Lush Cosmetics now offers six months of paid parental leave to US retail employees

While two-thirds of US retail workers had access to paid leave between 2024 and 2025, few used it to take time off after the birth or adoption of a child, according to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That data, which draws on the American Time Use Survey, shows that 66% of retail workers were entitled to paid leave as of last year, but just 1% took parental leave, specifically.

Lush Cosmetics recently rolled out expanded parental leave that may boost uptake in a sector where the benefit is still rare. As of July 1, full-time employees working 30 hours or more in North America, who’ve been with the company for at least a year, can take up to 26 weeks of parental leave with full pay. The six-month leave benefit now applies to employees in functions who previously didn’t have access, including retail, manufacturing, and support and administration.

Lush North America’s head of people and culture, Jag Bhachu, told HR Brew her team hopes the expanded leave will improve internal mobility and retention in an industry where high turnover is common.

Why Lush expanded its parental leave. Lush employees in the United Kingdom have been entitled to six months of parental leave since 2017, Bhachu said. Her team started working actively on a plan to grant the same benefit to North American workers about two years ago, and in that time, solicited feedback from an employee resource group dedicated to parents and caregivers.

“We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from the group to say that if we were able to have a more robust support for parents that are about to go and leave, it will create more financial stability for them to return,” she said.

“For us it became quite evident that if we don’t make some changes here, we’re not going to be able to retain the employees that are coming from retail,” Bhachu continued.

Lush sought not only to expand its parental leave policy for North America, but also to simplify it, she said. “When we think about employee experience, we try and make it as easy and simple for everybody to understand, and I think it was a little bit complicated for some people.”

Whereas the previous policy differentiated between birthing parents and non-birthing parents, the new policy allows any employee who is a new parent to take six months of leave, regardless of whether they gave birth to the child. Additionally, the new policy grants leave to any employee who works 30 or more hours a week for Lush, and isn’t limited to only corporate or retail management, as the previous policy was.

How the program came together. It wasn’t hard to secure leadership buy-in for this benefit, Bhachu said. She worked with Lush’s global total rewards lead on the expansion after Lush’s founders advocated for the enhanced leave. “They were very keen to have this moving forward.”

When planning to roll out expanded leave to US employees, most of the discussions Bhachu and her team had centered around cost, she said. In other markets like the UK and Canada, governments bear part of the cost of parental leave. That’s starting to change in some US states, but is not the case everywhere.

Given the likely costs, Bhachu and her team considered several scenarios, including ones where they didn’t pay workers their full salaries while on leave, and instead provided partial wage replacement for the time being. After doing some modeling, they decided to grant six months at full pay, topping up in places where state governments subsidize a certain number of weeks.

“Globally, we would like to give everybody six months,” she said. Ultimately, “we landed where we wanted to be.”

While it’s early days, Bhachu said her team will be keeping a pulse on outcomes like hiring and retention as the program continues.

A recent survey from Pew Research suggests benefits like paid parental leave may go a long way in helping parents feel more comfortable balancing work and family life. That survey found lower-income parents who work full-time were less likely to have access to paid parental, family or medical leave.