Why a Bar Has to Be Better Than a Bottle: Allison Teasdale on Building Notice Hair Co.
A conversation with Allison Teasdale, co-founder of Notice Hair Co., part of the Plants Over Plastics Collective, our Plastic-Free July interview series.
Allie Teasdale still remembers the bags of milk. She grew up in a small farming town in Canada where nothing got thrown out, where things were washed, reused, and fixed rather than replaced. Her mom, who Allie now laughs was the original zero-waster, rinsed and dried the plastic bags their milk came in and packed school sandwiches in them, because a milk bag happens to fit a sandwich perfectly. The family motto was "I paid good money for that." Allie spent her teenage years rebelling against all of it, a self-described "product junkie," before it came full circle.
About ten years ago she and her sister Arden started talking about building something together. They'd grown up around hair care, with an aunt and uncle who ran a salon, and the pull toward it never quite left. Arden brought marketing and business development, Allie brought finance and operations, and between them they built Notice Hair Co., now one of Canada's leading plastic-free hair care brands.
We invited Allie (Arden couldn't make it) onto the Plants Over Plastics Collective to talk about her insight into the hair care industry's plastic problem, and she turned out to be a genuine historian of the category.
Watch the full interview below, and keep reading for some of the most enlightening takeaways.
The number that made her pay attention
Ask Allie what first pulled her back toward her roots, and part of the answer is scale. Looking at beauty through the lens of a makeup artistry course she'd taken, she started noticing how much of every product is packaging, and how little of it actually necessary for a great product.
The personal care and beauty industry produces more than 120 billion units of packaging every year globally, and by most estimates around 95% of it is never recycled. (That figure is one Plastic Pollution Coalition cites too, whose conversation with us is also part of this series and well worth a watch.)
Why so little? Cosmetic packaging tends to combine several small, mixed materials. A single item might carry a bottle, a label, a pump, a spring, and a cap, and even pried apart, many of those pieces are too small or too mixed for standard recycling systems to handle. Add the product residue that's nearly impossible to fully clean out, and the patchy recycling infrastructure across much of Canada and the US, and most of it simply can't be processed.
"Packaging at the end of the day is just pretty garbage," Allie told us. "You can dress it up and make it look fancy, but if it can't be reused or refilled, it's trash."
You're mostly shipping water
Conventional liquid shampoo is largely water, commonly 70 to 90% of the bottle by weight, with the actual cleansing surfactants making up as little as 8 to 20%. The rest is thickeners, preservatives, and fragrance.
A misconception of sceptics is that the water in a formulation is a form of filler but Allie made clear it's doing real work, dissolving the actives and creating the texture people expect. But it does mean that shipping conventional shampoo around the world is, to a large degree, shipping water in plastic bottles. Take the water out, and much of the need for the bottle goes with it.
This is what makes a solid format possible. As Allie puts it, a bar can deliver the same cleansing formula, minus the water you were only going to add back in the shower anyway, and minus the plastic that the water required.
Soap, shampoo, and why the two aren't the same
One of the most useful things Allie cleared up is a misconception her own customers repeat all the time: that a shampoo bar is just fancy soap.
It isn't. Bar soap has existed for centuries, but soap is a limited cleanser. You can barely shift its pH, and it isn't especially kind to hair and scalp. The shift to liquid shampoo in the 1950s and 60s came with the rise of synthetic, detergent-based surfactants, cleansing agents far more flexible to formulate with, and those happened to be liquid. Liquid formulas and plastic packaging grew up together, hand in hand.
By the 80s and 90s, those same advanced detergent surfactants could be made in solid form. So a modern shampoo bar isn't a throwback to grandma's soap. It's contemporary shampoo chemistry, delivered without the water and therefore without the bottle. The pendulum swung hard toward liquid and plastic, and it's now swinging back, carrying all the formulation progress of the last seventy years with it.
Why a bar has to be better than a bottle
A conventional shampoo bottle is a small billboard. Every time you shower, consciously or not, your mind takes in that label, quietly reinforcing an allegiance to the brand. Multiply that by every wash across the months it takes to finish a bottle, and it adds up to a lot of free marketing.
A bar has none of that. It arrives, you unwrap it, and from that moment there's no logo, no name, nothing carrying the brand. As Allie says, "There is nothing else carrying you at that point. Either you love using this in the shower, or you don't. The performance has to stand on its own."
It's the exact challenge we've built KOOSHOO around. Our hair ties come on paper packaging, and the moment you take one off that card, very little on the product itself says KOOSHOO. For that reason, to develop brand loyalty we understand our product has to be exceptional - strong, comfortable, better for hair health - so that you deliberately seek us out when next in need of a pack. More on that here.
Allie put it perfectly: it can't just be as good. A plastic-free product that merely matches the conventional option will lose, because the conventional option has the shelf presence and the daily billboard on its side. To earn a place in someone's routine, you have to be unmistakably better. That pressure, we'd argue, is exactly why so many plastic-free products end up outperforming the things they replace.
The key takeaway she'd want you to keep
When we asked Allie what she hopes people retain from our conversation, her answer was refreshingly simple: "You don't have to be perfect. We aren't perfect. But you can be a little bit better, and you can try."
She's wary of the early zero-waste era's instinct to throw everything out and replace it all at once, which was both wasteful and heavy with shame. Use what you have. Reuse and fix things. Then, when something runs out, find one category, one product you genuinely love, that happens to be a little better for the planet. She calls a shampoo bar a bit of a gateway: you swap one bottle, notice your shower shelf looks calmer, and start eyeing what else could change. One easy trade tends to lead to another.
Watch the full conversation with Allie on our YouTube channel, part of the Plants Over Plastics Collective, our Plastic-Free July series featuring the founders, scientists, and makers building a less plastic world. See every conversation, and more, here on YouTube. and in bite-sized forms on all our social platforms, including Instagram.