Sustainability Spotlight is a collaboration between the Nugget and NAITSA’s Sustainability Committee. Each month, the committee interviews a sustainability expert to learn more about their journey. This month features Cam Baty, co-owner of Rocky Mountain Soap, a Canadian company focusing on natural beauty products.
Answers have been edited for clarity and space.
NAITSA Sustainability Committee: How are your products different from traditional ones in terms of environmental impact?
Cam Baty: Natural is the start, organic is number two and then sustainability and packaging is number three. And then sustainability and energy use, et cetera, would be number four.
So the natural is easy for us, because that’s what we’ve always been. The organic costs a lot, but we’re happy to do it wherever we can and we do it to a large extent. The packaging is the most critical area and the hardest.
So we’re on a journey there and there’s no easy solutions to that. We do try and go naked first, so no packaging if possible. You can have it with a wrapper, which is a paper wrapper, or you can have it unpackaged. So we give people options.
And it’s refillable. All of our liquid soap products and bubble bath and things like that, you can buy refills. So that in itself reduces plastic by 60 to 70 per cent.
NSC: What long-term impact do you hope to achieve?
CB: Well, there’s many things we want to do, but from a sustainability and people standpoint, we want to provide a great place to work for people and ideally have them have the ability to have long-term financial security, which is very tough. And we haven’t done a lot on that front, but that is one of our goals.
And I guess to be a model for other businesses to try and do things sustainably.
NSC: Tell us about your community bar program.
CB: It’s a monthly feature bar and we just come up with a new scent that’s inspired with different things. And then a dollar from each of those sales goes to a charity, and various different charities get supported.
We also do a lot of product sponsorships, just most locally. We sponsor some athletes and we have bigger philanthropic goals.
We have a sales profit and profit number we want to get to, and the other two aspects of it, is over this period, we want to share $5 million in profit sharing with our team. We did $1 million previously during COVID-19. We had a really good year and we were able to distribute a million dollars. It’s a big goal, and we’re nowhere near it, but we hope to get there.
NSC: What’s next for your business in terms of growth and sustainability goals?
CB: We want to continue being manufactured in Canada. We want to continue to find local ingredients, organic. More refillable stuff, like we’re trying to get our deodorants to a state where they can be refilled. And then more paper. Our bath salts are currently in plastic, so we want those to go in paper, our body butters, our lip butters can go in paper. Those are all phase two of our packaging project.
We just completed phase one, which was those all plastic pumps and 100 per cent recycled bottles. So really, the major focus is the packaging. And then from a business standpoint, we just want to continue growing with a focus within Canada right now. We’re at $30 million in sales right now, we want to get to $50 million over the next few years.
NSC: Is there anything that you wish you had known at the beginning of this journey?
CB: All lessons are good lessons. One that stunted the growth a little bit is expanding too wide geographically. Like at one point, we did three new stores, one in Manitoba, one in Victoria and one in Vancouver.
In hindsight, we should have went to one market and done three stores. And then you can concentrate your resources into building your brand in that area. So that was a mistake that held us back on our growth.
And then two is — my wife would have a different answer — is not doing things because of seeking perfection.
So as an example, I wanted to change our basalt packaging over like 10 years ago to paper. And we couldn’t make it look good enough. So it was always delayed to say “no, the brand, it’s not perfect,” so that it never happens.
So perfection is the enemy of progress in some aspects. On the flip side, you know, we just went through a rebrand. It took us a long time. It looks amazing. It’s going in the right direction. The customers are really liking it.
So, it’s that balance between perfection and action. And you got to find that. I’m more towards the action side of things than the perfection side of things, from my point of view.
To learn more about Rocky Mountain Soap, visit the website. Catch up on other Sustainability Spotlight interviews at Ooks Life.
Featured image via Rocky Mountain Soap
