Beyond Soap founder on making sustainability affordable

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Charlene Fitisemanu, founder of Beyond Soap, believes in sustainable products and packaging, crafting a range of hand and body bars using natural ingredients specifically without palm oil.
Photo / Supplied
Charlene Fitisemanu, founder of Beyond Soap, talks to Tom Raynel about how sustainable practises motivate her business, and why it extends not just to the products themselves, but the packaging as well.
What is Beyond?

Beyond is your go-to hand and body bars which are made of the most sustainable
ingredients on the market at the most affordable price. Sustainable products are often for those that have a lot of money, so it’s about making sustainable more affordable, but I think it’s also making it really multi-purpose products as well.

What inspired you to start the business?
I’ve been on a bit of a waste minimisation journey for some time now. I used to have another business called Eco Mailbox where I was obsessed with reducing junk mail. I distributed over 500,000 stickers to households and councils bought them and I had a website with retailers deals. So I was very much down the waste rabbit hole, and I had already made the switch to soap bars.
I was telling Josh [Page] and Scott [Kington], who are my business partners, that supermarket bars all have palm oil in them and also the boxes come in a plastic lining, so I can’t put it in my compost bin. I said I’d love to do a bulk soap that’s palm oil-free and the wrapping can go into a home compost bin, that’s recyclable. Do you guys want to do a side hustle? They’ve got really good experience in their own fields. We’ve combined our talents all together and they’re really great to work with.
What goes into making a Beyond Soap bar?
Our bar doesn’t have palm oil in it and it has really nice ingredients like New Zealand avocado oil, shea butter, coconut oil and olive oil. If you want to get into the soap business or liquid soap business, palm oil is the cheapest ingredient that’s going to do the job. Whereas if you want to go against the grain and go, we want to be fully sustainable, then you have to go for a non-cheap ingredient, but we are very heavily values-driven. We know how much it will cost but we’ve put less margin to make it accessible and affordable.
You’re not just on the shelf looking like a beautiful product, you really have to build that kind of community trust and word of mouth with customers which is having ingredients that are really good for sensitive skin.
We’ve got customers that have psoriasis and eczema and they use our Beyond Bar, so it’s creating a product that someone wants to use for life. I hope we can make a bit of a dent in terms of the behaviour change and make it easy because it’s one of the barriers to being sustainable is that it’s a hard basket for a lot of people.
How does packaging play into this?
We are designing waste out of the system, which is really hard because people love packaging and branding. It’s about attractive, functional, and what we’ve done is our core value is a less-is-more approach. With product stewardship in mind, creating a product and offering that is more bulk. We don’t have an extra box around our product. What covers our product is actually our shipper because we’re predominantly online.
We even had a sticker to start off with and we changed that to a stamp, so we’re constantly thinking about our labelling, our box. Obviously being plastic-free and reducing waste at each touch point of the product development.
What was it like to work with Air New Zealand through its Ka Rere initiative?
It’s kind of like Dragon’s Den. There was a panel of people from C Suite there and it was an hour-long presentation, I just love the Air New Zealand team now. The $20,000 that we’re using for our research and development and a few other projects has been amazing and really transformative.
I thought that would be the goal, but it was actually all the mentoring that has really changed our North Star in the last year. That programme was just so instrumental. I hope that I can help out with the other businesses that come through that programme next year.
What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?
I think it’s probably been said a million times, but mine is just really just go for it. I didn’t regret my last business. I learned so much from it and it’s put me on the path to this business. Be as lean as you can and have fun, you’ve got to have fun because you put in so many ridiculous hours. I’m really passionate about waste management and the environment and so it comes very naturally to me.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.
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