Plastic-free bathroom with essences made from powder and tap water
The bathroom is the place where a particularly large number of plastic tubes, brushes of all kinds, cans and bottles accumulate. The plastic waste could be avoided: shampoos and shower gels consist mainly of water and can just as easily be replaced by soap or solid shampoo bars. But not everyone likes that. For fans of liquid products, there is now a plastic-free solution from Treu Refill. The beauty start-up relies on powders that anyone can simply mix themselves with tap water. Founder Eva-Maria Wendt has analyzed the ingredients of shampoo, conditioner, hand and body care products, reduced them to the essential cleansing and nourishing essences and processed them into fine powders. They are packaged in paper bags, biodegradable, cruelty-free, vegan and made in Germany. We spoke to Eva-Maria Wendt and Ulrike Lierow-Schad, two of the three founders of Treu Refill, about their journey from the idea of powder-based care to the market launch of Treu Refill.
The beauty market is considered to be highly competitive, with strong competition and many cheap products. Why did you want to find a solution for precisely this market and offer hair cleansing and hair care?
The decision was made after my family, and I spent a few months in Bali in 2018. We experienced how happy the people there are but how overwhelmed they are by the flood of garbage that is constantly washing up. The plastic is burned in bonfires and people almost suffocate. And this is not only the case in Bali, it affects all countries in the global south, where there is no waste disposal system like we have, without judging it. We thought this can’t go on, this is our garbage, we have to do something in our everyday lives, otherwise it won’t change. And that became our New Year’s resolution for 2019: with every purchase, if the product or packaging is made of plastic, we question whether it must be. I’m not talking about wrapped cucumbers, which we clearly don’t buy, but the big areas, cosmetics and cleaning, where this hasn’t yet arrived at all. At least in 2018, it was still in its infancy. There were no shampoo bars back then. Instead, there were flashy, colorful, laminated packaging that was used once and gone. That still dominates the shelves. It was clear to me that this couldn’t be the principle. And I took this as a challenge to deal with the problem. That’s how it started. I wanted to find a solution for care products from the bathroom, this is where I saw the fewest sustainable alternatives to plastic products, and these were also the most conspicuous plastic waste that I recognized in Bali. This category of plastic waste is also difficult to recycle here because it is very colorful and contains strong synthetic fragrances. Most of it is also incinerated here.
Powder shampoo has been around since 1903 and was invented by Hans Schwarzkopf. But in 2019, it was still difficult to find powder shampoo in drugstores, as the era of sustainable shampoo bars was just beginning. But then you decided to use powder as a base for hair and body care. How did you come up with the idea?
I looked at the ingredients and asked: does it have to be liquid? Because the ingredient that is in the bottles the most is water. That’s not bad, but at this point water is a filler, a vehicle. Nevertheless, I started making my own shampoo bars and reading up on all these ingredients to get to grips with the subject. But they’re difficult for me because I have curly hair. What’s more, many people say they don’t like shampoo bars, they don’t warm to them, and I don’t either. Then I asked myself what alternative there is to shampoo bars, what base ingredient that is as highly concentrated, perhaps even more concentrated and efficient. And that’s how I came up with powder. You can have a powder that you dissolve in water and that only then becomes larger, so it also has a much lower transport weight. The idea sparked in me that there is another variant that picks up people who can’t cope with shampoo bars and also has the added bonus that it weighs even less. If you extrapolate that, powder can replace the many liquid products in terms of storage space, transport volume, that entails a whole chain, that’s a lot of benefits that avoid waste and are more climate-friendly overall.
So you wanted to rethink the existing beauty products, break them down into their constituent substances and come up with a powder as a solution. You don’t come from a chemistry or beauty background; you originally have a different profession.
I’m a production designer in film. I’m used to taking topics apart and finding a solution for them, there’s a script, the problems, the challenges are in there, we have to visualize that. The beauty segment is also one of the hardest things you can do, everything is far too cheap – I didn’t know that before, I had never thought about it. I went in with the idea that we could make great content here, find a great laboratory and then the sachet for the powder and so on. We have the idea and we’ll implement it, we’ll just do it now. And then we realized: Stop. The world hasn’t come that far yet. None of this exists yet
How did the idea become a start-up?
I first concentrated on powders, started researching them, where can I start producing powders, are there any laboratories that can develop them. And by the way, no, they don’t actually exist. I told my friend Christine about it, she is a brand designer and was also looking into sustainability and beauty at the same time. Somehow it quickly became clear that I wanted to develop a company out of it and Christine did too, she joined in 2019. The name Treu Refill was decided relatively quickly, also as a commitment to “this is what we’re doing now”. We have taken this further and developed it to this point and have just completed production of the first serial batch, which we now offer in our online store. Ulrike then joined us as the third member of the team in late summer 2021 and is mainly responsible for sales.
You all had no experience with beauty products, the market and you had no partners. In cosmetics, contract manufacturers are important. Companies that, on the one hand, have the production facilities with which they mix various active ingredients, process them into the desired product such as lotion or powder and fill everything into the packaging. On the other hand, the contract manufacturers also have the knowledge of the correct composition for the mixtures. How did you find your partners?
We searched for a long time to find the ideal partners and now we have a great feeling that they are the right ones. But that was quite a challenge. Many people said “funny, good idea”, but most of them only have machines designed for liquid products. There are only a few that have machines for powders. They are often fully booked with the cheap stuff, have no time for development and we couldn’t get a foot in the door. The contract manufacturer who is now doing this with us has a laboratory, but she quickly realized that finding the perfect formula for the active ingredients was not profitable for her. Nevertheless, she worked with us and gave us a very valuable tip because she said, “You’ve already thought your way into the subject: why don’t you try the right mixture yourself; it might work better and faster.” She pushed us into it, but still accompanied us and that was actually really great. Right from the start, she was also very enthusiastic about the idea and the possibility of this approach. But there were always some difficult points, especially with the raw materials. The challenge here was to find the best powder ingredients. In the beginning, we only bought small quantities and weren’t sure whether we would be able to get hold of them and convince the manufacturers. But a laboratory might have presented us with something and we wouldn’t have questioned it so much. If we hadn’t had to deal with it so much ourselves, it would have been a different result. And it was actually the case with the raw material suppliers that we were able to inspire them with the powder solution and receive support.
You have nine different ingredients for the shampoo and twelve for the conditioner. Do you have to mix the powder with the different ingredients yourself so that they blend together and don’t become a layered mixture?
We only did this ourselves at the beginning in the development phase, at home in my laboratory kitchen. The blenders got bigger and bigger. It was never our goal to make the powder ourselves in the long term. Once we had the perfect mixture, we were able to hand it over to the contract manufacturer. She does it professionally for us today.
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