Weleda turns London Fashion Week green
Back to support London Fashion Week for its seventeenth year, Weleda has taken up residence in Bloomsbury — close to the site where it was first established in the UK in 1925 — to host the Weleda Model Lounge.
The lounge acts as a health and wellbeing hub for models, providing them with a ‘quiet home-from-home’, in which they can benefit from healthy food, take some time to relax, remove their catwalk make-up, indulge in organic facials and receive holistic skincare advice from the brand’s team of experienced aestheticians.
The 2007 brainchild of fashion icon Erin O’Connor, the lounge represents a ‘private sanctuary in busy central London’ dedicated to offering nurturing conditions to models while they work. “Most models are very young when they first enter into the industry. I wanted to provide a safe haven to allow them to flourish and feel comfortable with themselves. When you combine the amount of pressure they receive from the industry and the media, I felt it was important to provide a service which aims to nurture and encourage them,” says O’Connor.
A private sanctuary
Over the course of London Fashion Week the lounge will welcome hundreds of models through its doors.
Inside, Skin Food Glow facials serve to ‘restore radiance to lacklustre complexions’ and soothe skin after catwalk make-up is removed, while an array of healthy snacks and hydrating drinks are provided by supportive organic and biodynamic producers. Collaborators include Clearspring, Hampstead Tea, Yeo Valley and Celestial Coffee.
Gearing up for growth
In other news from Weleda, managing director Jayn Sterland (UK & Ireland) recently welcomed local MP Adam Thompson to the brand’s new logistics centre in Derbyshire — ‘perhaps one of the most unique companies in his constituency’, according to the MD.
Housing Weleda’s customer care team and state of the art high-bay warehouse, the 23,793 sq ft premises has the space to store over 4.75 million stock items and the capacity to handle over 75,000 dispatches a year. The company says its new facilities enable it to ‘gear up for growth’, improve efficiency and enrich the working environment for staff.
100 years in the UK
“We enjoyed showing him the differing aspects of the business … [and] sharing the news of our Centenary year,” comments Sterland. “We look forward to welcoming Adam back to Weleda over the summer when we will be celebrating 100 years in the UK.”
By Rosie Greenaway, editor