BUSINESS
Hindsight
THE BENEFITS OF HINDSIGHT Elizabeth Ashley muses on the things she wishes she’d know when starting out in the business twenty five years ago…
I
started working in the family business twenty five years ago alongside my mother Jill Bruce, who was one of the pioneers of aromatherapy in the UK. Her company, Jill Bruce Aromatherapy, would later change its name to The Apothecary which became one of the best known aromatherapy companies in the country. The Jill Bruce School of Aromatherapy was the largest in Britain and was affiliated to both governing bodies. Every summer, we’d pack up the estate car and caravan with dozens of stacker boxes full of pots of cream. On top of the green boxes, lay trestle tables and fold out chairs and on the top of those, three border collies and cats. One cat was never pleased about leaving her spot sunning herself in the garden, thus we travelled in a tranquilising valerian fog, up and down the country to different agricultural shows. Setting up and closing down was hard, physical work. The boxes were heavy. If you were really unlucky you carried one of my stepfather Mike’s boxes filled with oils that I could hardly lift or the mobile phone which had to be plugged into the mains and weighed an absolute ton. When I started out, the pots were labelled as “Eczema”, “Psoriasis”, “Hay fever” etc., but later, laws forced the change to “Geranium ointment,” or other oils we’d used, and we concentrated on selling on a one to one consultation basis. As I think back, I reflect most on the headache cream. People thought I was bonkers saying “rub it on your forehead and temples”, but when I pointed out how odd it was to swallow a pill, they would be stopped in their tracks. Now of course, no-one would bat an eyelid and I think that’s my biggest proof of how far therapies have changed.
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HOLISTIC THERAPIST 2021
We had two targets. To sell pots of cream and to collect contacts for our newsletter. Every month we would send out an eight sided magazine, with brown ink printed onto green paper full of recipes, products we’d designed and gossip from the shows. The agents collected names and addresses on little slips, temps inputted them onto the computer system, and then we’d print off labels to stick onto envelopes
For about 5 years we posted them out. Around 5,000, until one year, we’d paid for all the printing, hand folded and put them into envelopes, and put them in the post. Only to realised after, that I’d forgotten to put our contact details on. This was pre-websites of course, so naturally the phone remained eerily quiet. My popularity dipped in the company considerably that month. After that we started adding emails addresses to the list, with no real understanding of what that was for. Nobody created a back-up. The computer crashed and a database of 10,000 contacts was lost. That was back in 1995. Can you imagine what that database could have grown to now? The recipes file remains intact and is in the process of being made into a monthly subscription video database of how to make different products, called The Recipe Hub. Each year the school enrolled two more intakes of students. Two sets of 12 students in September and second intake in January. We also created a series of formulas to treat stress, to
holistictherapistmagazine.com
