Henry Ford’s “Any colour you like as long its black” approach to manufacturing has always jarred with me; it’s the opposite of small batch manufacturing. It’s counter-intuitive, but it also goes against my intincts and I wonder: why did it take us 300,000 years of human activity before we developed this approach?
It was a manufacturing approach so effective it transformed our economies. But maybe it took 300,000 years to achieve partly because it wasn’t instinctive to us, and I believe we should listen to that discomfort.
When my daughter, who was seven at the time, keen to help me prepare dinner, opened the cupboard and accidentally spilled a jar of pasta on the kitchen floor.
She bent down and picked up a piece of pasta, walked it to the bin, carefully placed it in and then returned to pick up the next piece until the floor was clean again.
My internal voice was screaming; just go and get the brush and sweep it up and do it all in one go! But my daughter’s solution was instinctive and mine, I realised, was learnt. And, I believe, we should, unlearn it.
This is where Lean comes in.
Lean takes the best of both worlds: it is a systematic approach to optimising the process of making things; by eliminating waste and maximising value for customers. It focuses on continuous improvement, efficiency, and quality, with the goal of delivering products that customers actually want and value in the most timely manner possible. It means we can deliver perfumes to you quickly, adjust the perfume depending on your feedback and give our customers what they really want. It’s more fun and enjoyable too!
In my daughter’s world it meant she did a better job, and she made sure that each piece was cleared away properly.
More than the complete disregard for what his customer really wanted and needed, Henry Ford’s process does away with craftsmanship, dismisses the environmental costs and dismisses treating the workers and those in the supply chain fairly. It’s all about providing something utilitarian to as many people as possible and making as much money for the shareholder as possible. It was primarily beneficial to Henry Ford and his now $47.28 billion market capitalisation.
And it happened in all sectors of manufacturing. British products moved from a cottage industry made by artisans, to a factory environment and mass manufacturing and eventually moved overseas to be made in bulk in a place where environmental concerns and labour rates were much reduced.
The benefits of the mass-produced product is a mass market, lots of things became a lot cheaper for more of us – but also a paler imitation of the original, often boring, often taken for granted and we have completely removed the connection between the makers and the consumer. Fordism has created a world where we can no longer take into account all the many people who have touched the things we buy, from the raw materials taken from our natural world to the final product sitting in our hands.
I would argue too that these exploitative labour practices and weak environmental standards are ultimately just mining. An extraction industry that takes more than it puts back and leads to the depletion of our world and more importantly the people in it, and that can’t be sustained.
So the question is: “What do we deserve to receive in return for our hard-earned money?”
For our part, we will never sell you products that have not considered the fortunes of everybody who has been involved in producing our amazing products, from the grower to the person who puts the postage on the packet. We promise to truly consider the future generations in everything we do.
Over the coming months and years I’ll be writing more about this subject at it is dear to my heart, but until then you can read about our environmental and modern slavery policies we’ve used as the foundations of our company.
We’d also rather you didn’t take our word for it, so why not come along to one of our London perfume workshops and make your own small batch perfume and have a look behind the scenes of our company.
