There has been a wave of coverage over the last fortnight about Lush. The framing has been consistent across all of them: Lush walked away from social media in 2021 and the business grew anyway.
The numbers quoted: Retail traffic up 26.6% compared to 2021. Collaborations driving around £34 million in sales. 6m email subscribers. 2.8m app users. Revenue growth of 9.4%.
Every single one of those pieces quotes Lush’s head of marketing. Not one of them opened the accounts.
So I did.
Lush publishes its audited group accounts openly on its own website, which is genuinely more transparent than most private companies of its size. What they show is considerably more interesting than the story being told, and considerably less comfortable.
Lush did not quit social media and grow. Lush quit social media, had two of the worst years in its recent history, and then recovered in year three to roughly where it started.
Let me show you the actual numbers, then be properly honest about what they do and do not prove.
