SUSTAINABILITY TOP MESSAGE

The mission statement of I-ne Group reads, “We are Social Beauty Innovators for Chain of Happiness.” We never stop combining beauty with innovation to create a chain of happiness spreading around the world.

The first link in this chain of happiness is our customers. What we give to customers is not tangible products. It is joyful experiences.

“I had a complex, but your product solved the problem. I have regained confidence and am back at school.”
“My daughter gave me your product as a present. I’ll treasure the memory for life.”

As these examples illustrate, our products initiate the chain of happiness in customers. The chain of happiness then extends outward from customers, creating happy supply-chain partners, happy communities, and a happy environment. We want the chain of happiness to extend as far as it will go.

It became apparent that we no longer live in an age of consumerism in which all we needed to do to be considered a socially responsible company was to make people beautiful, make a profit, and make jobs. In addition to these things, we would now need to commit to sustainability. Indeed, people around the world, including in Japan, are increasingly concerned about social and environmental issues. Our role is to embrace this sustainability trend and turn it into a source of competitive advantage. To fulfill this role, we are leading the way into a new age of social branding.

Let me specify what I mean. Our brands have clear goals related to socioenvironmental issues and use ecologically sustainable packaging and ingredients. A portion of the sales proceeds are given back in that they are used to fund initiatives related to the socioenvironmental issues. Our brands also communicate powerful messages to raise awareness about the issues. With this approach, the more a brand grows, the greater the positive impacts become for the environment, communities, and customers. We want to keep developing value-creating brands in this way.

We can only create such socially transformative brands if we have an organizational culture in which employees are aware of environment and social issues and take a personal interest in them. To that end, we run educational programs for employees and provide organizational support for employee voluntarism.

As Social Beauty Innovators, we will continue to engage in socioenvironmental issues through our business activities so that the chain of happiness extends all around the world.

Yohei Onishi, President and CEO of I-ne Co., Ltd.