Global travel amenities company Buzz has bought cult Australian sustainable personal-care brand Single Use Ain’t Sexy, for an undisclosed sum.
As a result, the “Berocca” of hand-soap will cease to be available direct to consumers with Buzz focusing on selling into the international travel market. Buzz says its on track to have the product and the rest of its personal care range in more than 50,000 hotel rooms worldwide – including Hilton, Marriott, MGM Resorts, SLS, Atlantis, Belmond and Jackalope – by the end of the year.
Single Use Ain’t Sexy uses a dried soap pill that goes into reusable soap dispensers. You add water and it comes out as foamy soap. Removing the water from soap also cuts down on emissions from transport costs by making it lighter and smaller.
Buzz was founded as a design company in Melbourne in 1999 by Barry Gold and Leonard Hamersfeld. It has offices in Los Angeles, Dubai and Shanghai. It made headlines at the 2018 Superbowl with plastic cups that lit up with key events like touchdowns.
“Buzz has always been a proud first mover in the war against waste, so we are delighted to welcome another trailblazer in Single Use Ain’t Sexy to the Buzz family,” said Buzz founder and managing director, Barry Gold.
“We firmly believe we will be stronger together as we continue revolutionising how the world’s best airlines, hotels, cruise and rail lines replace single-use amenities with refillable alternatives for travellers.”
Under Buzz, Single Use Ain’t Sexy will shift its focus to the wholesale travel market and cease operating as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand in Australia. Single Use Ain’t Sexy founder and CEO Josh Howard will join the Buzz team in an international role to help scale their full sustainable portfolio.
Howard [pictured at top] said he was motivated by impact. “The sheer scale of their global operations means we will save more single-use plastic bottles from landfill with just one hotel partnership than we could achieve alone – that excites me.”
In other initiatives Buzz’s proprietary ecoTHREAD™ blankets for airlines like Emirates and Jetstar have, it says, saved over 100 million plastic drinking bottles from landfill.
“Our vision aligns perfectly with the design-led, market first and impact-driven ethos of Single Use Ain’t Sexy and we are thrilled to have them on board” said Buzz founder and creative director, Leonard Hamersfeld.
