When working as Naturopath, Megan Douglas noticed many women suffering skin problems. As a female entrepreneur, Megan decided to start her own makeup company that was natural, from the roots, and boosted the skin. Read on to find out more about her company:
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and why you started The Organic Skin Co?
In many ways, my background and the reasons why I started The Organic Skin Co. are one and the same. That’s because The Organic Skin Co. is really the story of my past – the many hours I spent out the back of my grandmother’s health food shop as a child, my experiences in London as a fashion designer, my work as a naturopath (where I was shocked by the number of women visiting me with skin problems, most of them caused by environmental stressors and toxins), and by my experiences as a mother. In particular, as I watched my daughter and my niece grow, I became concerned that they had almost nothing to choose from when it came to natural makeup. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything on the market that both did its job and which cared for their skin at the same time. So, I decided to do something about it!
Can you tell us a bit more about your products and how they differentiate from other brands?
I think what makes our products so special and which differentiates them from other brands is that they work on so many different levels. We’ve worked hard to create a brand that we like to describe as ‘Natural Beauty, 360’. In other words, The Organic Skin Co. stands out because it has a fresh, multi-faceted approach to organic beauty and how people perceive it. We have attractive packaging, an optimistic and modern voice, a strong back-story, and we’re ethically grounded. Not only do we have organic certification, we’re also cruelty-free and vegan, and we are, of course, very proud of our ‘One Product, One Tree’ initiative.
We also have access to the most incredible organic ingredients, thanks to our partnership with community farms in India, and we make extensive use of revolutionary supercritical extracts throughout our range. We’re world leaders in the use of this technology, which brings a real punch of goodness to all our makeup and skincare products, ensuring that they not only have a great color payoff, but they’re also really good for your skin.
Growing a business has many trade-offs. What was something that was non-negotiable for you?
We have always taken the attitude that to create a strong business the foundations need to be strong, Using a tree analogy, the roots of The Organic Skin Co. have been carefully nurtured over time to hopefully build a strong and healthy business that stands the test of time. Sometimes it seems that it would be so much easier and cheaper to take shortcuts, but these would only compromise the quality or sustainability of The Organic Skin Co.’s products. So the care in laying down the foundations was a nonnegotiable action for us.
The Organic Skin Co.’s roots are like any roots, they are not visible above the ground and it feels like they have taken time to nurture into something that is only now bearing fruit. Building our vegan and organic certification protocol for our products over our 7-year history was one foundational root. While this has taken much commitment it has also helped us knit together a community of suppliers for our products that have excellence in what they do. We always strive to incorporate ingredients that are the best, the cleanest, and most effective we can find and certification paperwork helps us confirm which ones these are.
Another non-negotiable foundation has been the time it takes to create more sustainable packaging systems, and this is an ongoing commitment to continually improve the way we work with the earth’s resources.
Can you tell us a bit more about your One Product and One Tree initiative?
One Product, One Tree (we refer to it as OPOT!) is something that’s very dear to the hearts of everyone who works at The Organic Skin Co. We’re lucky to have partnered with the remarkable people at Eden Reforestation, who are doing some amazing things to help regenerate forests and uplift communities in areas as diverse as Madagascar, Nepal, and Haiti. Basically, we help support what they’re doing by providing them with the funds to plant one tree for every The Organic Skin Co. product purchased. We recently passed 100,000 trees planted, which was an exciting milestone for us!
