How to start a beauty business

I get asked all the time how I started One Therapy. Where did I get the idea? How did I pull it all together and what were the biggest obstacles I faced so I thought it would be a great idea to do a little blog series about how it all started. If you’ve read my about page ( if not, go read it quick, here’s the link) you’ll know that I created One Therapy because the average woman uses 12 products containing 168 unique ingredients every day and I used to be one of them.

After years of spending sprees in the beauty aisles my skin was stressed and I had major marketing fatigue. I needed to find a natural product to bring my skin back to health. There was one rule however. I was only going to allow myself one more product. I already had enough in my bathroom to last a lifetime and I didn’t want this to be an excuse to indulge in more retail therapy!

After a lot of research, I realised that if I wanted one product to meet all of my needs I would need to make it myself and that organic oils would be my best bet. Hello Project! I went online and had no idea where to start so I spent about €300 on a huge selection of different essential oils and carrier blends. In my defence, this was research. I needed to spend a bit more now to save myself in the future , or at least that’s how I rationalised it at the time :)

After a few false starts (who knew you can’t apply undiluted essential oils to your face! ) I got into a rhythm mixing essential oils with base oils like almond , coconut, grape seed and olive. Blending oils is so relaxing and it became my hobby. I bought little glass bottles online and would boil them in a pan of water in the kitchen to sterilise them and then bottle my creation and test it the following week.

During my blending sessions I discovered that some of the scents I loved like orange and grapefruit can cause photosensitivity leaving your skin more prone to burning in the sun so they were out. I also found that Sweet Almond Oil (which I loved the smell of) left too much residue on my skin and coconut oil is solid at room temperature so that was a huge challenge to blend with. I also found that some blends would be great for a while but I would get a breakout two weeks in from clogged pours which was not fun!

Eventually, I narrowed down my base oil which was jojoba and I knew Ylang Ylang really suited my skin and was anti-aging which is always a plus :) I started adding other oils to that base formula and eventually it all came together with Frankincense and Sandalwood. I had actually been avoiding both of those oils because they are harder to get your hands on and really expensive but after a month using the blend my skin looked and felt amazing! It became my muti-purpose skin salve which was great because my bathroom cabinet became a lot less cluttered and I didn’t have to bring so many things away with me when I was traveling.

I used it for a few months before I gave any to friends because I wanted to give the oil a good trial run but once I had passed it around and started getting requests for more I knew I had found something special. I also had a nagging feeling that a simple oil that worked on all skin types and could be used all over your body was something a lot of people needed so I started researching how I could bring my kitchen creation out of my house and onto more peoples skin.

I hope that gives you a snapshot on how everything started, It’s super long but I’ll go into more of the business side of things and what happened over the following year in the next post!