The Real Story

Hello, I’m Dawn, and I’ve been asked to write a few paragraphs about how the idea for Real Bodycare came about.

The Real Bodycare story really started in our kitchen at home.  I looked up some home made skin care recipes online one weekend, and just started experimenting, to see if I could do without the shop-bought commercial products that were cluttering up the bathroom.

I’ve never had any serious skin complaints myself, but I’ve always had rough, dry skin on the tops of my arms which I preferred to keep covered up, even in summer.  Whatever creams I applied, it never got better, and sometimes the creams seemed to make the skin even more irritated.

I can’t quite think when it all started, but something I had seen or read led me to start googling around the subject of chemicals in body care products, and I really didn’t like what I found out.  I suddenly realised that I should be looking at the ingredients labels on the products I was using – it had never before occurred to me that skin creams might contain skin irritants…

A whole new world

This opened up a whole new world for me.  I spent hours on my laptop, reading endless websites about natural skin care, and discovering all kinds of things about the nasty synthetic ingredients that the major brands add to their products.  The ‘natural’, ‘simple’ brands I had previously loved and trusted turned out to be no better than the most commercialised big names.  I scoured the shelves of the big retailers for products that didn’t contain any of the ingredients on my ‘worry list’ and was amazed to find that there was nothing I wanted to buy.  This was in 2006, and to be honest, not much has changed.

So I started making my own creams and soaps from simple ingredients that I could buy locally or order online.  I made it a rule not to use anything I didn’t recognise or which sounded ‘chemical’.

I’m not a scientist, and there seemed to be so much conflicting information online about which ingredients were safe – I decided to keep things really simple and only use ingredients that I fully understood - real ingredients.  (This is still the approach we take today).

But this was all just a hobby, like baking cakes or playing the piano.  I hadn’t thought about turning it into a business.  To be honest, I felt like I had enough on my plate with my day job.  But I had become a natural beauty evangelist.  Every opportunity I got, I was boring friends and family with warnings about the chemicals in their favourite cosmetics.

I was whipping up skin care recipes to give as presents, and trying out any ‘natural’ products I could get my hands on.  I was becoming something of an expert, and I was also becoming pretty annoying to be around…

From a passion to a business

It’s funny how things happen.  I was at a work meeting one day, and talking to a few Swansea business people I’d just met.  We were sharing stories about the recession – which businesses struggle in a downturn and which businesses continue to do well because they’re particularly innovative or offering something people really need.

This got me started on my spiel about natural bodycare:  how the big name shops don’t stock any truly natural products, how people who discover life without chemicals never go back, how people have a right to know about the toxic substances they’re rubbing into their skin, how there’s a huge opportunity there for someone…  I suddenly realised that this little group of entrepreneurs were all staring at me!

From this moment onwards, things started to change pretty fast.  My husband got the website up and did some nice design for the labels and packaging.  One of the team started looking into all the legalities and technicalities of selling skin cream.  Another registered the company and got us a bank account.  And we all got pretty oily, trying and testing new recipes to finalise the perfect range of real skin creams to launch the company with.

We were all so excited – so passionate about making Real skin cream – and everyone we spoke to about the idea was excited too, everything just started falling into place.  

We have no desire to be a massive cosmetics corporation – we don’t want to look like them, speak like them or act like them.  We just want to provide the world with access to real, skin-loving products and honest information about the benefits of ‘going natural’.

Summer 2011

Well, that pretty much brings us up to date, and Real Bodycare seems to have taken on a life of its own!  It’s amazing what a few bloggers and online reviews can do for a tiny start-up – everyone has been so great.  Suddenly people are starting to hear about us and try our real skin creams, and the word is spreading like wildfire!  We're still making all the skin creams by hand, sticking the labels on every tin and popping down to the post office with the packages to send out every afternoon.  It’s quite a change from sitting in front of a computer all day, that’s for sure.

Every day we get emails from people whose skin complaints are fading away thanks our real skin cream and cutting out chemicals from their body care routines.  It’s the real-life experiences of our customers that makes this all feel worthwhile – that, and sticking one to the big brands that have fed us all their lies and chemicals for so long!  We’d love to know what you think about Real Bodycare, and hear your natural skincare stories.