Life on Norfolk Island, a remote speck of land between Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia is shaped by ocean air, salt, and a deep awareness of limits. It’s also where beauty brand Kooshoo began building a very different kind of hair accessory brand. One that treats even the smallest everyday object as something worth rethinking.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!At the centre of it all is a female-founded vision that feels almost radical in its simplicity. What if the things we use to hold our hair up weren’t part of the plastic problem … but part of the solution?
Kooshoo’s new collection continues that mission. But it also reads like a quiet manifesto for modern sustainable beauty. But this isn’t sustainability as a marketing hook. Instead, it’s a design constraint, a starting point, and a promise that even the most disposable-feeling products in our routine deserve better materials, better longevity, and better intention.
“We started Kooshoo because we couldn’t find hair accessories that aligned with how we wanted to live,” founders/husband-and-wife duo Rachel Evans and Jesse Schiller have said of the brand’s origins. That ethos hasn’t shifted in over a decade. If anything, it has sharpened. While the beauty industry has raced ahead with clean skincare, refillable makeup, and waterless hair care, we have largely left the humble hair tie behind. It relies on plastic-heavy, mass-produced design. And prioritises replacement over repair or reimagination.
Kooshoo’s answer is to work backwards from waste.
Instead of synthetic elastics and plastic cores, the brand builds its accessories from organic cotton, natural rubber, and Fairtrade-certified supply chains. The result is a collection that feels intentionally unremarkable in the best possible way – soft, wearable, familiar – yet fundamentally different in what it doesn’t contain: no virgin plastic, no microplastic shedding, no disposable lifecycle built into the design.
There’s something distinctly island in that thinking. A sense of limitation not as restriction, but as clarity.
The new range spans crochet ties handcrafted in Japan, woven bracelet-style elastics, pearl-textured designs, and softly structured scrunchies and headbands. Rachel and Jesse have created each piece to live multiple lives – on the wrist, in the hair, or passed between them without losing shape or purpose.
But the story that lingers isn’t just about materials. It’s about origin. In a beauty landscape still dominated by fast cycles and faster trends, Kooshoo’s Norfolk Island roots feel almost countercultural. This is a brand is shaped outside the usual industry centres. It treats supply chains as ethical choices, not just logistical decisions, and it proves that scaling doesn’t have to mean compromising on values.
That perspective has also shaped how the brand shows up globally. Kooshoo has quietly made its way into professional hair departments in Hollywood productions, including Never Have I Ever and Nobody Wants This, where the demand for performance meets an increasing expectation for sustainability. But even there, the brand keeps the product unchanged – simple, plant-based, and built to last
What makes Kooshoo stand out in the current wave of “eco beauty” brands is that it doesn’t try to aestheticise sustainability. There’s no over-polished earth-tone branding or vague wellness language. Instead, the brand focuses on systems. On how it makes something, who makes it, and what it returns to the earth when it’s no longer needed.
It also draws deeply on female-led design thinking, prioritising practical, user-led solutions and actively recognising the invisible labour of everyday routines. The kind of thinking that recognises that a hair tie isn’t just an accessory. It’s something you touch, adjust, and rely on dozens of times a day without ever really noticing it.
