Going Green host Dylan Welch recently sat down with Lorraine Dallmeier, the CEO of Formula Botanica, to talk to her about her experience building her multimillion dollar sustainable eLearning platform. Lorraine shares how she went from watching the apprentice to scaling her international eduational business.
Let’s get to know Lorraine and her journey into entrepreneurship. Who is Lorraine Dallmeier?
A Biologist and Chartered Environmentalist by training, Lorraine worked in the international energy industry as an environmental consultant for over a decade before she decided to fully embrace her love of plants. She retrained as an organic formulator by taking a course with Formula Botanica when it was in its infancy (she was on of the school’s first ever students!). Formula Botanica completely changed Lorraine’s life by helping her realize that formulation is fun, easy and empowering. Whilst on maternity leave with her second baby in 2014, she then bought Formula Botanica as a side hustle.
Starting a Sustainable eLearning Platform
Now, Lorraine Dallmeier is the award-winning CEO of Formula Botanica, the online organic cosmetic formulation and business school, which has trained over 10,000 organic cosmetic formulators and indie beauty entrepreneurs in 160+ countries. Formula Botanica is also a green beauty publishing platform and welcomes hundreds of thousands of readers to its popular blog and Green Beauty Conversations podcast each month.
Today, Lorraine now employs a team of 30, who teach Formula Botanica’s award-winning online courses through its accredited eLearning platform. Now that Formula Botanica has enrolled its 10,000th student and Lorraine was voted in as the number 1 most influential person in the natural beauty sector for 2020, her vision for the school is to make formulation as commonplace as cookery, as she believes that anyone can learn to formulate with natural, sustainable ingredients.
What trends are you seeing in your industry?
Sustainability and conscious consumerism have finally arrived in the beauty industry and the industry is finally catching up with the rest of the world.
The beauty industry and its customers are finally talking about packaging, ingredient sourcing, ecological pressures, carbon footprinting and operational processes to take action and try to reduce the enormous impact the beauty industry is having on our environment.
What is one Action Item for our listeners and viewers to take away from this conversation?
Green beauty can mean supporting small indie artisans who embrace sustainable ingredients and don’t encourage the same levels of mass consumerism as the beauty giants.
What is a fun fact about you?
I have lived and worked all around the world in the UK, Netherlands, USA, Australia and Russia. I had to travel to the other side of the world to a remote Russian island in the Far East to meet my partner (who is also an environmental scientist!) where we lived and worked as environmental advisors in the energy industry for several years.
Where do you see your industry ten years from now?
In 10 years, I’m hopeful that conscious consumerism will be such a force for good that the beauty industry will have been forced to rethink its desire to achieve infinite economic growth with finite resources. Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive were recently named as being amongst the top 10 biggest plastic polluters worldwide, so the industry has a long way to go.
Going Green wants to thank Lorraine for taking the time to share her experience building a Sustainable eLearning Platform.
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