We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelly Woodruff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelly below.

Kelly, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

This may seem obvious, but I think the first requirement to being successful is knowing what you want. If you don’t know what you’re after, then by definition you cannot succeed. As someone who is very open-minded and indecisive, I often have to remind myself of this.

Once you know what you want, I think success comes from a combination of hard work, patience, and continuous feedback. You’ve probably heard the first two a million times. So on the third one: feedback is critical for evaluating how things are going throughout your journey, so that you can pivot quickly when things are not going in the right direction.

Personally, I reflect a lot on what is vs. isn’t going well with Terracotta, and I try my best to be honest with myself. However, I can’t do this by myself – I need feedback from my customers, my wholesale partners, and honestly my husband, who sees what goes on behind the scenes and will ask me questions like, “Why did it take you so long to package those orders? Is there a faster way?” As someone who is sensitive and a bit of a perfectionist, feedback isn’t always easy for me to hear. But it is 1000% necessary to succeed, so I am always grateful for it, even if it stings in the moment.

Kelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Terracotta is an all natural, plastic-free skincare company based out of California.

I’ve had eczema since I was a baby, so I have always been on the hunt for products that are not only effective, but also gentle and safe for long term use. As anyone with eczema can attest to, that is no easy feat! Given how challenging it was to find the right products, I told myself when I retired I would just make my own products.

So when the pandemic hit and I suddenly had a bunch of extra time at home, it was the perfect opportunity to start experimenting. A few months in, I knew I was on to something and decided to try my hand at entrepreneurship. Thus, Terracotta was born out of my kitchen in the fall of 2020.

Today, we make body butters, balm sticks, lip balms, and lotion bars – all superstar, 100% natural moisturizers. Our customers love our simple but effective ingredients, unscented options, and the fact that we don’t use plastic in any of our packaging.

The decision to go plastic-free came about as I was researching different packaging options for Terracotta. It was then that I learned that only 10% of plastic actually gets recycled, and the rest ends up in landfills, incinerators, or the ocean. As someone who would bring home empty bottles if I couldn’t find a recycling bin nearby, I felt like a total fool. Even though plastic containers would have been 1/6th the cost of paper jars, I just couldn’t do it. So I made the decision to go completely plastic-free, and haven’t looked back since!

Running a small business isn’t always easy, but what keeps me going is the stories my customers share with me. It truly makes my day every time a customer tells me how much our products helped their kid’s eczema, or how excited they were to finally find some unscented products. This is why I do what I do, and why I’m so excited about Terracotta’s future!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

When I started Terracotta, I was an amateur formulator who had only recently learned how to make a decent body butter for myself. It all started in my kitchen in the early days of the pandemic. I have always enjoyed making things, and I was motivated by my own need for a high quality, non-toxic moisturizer. Every time I returned to the kitchen my body butter got a little bit better, so I quickly fell in love with the process.

As a business owner, one thing I love about manufacturing my own products is how easy it is to iterate. For example, I’m pretty sure the first 10 times I ordered labels, I changed something about the labels each time. And even with the formulas themselves, I was still making slight tweaks for the first few months after launching.

Now that our formulas are locked down and we have a steady stream of sales, I have to admit that making products has become less exciting, and more of a mundane task. However, the next challenge is figuring out how to manufacture more efficiently. This is where my husband has been really helpful, since he works in manufacturing and has asked me some really good questions. He made me realize that I had become very stubborn about how I make my products, and that I need to stay open minded to new tools and systems that could make the manufacturing process more efficient. This is now becoming a higher priority for me, since more sales = more manufacturing, and every minute I spend on manufacturing is 1 minute I’m not spending on growing the business.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I once heard a business owner say, when you’re first starting out, do the things that are not scalable. Write those hand-written thank you cards, reach out individually for feedback, and even set up calls with customers to learn more.

I really embraced this concept with Terracotta, and I’m so glad I did. I’ve learned so much from individually reaching out to customers to see what they thought of the products, and I think my customers also appreciate the personal touch.

I also like to surprise my repeat customers with periodic freebies or samples of new products. In the future I’m hoping to launch a more formal rewards program, but in the meantime this is my way of thanking my customers for their loyalty!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://terracottaskincare.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terracottaskincare/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terracottaskincare
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits
Ryan Gregory Photography