Beauty entrepreneurs Joseph and Kim Peirce are laughing all the way to the bank. Photo / Supplied / news.com.au
Beauty entrepreneurs Joseph and Kim Peirce are laughing all the way to the bank. Photo / Supplied / news.com.au
• This article originally appeared on news.com.au in November.
When Melbourne mum Kim Peirce quit her six-figure job to sell body scrubs from her kitchen, she took a leap into the unknown.
Throwing in her stable, high-paid gig as a management consultant in the oil and gas industry to mix essential oils with fancy Himalayan sea salt may have seemed like a flaky move.
But the gamble has paid off, with both Peirce and her husband Joseph now working fulltime in the business after securing a lucrative wholesale contract in the United States with cosmetics powerhouse Sephora.
Already stocked by department store Nordstrom and fashion chain Urban Outfitters, Babe Scrub beauty products - developed, manufactured and packaged in Victoria - look set to gain an even wider following in the US.
And it all started with an online store launched in 2013 "on the smell of an oily rag", with a simple body scrub made from sugar, salt and almond oil.
"We launched Babe Scrub with a view to having a purely online business; we had this vision of siting back in Thailand drinking cocktails while on our laptop, servicing our orders from some remote fulfilment centre," Peirce told news.com.au.
"But we quickly realised that wholesale was coming knocking on our door ... We get wholesale inquiries constantly without us going out and shopping for them."
Beauty buyers for the big US chains spotted Babe Scrub products on social media, and "reached out to us randomly", she said.
Now the company ships its expanded product range of body scrubs, souffles and lotions, candles and cleansers to America by the pallet load.
"We've gone from ordering raw materials in the kilos, to now going through tonnes," Peirce said.
With no outside capital, product development and marketing needed to expand the business were funded through the PayPal Working Capital program, which loans money to start-ups and allows them to pay it back when they hit a target level of turnover.
"One of the biggest limitations early on was trying to find a manufacturer that would take us on," Peirce said.
We've got three children and we just really want to be involved in life as much as possible.
"We just simply couldn't keep up. We were literally manufacturing stuff at home, and within six months it got too big for us."
After having the door slammed in her face several times, a well-timed introduction to a Victorian manufacturer set her on track for international expansion.
While Babe Scrub has become a profitable endeavour for the Peirces, they said, the real pay-off was the change to their day-to-day reality.
"We just wanted to be able to engineer our own lifestyle," Peirce said. "We've got three children and we just really want to be involved in life as much as possible."
In her corporate job, she said, the lack of freedom and constant travel away from the family had begun to grate.
"I started to get really restless and Joseph and I spoke about 'what's it going to take for me to finish up and launch my own thing'," she said. "Coming up to turning 40, I just realised that there was never going to be the 'right time'."
Testing the market, she quickly launched four start-ups "to see what would stick", with Babe Scrub emerging as the star performer.
Peirce did a basic cosmetic chemistry course to get her head around the terminology she would need to be across, and ensure that the products she developed were safe for cosmetic use.
Now, the family enjoys a more flexible lifestyle that allows her and Joseph to structure their day around their children.
"We work late some nights, but we go home, have dinner together, spend some time with the kids and get them to bed," he said. "It has really paid off."
