Bubblebath baron funds greens’ fight

Kevin Dowling
THE founder of a £150m cosmetics empire has established himself as a radical successor to Dame Anita Roddick, the Body Shop tycoon, by devoting large parts of his fortune to green and humanitarian causes.
Mark Constantine controls the Lush brand, which hand-makes soaps, bubblebath and fragrances using mainly vegetable ingredients.
Constantine, 57, has spent £500,000 in the past year backing dozens of enterprises ranging from Plane Stupid - which campaigns against airport expansion - to anti-capitalist magazines and the guerrilla gardening movement, whose members descend on derelict urban spaces to improve and cultivate them.
Lush, founded by Constantine in 1995, is expected to double its funding for the causes next month.
“Mark is deeply passionate about direct action,” said Sophie Pritchard, Constantine’s charitable giving manager. “He feels that the people who get involved in direct action put themselves at risk to look after others and he really wants to help people like that. He feels that someone needs to look after those people who seek to look after us.”
Constantine owed much of his early success to Roddick, who died in 2007 of a brain haemorrhage. The two met when he was 22 after he read about The Body Shop in a newspaper and sent her some soap samples. She had just opened her second shop and placed an order with him for £1,200.
Constantine became her biggest supplier as she established her chain founded on environmental, ethical and human rights values. In the early 1990s Roddick bought him out for £6m. He put the money into Cosmetics to Go, a mail order sideline that the Constantines had already started. Within two years, however, the money was gone. He started again and Lush was launched.
The company, which won a Sunday Times Best Company to Work For award last year, is still based close to the family home in Poole, Dorset.
The entrepreneur, who does not have a driving licence and has never owned a car, cycles to work each morning.
Lush, which sells a range of natural cosmetics and soaps, has more than 600 outlets worldwide with sales of £153m last year and almost £20m in pretax profits.
The groups Constantine supports are often unpopular with the public. In December 2008 Plane Stupid protesters broke into Stansted airport and delayed thousands of passengers by chaining themselves to a barrier close to the runway. He paid the legal fees of 56 protesters who were arrested and is in discussions with them to provide permanent funding.
He has also helped anti-road groups and campaigners fighting expansion at Heathrow, Luton and Bristol airports.
Specific products are used in Lush shops to publicise charities as well as to raise funds.
This year Sea Shepherd, a group which has scuttled eight whaling ships in port and attacked a Japanese whaling vessel at sea, received £22,000 through the sale of a shark-fin soap in Constantine’s shops.
Another product, Guantanamo Garden, an orange foaming bath ball, raised a similar amount for Reprieve, the human rights charity, which has helped Binyam Mohamed, a British resident formerly held at Guantanamo Bay.
Other beneficiaries include Shift Magazine, which advocates a “noncapitalist way out”, and Undercurrents, a group of film makers who video direct action events.