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Sustainable Management of Luxury pp 211–231Cite as

More Than Skin Deep: A Service Design Approach to Making the Luxury Personal Care Industry More Sustainable

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Abstract

The core values of both luxury and sustainability are at odds with a consumer culture characterised by cheap, disposable products and undervalued natural resources. Although some product categories within the luxury goods sector have upheld the values of quality and durability, others, such as personal care, have come to rely on materials and processes that are harmful to ecosystems and human health. The luxury personal care industry trades on qualities of purity, freshness, beauty and the ‘natural’. However, the industry remains unsustainable through its continued use of single-use plastic packaging and particular synthetic chemical additives. For this to change, the way in which personal care products are delivered and administered must be fundamentally redesigned. This chapter presents a case study of luxury personal care company LUSH, and examines how its innovative approach to service design could provide a genuinely sustainable model for luxury personal care companies, and potentially the broader industry. The central elements of this model include local production, ‘naked’ products, short expiry dates, and innovative retail design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    R. Wakefield-Rann

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  1. R. Wakefield-Rann
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Correspondence to R. Wakefield-Rann .

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  1. Center for Studies on Sustainable Luxury , Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Miguel Angel Gardetti

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Wakefield-Rann, R. (2017). More Than Skin Deep: A Service Design Approach to Making the Luxury Personal Care Industry More Sustainable. In: Gardetti, M. (eds) Sustainable Management of Luxury. Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2917-2_10

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