Change on Board: Oceanly Goes Plastic-Free for Packaging

When it comes to beauty products, packaging is often just the glossy shell, designed to catch the eye, then destined for the trash. But for Oceanly, the skin care and makeup line under Canadian beauty company Attitude Living, the container is as central to the product as the formula inside it.

Oceanly

Most brands start with the product and figure out the packaging later. Oceanly flipped that order. Before a single ingredient was chosen, the team decided their tube wouldn’t be plastic. That decision set them on a years-long journey to create the first complete skin care and makeup collection housed entirely in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified, biodegradable cardboard—a choice that meant rethinking everything from texture to how solid formulas would work on skin.

It was a bold idea that quickly became a technical challenge, with packaging dictating the entire development process. “When we launched [our] cardboard packaging, it was a net new for the industry,” says Jean-Philippe Guay, communications and brand director of Attitude Living. 

Attitude wasn’t starting from scratch. The company had already experimented with cardboard tubes for deodorants, baby care, and pregnancy lines. That experience gave them a head start for their Oceanly line, but skin care posed its own hurdles: formulas had to be stable inside paper, resistant to leaks and crumbling, and still deliver the sensorial performance of traditional formats.

The breakthrough came from the brand’s vertically-integrated model. “We were able to design it internally and also produce it internally,” says Guay. With their own lab and factory, Attitude could test and tweak in-house until formulas worked perfectly with the new packaging. 

The cardboard tubes themselves are made by a trusted third-party vendor, but every step after that—fitting, filling, and finishing—happens on Attitude’s production floor. As Guay explains, that control is their differentiator: the ability to innovate without relying on outside manufacturers. “We don’t have to compromise quality, performance, cleanliness, or sustainability because we’re able to do everything ourselves,” he says.

With their FSC certification, the cardboard is sourced from responsibly-managed forests, and is part of a broader sustainability strategy Attitude calls “reduce, reuse, recycle, and reforest.” For every product sold, Attitude plants a tree, and since 2020, they’ve planted more than two million.

Inside the tubes, the formulas are just as deliberate as the packaging. Every Oceanly product is verified by the Environmental Working Group, “a nonprofit that [researches] on toxic chemicals, clean water, and corporate transparency.”

In fact, Oceanly goes beyond regulatory minimums, banning over 10,000 ingredients from its formulas and surpassing even stricter European standards. “Every time there is a doubt about a product or an ingredient, we ban it,” says Guay. Transparency, the brand believes, is the backbone of what they do. “If we’re not transparent, we cannot show people that we are sustainable.”