FEATURES
26th November 2019
When I think of the UpCircle team creating their caffeinated beauty products, I imagine them in their lab coats, surrounded by hessian sacks of used coffee grounds and residual chai spices bubbling away in an old school beaker under a Bunsen burner.
Now I am sure this isn’t the case, but to be frank, what UpCircle are creating with their brand, is beauty wizardry. This is modern day beauty wizardry at its best!
​
In a nutshell – the brother and sister duo transform leftover natural ingredients into quality skincare products. Every year coffee grounds account for 500,000 tonnes of waste rotting in landfill. UpCircle aren’t letting those magic beans go to waste and what they are creating is good for you and good for the planet. All of their products (an impressive 22 products are currently in the range) are organic, cruelty free and vegan. (And delightful I might add – their Coffee Face Floral Blend face scrub is a treat!)
I am really interested in getting down to the nitty gritty scientific roots of the experiment and how it all started! How did they come up with this amazing sustainable idea to create beauty products out of re-purposed goods. I chat to Anna (The brawn behind the operation) to find out more!
What I would be interested to find out is more of the science behind the brand, for example, how did your idea about re-using coffee grounds turn into your coffee scrub? What were the steps in between?
The original product we launched with three years ago was a range of scrubs made with recycled coffee grounds. The idea for this came about after receiving a cafetière for Christmas one year. After receiving it I became aware of the large quantity of coffee grounds I was discarding daily. Subsequently I decided to investigate the benefits of using coffee on your skin. After learning that coffee was an excellent natural exfoliator packed with antioxidants which benefit the skin I realised there was an opportunity. I started to reach out to coffee shops around London and learned that they have to pay the council to dispose of their used coffee grounds. I had identified a gap in the market where we could promote a circular economy by putting the discarded grounds to use whilst also producing a product that delivers real benefits for the skin. That is when we started to investigate formulations and other natural ingredients that would enhance the properties of the coffee and further nourish the skin.
Did you start making the scrubs yourself?
Absolutely! We had to develop our unique formulation and it was not easy. We wanted a natural scrub that was suspended in a moisturising oil base that comes out of a tube - something that was not available (and is still not available with the exception of our product) on the market. When you run a business you have to do everything yourself at the beginning, you are branding, marketing, accounting, HR, legal, operations, logistics, sales - it is full on!
We decided to launch our idea and product at the London Coffee Festival. We made hundreds of home-made scrubs hoping that they would last us the duration of the five day show, but we actually sold out on the first day. This proved two things: Firstly that the products worked and people wanted to buy them, and secondly that people were not turning their noses up at the idea of repurposing by-products into sustainable skincare products.
"One third of all food produced is wasted. It is one of the most wasteful industries in the world..."
Did you speak to beauty industry experts?
We had a good grasp of what we wanted to bring to the market and we understand the natural ingredients we are working with. Working with nature and plant-based ingredients such as ours is much more akin to cooking than to traditional chemical based laboratory-led product formulation. We want our customers to be able to pronounce or at least recognise all of the ingredients in our products! We have a small trusted network of people we work with, but our product ideas and production come about because we have a vision and the consumer has a need. Once you have those two components the rest (in theory!) should be simple.
How did you know what ingredients to add to the coffee grounds to come up with all of your different products?
There is a reason nobody is producing a product like ours... it’s not easy! The fact that we repurpose a core ingredient into every UpCircle product is both our biggest challenge and our biggest strength. We must catch the ingredients at exactly the right time… and place! However, the circular element to our range is also what makes us who we are, it is central to everything we do. It is what makes journalists want to write about us (we have had four features with The Sunday Times in four weeks), retailers want to stock us, and customers want to try our products and tell their friends about us!
One third of all food produced is wasted. It is one of the most wasteful industries in the world meaning that it gives companies like us a huge number of ingredients from which to do better things with. Food ingredients can have powerful effects on the body on the inside and out – so there’s an opportunity for us to create beauty products from food ingredients that were being discarded and yet still have a huge amount to offer the skin.
But, put simply, there’s a lot of trial and error in deciding what works best. We often take different versions of potential product formulations to shows and events, we ask customers to try or smell them and vote for their favourite – it’s a great way to get instant feedback and honest reactions!
Where are your products made?
All of our products are made by hand in the UK. They’re also vegan, cruelty-free, palm oil-free, organic and housed in 100% recyclable packaging.
And finally; what is the future for UpCircle?
We have a very busy and exciting run up into Christmas. We will be launching three new products using three new upcycled ingredients in the next month. I’ll keep the detail vague... but we’re calling it the fruit stone range - I am so excited to share the products with you! We have had customers asking for us to make these products for a while and we have laboured for months over different formulations and the final results are awesome - bring on 2020!
​
You can buy all Upcircle's repourposed products on their website www.upcirclebeauty.com.