Body care line goes mainstream

[attach]3584[/attach]Longtime Beacher Stacey Davis has taken handmade, all-natural bath and body products to a new level.

Her Lovefresh natural body care line, which has been going strong since launching in 2007, has just been picked up by Chapters Indigo. And if that isn’t enough in the fresh and new department, Davis has recently released an all-natural travel body care collection, Lovenotes, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

The mother of two is so busy she jokes that she hasn’t had her hair done in two years.

“It’s consuming,” she says of her business.

But what makes Davis distinct is the direction she’s taken with Lovefresh and Lovenotes. Instead of selling her handmade products at craft fairs and artisan shows as many such makers do, she’s gone the commercial route, focusing on the spa market, as well as on online selling at [url]www.lovefresh.com.[/url]

Farmer’s markets just weren’t the way to go for her, she says.

“You stay stagnant that way.”

Working at a market in the early days, however, did help Davis hone her product line and a strategic direction for her company. She started selling her body butters and whatever product she was experimenting with at St. Lawrence Market on Saturdays. The products were selling like hotcakes and even turning a profit, she says.

At the end of her first summer at the market, a customer told her body butters were just as good at the ones at downtown’s Stillwater Spa — except way too cheap.

That’s when Stillwater Spa became a goal.

The content was always there, Davis says, but she knew she needed the whole package — in other words, the right kind of packaging.

You can capture a certain market with the artisan look, she says, but not the spa market.

“They want something visually gorgeous,” she says.

“If I’m selling a body butter for $25 that looks very homemade, they’re not going to touch it.”

Her next step was to develop packaging that went against the industry grain.

She says she found that many body products at the time had colourful labels yet no colour in the actual product. So she went in the opposite direction, adding natural colour like beets and strawberry powder to brighten her products. And, she housed them in simple packaging.

It took a year to get an appointment and another half year to get Lovefresh into the Stillwater Spa, which carries all the top brands.

Today, they’re the number one body care items at the spa, she says.

And, Lovefresh is now in spas across the city, including the first big spa that approached her in 2008, The Ten Spot beauty bar on Queen Street West. Her products are now at various Ten Spot locations including in Leslieville.

The new Lovenotes line, a 100 percent natural line with a natural preservative, comes in portable tubes and saucy fuchsia boxes with little love notes on them, such as, “How to make an ex-boyfriend jealous?”

It’s also available at The Ten Spot, and green retailer Pistachio (sister store to Chapters Indigo). Meanwhile, top sellers from the Lovefresh line are rolling out to 24 Chapters Indigo stores across the country and should be in all 96 stores within a year, she says.
There’s still a lack of naturally made body products with really great packaging on the market, Davis says — something she just doesn’t get.

“They never go hand-in-hand.”