By Mark Constantine OBE, co-founder and managing director of Lush ​

LUSH is a profitable multinational cosmetics company with 934 shops in 49 countries; total brand sales are around £700million and we employ 16,000 people worldwide.

Still owned by the five original local Lush founders, all of whom are British tax payers, our main admin and manufacturing functions are based across 21 different premises in Poole, where we employ 1,400 people.

A third of our Poole staff do not hold British citizenship; this small group pay a little under half a million in UK tax and a further one million goes into their National Insurance contributions per year. They spend around £4.6m locally on food, leisure and housing – including approximately £700,000 in local council tax.

Despite having factories also in Canada, Brazil, Germany, Croatia, Japan and Australia, just under half of the product we sell worldwide is made in Poole.

Over the past 20 years we have grown 10 times as big, all the while Britain has been part of Europe where there has been free movement of workers, goods, services and capital. The free movement of workers is one of the three basic concepts of capitalism.

Borders are an artificial political concept. Unless you are associated with the arms trade, borders disrupt commerce. That’s why the European Union helps businesses like ours.

It removes uncertainty from 25 per cent of the world market. In business we rely on our legislators to provide a politically stable and constant environment.

Closing borders and weakening ties to our European neighbours does not feel like it will promote and expand British exports, instead the two things are in conflict. So when we ask what will change if Britain comes out of Europe? No one can tell us.

Support for Lush from the Echo and its readers has been a big part of our success; locals helped us get off the ground in the early days, so I can’t imagine us upping sticks and moving to Germany just yet.

However, our European neighbours are also valued customers, with their purchases from us supporting the jobs in Poole and boosting the UK Exchequer.

As we head to the polls hard facts about the options are not clear, instead it feels like the known versus the unknown. So we, the founders of Lush, are in agreement that we are voting for the known and want to stay in Europe.