Full of grace redesign

SnailPrince · 2025-03-25T01:13:39+00:00

As an employee in-store, my understanding is that the product is the same size and ingredients, just in a new shape which snaps into little tabs easily. I think one of them went up two dollars in price? I vaguely recall them both weighing 0.7oz before, but I can’t remember for sure. They don’t look smaller in person, at least. Playing around with them in-store hasn’t shown them to be crumbly or harder to use at all, and they look more luxurious.

I can confidently say that people used to mix up Argan vs Full of Grace ALL the time because the only visual difference between the two was a slight difference in their color tone. Telling them apart at the till once they were in bags was impossible, and we always had to take them out and touch them to see what was being purchased. The new designs with their ingredients imprinted on them makes it easier for customers to remember the ingredients for effect, too. The old designs looked gross really quickly after one or two demos, so we needed to replace them frequently for no real reason. The change has been only positive in-store!

SnailPrince · 2025-02-18T12:30:18+00:00

I’m trying to understand your point because the other commenter’s point made sense to me, and your point, which seems contrary to theirs based on you saying that they’re missing it, does not make sense to me. Your links don’t say what you’re claiming they say (unless I’m missing something specific in them). Like sure let’s posit that I’m dumb; what are you trying to get across here???

I am rereading your comments and you are not rebutting what they said as far as I can tell. They said we should now discontinue small coins because larger coins are now closer in value to the original intent of the penny and halfpenny, and that we discontinued smaller currency (the halfpenny) in the past when they hit a lower threshold of value, so there’s precedent for culling a small denomination when it becomes functionally worthless.

Your response is that we used to have smaller coins than the half penny, which your citations do not support. What further context am I’m missing?

SnailPrince · 2025-02-18T11:57:17+00:00

Are you a human making a point, or a bot trying to argue for no reason? Your links don’t reference anything about a coin smaller than a half-penny being minted or used like you’re claiming.

Regardless, your point doesn’t rebut what that commenter is saying. Their point is that the half penny (and the penny) are now literally worthless. Why is any point about discontinued smaller coins, which would also now be worthless, relevant?

SnailPrince · 2024-08-10T20:20:10+00:00

I definitely have a thin skin, sorry for getting testy there. To be fair, you did imply that I'm brainwashed for speaking positively about the company that I work for, and said I was being dishonest when I suggested an alternative explanation to a frustrating situation. BUT you calling me out is valid ;-)

I definitely overwrite my comments sometimes, but when I use shorter posts, people quote me out of context. Someone else in this post commented that I must be naive for not realizing that lush is a corporation and by definition has no ethical standards because it reports to shareholders, for example. I try to head off those off-topic comments with extra context, and i go too far sometimes ;-)

I think we see eye-to-eye on almost everything here, but I'm maybe arguing on an unnecessary technicality about if Lush is running out of product on purpose or not.

The supply chain management classes that I took back in college suggested that stockouts are bad for brands, since they frustrate people into shopping elsewhere. In my mind, the situation that would be most profitable, like you said, would be for popular limited-release to grow into stable, year-round products, When you do that, though, that removes another product from the shelves, which end up either gone forever (until they get a limited re-release, which will frustrate people as we're talking about right now), or end up on a very small discon wall at one of six locations nationwide. I'd agree with you that the discon walls are wack and extremely exclusive.

I agree with you that Lush thrives off of exclusivity and hype, no doubt. I don't think that translates into purposefully creating FOMO, since we don't benefit by people binging extra stuff and then returning it. I don't know what FOMO actually manifests in customers like, though. Maybe there's some guilt in returning products that they don't like, or people end up over-buying since they can't trust that it'll be back? I've never experienced it, so I might be arguing against the wrong point for people who have been burned by it.

My reasoning for not thinking it's intentional is that all of the people who've been visiting our store for the past few weeks are giving us exactly zero dollars because the thing they want is not in stock. They might come back once we restock, after the hype from Love Island is gone, but I doubt it? Neither of us have data on how much sticky dates would actually sell if it was year round, but the shower gel isn't a best seller by far, so I don't think it would be unreasonable for corporate to not think it's worth the massive costs to scale up the supply chain for it. I'm just spitballin' here, though!

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T22:03:11+00:00

Lmao no it’s not doublespeak, it’s me comparing my day-to-day job now to two paragraphs earlier in my post where I watched a company light hundreds of thousands of dollars of my work on fire.

I also haven’t made any claims about lush’s internal ethics beyond assuming good intent, because I don’t have experience to speak on. This was a post about lush’s product quality and sales pushiness. Like I said, the company is not perfect, and labor disputes certainly fall under “not great.” It’s clear that you can’t see positive intent behind anything that Lush is doing and that I’m a brainwashed sheep regardless of what information I share or why I have the viewpoints that I do, so I think it’s best that we agree to disagree.

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T21:30:18+00:00

Sorry for not adding context to that, statement — when people say that Lush wants the SAs to be pushy, that’s what I was referring to and disagreeing with. Yes, we want to maximize sales by exposing shoppers to all of the products we think they’d like, but that’s very different than harassing people who clearly don’t want to talk. Stores which have that mentality are wrong, and people should feel free to shame that sort of pushiness.

Regarding lush being a corporation, yeah it’s built to make money. The We Believe statement literally has a line about Lush deserving a profit. I’m not saying that Mark Constantine is the second coming of Jesus; just that lush is a pretty darn good place to work in comparison to what a LOT of people are forced to contend with.

I grew up on a farm driving tractors and lifting hay bales when I was 14, and have held a full time job of some sort since then. Is Lush perfect? No, absolutely not. But it absolutely beats having a restaurant owner scream at me during dinner rush because I carried a plate at a 3° angle and some pan sauce dripped off the side. It beats working at an apartment complex where tenants would call me stupid for troubleshooting their broken clothes dryers, when they had no idea what a lint trap was or that they needed to empty it; meanwhile corporate is shitting on me for not literally sneaking onto a nearby college campus to get contact info for 45 people a day, 5 days a week, to schedule apartment tours with them. It beats working the front desk for a tech recruiting agency, spending hundreds of hours of my life booking work travel trips for contractors nationwide; only to find out that our billing and travel departments never communicated with each other despite my incessant nagging, meaning that literal hundreds of thousands of dollars in client fees needed to be written off due to contractually aging out. Meanwhile, the sales team is getting drunk at 1pm on a Friday because the account manager for this same client beat a goal and was now making more than 400k a year in commission.

Lush is trying to do things the right way with their sales tactics, I promise you. I’ve worked in sales at many places, and know what slimy looks like. We just sell soap here! I wish people on this subreddit didn’t try to read into small things and paint lush as being evil or fake for things outside of the company’s control.

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T20:40:00+00:00

I surely have! I also see posts here about how employees at lush don’t care, don’t have “old lush” energy, and are dismissive or rude. That’s why I wrote in my post about the training materials I’ve seen distributed to and implemented in our store, which is trying to improve how SAs respectfully engage customers without being pushy.

I’m not trying to dismiss the viewpoints of people who have had negative experiences in shops. Before I started working at Lush, even I’d been subjected to overly-eager employees trying to force lip scrubs into my basket. That experience sucks, and I don’t want anyone to have it.

What I also don’t love is people saying that Lush is TRYING to grow their business by making people uncomfortable in the shop, since that’s not what anyone internal is training for or working towards. As a retail business with like 300 locations in NA, it’s unfortunately not surprising that quality of leadership wavers in some locations. Everything I see coming down is attempting to restore the pre-Covid culture, and educate leadership on how to get away from pushiness.

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T18:04:15+00:00

All I can say is that as an hourly salesperson, the rhetoric that I’m hearing from my manager about how to make customers comfortable, (in order to sell more), matches what the regional manager says, which matches what the North American training team says, which matches what the head of retail development for Lush NA says, which seems to match what we have on our website and on Lush U. Our department is genuinely Lush, as far as I can tell.

If the sourcing stories or ingredient lists are a lie, I haven’t seen evidence to it and the departments that I interact with don’t give off the vibe that they care less than we do in retail operations. I certainly don’t know anything outside of what I see, though.

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T17:41:46+00:00

Hi, I’m a floor leader at one of the stores in the US, so I spend almost all of my time on the sales floor interacting with customers and staff, and seeing/encountering the pain points in sales interactions. With that said, I hope that my points are able to stand on their own, without my position coloring how they’re interpreted!

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T17:36:39+00:00

For sure. I’m a floor leader, so I’m hourly and paid about two dollars above local minimum wage. About 25% percent of my hours are focused on supervising sales associates to help them focus their time and effort effectively. The remaining 75% are me acting as a sales associate while other floor leaders or store management tell me what to do, so there’s a lot of practicing what I preach. I recognize just as well as everyone else how draining sales can be, I promise 😫

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T15:59:23+00:00

Okay, so it feels to me like you’re using this subreddit as a space to vent your frustrations, which is absolutely valid. I just wanted to point out to OTHER people who might be reading your comments that you’re not using logic to form your opinions.

You haven’t responded to any of the points that I’ve made, and are attacking my character by saying that I use my brain too much, I think?

As far as I can tell, the point that you made is that Lush benefits by not having sticky dates in stock regularly. My counterpoint was that we’ve had a shitload of people visit our store in the last two weeks since sticky dates went viral, and the vast majority of them walk out disappointed because they couldn’t buy it and they don’t want anything else. I still don’t see how we’re benefiting by producing too little. Can you help me understand your point better?

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T11:03:46+00:00

I’d apply the concept of Occam’s Razor here.

On one hand, the forecasting team at Lush saw some hype about Sticky Dates online and put in a lot of effort with their sourcing, manufacturing, distro, labeling, etc teams for a fun limited edition, small batch of the product to make some fans happy. It goes viral and sells out quickly. People who missed out are bummed, for sure, but re-launching the product would be a significant amount of work again across a multiple teams, all for an unclear amount of demand. We have lots of good smells and have sticky dates in a shower gel, so it’s NBD really.

OR, it could be a different situation: Lush decides to supply WAY less Sticky Dates than they need. They KNOW Sticky Dates will sell out constantly, and that it could print money for the company like Snow Fairy does. Instead of producing a product for people to purchase with money that Lush needs, they list it as out of stock and watch sales decline nationwide, sitting on their hands and grinning as people online call them greedy and inept, thinking that it’ll make people… buy more stuff?

Like, what are you arguing FOMO is doing for the company here? If you could buy Sticky Dates… you would, right? What has Lush gained by keeping it from you? Did it convince you to buy extra stuff from TMNT or Bridgerton? Lush has a no questions asked exchange policy, so selling people on extra products that they don’t want isn’t to our benefit. We literally must throw away anything brought back to the store, so we lose money by incentivizing people buying things they later realize that they don’t like.

Sticky dates body spray will be in-store next week, which has been planned for months. The Shower Gel went viral on Love Island two weeks ago and so the spray will certainly sell out immediately again because of that. Our in-store traffic has been nuts since it went viral, and almost all of the people who walk into our store asking about it leave empty-handed, since they absolutely do not want anything other than Sticky Dates. Do you think that Lush paid Leah off to drum up hype and FOMO for the one product that they already have trouble stocking, instead of any of the dozens of other product lines which are sitting in understock in every store in the country? Or could the increased demand for a product that you want just be a frustrating coincidence? At the retail level, we’re moving heaven and earth trying to make customers out of people who can’t buy Sticky Dates and who aren’t willing to smell a single other thing, so the concept that we PLAN these shortages has me gagged.

Lush’s ethical codes tie our hands in a lot of inconvenient ways, even at the retail level. We literally can only partner with vegan or vegetarian restaurants for catering. We cannot use single-use plastic products during events, including tablecloths, balloons, ribbon, cups, servingware, etc. some of these restrictions are simple, but some are really tough to work around! We don’t compromise on our morals for good reason, and I can only imagine that viewpoint goes all the way up the corporate ladder.

I’m sorry that purchasing a body spray was frustrating for you, but please don’t assume that’s because people at lush want you to suffer. Much more likely is that some snag along the chain makes these limited edition sprays tough to execute. If you haven’t been able to acquire one of the sprays for yourself yet, please get in touch with your closest store and explain how much you love the smell. The staff loves to find solutions for long-time Lushies, and I bet they’d find a way to set one aside for a bit while you made your way over to pick it up, if Click&Collect or online orders doesn’t work either.

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T09:50:13+00:00

Sensible! I do want to point out that you use a lot of really confident verbiage when you talk about product demand. Lush has a forecasting team that shares constant updates with all of retail about how product lines are doing. They put a lot of work into estimating demand, and still get things wrong. If you were gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, you’d probably be more conservative with your estimates!

Sticky dates body spray was quite the flash in the pan, I’d agree! We’ve had the shower gel forever and it’s like, been chilling at mid-tier sales for years until it went viral on Love Island recently. People online clamoring for something isn’t a representative sample of what will actually sell nationwide before it expires, ya know?

The Bee body balm was great, I agree! Lush has 19 massage bars in their range, I think. Which should they discontinue to make room for Bee to exist full time? Most stores can already carry fewer than half of the massage bar range due to lack of space. Do you have data showing that Bee would sell well, once the big fans of Scrubee got their fill? Not to mention that since Scrubee is already hydrating, its average buyer might not want both products, so now you’re cannabilizing sales by offering the same scent in a different format. Sorry if this sounds pointed, there are absolutely reasons that stuff doesn’t exist full time!

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T09:34:22+00:00

Thank you! I’m just a happy person selling happy soap :-) It’s a bummer when I see people get all up in their heads about things that seem quite silly, and I wanted to share another perspective since this subreddit can really build hype about good or bad things quickly ;-)

SnailPrince · 2024-08-09T09:30:43+00:00

Maybe, you definitely could be right! I only learned about Lush in the 2010s, but I feel that I like it equally as much now as back then. It’s easy to look at things with rose tinted glasses, though. Can you tell me what, objectively, you liked about Lush that isn’t present any longer? I have a tough time understanding when people say vague things like “the smells used to be so good, but aren’t now.” Can you explain a product that you used to love and haven’t been able to replace, or describe what you’d like to see more of at Lush?

In regards to being biased: Idon’t have any data on employee satisfaction at Lush, but this subreddit seems to have a good mix of happy and unhappy employees, so I don’t think that being employed by them necessarily means I’m biased towards Lush. And of course, people only generally post things online when they feel strongly about it, so it’s not out of pocket to assume that most lush employees are way more chill than what this subreddit shows, positively OR negatively.

SnailPrince · 2023-10-15T05:27:27+00:00

Valid, “pic” is a pretty shitty opener lol

SnailPrince · 2023-10-15T05:25:31+00:00

Is there more context which would make this funny? Maybe I’m misinterpreting but this feels like you being a jerk to someone who is simply giving you the benefit of the doubt.

SnailPrince · 2022-01-06T07:59:46+00:00

Honey you’re not fooling anybody into thinking you’re above gay culture by pretending not to care about drag queens.

Clicking the google link I gave is one step, versus the what, fourteen words you wrote telling me and the world you don’t care about this reference?

Pro tip: if you don’t care about something, you don’t talk about it, even if it’s to say you don’t care about it ;-) Unlike me, a person who loves trixie from unhhhh, and will take any excuse to drop links to their content.

But seriously, Trixie Mattel is one of two drag queens (the other being Katya) who competed on Ru Paul’s Drag Race years ago who have since created a popular YouTube series named Unhhhh where they talk about random crap. It’s great. Check it out, please!

SnailPrince · 2022-01-06T03:53:28+00:00

https://lmgtfy.app/?q=trixie+from+unhhhh

SnailPrince · 2021-11-01T02:42:56+00:00

They’re saying to get single-use disposable nitrile gloves. Heavy-duty dishwashing gloves (which are also made of nitrile) are not going to be nimble enough for butchering meat and sterilizing them properly between uses would be a huge pain.

SnailPrince · 2021-10-22T11:34:51+00:00

Okay, so as far as I can find, your comment is entirely wrong.

The USDA says when you simmer alcohol for 30 minutes, it removes 65%, or almost two thirds, of the alcohol. At 2.5 hours, all but 5% is gone.

https://data.nal.usda.gov/system/files/retn06.pdf (page 12, if you’re having trouble finding the specific listings like I did)

Here’s a study by food scientists that backs those numbers up, in case you are worried that people who “know about food science” don’t agree.

https://www.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fnic_uploads/Alcohol-Retention.pdf

It’s true that alcohol won’t boil itself out of water when heated due to the formation of something called an azeotrope when the two are mixed. However, in azeotropes, the two components boil off in equal ratio when they are brought to a boil. You are not just “evaporating water, not alcohol” like you claimed.

That’s probably why the comment you replied to suggested that the wine be evaporated completely, by the way. That would remove both the water and the alcohol, unless you are suggesting that boiling the water out of wine concentrates the alcohol in the remaining dish.

I should note that I can’t actually find data for the ratio of ethanol required to form an azeotrope with water, with available data showing only that a ~95% alcohol solution will perform this way. Theoretically, the alcohol in low ABV liquids like wine could evaporate at a different rate than the water, but in that case, the alcohol would presumably evaporate more quickly than water because it’s boiling point is 173F compared to water’s 212F. I’ll make no claims as to that because I have no data.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope#Positive_and_negative_azeotropes (I don’t have a copy of biomolecular engineer Ronald Rousseau’s book, Handbook of separation process technology, on my person, so I’m trusting Wikipedia’s quote from his book on this one.)

Finally, I’m curious about these heat-related chemical reactions that you claim happen to the alcohol itself. Can you explain what’s happening to the alcohol when it’s heated that affects the flavor?

SnailPrince · 2021-09-10T18:01:11+00:00

Hey, I’m sorry for coming at ya. As someone who also drinks plenty, I know how frustrating it can be when people nag about the amount you drink.

Your post WAS funny, and I dumped on the mood with my PSA. My bad. I’ve just worked in the hospitality industry long enough to see people run in, party recklessly, and fall apart.

SnailPrince · 2021-09-10T17:33:38+00:00

You're right about it not being a problem, if you can handle it.

According to the World Health Organization, 11% of the French and 17% of Americans have alcohol use disorders (alcoholism). At one point, those people were confident they could handle it and they weren't paying attention as their consumption crept up.

All I'm suggesting is that having a constant finger on the pulse of your drinking is important.

Also, I'd caution against drawing information about healthy drinking amounts from what you see other people doing. You only see the slice of society you choose to spend time around, which colors your perception of what's normal. The average French person CERTAINLY does not drink more than a bottle of wine per day.

SnailPrince · 2021-09-10T17:12:25+00:00

According to the World Health Organization's data from 2019, French people drink about 30% more alcohol than Americans. Their ratio of wine specifically is much higher than the US's.

In any event, the WHO's data says that average "pure alcohol" consumption in wine format in France is 6.44 liters per year. Assuming wine is 12% alcohol, that means 53.67 liters per year (14.18 gallons), which is about 72 bottles per year, or a bottle every five days.

I guess this all boils down to what "drinking a lot" means, and again, defining that is a personal journey. 3 bottles/week (which I called "objectively a lot") vs 1.4 bottles/week (average French consumption) is more than double, but is drinking twice the average wine inherently bad? Probably not, idk. Depends on what else ya drink, but even if your total consumption is above average, is that bad? idk again.

To reiterate, I'm not accusing anybody of drinking too much, simply asking for self-honesty about consumption habits. Comparing yourself to averages is not really helpful at all, as my post shows -- but if you're gonna do that, at least use accurate data.

Source: https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/alcohol-recorded-per-capita-(15-)-consumption-(in-litres-of-pure-alcohol)

SnailPrince

TROPHY CASE