help the next generation of ethical brands. “When you’re trying to set up a company where ethics are a big part of what you do, you need examples," says Constantine. "And it’s very difficult when those 'examples' keep getting bought by large, unethical companies.”
A veiled swipe at Innocent, perhaps?
To hear Mark Constantine's views on the recession, why Woolworths went under and why he's "digging for potatoes", watch our vodcast here.
Related articles:I'll have what Mark Constantine is havingLush launches new spaVodcast with Mark Constantine
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