Why we've stopped stocking Miniml

After six years, we've stopped stocking Miniml. We know some of you will be disappointed by that, because a lot of you came to us specifically for their products. We did too. So rather than quietly swapping the labels over, we wanted to explain properly.

What we look for in a refill supplier

When we started working with Miniml, we were both young companies with the same aim of cutting plastic waste. That shared aim is the whole basis on which we choose refill suppliers, and for us it means a genuine closed-loop system where containers come back and get used again.

Bulk is the most efficient way we know to do that. We buy in 200L drums, 20L containers and 5L cans, and we refill from them hundreds of times over. That is the model our shop is built on.

What changed

No single thing caused this. It was a number of changes over a few years that gradually moved the brand away from what we signed up to.

The first was Amazon. For plenty of refill shops that alone was a dealbreaker, but we stayed, because the argument made sense at the time: QR codes on the 5L cans pointed people towards independent stockists like us for refills, which kept the loop closed. In practice, across markets and in the shop, we never met a customer who brought back a can bought that way.

Then came plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, and 1L refill pouches. Pouches are where our opinion differs from a lot of the industry. A thin pouch can only be washed and reused a limited number of times before it is waste, so as a way of reducing plastic we think it moves in the wrong direction. We also cannot physically refill most of them in the shop.

More recently the packaging was redesigned, and the QR code that used to send people to refill shops now goes to the Miniml homepage - though this is a dynamic QR code so has hopefully been changed. The only remaining reference to refilling is a small reuse symbol on the label.

The two that decided it for us

In our last year of ordering 5L cans, every single one arrived brand new. When we asked how that fitted a closed-loop system, the answer was that customers local to their HQ receive most of the reused cans, and those of us further away generally receive new ones. Their 20L containers are still genuinely circular, but the range available in 20L has narrowed over time.

The final change was a new scent booster range, sold in plastic bottles with no refill option (at time of writing, hopefully they will be introduced). We rang to ask when a refill would follow and were told there were no plans for one, on cost grounds. For a company built on reducing plastic, that was the point at which we accepted our priorities had moved apart.

To be fair to Miniml, every business making these products has to balance reach against principle, and a bigger company has commercial pressures we simply do not have at our scale. They have also been willing to answer our questions when we have raised them.

None of that changes our position. We can only recommend what we would use ourselves and stand behind in the shop, and after six years we could no longer describe Miniml to customers as the closed-loop brand we originally took them on as.

Who we've moved to

Our shampoo, conditioner and body wash refills now come from Fill Refill and Choose2Eco. Both are closer to us, both run properly closed-loop systems, and Choose2Eco are based in Suffolk.

We compared the ingredients across all three brands line by line before committing, and we are confident this is a step up on formulation as well as on how the containers are handled. You can see the full range on our refills page.

We have also stopped stocking the Miniml antibacterial spray. We now carry OceanSaver antibacterial pods alongside dedicated kitchen and bathroom cleaners, and we will explain our thinking on antibacterial sprays properly in a separate post.

If you have a Miniml can at home, please keep hold of it. You can top it up from the new range on our 5L refill page, so the can carries on being used rather than becoming waste.

Thank you for sticking with us

Changes like this are not easy for a shop our size, and we know some of you had a scent you loved. If there is something you are missing, or you want a recommendation for the closest match in the new range, please get in touch and we will do our best to help.

Dan & Gab