This Way Forward with Tyler Halliday, Haeckels

Haeckels is a natural skin care and wild fragrance company, whose products are inspired by and from the beaches of Margate. From using waste natural resources in their products to fully recyclable or compostable packaging, Haeckels aims to create products that are kinder to people, the sea, and the wider environment. We caught up with Haeckels’ Sustainability Lead Tyler Halliday to find out how Haeckels started, how they are working to reduce their impacts and words of advice to anyone looking to embark on the same journey.

Can you tell us more about Haeckels and how you started?

Haeckels was founded in 2012 by volunteer beach warden and coastal enthusiast Dom Bridges. When Haeckels was just starting out Dom would collect seaweed and local botanicals along the Margate coast and bring them back to his family kitchen to experiment, creating our original Exfoliating Seaweed Block for his friends. Dom’s wife Jo soon said it was time to get a proper lab and turn a passion into a business as every saucepan in the kitchen was starting to smell like a skincare product. Taking his wife’s advice he acquired the lab on Cliff Terrace in 2013 where more product formulas were developed to complete the range. Since then, Haeckels has continued to grow but all the products are still made in the town, footsteps away from the original shop. We harvest seaweed by hand from the beaches opposite our shop and manufacturing site, creating products that celebrate local communities.

What initiatives have you put in place to help your customers live and breathe your ‘ocean first’ philosophy?

We’ve always run beach cleans in Margate but also have a beach clean discount. Collect a bag of rubbish from our local beach and get a product for free. It’s that simple!

Any customer who collects a bag of rubbish from the beach can come to our Margate shop and claim a free product and we then extended the beach clean discount to the rest of the world on our website.

How else is Haeckels working to reduce its impact, not just on our waters, but on the rest of the environment?

Everything we do at Haeckels is in-house which allows us to explore lots of new avenues. We’ve worked with brands such as Red Bull to introduce edible, compostable cups for festivals, and launched a soap with Palmless, a palm oil alternative, in collaboration with Pangaia . We’ve done an ongoing project called ‘Your Tree’ to help with the Christmas Tree waste produced yearly. We take our customer’s trees, chip them down, create fragrance from them to make candles we send back to our customers, then the chips go off to be used on growing sites.

We also work on the operations of the company. We introduced skincare packaging made of a biopolymer called vivomer, which is certified home-compostable and we were the very first skincare brand to do this. 79% of our outgoing waste is recycled or composted. All our food waste and seaweed waste goes to be composted at a local community garden to create vegetables for the local towns. We also grow vegetables in vertical farms in our Margate shop which we give to customers for free! We’ve fine tuned our production in the lab to reduce waste and increase output of our seaweed creations. In the last few years, soil health has become a big interest and we’re looking at how to regenerate healthy soil systems within our work as well.

What have been your biggest highlights on your B Corp journey so far?

Our biggest highlight has been connecting the team together and using the certification to further the connections within the whole of Haeckels through volunteering days, collaborations with other B Corps and really pushing ourselves forward as a business. We did a team volunteering day at the Windmill Community Gardens in Margate and having all the team on site, all working together doing small tasks to complete a bigger goal was fantastic. We all really enjoyed it and just getting out into the world.

Words of advice you would give to other organisations, whether aspiring B Corps or New Bs, who want to leave the planet in a better place?

Firstly, look at the simple things. If you're a company that sells products, look at your packaging. Is it actually good? Is it recyclable, are the materials natural? Then look back. How are you getting it into your building, what’s it wrapped in? What is the supplier like, how are they producing it? Start to look at the part that ends with you and then look backwards. 

Start to record and track things like energy usage, water usage and outgoing waste and pinpoint areas where you could improve. Also look at your other operations, are you paying your staff a good wage, how are their benefits? Are you doing anything in your wider community? B Corp isn’t just environmental, it encompasses all areas of the company. 

With this month’s theme being all about ‘This Way Forward’, we’d love to know what is the biggest thing you’re focusing on improving this year at Haeckels?

We’re currently conducting a materiality assessment to reconfigure our long-term goals, but some of our short-term goals include further reducing our usage of plastic packaging components in favour of biodegradable options, and improving our shipping-related CO2 emissions. This year, one of the goals we’re working towards is completing the circular nature of our Vivomer packaging from the customer buying it, returning it and breaking it down into something new for the customer to enjoy. More to come on this soon!

If you're looking for products that are as kind to your skin as they are to the planet, make sure you check out the Haeckels website. They are also stocked in stores around the UK, Europe and beyond.