Sustainability-focused indie beauty player Graydon Skincare is teaming up with HBC for a retail partnership aimed at enticing the better-for-the-planet consumer.

The brand’s vegan and all-natural serums, eye creams, cleansers and face glows, can be purchased at 17 Hudson’s Bay stores nationwide with a store-within-a-store retail setup at the Toronto flagship location and online. Apart from a point of commerce, it is also a drop-off point where consumers can recycle used and empty product components and packaging.

Graydon Skincare is the eponymous brand founded in 2012 by Toronto’s Graydon Moffat (below), an entrepreneur with a background in the food industry, who uses her culinary experience to inform product formulas using items commonly found on a plate, or what the company refers to as “clean, plant-powered ingredients.”

Moffat tells strategy that her skincare brand is both plant-based and also “very focused on sustainability” in terms of its positioning. In fact, she says, when it comes to driving trial and drawing attention at shelf, she says many of its products stand out in that they are recyclable at most municipal curbside programs.

For those components that aren’t recyclable, Graydon Skincare is one of the first brands in North America to link up with Pact, a non-profit beauty recycling program. Pact is also supported by four companies including Hudson’s Bay, MOB, Element Packaging and Credo Beauty – what Moffat calls a “clean Sephora” in whose stores the venture launched on Earth Day of this year.

The Pact program, Moffat says, is for difficult to recycle components, like the dropper of a serum bottle, or an airless pump that can’t be easily taken apart. You can send these items to be fully recycled, she explains, a model that’s a bit different from a Loop circular economy program.

“There are other recycling programs out there, but nothing beauty-related,” Moffat claims. HBC, she says, is the only retailer to come on board with depots, so consumers can have a place to bring in their tough to recycle products.

In store at HBC, Moffat says Graydon’s lineup of products are not in the retailer’s beauty section, or a “traditional beauty counter-type situation,” but rather more of a boutique set up to call out independent skincare brands.

“If you can go and get your regular department store products, but there’s a special place for local indie brands, that’s very awesome and very inclusive of HBC and really smart marketing,” Moffat says.

Earlier this year, Graydon Skincare also launched a partnership with Shoppers Drug Mart online and is included as part of the pharmacy’s Thoughtful Choices, a curated personal care program to facilitate shopping consciously.

Thoughtful Choices, according to the Shoppers site, includes a range of quality, cruelty-free products that are mindful of the planet – featuring products that either have partly-to-fully recyclable packaging, or contain ethically-sourced or sustainable ingredients.

In 2019, Graydon Skincare was one of a cohort of seven challenger brands which received a $150,000 investment from Arlene Dickinson’s growth ecosystem District Ventures Capital in exchange for a minority equity stake, based on criteria such as product, sales and market potential.