Last week, sustainable beauty brand Seed Phytonutrients presented its farm-to-beauty collection before hosting a farm-to-table feast at Long Island City’s The Foundry in celebration of its launch. Founded by L’Oréal’s Shane Wolf, Seed Phytonutrients keeps the earth and the farmer priority, offering a line of hair and body products that are natural, effective and formulated to preserve seed integrity in recyclable paper bottles.
Wolf, who is L’Oréal’s global manager for Redken, Pureology and Mizani in the professional hair division, knows a thing or two about farm life. “I grew up on a farm in Kansas, but on the other side of my life, I’ve worked in the beauty industry for my entire career,” he said. “I was so determined that I was going to do something that brought some kind of value in the world.”
Shane Wolf | photo courtesy of Aliza Eliazorv
Taking the idea, and recruiting a few members of L’Oréal, like vice president of global brand marketing at L'Oréal Brad Farrell, he sought out experts. “We brought together a group of experts around two ideas—one was about saving the seeds and one was about supporting independent organic farmers,” he said. He calls that group the Seed Squad.
“We had a vision to create a brand with four cores sessions: seed diversity, supporting American organic farmers, creating the most effective natural products we could possibly bring to the market and American sustainability,” he said. “Over the past 100 years, 93 percent of seed varieties have been lost due to things like over-commercialization."
Wolf presented the concept to L’Oréal—which adopted it into its incubator program—rather than branch out on his own, hoping to have a larger impact and create change from inside one of the world’s largest beauty companies.
Currently, the brand offers 16 products in the hair, skin and body categories that are formulated using seeds from organic American farms. Seed Phytonutrients partnered with the Hudson Valley Seed Company to provide packets of heirloom herb seeds inside each paper bottle—like a “Cracker Jack surprise,” Wolf said. All products are packaged in glass or recycled paper bottles, which are made from waste, like cardboard boxes, at a L’Oréal manufacturing plant in California and transformed into usable bottles thanks to company Ecologic Brands. The line, which ranges from $12 for lip balm to $55 for Superseeds Serum, is available today at seedphytonutrients.com.