Sustainability isn’t a trend for us; it’s just how we like to run things. And we’ve always figured the best way to look after the coast we call home is to partner with the people already doing the work. So we’re pretty excited about our newest in-room bath amenities, made just up the road on Vancouver Island by Seaflora.
The star ingredient is one you can practically see from our shoreline: kelp. It’s tempting to think of it as an underwater plant, but it’s actually something else entirely – an alga, from a completely different branch of the family tree. And it grows in ways no plant could dream of. Giant kelp is one of the fastest-growing organisms on the planet, adding up to 60 centimetres (nearly two feet) in a single day. When a resource grows back that fast, sourcing it responsibly stops being a nice idea and starts being downright practical.
An ingredient the ocean makes for free
Here’s what won us over: kelp barely asks for anything. No freshwater. No soil, no farmland. No electricity, no herbicides, no fungicides, none of the fertilizers that go into growing most things. It just sits there in the sea, its own growing medium, sipping nutrients from the water and soaking up sunlight. Instead of roots pulling from the land, it grips onto rock with a holdfast – so it never competes with the soil that grows our food.
It even makes more of itself. A single mature kelp can release spores that grow into microscopic male and female life stages, meaning one organism can kick off a whole new generation on its own. The ocean, in other words, keeps the shelves stocked without any help from us. That’s a rare thing when most raw materials come at some cost to the land.
Harvested by hand, close to home
We love that Seaflora keeps things simple and hands-on. Rather than leaning on heavily processed extracts, they use whole seaweed, responsibly hand-harvested from local waters with just knives and scissors, no machinery.
Think of it as giving the kelp a haircut. Harvesters trim it selectively and leave the holdfast and key growing areas untouched, so the organism keeps right on growing and reproducing after they’ve gone. They reach the seaweed beds on foot or by boat with cleaner four-stroke engines, and everything happens within a few kilometres of where the products are actually made. From the water, to the workshop, to your room – it’s about as short a trip as an ingredient can take, and it ties what’s at your sink straight back to the waters you can see from Victoria’s shore.
The bottle that comes back
Here’s the part we might be proudest of: nothing gets thrown away. Seaflora and the Oswego run a closed-loop refill program together. They deliver each product in big reusable containers, we top up the wall-mounted dispensers in your room, and once a container is empty it heads back to Seaflora to be cleaned, sanitized, refilled, and returned with our next order.
That closes the loop completely. No more single-use amenity bottles piling up, no durable containers heading off to the recycling depot or the landfill – just the same sturdy vessels going round and round. It’s a small change, but multiply it across thousands of stays and it really adds up.
Giving a little back
Choosing Seaflora is about more than a nice bottle at the sink. A portion of our cleaning costs goes to Redd Fish, a local group working to protect and restore Vancouver Island’s coastal ecosystems – the very waters this kelp comes from. So every stay quietly chips in to keep that coastline healthy.
And Seaflora doesn’t stop there. They chip in every month to the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Sooke Salmon Enhancement Society, and the Ancient Forest Alliance. Every time we reorder, we’re backing a local company that keeps pouring what it earns right back into the island’s oceans, salmon habitat, and ancient forests.
So the next time you lather up at our sink, know there’s a lot going on behind that simple bottle: kelp that grew itself just down the coast, harvested by hand, in a container we’ll send back to be refilled – and a little something set aside for the oceans, salmon, and forests that make this place what it is. That’s the kind of luxury we can feel good about, and we hope you can too.
