How one woman’s mission to transform the beauty industry with a view to boosting transparency has taken her company international.
Four years ago, Therese Kerr, the mother of renowned super model Miranda Kerr, set out on a mission to create a certified organic beauty product line for middle aged women.
At the time, she was CEO of Kora Organics, an organic skincare range co-created with Miranda that targeted a younger market.
As an older woman interested in an efficacious, spa-grade, certified organic skincare range, Therese saw a huge gap in the market. Within months she started the Divine Company – launching a product line of self-care products and soon branching into skincare.
Fast-forward to 2019 and the company now sells a massive product line – from moisturisers to deoderants and face masks – distributing their products to spas across Australia.
The brand has also seen huge success internationally as consumer desire for organic products grows, now shipping into the lucrative Chinese market and looking to branch into the United States.
But success isn’t everything for this mother of two. Therese’s vision has always stemmed from an innate desire to raise awareness about the chemicals that are contained in everyday products and their health impacts – spending much of her time travelling the globe to speak about the health impacts of chemicals in products labelled organic.
“In relation to current laws in Australia around labelling a company can claim something is organic if it has one natural ingredient but may contain thousands of chemicals and still be classed as organic. That’s not right, there’s a huge conflict of interest,” she said.
“I believe there needs to be transparency. I believe there needs to be authenticity and integrity in marketing and that’s not currently there.”
As her brand expands, Therese is bent on ensuring there is a “paradigm shift” in the market towards transparency, with the hope that consumers will be able to make more informed decisions as retailers come forward about the health impacts of their products.
“There’s a huge demand for healthy products now. More and more people are getting sick. If you look at the statistics there’s 100 different types of auto-immune disease, Australia tops the list for the rate of cancer, we have childhood illness and obesity. People don’t understand the impact of chemicals in everyday products,” she said.
While the entrepreneur has an eye to expanding internationally in coming years, her real mission is to get the word out about misleading advertising around organic content
“I’m concentrating on educating at the moment because educating is what drives awareness.”