In your view, what responsibilities do brands and consumers have when it comes to environmental and social issues?When I first started working on Blue Nude, I believed that responsibility fell mostly on consumers. I have certainly changed my attitude since then.

My dedication to sustainability and ethics revolves around my belief that a business should operate as responsibly as possible. To that, businesses, and the government, should be making ethical choices as easy as possible for the consumer. A lot of us would love to make better choices with the products we consume, but realistically with all the demands of our life (work, family, friends, time to take care of ourselves) it is not necessarily realistic to have to dig for information on the ethics of how specific products are made. It blows my mind that consumers in the UK are not protected by law from purchasing products that were made with forced or child labour. I’m positive a vast majority of the population would not support these products if they knew the ethical issues, but information on supply chains is so convoluted that you can’t expect the average consumer to understand the implications of buying products with, for example, forced labour in Xinjiang. And that is if they can even find that information!

I believe in the shift from supply and demand economics to demand and supply. Businesses need to take responsibility for their excess and waste - we must produce responsibly. I wholeheartedly support government taxation on excessive waste, and banning the burning of excess inventory.