Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aaron Long. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Aaron, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

We originally started Elevation Lifestyle as a lifestyle blog. We ran that blog as a family and each shared our experiences in the travel, food, and lifestyle space. Then, two years into running the blog the pandemic happened. That put things into perspective and we realized how short life was and we as a family started pondering the idea of starting a business but we didn’t know what kind of business we wanted to do just yet. Then, in April of 2020–less than a month into lockdown, my mother lost her mother to Covid. My mother is a strong individual and instead of using what my grandmother left for her for solely herself, she decided she wanted to start a home and body care company. My mother’s vision—and I didn’t realize this until answering this question—but my mothers vision for Elevation Lifestyle was to leave us with something long after God decides it’s her time to leave us. And, for that, I am enternally grateful.

Our mission for Elevation Lifestyle is to put more all-natural products back into the world. We don’t use chemicals, we don’t use harsh additives, and materials meant to harm the body and home. We make every single one of our products by hand in our home studio. We each have different skin types and tastes and for some businesses that may be of issue, that is our strength in that we can honestly say our products work for all people. And, we can own that.

For Elevation Lifestyle, we don’t want to compete with the bigger brands because—we know that their brand identity is surmountable to ours and for us that is okay. We’re trying to serve a bigger purpose. And that purpose is to prove that you don’t need to lose your vision in order to serve the masses, because, if the masses really loved us they’ll help us get the word out and the support will remain endless. In the four years that Elevation Lifestyle has been in business, we haven’t faulted on that original vision of putting clean products back into the world.

Going on our fourth year, we’ve put all of our lessons learned over the previous years and we’re starting to see our mission come to fruition. If I had to sum up the next four years for us as a company it would be to become one of the leading brands when you think clean, pure, and all natural products.

Aaron, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We decided to start a home and body care company because we had always made our own body scrubs and body butters and saw the benefits it had to our skin—so, when it came time to decide on a focus, home and body just felt right.

As of today, we hand make 17 different products and have about 8 in the testing phase. It is important to always note that we make all of our products ourselves. Each product starts out in its raw ingredient form and we craft it into what you see on our website.

We do not use bases, or have it shipped in. That was important to us because this way we have full control over our product and can stand behind anything if a claim of error were to ever arise.

Each customer that purchases one of our products becomes like family to us. Because the support then comes greater than some of our “closest” family members have ever supported. We take pride in community, and we foster it each time we go out into the community for markets, fairs, pop-ups, and classes. The conversations, the love and that initial response and reaction people get whenever they test, or smell our products will never get old.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We as a black owned company, everyday is about resilience and perseverance. But, my mother is the most resilient person I know and I speak for all of my siblings in saying that we are fortunate we got chosen be her children.

We started this current version of Elevation Lifestyle in July of 2020. Two months after losing my grandmother. Not, once did my mother sulk in her grief—now thinking about it, my mother knew her bigger picture for us. She always kept her light—even when two years later we would open a store and her biggest supporter and champion was not there, my mother never once shed a tear and broke in front of us. I attribute that opening success to my mother’s resilience.

Then, in November of 2022, my mother lost her father. This was three months after opening our store. In the week after his passing we had two fully booked candle making classes—I can openly admit that I wanted to cancel the classes. But, I’ll never forget my mother’s words to my twin sister and I. She said “we’re going go up to New York say goodbye to grandpa—then, we’re going to get it all out and then we’re going to make grandma and grandpa proud.” The day of his funeral, I kept telling myself that I was going to be strong for her, but that day became all too much for me and I couldn’t contain myself. It was like the past three years had been one long test from God. It was like he wanted to make sure that we could battle every kind of storm. My mother somehow managed to console four kids at once.

When we left New York, we hosted our classes that same weekend and everyone in the class was so sympathetic and understanding and most of the participants even said they would have understood if we cancelled the class. When my mother taught those classes I stood back in awe of how tall she stood. If when I’m older, I hope to be just slither of who my parents are as individuals.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2022, we felt ready to open a store. We realized that our business does better in person because the people can feel and smell our products.

We opened our store in August of 2022 and for us the biggest lesson we learned was that waiting is never a bad thing. It is never a failure to admit defeat. We kept our store open for eight months and decided that being a mall was not for us.

Being in a mall meant we could not control our flow, we couldn’t be out in our community building our community. For those eight months, it put us all in a rut of sorts, so much of the business fell by the wayside. It took us the rest of 2023 to catch up and get back to that feeling we had in the earlier years of our company.

We stopped viewing the closing of our store as a defeat. So much happened in those eight months that I know for a fact other businesses or people probably couldn’t have survived it. Pivoting back to the basics of what we became known for resurged our drive for our business, and in a way helped us heal.

Contact Info:

• Website: elevationlifestyle.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/elevation.lifestyle
• Other: We’re rebranding our entire business with a relaunch date of March 17th

Image Credits
All photos taken by Elevation Lifestyle