R+Co luxury brand features recycled-content packaging

When R+Co was founded in 2014, the idea was to create a fun, cool brand that was different than what was currently on the market. The Miami-based brand is a subsidiary of Luxury Brand Partners, which owns and operates several beauty companies. Luxury Brand Partners’ founder and CEO Tevya Finger says the company likes to stay ahead of the curve.

“That's where the name R+Co came from—R stood for rogue,” Finger says.

When R+Co launched, Finger says sustainability just wasn’t really on anyone’s mind. However, Finger himself lives a healthy lifestyle and started thinking about the link between health, sustainability and hair care a few years ago.

“We realized there was kind of an intersection of two things that we felt were missing,” he says. “One was a very luxury, more of a high-end luxury, kind of a brand that was also sustainable because that we didn’t see that.”

Instead of adding onto the existing R+Co brand, Finger says the spinoff brand, R+Co Bleu, was created.

“Generally, the more high-end you go, the more perfume is added, the more waste to packaging is actually added,” he says. “It was kind of like an audacious kind of a dream because we internally actually thought, ‘This is the stupidest thing.’”

Finger says the goal was to create a hair care line that would be similar to a Rolls Royce in quality but with the sustainability profile of a Tesla. In the early stages, Finger and R+Co President Daniel Langer received feedback from a large number of container manufacturers saying 100 percent PCR wasn’t possible.

Despite hearing ‘no’ over and over again, they kept pushing back, and R+Co Bleu was born.

The challenges

For a while, manufacturers told Finger and Langer that the bottles could top out at around 55 percent PCR, but that wasn’t a number they were willing to accept.

Finger says he and Langer pushed back hard. He says eventually they were able to achieve 100 percent PCR. He adds that one of the toughest challenges was getting the colors of the bottles and caps right.

“The way I always think about it is that if we kept meeting on the same stuff over and over again, and that we weren't getting there,” Finger says. “I think back to the year and a half of meetings, there was quite a few meetings on the caps, on the colors.”

The bottles and jars are made from recycled polypropylene (PP) and recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET), while the tubes are sugarcane bio-resin. Finding those materials consistently also was a challenge for R+Co.

“We really worked a ton with our supply chain in order to identify good streams of plastic,” Langer says. “We had to have color consistency across the pellets, that way we could do this for the next five to 10 years, not just once.”

Langer adds that the back and forth with suppliers lasted about two years until he and Finger were happy with the materials coming in.

When it came to creating the right bottles and canisters, it wasn’t just about their look but also their function. Langer says it didn’t matter if the bottles were sustainable if they didn’t preserve the product inside.

“There was a huge uphill battle in terms of all of the elements that had to come together,” Langer says.

Once the hiccups with the packaging were resolved, it came time to see how consumers would respond. For R+Co Bleu, that was primarily hair stylists and those working in salons. Langer says people responded well to the smell, the functionality and the results from the product. He says people also loved the look of the bottles. Explaining the sustainability aspect of the line was an extra bonus.

“This is more than just a beautiful-looking product that works well. This is sustainable and good for the earth,” Finger says. “We're educating everybody that there's so much more to the story than just a cool bottle.”

Why this is significant to hair care

“We also wanted to lead,” Finger says. “We've always been known as Mavericks in the hair industry, and we wanted to do something that would change the industry.”

They wanted to create a luxury line that was sustainable in other ways, too.

Not only are the bottles and canisters made of 100 percent PCR and recyclable aluminum, but the boxes and secondary packaging are made from recycled paper. Additionally, a sheet of seed-embedded paper is included with each product and can be planted to grow wildflowers. Plus, every R+Co Bleu purchase includes a donation to promote reforestation efforts around the world.

Using recycled materials also decreases R+Co Bleu’s overall carbon footprint, something Finger hopes to decrease even more in the future.

Inside the bottles, the environmental impact is low as well. All products are vegan and free of gluten, parabens, sulfates, mineral oil or petrolatum.

The inside really mattered to Finger and Langer—Finger says all this was for nothing if the product inside didn’t stand up to the luxury of the bottles.

“I didn't want anyone to say, ‘Oh, it's the most beautiful, sustainable brand ever, but the product sucks,’ and then we lose the war,” Finger says.

Making sure the product was well-rounded and delivered in all aspects was important, especially when it came to setting a standard within the industry for sustainable hair care. In the future, Finger says he expects sustainability to be expected by consumers. He adds that he anticipates other hair care companies will be inspired to catch up on the sustainability front in the next few years, so R+Co will be continuing to develop its sustainability to move forward even more.

Ongoing sustainability

While R+Co Bleu is the only sustainability-based line within the brand, the plan is to expand that into other R+Co products. Langer says the business is working to achieve at least 55 percent PCR in all its packaging.

Finger says he has plenty of ideas on the sustainability front, including eventually making bottles that could turn into fish food in the ocean, but for now, the next major goal is to see the core R+Co brand reach 100 percent PCR.

“We're always working on pushing the envelope on the materials that we're using, whether it's the plastics, whether it's the papers, whether it's the metals,” Langer says.

Additionally, he says providing consumers better access to recycling their used products is going to be a big education initiative going forward. He says the company plans to use social media more to educate product users about recycling and the sustainability of the company's products.

Becoming more sustainable with its actual products is major goal, too. While the ingredients in the brand's hair care products are already clean, Finger says there’s always room to improve without compromising.

While there were many challenges to create R+Co Bleu, Finger and Langer say they are confident that they have established a strong network in the sustainability space, especially since they started the core brand R+Co with no sustainability goals in mind.

“It was a thrilling ride from a brand-building perspective for us,” Finger says.