We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Fiona Robins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Fiona, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Back in 2014, our founder – Laura, couldn’t find solutions to stop her face from breaking out so she began tinkering around in her kitchen. It’s through her own DIY experiments that she discovered oil-based skincare. She started Island Apothecary and pushed the benefits of oils to everyone who wanted to listen, including myself. I joined the team and immediately noticed my face glow-up once using the product line and now I tout the same oily agenda. The heart of Island Apothecary lies in offering self-love tools that are affordable, organic and thoughtfully crafted to nourishingly support your skin.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Island Apothecary is an organic skincare company based on a small island twelve miles off the coast of Maine. We are a small women-owned business dedicated to bringing world-class organic skin solutions to women at an affordable price. Each of our oil based products is mixed and poured by hand and shipped on the ferry or the mail plane (depending on the weather) to our customers all over the world.

We make everything here on the island and offer seasonal harvest-batch products. We hand pick rose petals from the wild Rusa rugosa or beach rose growing along the oceanside to produce our summertime rose hydrosol. Our fall harvested Calendula Oil is a crowd favorite. We collaborate with a local women-run organic farm to grow and harvest the flowers. And most recently, we’ve offered a wintertime Salt Water Spray to promote curly hair for when you can’t swim in the ocean. The main ingredient of course is distilled sea salt that we collect ourselves from the Atlantic Ocean in our backyard along with Argan Oil, Vitamin E, and Rosemary Oil.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

Yes, I bought this business in the fall of 2020. Perhaps that seems like a strange time to be taking on a lot of financial risk but 2020 was the peak of e-commerce and it felt right in my gut for more than that reason. Living on an island is a unique lifestyle with many many benefits, highest on that list being community but it’s not without it’s cons. Buying Island Apothecary allowed me to bolster my income in the winter time and offered me purposeful work that pulled me out of the seasonal grind. I bought the business from our founder and my boss, Laura Serino. I was Laura’s first hire in 2018 and we hustled together to grow the business to what it is today. I owe everything I know about e-commerce and marketing to Laura. Because of our relationship, the acquisition was easy. Laura helped me transition to owner over the course of 4 months by acting as my business advisor and mentor as I figured it out. She is still available as my mentor today when I need to pick her brain.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Tik Tok. Hands down. The joy of tik tok is that it promotes videos to a wide audience of people it deems interested in whatever my content is for that day. It’s free marketing to fresh eyes in a way that is difficult to achieve on that scale with instagram, referral programs or gifting.

Contact Info:

• Website: islandapothecary.com
• Instagram: islapothecary
• Facebook: Island Apothecary
• Other: Tik Tok: Island Apothecary

Image Credits
Claire Donnelly, Greta Rybus, Laura Serino, Fiona Robins