January 3, 2024 |
It seems only fitting that the Hæckels lab is located in a converted casino in Margate. For years, the skincare and fragrance brand has been pursuing what so many others claim to be succeeding at – sincere and impactful sustainability – but with a willingness to test experimental materials, create alternative ingredients and rethink production methods to an extent that few other brands would be willing to risk.
Like any great gambling story, this one has humble beginnings and a stratospheric rise. Hæckels began in 2012 when founder Dom Bridges created a bar of soap out of seaweed he’d harvested from the local beaches. He was working as a volunteer warden and the soap was his way of putting the pounds of seaweed and natural botanicals that washed up on the beach to good use. Seaweed is packed with vitamins, minerals and amino acids that make it naturally hydrating, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory, and by repurposing it into something new, Bridges wanted to promote Margate’s heritage of healthy coastal living.
It was a way of celebrating his home, an English seaside town that, although it has been gentrified in recent years, still retains some romantic, dingy charm: fish and chip shops, a towering brutalist apartment block, a shabby fairground called Dreamland. A year after that first soap bar, Bridges graduated from his saucepan laboratory at home to a space on Cliff Terrace, where he and a small team began to build out the Hæckels range with more seaweed-based skincare products and fragrances derived from natural botanicals. It blossomed quickly, with people falling hard for its distinctive fragrances, home scents and natural skincare products that were just as effective than big-name brands with higher price points, if not more so.
Like Aesop before it, Hæckels’ products became tokens of a certain kind of cultural subset, with a candle on a home coffee table or the soaps in a restaurant bathroom signifying you were probably somewhere very trendy. And while it always looked cool, what really set Hæckels apart was its material innovations. It was one of the first brands to use mycelium packaging, made from the thread-like root system of fungi and agricultural waste, for its products. It partnered with a London café to make soap from the excess coffee grounds and launched ‘grown to order’ face masks, a zero-waste product grown in-lab for each individual order, which was then shipped in compostable glassine sacks. It seemed like every few months the brand was debuting a new, more innovative eco-conscious product, attracting the attention of publications, social media and, in 2022, the eye of Estée Lauder, who made a minority investment in the company.
The money from Estée Lauder made it possible for Hæckels to bring its vision to new heights, but it also garnered some criticism from those who thought the brand was selling out to a corporation that didn’t align with its sustainable ethos. However, for Hæckels, the investment meant that they could finally bring their forward-thinking vision into the mainstream and be a viable competitor to big name, less environmentally conscious brands that, otherwise, they would never have the resources to scale-up to.
It also meant that the brand could debut its most ambitious creation yet. Hæckels 2.0 has redefined its identity, packaging and product offering in a three- part launch: Hæckels Skin, Hæckels Home and Hæckels Lab. Skin came first, taking the brand’s classic products and repackaging them in Vivomer, a revolutionary compostable material that decomposes in soil or oceans without leaving behind any microplastics. The Hæckels Lab engineered ingredients in its Margate laboratory to mimic the properties of natural ones without expending the carbon emissions that are needed to grow, ship and manufacture them. Ingredients like EGF, a protein made from in-lab sugar fermentation that helps in the production of collagen, elastin and hyaluronic acid, and Spiraglow, an in-house designed biofabricated algae that promotes a healthy microbiome to reduce breakouts, redness and dryness on the skin through pH maintenance. It was, hands down, the most groundbreaking launch yet for a brand that had established itself as the foremost pioneer of sustainable beauty.
It is easy to be dubious of any beauty brand that claims to be ‘sustainable’. After all, that word that has been used so excessively and expansively, describing everything from refillable packaging to natural ingredients (neither of which are necessarily better for the planet) that it has become practically devoid of meaning. But, as someone who has written about beauty for years, what sets Hæckels apart from the others is not just its willingness to invest in experimental materials, but the earnestness of its efforts and the self- evaluating ethos it maintains throughout every project it takes on. That lab in the converted casino is filled mainly with locals who have been with the brand for years and know its workings inside and out. Everything, from growing the ingredients to boxing them up for distribution, takes place among the laminated wood walls and confetti-patterned carpeting left over from the space’s previous life. That creates a homespun, community atmosphere rarely seen in brands that have garnered as much success.
When I called Hæckels managing director Charlie Vickery, now a year after the Hæckels 2.0 launch, he immediately offered up thoughts on what the brand could have done better. “I’ll be super transparent about how Hæckels works,” he told me. “We obviously spend a lot of effort and time creating our vision of what the future is in terms of sustainable skincare, futuristic materials and a new natural world. I think, in our excitement, we didn’t necessarily communicate that [at first] to customers as effectively as we could have. In trying to attract new customers with compostable materials we forgot to explain that, by the way, the liquid inside that package is amazing and it will make your skin better.”
So, the brand took to its Discord channel and asked people what they wanted. The result is the Innovation Subscription, a box delivered monthly that contains either a preview sample of an unreleased product or a hero product, as well as a newspaper that shares what the brand is up to. “It has really resonated with our customers,” says Vickery. “The first box sold out in 48 hours and the next sold out in 72, and that’s because it was designed by our customers on our Discord. I think that is something only we do – creating the relevant products that customers are asking for. That’s really brought us back into the fold.”
It seems that it has. In terms of sales, 2023 has been the best in the brand’s 11-year history, with profits up from last year by nearly triple digits. In addition to subscription boxes, it collaborated with materials science brand Pangaia and biotech company C16 Biosciences earlier this year to create a soap block out of Palmless Torula Oil, which uses lab-fermented ingredients to bind the soap and stops it from melting, just like palm oil, but without the environmental cost.
Hæckels has even branched out of the beauty sphere. In an attempt to combat the millions of plastic cups used and thrown away at festivals every year, they launched an edible cup made with postbiotic ingredients, to aid in gut health, and seaweed, so that makes for a good fertiliser if it is not eaten.
Rather than launching more new products, though, Vickery asserts that the brand will spend the next year focusing more on what it already has going for it. That includes products like its Algae Plump Serum, a lightweight but highly moisturising formulation that uses seaweed-derived ingredients to create a potent, marine-based alternative to a typical hyaluronic acid serum; or its Prebiotic Cleansing Balm, a gentle, hydrating cleanser, rich in sterols, ceramides and adaptive prebiotics that allow it to adjust to the specific needs of your skin microbiota.
Beyond that, Hæckels will be working to make its products more affordable and, consequently, more accessible. As Vickery says, “the final frontier for sustainability is affordability”, meaning that you can make the most environmentally conscious products possible but if only a select few people can purchase them then you won’t make much of an impact. To that end, the brand has just launched a Algae Hydrating Clay Mask that costs just £18, the same price as many of the masks on sale at Boots.
Hæckels has sent shockwaves through the industry again and again through its pioneering innovations, but sometimes the biggest impact can come from the smallest changes. Making Hæckels’ innovative products as accessible as the chemist’s alternatives is certainly a future to be excited about.
Photography courtesy of Hæckels. Taken from 10+ Issue 6 – VISIONARY, WOMEN, REVOLUTION – out now. Order your copy here.
