“France was designed for future growth. Big volume lines can now be made in 40,000 litre tanks, which allows flexibility in the Belgian factory where we can develop new lines in the smaller tanks,” says Ecover’s marketing director Clare Allman.
Over the last five years Allman says Ecover has extended its ranges in the major supermarkets and has just made its first foray into the convenience sector with Londis. Its household products continue to show strong growth: its most popular product (in volume), washing up liquid, is in 20% year-on-year growth.
However, Ecover is now moving out of its household heartland and into pastures of personal care with two new developments. The first, already on trial in the UK, is the Wellments brand, available to health food stores through wholesalers The Health Store, and Ecover is also in discussions to launch it through an internet retailer soon. This range is designed to “nurture you” says Allman, and was a natural extension for Ecover: “It was obvious Ecover would start to expand its ranges, and one of the ways to do this was by acquisition.” These ranges are already available in Belgium and Germany, and are not the only personal products Ecover is bringing over from the Continent: it will also be extending its Ecover-branded personal care range (more straightforward and practical, says Allman) over the next few months, and shampoos will join the hand soap and shower gel. These products will offer organic ingredients as well as ecological assurance.
However, organic is not an area which Allman considers tallies with household, and she is concerned many manufacturers aren’t helping consumers to unmuddle ecological and sustainable messages: “Organic farming makes an enormous difference, but a lot of other issues are more important for sustainability for household products. Green-washing makes it very difficult as no one thing defines ecological, it’s a balance of lots of things.”
And Allman says the European Eco-Label just confuses the issue further: “The European Eco-Label in the UK allows phosphates but the European standard in France, Germany and Belgium doesn’t. Consumers are looking for our help, and this issue could mean they lose trust in the whole
eco-sector.”
According to Allman, Ecover has just recommissioned a new ecological footprint study for the early part of next year, which will follow a deep definition of sustainability: “We use renewable surfactants, which is not a requirement for the Eco-Label. There are petrochemical surfactants in other brands.”
Allman says this is because renewable surfactants are much more expensive (the ingredients for the average market leader are about 10% of costs, but for Ecover they are 30%). This leaves a lot less money for marketing, so Allman says Ecover can’t compete with big TV advertising. Careful partnerships with companies such as charity and coalition Stop Climate Chaos are Ecover’s promotional route. And as the company has seen 20% growth for the last five years, it must be doing something right.
However Allman is keen to stress that in no way does Ecover consider itself perfectly ecological: “Ecological status is a never-ending journey and that’s what drives us. We hope the producers launching own labels have guidelines they respect and don’t believe they’ve ticked all the boxes.”
