We were lucky to catch up with Tish Holman recently and have shared our conversation below.
Tish, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.
We believe in protecting what we love, so for every product purchased we plant one mangrove tree with SeaTrees by Sustainable Surf and pull one pound of plastic from the ocean through our partnership with 4ocean. We first partnered with SeaTrees when I was searching for a local coastal restoration company. When I was young, I saw trucks depositing sand on the beach. I had seen sand being bagged from the beach prior to hurricanes but never dumped on it. Curious, I asked what they were doing and they were doing beach restoration. It stuck with me all these years, & when I was searching for coastal restoration I came across SeaTrees. I thoroughly researched their impact & reached out, taking my shot, hoping they’d be open to partnering with a small, new brand like Coast+Salt. Fortunately, they were and we’ve planted almost two thousand mangroves this year.
I had the same hope when I reached out to 4ocean. We had just released our Sea Glass Scents Collection, but one of our products for that collection was packaged in plastic; but I just couldn’t release it. I wanted to ensure the product was plastic neutral before doing so. I am so so grateful to partner with 4ocean so that we not only offset the plastic from our Sea Glass Soaps, but also pull one pound of plastic from the ocean for every product purchased.
Tish, 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?
I am the founder and maker at Coast+Salt. C+S is a niche fragrance brand, and we make personal fine fragrance and a line of signature candles in coordinating scents for all of our body products. Coast+Salt was created from my desire to have an authentic coastal scent. I don’t even want to think about how much money I spent trying to find a fragrance that actually smelled like the ocean; every scent smelled like baby powder. So I began formulating my own scents drawing upon inspiration from my hometown, and my favorite coastal destinations and experiences. And then, as many do, I decided to turn my hobby into a business. Initially, I felt really vulnerable doing so; I had spent so long crafting what would become our Classic Collection, I didn’t realize how much I wanted people to love it! I mean I had created it for myself, but now I was putting it out there in the world, so that felt kind of revealing in a way. I’m happy to report both our Coast and Salt scents from our Classic Collection remain our top two best selling scents. I’ve added two more collections since then, with another releasing early 2024, and I’m super stoked to share it with the world! I love that we are able to bring the beach to our customers everyday through the power of fragrance.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
Prior to C+S, my professional background had been in business-to-business sales, so I decided to leverage that experience by growing our retailer accounts. I understood the challenges we would face being a new fragrance brand; people like to smell before they buy. I knew getting our products directly in front of our target customers through retail stores would give them opportunity to try our scents. We are now in over 70 stores in 27 states. As you’d imagine a majority of our retailers are in coastal regions. Our products do really well in a variety of retailers, from clothing boutiques to gift and surf shops. I absolutely love partnering with these small businesses. Coming from a tourist town myself, I understand the unique challenges many of our retailers face as lots of them are seasonal shops and I’ve actually become friends with many of our retailers! We have also partnered with Faire Wholesale to facilitate passive wholesale sales. While I do prefer to build relationships with our retail partners from the outset, the time freed up from searching for shops that would be a good fit and reaching out has been invaluable and allowed us to scale up. Time really is our greatest resource.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
We manufacture all of our products. Since C+S really began as a hobby, I already knew how to produce all of our products, so the only challenge we encountered was in scaling up production. Our biggest boost was the purchase of new production equipment. What we used to schedule an entire day of production for now takes us maybe 45 minutes, so we’re able to produce more products much more quickly. That frees up time to make more of our other products, time for formulating and testing new products, etc. To scale you really have to buy yourself time, either in new equipment or hiring new talent or help, & that can come at a significant investment. What we found to work well for us, was investing in strategic areas versus “across the board”. It didn’t make sense to invest in scaling a product line I was considering discontinuing (& have since discontinued). I’ve seen many entrepreneurs do this, and end up super cash strapped, so I’d advise an owner/founder to scale bit by bit. Maybe start with your most in demand product- we started with our most time consuming product; this bought us more time to also scale up our most popular product and worked really well for us. Feeding two birds with one seed.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.coastandsalt.com
- Instagram: @coastandsalt