The Konjac Sponge Co

The Konjac Sponge Co is a British beauty-tool company founded around 2010 by Michele Riley, built around a single product: the konjac sponge, a soft cleansing sponge made from the fibre of the konjac plant. The company presents itself as the creator of the original western konjac sponge and sells a range of facial, body, baby and specialist sponges alongside a handful of related lifestyle products. Its operations were later moved from the United Kingdom to the European Union, and the head office is now in Poland — a change the company attributes to keeping stock available to European customers after Brexit [2].

The brand remains actively trading, with a live direct-to-consumer site, worldwide shipping and international distribution across dozens of countries.

The company traces back to Michele Riley, who came from a background in natural baby and child products. By her own account, she was looking for a gentle, natural baby sponge when she came across an early version of the konjac sponge in Asia around 2010 [4]. Having sensitive skin herself, she tested samples on her own skin over several weeks, saw an improvement, and set out to adapt the product for a Western market that, as she put it, had never heard of konjac before. She then founded the company to sell it.

There is a small discrepancy over the founding date. The company's own founder account places the origin in 2010, when Riley discovered the sponge and set up the business [4]. Trade press points slightly later: a January 2016 feature in Cosmetics Business said the brand had launched "five years ago," implying a commercial launch around 2011 [5]. The two dates are consistent with each other — 2010 marking the company's start and 2011 its commercial launch.

According to the Cosmetics Business account, Riley started the business with about £6,000 in capital and built early awareness through Twitter and Facebook and by exhibiting at the Natural & Organic Products Europe trade show [5]. The company first visited its Korean manufacturing partner in 2014 and later secured a ten-year exclusive manufacturing arrangement covering a large group of countries [5]. By the time of the 2016 feature, the company said it was exporting to 56 countries and had won nine awards [5].

A later milestone was the post-Brexit relocation of operations from the United Kingdom to Poland, which the company frames as a move to keep products available to European customers [2].

The company's core product is the konjac sponge — described by the brand as a natural, biodegradable cleansing and exfoliating tool made from konjac plant fibre. Its signature item is the original facial sponge, and the range extends to body sponges, mini pore refiners, baby sponges and other variants. The sponges are made by hand on Jeju Island in South Korea, using konjac blended with volcanic water [2]. The brand markets the product line under the tagline "The ultimate Korean Beauty Tool," and says its sponges suit sensitive skin, including conditions such as eczema and psoriasis. The company also lists a small number of adjacent lines, including Okioki and Sleepion.

The company positions itself around simple, natural cleansing products and describes its formulas as pure, vegan and cruelty-free. It says it uses food-grade konjac and does not use chemicals to speed up manufacturing. Alongside these claims, the brand holds Leaping Bunny (cruelty-free) certification and is registered with the Vegan Society [2]. The products are described as fully biodegradable.

The company has also pointed to counterfeiting as a challenge, saying it has found copies of its sponges sold through Alibaba and on Amazon in the United States [5].

The Konjac Sponge Co is an actively trading independent company. It operates a live e-commerce site with worldwide shipping, maintains international distribution, and completed its relocation to the European Union in the wake of Brexit. No change of ownership or acquisition has been documented.