This story appears in the
December 2001 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Sometimes opportunity knocks; other times it slips in the back
door. When Faith and Scott Freeman, both 44, got the opportunity to
exhibit their Primal Elements soaps at the New York International
Gift Fair in 1996, they jumped at the chance. They wondered what
kind of crowd they'd draw beyond their beach-side store in Long
Beach, California's Belmont Shore neighborhood.
A vendor offered Scott a booth at the fair, letting the Freemans
skip the fair's long waiting list. Back then, the
husband-and-wife team made their soaps in the kitchen of
Faith's mother's house. "We scraped everything
together [for] this show," Faith says. The response? "It
was phenomenal. We were backing people up in the aisles, just to
stop and smell the soap."
With intoxicating scents like pikake and mango sold in sliceable
logs, Primal Elements began receiving weekly calls for reorders. To
deal with the sales growth from the trade show, the Freemans closed
their shop and eventually moved manufacturing operations to a
facility in Garden Grove, California, from which they wholesale to
retailers.
To what does Faith attribute their nearly $18 million in sales
for fiscal year 2001? "People are bathing," she says.
Yes, and fans of Primal Elements are doing it in style.
Contact Source
- Primal Elements
(800) 434-8277
