Our Guiding Principles

Our Guiding Principles

Modern beauty products today not only have to be innovative and effective, powerful and gentle, they also have to be clean and kind.

Hark & Zander’s revolutionary luxury skincare range has been forged on three key guiding principles:

• To be New Zealand made
• To be sourced from nature and proven by science
• To be uncompromisingly sustainable.

 Here’s our ethos statement to show you just how committed we are:

At Hark & Zander we are dedicated to providing revolutionary, natural skincare in a sustainable way. We harness the powerful properties of hempseed, used for centuries to rejuvenate the skin, and bring you skincare that is safe, non-toxic, ethical, sustainable and highly effective. 

At Hark & Zander we care about the details: from using ingredients that replenish the earth, to choosing glass and aluminium over plastic wherever possible, to using backyard compostable courier bags, to insisting on adhesive-free, sustainably sourced boxes, to sourcing local ingredients and supporting local businesses. We’re not just tipping our hat to sustainability, we’re committed to doing our utmost to serve our world better. 

Here’s a fuller insight to how we’ve committed to our guiding principles…

 

To be New Zealand made      

We were so committed to sourcing organically grown New Zealand hempseed for our oil that we went to some extreme lengths to innovate in order to get the precise oil we needed to make HempTonic Face Oil perfect. Our hempseeds are organically grown in the fertile fields of Whanganui, on the West coast of the North Island. It is a micro climate for hemp and produces 1–1.5 tonnes of glorious seed per hectare. Our hempseed colleagues have installed machinery, the first of its kind in New Zealand, to work with us to produce the perfect hempseed oil for you.

Just as we are committed to sourcing ingredients wherever possible from New Zealand, we are also committed to making the oil in New Zealand, supporting other New Zealand businesses wherever possible and being 100% New Zealand owned and operated.

We have supported local businesses in every possible way. Even when overseas suppliers or solutions are more cost effective. We have an attitude that extends past the ability to legally pop “NZ Made” on a bottle, we want to support local industry and reinvest into our communities at every opportunity. To that end we have also chosen to sew into local charities like Breast Cancer Cure.

We hope to make a little NZ made video to share with you so sign up to Hark & Zander and we’ll make sure you’re the first to see it, plus you'll get 10% off your first purchase. You might also be interested to read our Kiwi flag-waving NZ Made blog piece.

To be sourced from nature and proven by science

This is simple: Hark & Zander skincare products are 100% natural. We seek to marry our natural bias with scientifically proven results and expertise. Our natural formulations are tested and developed in a leading NZ laboratory to ensure optimal performance and stability. We don’t fill our products with cheap fillers, harmful toxins or anything unethical. We care deeply about the purity of our products and insist that ancient nature moves hand in hand with modern science to ensure safety, quality and effectiveness.

Learn more about the properties of our natural ingredients.

To be uncompromisingly sustainable

We have clung to this principle even when all the business rule books would tell us not to. We’re not perfect, but we are committed to continuous improvement.

Recycling

One important aspect of sustainability is recycling. We have taken every opportunity to ensure our environmental footprint is as small as we can make it, so here’s what we’ve done:

• Product containers
  We avoid plastic! We use glass and aluminium wherever possible to avoid all the plastic we possibly can. If you live in an area that sorts its glass, the blue glass gets recycled with the green. On the rare occasion if we have had to use plastic because there hasn’t been a viable alternative we make sure it can be recycled and only use one sort of plastic (no mixed plastics) to help with this.
  We are very proud to share that in true Hark & Zander spirit we have partnered with Futurepost who make fence posts from recycled plastic for the vineyard. Now that’s industry-leading recycling!

• Product labels
  We’ve also ensured our labels are made from natural fibres, consciously avoiding synthetic, non-biodegradable, (cheaper) options which compromise the recycling process. This is a little bit tricky when your products are oil-based but we managed it!

• Product boxes
  We have created our beautiful boxes with FSC certified, sustainably sourced carboard that is 100% recyclable. You may notice they feel soft to the touch, that’s because we chose not to laminate them, making it easier to recycle. We even went so far as to insist on an adhesive-free box, again, to make recycling easier. We affectionately call them our origami boxes and we love them!

• Dispatch and retail boxes
  This part of the process is invisible to end customers. When products are bottled and boxed they are usually shrink wrapped in a generous amount of plastic to make them ready for dispatch or sell-in to retailers. We sourced a different (more costly) solution and chose to pack our Hark & Zander products in brown, recyclable shipping boxes instead (which we reuse in our day to day business).

• Courier solutions
  If we have to use courier bags we only use 100% recyclable or home compostable bags. We use compostable fillers in our shipping boxes (no bubble wrap here!) and we do not wrap our products in unnecessary layers… besides the gorgeous H&Z box speaks for itself!

And the result of all this?

 Guilt-free, revolutionary skin care without compromise.