There are only 100 of these bottles in the world. When it’s empty, would you like us to refill it?

We’ve found a way to get the pumps off our bottles, refill them, and put the pumps back on again (with only a few scratches – marks of pride).

We’re giving all our customers 25% off the price of a new bottle if they’ll kindly go to the bother of returning their empty one to us for a refill. That’s somewhere between £3.75 and £62.50, for £15 and £250 bottles.

When someone buys our perfume, we fill it to order. (It’s not just made by the 1000, despatched and sat on a shelf until required – or not.) In perfumery, it’s standard business practice to make as many as you can afford to get costs down. But what if they don’t sell? What’s their future? Landfill? Or to be burned, like so many designer products, to avoid their turning up in discount sites, or magically appearing in India and Africa (and reappearing on eBay).

Quantity only brings the cost down if you don’t count the invisible extra cost to the earth. The (ab)use of oxygen, water, metals and sand to make a million bottles, cotton for boxes which can’t be recycled because the board is coated with a layer of shiny protective plastic, and pollution costs of shipping these things around the world don’t get added in. If you only count cost in cash, then you’ll kid yourself into thinking that quantity is a saving.

If businesses, and people, buy only what they need and no more, then we’d all reduce waste and resouces.

It’s all a lot more effort to do things differently though. If companies don’t have to get their customers’ parcels back, unwrap them, refill them, give a discount as a reward, and send them back one by one, their lives seem easier. It’s simpler just to bung them out of the door, turn their backs and get on to making the next lot.

But then they’ll have to explain to their grandchildren why they messed up their planet.

What we’re doing is very small. Mugler do it bigger and better. (Some perfume companies are pretending, but not really helping.) Join in, send us a bottle back for a refill. We’re not changing much but we’re doing something, which is better than sticking our fingerd in our ears and pretending we can’t hear.

Here’s more about it:

The kitten head video, and how not to kill someone with a perfume bottle.

Here’s where you find more, and the discount codes.