My husband found me in Yellow Pages … we built our firm on love

Times

3 days ago

'All you need is love,' sang the Beatles. For Sakina Buoy, co-founder and chair of The Somerset Toiletry Co, which she started with her late husband, Roger, in 1999, the same is as true of business as it is of romance.
'It's a different kind of love, but business is all about love, isn't it? It's about loving your employees, loving what you do, and, for me, loving the creative process.'
It's an approach that has helped the company, which makes affordable but inventively packaged bath and body products, stand the test of time. In the past 26 years it has contended with the global financial crisis, Roger's death from cancer in 2016, and the pandemic.
Today the business, which employs 72 people, is in rude health: it generated sales of £13.7 million and a pre-tax profit of £674,000 in the year to December 31, 2023. Buoy says her husband was the entrepreneurial brains of the operation, but given that the company had sales of £8.2 million when he died, she has demonstrated plenty of business smarts too.
To say Buoy's professional career started in a completely different sphere would be something of an understatement. 'If you told me in my twenties I would be a business person, I would have fallen on the floor,' she laughed.
Now 65, she was born in Wigan but grew up in Manitoba, Canada, after her family moved there for her father's job as a nuclear engineer. 'I grew up on this tiny island where almost everybody was employed by Atomic Energy of Canada. I gained an appreciation for bears and skunks and it was quite idyllic.'
They moved again, this time to Montreal, where Buoy went to university and gained a degree she would then use to help with a national effort to deinstitutionalise mental health services in Canada.
''I specialised in working with people with Down's syndrome,' explained Buoy, who described it as a beautiful but emotionally challenging job.
Next, she got involved in politics in the Canadian city of Edmonton, and, 'embarrassingly for my dad', became secretary for an organisation called Edmontonians for a Non Nuclear Future. 'It wasn't about nuclear power plants,' she recalled, 'but the military use of nuclear weapons.'
This was followed by a trip to India, where she spent time in ashrams and on yoga and meditation retreats, leading to an interest in essential oils.
By the age of 26, and now a qualified aromatherapist, Buoy returned to the country of her birth and made it her home. She moved to Devon a few years later and met Roger, who was seeking an aromatherapy expert to help him with a business he was working on. 'He found me in the Yellow Pages,' smiled Buoy.
That business, called Applewoods, sold luxury soaps and other toiletries. Launched in 1992, it had 28 stores around the world at its peak but encountered difficulties when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit. The couple had to prop up the company until it was sold at a cut-down price, and that depleted their personal wealth. When they took out a loan to start again with The Somerset Toiletry Co, it was secured against the family home — a decision that weighed heavy on Roger, said Buoy.
'We had the conversation when we had our kids that he never wanted to lose the house, and I would always say to him: 'I don't care if we live in a two-up, two-down.' This was our life and our passion; I was never afraid about losing money — it has never been of huge importance to me.'
The couple's stretched finances, however, meant that they 'worked on a shoestring' for the first few years. Their selling point was carefully designed packaging and creating products that were as natural as possible. 'If it's 100 per cent natural, you're going to be keeping it in the fridge. Our USP is making products that are really affordable but are still beautiful and have really good ingredients,' said Buoy.
The initial plan had been to sell products direct to consumers, but when the Buoys attended a trade fair in Birmingham in 1999, they met buyers from the fashion and homeware company TJ Maxx, the American owner of TK Maxx, who asked if they could make private-label products to be sold under their own brand name. 'Because we were a young business, we said yes and ended up doing private-label products for the first 11 years,' said Buoy.
The Somerset Toiletry Co has produced own-brand products for other large retailers including Laura Ashley and Anthropologie.
But the financial crash of 2008 forced the married co-founders to reconsider their strategy when orders from key clients dried up. 'That was a huge challenge for us — we nearly lost the business,' said Buoy. They retrenched, choosing not to take salaries, and 'went back to working on a shoestring'.
They also diversified into distributing their own products, so that they weren't over-exposed to any fall in demand for the private-label lines. It's now nearly 50:50, said Buoy. 'We knew that if there was another crash, we had lots of customers and we would be much more insulated.'
To ensure consistency of pricing and quality, the pair entered into a joint venture in a factory in Porto, Portugal, called Castelbel, where their products were made for ten years. Roger made the decision to sell the couple's 60 per cent stake shortly before he died in 2016.
'He had an inkling he was going to die, and he wanted to die knowing that no matter if I screwed things up or not, there was money in the bank.' Buoy won't divulge a sale figure but confirms that their stake fetched a seven-figure sum.
Although Roger had suffered from ill health his entire life, first because of a heart condition and then two different forms of cancer, his death was 'shocking', said Buoy. 'I don't think you can really plan for somebody you love dying. I think we all thought, although he was obviously very unwell, that he was like Superman.'
Buoy later decided that she needed support with the finances and, in 2019, Brett Bateman was hired as chief executive. Last year the company opened a new, larger factory in Somerset to make its products, and the longer-term plan is for her two sons, Zantore and Xavier, to take over the business.
Buoy, who still works for the company on the creative side three days a week, said the present climate for UK entrepreneurs was the hardest she'd known. 'Britain has always been a huge country for small and medium-sized companies, but I don't even know if this government likes business,' she said.
Despite this, her passion for The Somerset Toiletry Co is undiminished. 'I still love creating things. It is a thrill to go into a shop and see the products you've been working on there on the shelf, and then to be standing there when a customer comes and buys them.'