The Dutch 'Tanning Trends' spray tanning news site put the following questions to Catherine at Fresh Indulgence. Here is an exerpt of some of the interview - full story coming soon at tanningtrends.nl!

What is it that you are most passionate about in Fresh Indulgence?

Oh gosh! There are so many things I am passionate about, but I suppose number one would have to be our customers and colleagues. It is amazing to say, because one would think “it’s only a spray tan,” but it seems there is something represented in a brand - in its ethos, its appearance or its message – that attracts like-minded people to it. Customers we were working with five years ago are still with us today, and the support and enthusiasm for the brand that we receive from them and from all the people we meet along the way, has been instrumental in driving us forward.

It is impossible to have a bad day here, because if you ever feel demotivated, soon enough a customer will call up and share the positive feedback they’ve received from their clients. The excitement in their voice, the passion they have for the brand, is completely contagious. Our customers love sharing their ideas with us. Many of our innovations have come from them, whether it’s a new leaflet idea from Lafay in London, or a whole new range inspiration from Abby in Ohio, USA! Really, it is our customers who make the brand.

What are your values when it comes to being a business?

Values are very important in business, as they keep you focused. It’s very easy to get distracted by what other people are doing, and lose your direction. For example, we have done a lot of work and research into natural and organic ingredients, and rather than follow the crowd, we are now very careful about how we use these terms on our products. It is not fair to lead customers to believe that a product is “100% organic,” for example, when currently that is not possible in a spray tan (or practically any cosmetics) – yet many companies will claim their tan is, or will use clever wording to lead the customer into believing that it is. That is not fair and honest business, and it can have disastrous consequences. Brands have to remember that they are selling to other small businesses, and salon owners and mobile therapists buy from brands in good faith. They have no choice but to take your claims at face value and inform their own clients in this way. If they serve a client who has strong ethical beliefs – maybe they refuse to use any cosmetic which is not at least 60% organic, for example – and that client later finds out they have been getting sprayed by a product which they were told was organic but in fact is not, the anger that person will feel could destroy somebody’s local reputation and therefore their entire livelihood. Being honest and transparent with customers is therefore extremely important to me, and to Fresh Indulgence as a whole. It’s also important to feel that what you are doing actually has a positive impact on the world, so besides the obvious benefits of our tan itself in providing people with a safe alternative to UV exposure, we have a number of other values here at Fresh Indulgence:

• Environmental: we use recycled paper and card for our printing and packaging wherever possible, and our office building regularly wins awards for its energy-saving solar panels and energy efficiency.

• Community-building: we try to support community projects at a variety of scales. For example, on the local scale, our presentation boxes are hand-made by a small local company. On the global scale, we are currently involved in the building of a Fair Trade zone in Ghana for the production of products using natural Shea butter, which will provide fairly paid jobs, training and employment rights for hundreds of women.

• Responsibility: It would be easy as a tanning brand to decorate our website, posters and packaging with reclining women in bikinis, and nobody would question it. After all, we sell a type of cosmetic, and cosmetics and feminism can at times make for an uneasy partnership. However, our tan offers women and men a safe alternative to UV exposure, and it’s a way to instantly look healthy and feel great withoutactually having to change anything fundamental about yourself, or damage your skin. It would be disingenuous of us to advertise a natural-looking tan using the usual ultra-thin airbrushed models, not to mention that the promotion of certain rather negative types of images women’s bodies is not something that we can ask of ourselves (72% of our staff are female) or of our customers (75% of our clients are female).