Cocoon Apothecary Cares About Beauty
Although it was seeded with care, patience and perseverance, Cocoon Apothecary (opens in new window) has grown more like a weed – pervasively, relentlessly, quickly coming to dominate the local landscape of natural beauty products.
Jessica and Lane Burman launched their business out of a custom-built lab in their basement in 2003. Hand-mixed organic oils and extracts were blended with water to create a skin care line of creams, scrubs, bath salts and body butters, initially sold at farmers’ markets and online. By September 2014, the couple catapulted their operation into a lovely retail store in a former factory building in Mount Hope-Breithaupt Park (opens in new window), and Cocoon now produces batches of up to 500 bottles of artisanal luxury products that it once made by the dozen.
The brand’s appeal hinges on championing both impeccable quality and ethical practices. “If you go down the rabbit hole to see where your conventional beauty products come from, you end up with tires in lipstick or formaldehyde as a skin-preserving agent,” quips Jessica.
And their industry is ripe with challenges. Supply chain competition is incredibly stiff, and aggressive purchasers can instigate ingredient shortages that are only rivaled by working at the mercy of Mother Nature. Chemical lobbyists keep beauty products largely self-regulated, meaning there’s always spin and a promotional cacophony to overcome, especially for a brand bent on supporting organics, low carbon footprints and their regional economy.
Tell us about one of your favourite tools.
LANE: The labelling machine, I absolutely love that thing. It’s been a lifesaver. It was ‘fun’ to get up and running, but since doing that it runs like a rock. It saves me so many hours of work.
What was the last thing you made?
LANE: Malechemy aftershave (opens in new window). It’s a beautiful product that’s created with organic tea tree hydrosol from Australia. We deal directly with the farm, which ships to a location in California – we met the farm owner in New York City at an ingredients conference. We infuse it with our Cocoon blend of bay rum, which is bergamont, pimento and clove, and it has this wonderful scent that really sticks around. Although we’re a vegan company, it’s almost got a leathery smell – it’s the old classic smell, we really love it.
What was the first product you made that you were happy with?
JESSICA: Rosey Cheeks (opens in new window), which is our best seller to this day, was the facial cream I had always wanted and never found. I’m very picky, and so I knew if it was good enough for me it was gonna be good for a lot of other women.
What makes you make the things you make?
LANE: Women would hunt us down if we didn’t make what we make – there would be a vacuum that people would be very upset about. When we’ve run out of something like Rosey Cheeks, and women come in looking for it and they get quite upset if we don’t have it.
JESSICA: I just felt like it was my path, it was meant to be, because the moment I started doing it, ideas flooded in. It came so naturally for me, it was really easy for me to come up with stuff – sometimes I think we just have innate abilities. There’s also my passion for natural ingredients. I love the idea of extracting ingredients from plants and putting them in people’s bathrooms, and that connection between nature and modern life is really important, and I want to be the one to help get it into people’s lives.
What are some of your essential resources or collaborators in Kitchener?
JESSICA: We have two retailers that sell very well for us in this area. Holistic Nutrition (opens in new window) and The Truth Beauty Company have both really championed us as a local brand, and they have really helped with our growth because they’ve pushed our products and introduced them to a wide audience in this town. When we didn’t have a store, they were at the front line.
LANE: We’ve also had a ton of support from Well.ca (opens in new window), which is out in Guelph. We see email blasts that go out to a half a million people with our products featured in them…
JESSICA: We’re here because of Well. If they weren’t our client, we wouldn’t be in this building right now.
LANE: They are the most incredible company to deal with. They’re just on top of it, they know how to handle things…
JESSICA: They’re not like Amazon. They don’t gouge you. There’s a personal connection with the people, you can get them on the phone. It’s two Canadian businesses working together.
LANE: When we do a vendor conference and you have the CEO come over to you and say, ‘Your products are selling so well,’ and ‘It is so great to see you,’ to have a CEO of a company like that know about our product – when we’ve got 23 out of 50,000 SKUs [Stock Keeping Units] in their inventory – that’s neat to us. That’s something we created with our hands. And we have a good website that sends our products out to the masses, but nothing like Well.ca, whose entire existence is about getting more customers. For people to know about us and for them to be our constant supporters has meant a lot to us.
Who made you two into makers?
LANE: I was a classically trained chef, but my career path went from that to running factories, to managing staffing agencies or health and safety, to sales – all along the way learning different aspects of the total talent I needed to do the job that I do currently. Whether it be cooking and manufacturing, or managing a manufacturing process, knowing how to make things safe or do things right, those all kind of fed into it.
I’m really here because Jessica started the business, and we’ve chosen to do this together. I’ve always been part of the company, but a guy selling women’s cosmetics only really works at trade shows, it doesn’t work in the real, practical world. Now we have a men’s line for me to get out and sell, but I’ve always been kind of that quiet guy behind the scenes making the product, which has been fun.
JESSICA: There was a chain of events that got me making my own stuff, but it wasn’t like I came from a crafty family at all. I was always artsy and I loved doing creative things…
LANE: We built you a place to do this in, too. When we built the first lab in the basement of our house, that was a huge step for the progression of the business. I remember putting down the tile on that floor and thinking that this’d be great, and never imagining that we’d be in a facility like this. It was kind of Jessica’s hobby at the time, but it became so much more than that. Now it supports us, it supports our family. We have people working for us.
As we grow, we start looking at other possibilities. We have the machines that allow us to look at doing deodorants or home cleaning products. We’re looking at our next steps, and with a partnership like we have with Well.ca, they have unlimited shelves, so whatever we want to make they’ll buy, they’ve been very clear about that. It’s really cool to know that if we make something, we don’t have to worry about where to sell it to or how to get it out there, we have the largest online store in Canada and the largest online pharmacy in North America championing our products all the time.
JESSICA: It’s a total dream job for both of us. For a woman especially, who doesn’t want to be in the beauty industry? It’s so fun and creative, it’s always changing, and there are so many people clamouring to get where we’ve gotten, which makes me feel really privileged that we’ve ended up here in our lives.