When Wild launched in 2019 out of Brixton, London, it had a clear and compelling message: the deodorant industry was broken, built on single-use plastic and synthetic chemicals, and it was time for something better. Refillable aluminium cases. Compostable refills. A direct-to-consumer model that cut out the corporate middlemen. It was a genuinely exciting brand — and it grew fast.
So when Unilever confirmed in April 2025 that it had acquired Wild for a reported £230 million, the reaction from the sustainable beauty community was swift. The two founders, Charlie Bowes-Lyon and Freddy Ward, walked away with an estimated £100 million between them. And Wild became the latest in a long line of independent sustainable brands to be absorbed by one of the world's largest consumer goods conglomerates.
If you've been buying Wild because you believed it was a genuine alternative to corporate personal care, it's worth taking a moment to understand what's actually changed — and what it means for the choices you make at checkout.
What Wild Actually Stood For
To understand why the acquisition matters, you have to understand what Wild was selling beyond the deodorant itself. The brand's entire proposition was built on being the opposite of companies like Unilever. It was the challenger. The independent. The one that proved you didn't need Dove's marketing budget or Lynx's distribution network to build a refillable personal care product that people actually wanted.
Wild was the first refillable deodorant brand to offer 100% compostable refills. It built a loyal subscription community. It made sustainability feel accessible rather than worthy. And crucially, it positioned itself as a direct response to the waste generated by mass-market brands — the very brands now owned by its new parent company.
What Unilever Actually Is
Unilever is one of the biggest consumer goods companies on the planet. In the UK alone, it owns Dove, Sure, Lynx, Impulse, Simple, and now Wild. Globally, it sells products in 190 countries, employs 130,000 people, and turns over more than £50 billion a year.
It also has a plastic problem that no acquisition can paper over.
A Greenpeace International investigation found Unilever was on track to sell around 53 billion plastic sachets in a single year — roughly 1,700 single-use plastic sachets every second. These are the small, cheap pouches used to sell shampoo, conditioner, and soap primarily in developing markets. They're almost never recycled. They're one of the most damaging forms of plastic packaging in existence.
Greenpeace's response to Unilever's 2025 Annual Report was blunt: “Unilever's latest sustainability targets fail once again to match the scope of its plastic problem, or provide clarity for its shareholders and customers on how it will end its plastic sachet disaster.”
Unilever has made genuine progress in some areas — a 29% reduction in virgin plastic use against a 2019 baseline. But buying Wild doesn't change the scale of what Unilever produces, sells, and discards every day. The maths simply doesn't add up: a few thousand compostable refill pouches a week cannot offset billions of plastic sachets a year.
The Ethical Score Has Already Dropped
This isn't just a philosophical concern. Wild's rating with independent consumer ethics organisations has taken a concrete hit since the acquisition.
Ethical Consumer, one of the UK's most respected independent product rating organisations, dropped Wild's score significantly following the Unilever deal. Wild is no longer a recommended best buy in the deodorant category. The Good Shopping Guide tells a similar story.
These organisations aren't being harsh for the sake of it. They apply the same logic to any brand: if your parent company receives a bottom rating for irresponsible marketing and environmental practices, that rating applies to you too. Ownership matters. Where profits flow matters. Who ultimately makes the decisions matters.
Under Unilever's ownership, every pound you spend on a Wild refill contributes — however indirectly — to the same corporate structure responsible for those 1,700 sachets per second.
This Pattern Has Happened Before
Wild is far from the first independent sustainable brand to follow this path. Ben & Jerry's sold to Unilever in 2000 and has spent the decades since fighting a very public battle to preserve its values within a corporate structure — with mixed results. The Body Shop was sold to L'Oréal in 2006, then to Natura in 2017, and by 2024 was filing for administration in multiple markets. Dollar Shave Club sold to Unilever in 2016 for $1 billion and has largely faded from cultural relevance since.
The pattern is consistent: an independent brand builds something genuinely different, attracts a loyal audience precisely because it isn't corporate, sells to a corporation, and then faces an identity crisis it rarely fully resolves. The founders get rich. The brand gets diluted. The customers feel let down.
As one industry commentator put it when the Wild deal was announced: after the Dollar Shave Club experience, can Unilever acquire Wild without fundamentally undermining what made it worth buying in the first place? History suggests the answer is usually no.
What Does This Mean for You as a Shopper?
None of this means Wild's deodorant has suddenly stopped working. The product itself hasn't changed — at least not yet. What has changed is where your money goes when you buy it.
Before April 2025, buying Wild meant your money went to a small independent British company with a clear sustainability mission. From April 2025 onwards, buying Wild means your money goes to Unilever — the same company selling 1,700 plastic sachets every second, the same company that owns Dove, Lynx, and Sure.
If that matters to you — and for many people in the sustainable beauty community, it genuinely does — then it's worth thinking carefully about which brands are still truly independent.
How to Tell if a Brand Is Truly Independent
It's getting harder to know. The big consumer goods companies have become skilled at acquiring sustainability credentials whilst maintaining their core business model. Here are a few practical checks worth making:
- Look up the parent company. A quick search for “[brand name] parent company” or “[brand name] owned by” will usually tell you what you need to know. Ownership structures are public information.
- Check Ethical Consumer or the Good Shopping Guide. Both organisations track ownership chains and apply ratings accordingly. If a brand you think of as independent has a low score, it's usually because of who owns it upstream.
- Look for founder-led brands. Genuinely independent brands are usually still run by the people who started them — and they'll tell you so. They don't have investor relations pages or holding company structures buried in the small print.
- Ask where the profits go. With an independent brand, profits go back into the business or into genuine sustainability initiatives. With a Unilever subsidiary, they contribute to Unilever's £50bn+ turnover and shareholder returns.
Why Independence Still Matters
There's a broader point here that goes beyond Wild specifically. The reason sustainable challenger brands grew so quickly in the first place is that consumers were actively looking for an alternative to corporate personal care. The demand was real. The values were real.
When those brands get acquired, it doesn't just affect the brand — it undermines the signal that consumer choices send to the market. If buying sustainable means buying Unilever, the message to the industry is that Unilever wins regardless of what you choose.
Genuinely independent sustainable brands are still out there. They're just harder to find, because they don't have Unilever's distribution network or marketing budget. They grow through word of mouth, through customers who actually believe in what they're doing, and through building something that doesn't need to be sold to a conglomerate to survive.
A Genuinely Independent Alternative
If you're rethinking your deodorant choice in the wake of the Wild acquisition, it's worth knowing that Lifelong Deo is entirely independently owned and run by its British founder. No holding company. No corporate parent. No private equity waiting for an exit.
The Lifelong aluminium applicator costs £49 and is built to last a lifetime — with a no-questions-asked replacement guarantee if it ever breaks. Refills come in 100% plastic-free, compostable pouches made from natural ingredients: arrowroot, zinc oxide, and gentle plant actives. No aluminium salts. No parabens. No white marks on dark clothes. And for every applicator sold, 1kg of plastic is removed from the ocean through a verified partnership with Seven Clean Seas.
It's the same category as Wild — refillable, sustainable, designed to reduce single-use plastic — but it's still the thing Wild used to be: a small, independent British brand accountable only to its customers and the planet, not to a parent company selling billions of plastic sachets a year.
The sustainable beauty movement was built on the idea that your choices matter. They still do. It just requires a little more scrutiny to make sure the brand you're choosing actually reflects the values you're voting for.
Tasha Berkins is a UK sustainable lifestyle writer covering conscious consumption, circular economy brands, and the business of ethical beauty.
