Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tisha Ayers. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Tisha, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Hi, so excited to be able to share our story with you! The concept of Cashmere Moon started a couple years ago while I was pregnant with our son. My skin was extremely dry and was constantly irritated. My husband already had eczema, and we both found it quite hard to find something in our local stores that was thicker and more moisturizing than lotion, but easier to spread and better scented than pure shea butter. We searched high and low but were unable to find anything like that. Because of this, we searched online to see if maybe we could find a shea butter formula that would be what we needed. We found the foundation for our Whipped Body Cream formula online and perfected it with each batch. Once we felt it was the perfect amount of shea butter to make it moisturizing to our dry skin, but still easily spreadable, we gave some to family and friends to get their thoughts. After they continued to come back asking for more, we decided that maybe others could benefit from our products. Fortunately, we are proud to say that we have helped so many people, including children along our journey.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We provide natural, vegan body care products like ultra-nourishing body creams and body oil. We got into this industry just by chance, really. Unable to find the products we needed in our local stores forces us to make them ourselves. Once we realized that others needed more nourishing skin products, it was a no-brainer to start the business.
Our products are different because we add such a high concentration of quality ingredients in all our products without it being costly to the customer. None of our products include fillers, only quality ingredients to help nourish skin.
I am most proud of our journey and what we provide. We set out to provide quality products in eco-friendly packaging in local stores and although we have had challenges along the way, we are doing just that!
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
This is rather a short story because the initial funding for Cashmere Moon came from savings and personal loans. I had a vision, but I’ve never owned or operated a beauty store. I didn’t know the ins and outs of the industry, how to set up a website, how to hire employees or even set up marketing. But I learned everything along the way and I’m still learning.
I started Cashmere Moon with a vision, a few thousand dollars, and pure motivation. From there, we started with getting the branding for the business and the website set up. After that, I just took it a day at a time to see what the business needed in order to grow.
My husband and I have still loaned the business money to this day, but at least now, the business pays us back – with interest!
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
It definitely hasn’t been easy along the way! There have been many costly learning curves and bumps along the way. Building a beauty brand from scratch when the industry is already so heavily saturated is quite difficult. Being the new kids on the block, we have to prove that our products are effective and useful. Some of our challenges have been with packaging. It was very important to me from the beginning that we use only eco-friendly packaging so my mind immediately went to glass. Using glass containers becomes costly as you have to worry about the weight to ship and extra packaging to reduce breakage. This is still a challenge we are working on, but I am committed to eco-friendly options so we will find what works best for us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shopcashmeremoon.com
- Instagram: @shopcashmeremoon
- Facebook: @shopcashmeremoon
Image Credits
Images by Pamela Williams