When creating a new product, we focus on two things
- Creating an effective product, and
- Minimizing the ingredient list.
Number one is essential and fairly obvious — there is no point in creating a product that is not going to be effective.
Number two needs a bit more explanation. Why does it matter how many ingredients are in a product?
The number of ingredient matters greatly to us. All the ingredients take energy to create — whether it’s farmland to grow the ingredient, space in a processing plant to prepare it for use, a laboratory or manufacturing space to create the ingredient, and even warehouse space to store it. Every additional unnecessary ingredient uses valuable resources!
Even if the ingredients are organic or have good qualities, we leave them out if they don’t improve the effectiveness or purpose of the product.
Let’s look an an example for a new product we are developing: Hair Spray. Don’t cringe, you will not find plastics, sulphates, aerosols, or VOCs in it!
We started by researching exactly what is required to make a hair spray that has a strong and lasting hold. In a typical hair spray, it is a polymer that creates the hold but needs a propellant to accelerate it out of the bottle. They also include a preservative.
Because we do not want to use toxic ingredients in A Simple Planet products, we will use a fine mist sprayer to act as a physical propellant. That means our research will be focused on finding the perfect polymer to create a perfect hold. We are researching all types of diverse ingredients such as organic carbohydrates like sugar, organic gums and seaweed (Algin)! Once we find the perfect ingredient to create the hold we want in our hair spray, we will add in a preservative — most likely gluconolactone sodium benzoate — and that’s it! Nothing excessive, nothing wasteful.