Leicestershire's Business Week supplement

A bad hair day for one of her daughters started a chain of events which will see Wendy Stirling launch her own bodycare business at this weekend's Game Fair at Belvoir Castle.

Wendy will drive the few miles from her home in Waltham on the Wolds to the huge showpiece event run by the Country Landowners' Association. In the van will be her range of soaps, shampoos, bath and massage and body oils.

If her range, called Botanicals, had an ideal target consumer, it would be the Country Living-reading thousands who will visit Belvoir on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The range is designed to tap into the market drivers of consumers' willingness to indulge in the bathroom and their suspicion of mass-produced cosmetics and toiletries marketed on the basis of natural, organic ingredients.

Botanicals began as an idea after one of Wendy's two young daughters had an alarming reaction to a natural-sounding "herbal" shampoo.

"The shampoo label said it contained 'high quality ingredients derived from pure renewable plant sources'," she explains. "But when I looked closer, I found it contained a number of potentially harmful detergents, emulsifiers and preservatives.

"The tiny amount of herbal ingredients used may well have been grown under organic conditions without chemicals, but the shampoo itself was full of them."

After researching the market, Wendy found too few products were genuinely natural. The woman who spent her working hours advising other firms on how to market themselves saw the chance to practice what she preached and set up in business.

Two years on and the business is ready to roll. Its transactional website is up and running, the Game Fair beckons and a mail-order catalogue is on the horizon.

For the self-confessed label-reader, the ingredients in her products are what set Botanicals apart from almost all of the competition, said Wendy.

Instead of products labeled organic when they may contain, say one per cent organic ingredients, Wendy set out to make her products 100 percent organic. If that wasn't possible, she wanted them to be 90 percent or 95 percent organic.

Cutting down, or out, the water in the products had the benefit of reducing or removing the need for preservative ingredients in the oil-based products. Wendy's products have a relatively short shelf-life, compared to mass-market products which can sit on shelves for years because of their preservative load.

"We are producing in small batches," she said. "We are selling direct to the consumer, and the consumer is aware they have a shelf-life of one or two years. It's like the difference between a fresh cake you'll eat in a week or buying a mass-produced cake that can sit in your kitchen cupboard for six months."

Another food analogy is the use of seasonal products. Wendy's range will change with the seasonal availability of ingredients.

Many of the aspects of Wendy's products that make them different to competitor products also make them more expensive. Organic essential oils, for example, can cost five tunes that of non-organic.

Wendy's experiments in the kitchen sink at her cottage home in the north east Leicestershire countryside helped develop the products she will be selling at Belvoir.

However, don't think these are not professionally researched potions: they have been formulated using the expertise of Loughborough-based analysis firm Phyto-Research.

The local connections span the world of modern science and ancient craft, with the oatmeal used in Botanicals being milled at nearby Whissendine.

Grants from Leicestershire County Council and the Welland Partnership helped with the start-up costs, such as the Phyto-Research work which was needed for toxicology and other certifications.

The family has also pitched in, with graphic designer husband David working on the packaging, branding and website. "It has been a massive learning curve but great fun, rewarding and a lot of hard work," said Wendy

The first orders are in before her official launch, with the first order via the website generating a cheer in their Waltham home.

by Andy Gilgrist, Business Editor