Introducing...Naturally Better Box
Hello, Cruisers! With the arrival of winter (finally!) in Hong Kong, we hope you’ve been keeping warm and snug indoors whilst maintaining that workout regime that you’ve been adhering to since summertime and the boom in the fitness scene ‘round these parts.
While we’re always honoured to introduce you to the various boutique studios and fitness-related businesses that the city has to offer, we’re also intent on acknowledging the vast number of healthy lifestyle startups that have appeared on the scene in coalition with the physical aspect of the industry.
Enter Naturally Better Box, the brainchild of Jenny Peikert and Yvonne Leung, two same-same-but-different friends who found their calling in the exponentially large demand for an answer to Hong Kong’s lack of proper knowledge in regards to corporate responsibility and environmental impact.
We caught up with Jenny at the Conrad (Christmas) fair to learn more about how important these oft-neglected details really are to our well-being.
Hi Jenny! Please tell us a bit about yourself. I was born in Canada but then moved to Hong Kong when I was 4 years old. I went to GSIS (German Swiss International School) at first because my dad insisted we'd only be here for 2 years. Turns out, 35 years later, we still haven't left. I ended up switching over to HKIS (Hong Kong International School) when I was 14 because I knew I wanted a career outside of Germany and if you're studying in German, it kind of limits you. I knew from a young age that I wanted to help people; I just didn't know what it meant or how I could do it. After studying Communications and Design at the University of Toronto, I moved to China where I studied Chinese. Whilst there, I started working at the American Chamber of Commerce, working in their corporate social responsibility department. Basically, what I did was connect corporations and NGOs and in doing so, I learned about both the corporate side (what they need...window dressing, PR) and the NGO side (investors to further their social/environmental cause). Fascinating! What happened from there? I moved from Shanghai to Beijing, where I spent the next 3 years with the Red Cross; I loved doing corporate social responsibility, and actually slept on a cough at their office while I worked with the blind. However, I began to get really sick from all the cobalt in the air pollution. I kept fainting and had shortness of breath. I found out I'm severely gluten-intolerant, I'm a celiac, to the point where I need an Epi-Pen. It took me three years to figure this out. I had to leave China and decided to return to Hong Kong, where I continued to work with big companies on corporate social responsibility (CSR), but we were working with these companies who only cared about how they looked to the public; they didn't actually care about how they integrated the CSR into their companies i.e. “How will we use our paper? What is the work-life balance for our employees? Is there an impact on our environment? Is there slavery in our supply chain?”
Can you elaborate on this frustration? Sure. Companies don't really care. "Employee Day" or "Plant-a-Tree Day" are not solutions. So with all my CSR work I started looking at products differently...take, for example, a candle: a lot of the time, there are sulphates and parabens in it and when they burn, they can irritate people—these sulfates can impact you. In your every day life, you're ingesting your surroundings...whether it's what you smell, what you put on your skin, what you eat. Unfortunately, there are so many nasty chemicals that can affect you.
So how did you meet Yvonne? Yvonne and I actually went to high school together, but because of how large HKIS is, we only really got to know each other in university when we would come back to visit our families here. After I came back from China in 2010, Yvonne was preparing to get married and soon after, became pregnant. All of a sudden, she was thinking about food and all these different things for her baby. She knew that I'd been struggling with health issues and that I am very diligent about finding products that don't impact the environment or its inhabitants, so we started talking, and all of a sudden, I realized that she wasn't the only one who was asking me all these questions. So I began to wonder if maybe there was an educational niche here; you walk into a lot of health food stores and most of the time, the clerks can't answer your questions of "Why?" Eventually, we sat down and decided that we wanted to start a business together that was naturally better for the world in all ways!
When was this and how did the name come about? This was in March 2014 when we launched the company. We’d been thinking about the name for a long time and what we wanted to aim for, and it was always to make everything "naturally better," so we just added the word "box" to it because everything comes in a box. It made sense. We just really wanted to create something that—and we love hippie—would cater to the greater population. They come in really nice boxes, so they're stylish and reusable too!
How do you source your products? Obviously I had built up my own inventory of products over the years, but when Yvonne came into the picture, there were different needs. What were/are daily needs that we can address in a better way? From toothbrushes to the things, the way you eat, and really knowing what's in the product and where it comes from. It can be social media—often we'll come across things that way, or we love to engage with nutritionists and health-conscious people who we admire and often they'll just recommend products to us, as well as vendors who we really like and who they like to use. We predominantly work with other startups.
What kind of products do you offer mainly? Lifestyle products! Anything from a candle that you want to burn, to skin care, to household cleaning items, and food...although food is not our primary focus—there are other people out there who already do that. We'll maybe feature something we love that we've found through another startup who we like to support. Where do most of your products come from? Australia, because the certification laws are incredibly high compared to the U.S. Organic certification in the U.S. basically means as long as you're 40% (toxin-free) organic you can get approved, which does not meet our standards. We try to find Hong Kong companies that can offer us the standard of what we're looking for in these products and we're really excited to see that there are more and more people takiing initiative in this regard. We'd love to import from Europe but unfortunately that would drive the margin up so high because of the import cost.
What's your personal favourite product? Yvonne's? Mine is the Coal & Canary candles—Hot Barista! I love coffee. I don't drink a lot of it, but I love the smell! I take a sniff and it gives me my morning kick. Yvonne's is the Bambi & Sammi Hair Mask. It's salon-quality without all the nasties! One bag contains four servings. It's simply luxurious! How do you market yourselves? What are some struggles you've faced? Breaking into Hong Kong! Even though there's a rise in health consciousness, there isn't a sense of conscious consumption yet. Most people are brand-conscious, so getting them to think beyond the surface i.e. educating them on production and how it impacts YOU, that's something we're working on. There is this whole process that we go through in order to help these people. What are the next steps for you guys? We are now going to go into distributing the products that we sell, that we really believe in and that we want to share with other people. For example, this (Bambi & Sammi) hair mask—we want spas to carry it, so people can pamper themselves in a way that doesn't impact their environment or its inhabitants without the dangerous side effects to your health.
Also, pushing the art a little bit more! I design all of our cards and we'd like to offer these to the public along with customized illustrations.
These are truly two lovely, lovely girls who are working extremely hard to promote what, to them, is not simply a passing fad or an idea, but a true lifestyle—a way of living.