Cross-Team Collaboration: How can a Cohesive, Inter-Departmental Culture Improve your New Product Success Rate?

Ahead of its’ time in 2008, but absolutely of the moment in 2021, this multi-award winning business was created by Emma Heathcote-James when she questioned why UK supermarkets didn’t offer any choice of natural or organic beauty on their shelves. Starting on the kitchen table and selling handmade bars at farmers markets the business fast grew to become the first organic and natural soap to roll out nationally in all the major UK retailers and has been disrupting the soap market ever since. Little Soap Company has now made British, Cruelty Free, vegan and RSPO sustainable soap at affordable prices the norm, not the niche in all the main Grocers (Waitrose, Booths, Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda, Morrisons), chemists (Boots, Superdrug and Lloyds Pharmacy) plus online retailers including Ocado, Fetch and Amazon. Constantly pushing boundaries and bringing out innovative products that create market trends – the latest Eco Warrior range is entirely plastic-free, eradicating the need for unnecessary bottles, formulating traditionally bottled liquids, into bar form. Thrilled to have recently gained BCorp certification, and with industry awards including the Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders and ‘Scale Up Business” to “Best Rural Retail Business” to ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ - both Emma and the products feature regularly in national and international press as she is keen to share her ideas and knowledge on how all of us can make very small tweaks to develop new ways to build a more sustainable future together.

Agata Angelika Rzoska completed the MSc at SGH Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2020. The MSc thesis was related to problems of the Health Economics. Since October 2020, A. A. Rzoska is a Ph.D. student at the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland - in the discipline of Management and Quality Sciences. The prepared Ph.D thesis is associated with the management of innovative food and cosmetic products. She is also a certified yoga and Ayurveda teacher from 2019, leading classes and courses related to this topic. A.A Rzoska acts, as the affiliated volunteer, in the Innovation Park “UNIPRESS” Celestynów Polish Academy of Sciences, working on economic and marketing issues associated with the high-pressure processing for foods, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics innovative technology. It is also associated with the active promotion of all issues related to innovative, pro-health foods & cosmetics ‘designed & developed’ in the Innovation Park. The last year, the active participation in the promotion film on the Innovation Park “UNIPRESS” Celestynów. A. A. Rzoska is also actively interested in the management of the culture-related creative sector. This branch of the activity is associated with her passion – music. Regarding this issue, she finished BSc in the Harp class of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, Poland. She is also the winner of a prestigious International Harp Competitions. Achievements: The author of two research reports in international Journals: (i) Pretransitional behavior of the nonlinear dielectric effect for the liquid-solid transition in nitrobenzene, Phys. Rev. E 93, 062131 (2016), (ii) Econo- and socio- physics based remarks on the economical growth of the world, Turk. Econ. Rev. 3, 1 (2016), supplemented by a few publications in polish. The finalist of the European Competition for Young Scientists (EUCYS, 2016). In the last years, A. A. Rzoska delivered 3 oral presentations at the national conferences and showed the poster under the title: Wellness sector and health tourism trends at the international one (Wroclaw Annual Conference on Health and Lifestyle (WAICHL-2020).

Jo is a chemist and the Co-Founder of Beauty Kitchen, leaders in effective, natural and sustainable beauty. Widely regarded as one of the pioneers of sustainable beauty, Jo is driving the beauty industry forward with better practise approaches, always. She is Beauty Kitchen’s toughest critic, inspecting everything from the efficacy of the products, to the way ingredients are sourced, right down to the packaging sustainability for each and every product. Sustainability in packaging is a subject that is close to her heart.

Chemical engineer from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Master’s degree in molecular science and technology. Started master thesis project with the Royal Institute of Technology and IDUN Minerals in 2014. The purpose of the project was to study the surface of the nail, its composition and the effect from using products on it. The project resulted in IDUN Minerals nail polish collection, launched spring 2015. Since then in charge of all product development project at IDUN Minerals and from the beginning of 2018 also the director for all international sales. Aside from education in chemistry, Caroline also trained makeup artist.