Why our little bars can do (and cost!) so much Those little bars – why are people happy to pay £13.00 a piece for them? Here we give you a bit of background into how we’ve arrived at our pricing, what goes into making and packaging Ethique bars, and why those unassuming bars pack a more powerful punch than you might think. Power-packed concentration Our bars often get confused with soap, but they’re not. Imagine, for example, your bottle of shampoo with the water sucked out if it. What you’re left with is a super-concentrated bar of active ingredients. That’s good for the environment – with no water, we can package shampoo in paper instead of plastic, and they’re so much lighter so use far less fuel to transport. That super concentration works in your favour too – each bar is equivalent to many bottles of liquid product. One of our shampoo bars, for example, delivers the same cleaning power as three 350ml bottles of liquid shampoo. Conditioner is even more impressive – one bar saves you buying five 350ml bottles. A butter block gets rid of two 250ml bottles. How did we work this out? By how much water it would take to turn each of our products into a standard liquid product – generally, the mix is about 5-10% ingredients, 90-95% water. When you look at it like that, it’s easy to see why you could expect to pay a wee bit more – add together the cost of buying three bottles of decent-ish shampoo from the supermarket, and it’s about equivalent to one Ethique bar. We also put more into each pack than just super-concentrated ingredients: ethics. Extra ethical Ethique was launched as a no-compromises brand, and that nearly always comes with extra cost. For example, palm oil is so widely used because it’s incredibly versatile and cheap. Using palm isn’t an option for us, so we use alternatives, which can be 8-16 times spendier. As an accredited living-wage employer, we also pay our people enough to live a decent life – that’s more than the minimum wage, so we carry higher wage costs than many other businesses do. That care for people includes where we get our ingredients from, too – for example, our coconut oil is sourced exclusively from a women’s cooperative in Samoa, so we know every drop is organic, and genuinely supports the people and communities who make it. And that earth-friendly compostable packaging? Surprisingly, it costs 10-25 times more than plastic equivalents. More delicious ingredients Of course, naturally derived, quality ingredients cost more, too. For example, we don’t use cheap, synthetically produced fragrances, instead relying on costlier essential oils, which we add a lot of to get those delicious sherbet-y smells. We want everyone to be able to join us Regardless of the economics, or the quality and ethics built in, we know the price point is still above what some people can spend at one time. That’s why we’re always looking for ways to reduce our prices, without compromising on the product itself. For example, we reduced the prices of our conditioner bars a couple of years ago when we were able to reduce our ingredient costs by buying larger volumes. And we’ve never had a price increase. Because a big part of our no-compromises is our mission: to create a world without single-use plastics. We know that’ll only happen if everyone wants – and can afford – to join us.