“Fiddling around with potions has always been sort of a hobby,” said Ghislaine Bérubé, who has invented a large lip balm-like tube of beeswax, various oils, and natural, organic botanicals she named Lobsterman’s Balm.
She and her husband, James Hughes, both software developers by profession, moved from South Portland to Washington, D.C., in 1998, where Hughes was to spend the next two years developing software for private industry. Bérubé thought she’d spend those two years “not working, eating bon-bons, reading People magazine.”
That lasted a couple of weeks. Having nothing to do drove her crazy. So she started fiddling with some botanical formulas to relieve a granddaughter’s eczema. Bérubé has a chemistry background; she knew what she was doing. She remembers thinking, “I can fix something up for her.” And she was right. Her potion, a mixture of almond oil, shea butter, beeswax, cocoa butter, vitamin E, lavender, and tee tree oils, worked. Tee tree oil, from Australia, contains anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agents, as does lavender. Bérubé is quick to add of her product, “I can’t say that it’s the cure for eczema, but people love it. It works great for eczema. And it also turns out that it’s great for all those terrible cracks people get in their fingers in the wintertime.”
Because her “potion” worked, Bérubé decided to make some more up and send it to all her relatives and friends. She sent them boxes of the product and questionnaires, asking “Do you like the package?” “Do you feel the product was effective?” “Who used it and how often? Would you change the look of the package?” “Do you like the smell?” (The smell, mostly of lavender and tee tree oil, goes on strong, but wears off within a few minutes. She planned it that way, saying, “Men don’t like to go around smelling like a rose.”)
She also asked respondents to “Be brutally honest. I don’t want to make a fool of myself later,” and to suggest ideas for a name.
“I didn’t really know where I was going with it,” she said. “This was just going to be a hobby.” She thought it would keep her busy while she was in Washington when she wasn’t shopping.
The friends and relatives all loved the product, and, in the middle of the night one night, she found herself thinking: “There has to be a good name for this.” She was homesick for Maine and thought: “The lobstermen I know have got just the roughest hands … Lobsterman’s Balm: that sounds like something that would work.”
When Bérubé returned to Maine in late 2000, a friend suggested she try selling her Lobsterman’s Balm at craft fairs. She still thought her product was just for family; she never imagined that it would take off. She tried the craft fairs for a couple of years, but found that the amount of time and effort spent didn’t equal booth rent, travel expenses and the cost of the product. All along, though, she gained encouragement from her husband and from Dan Stevens, inventor of Canceaux Sauce, made in Portland, whom she calls her mentor, “a little cheerleader,” and “the King of Hot Sauce.”
When the craft fairs didn’t work out, Bérubé decided to have a better label designed and go with Internet and print advertising. “I paid big money to get a sophisticated design,” she said. “I’m very happy with it.” The next step was marketing. To her, selling is the hardest part of the whole operation, so she had a catchy website professionally designed (www.cascobaygardens.com) with bright, cute phrases, such as “Catch of the day” for Products, “Get your claws on it” for Order, “Fish tales” for About us, and copy that reads, “Oh buoy, you found it! Everything you’ll need to soothe your dry, parched shell.” She subscribes to Google, the Internet search engine. For a monthly fee, if people type in any one of 20 keywords such as: Lobster, Balm, Cracked Skin, Itch, etc., Lobsterman’s Balm will come up on the screen.
She then come up with two more natural, organic formulas: a lip balm called Lobsterman’s CoolKiss, formulated like Lobsterman’s Balm except for deleting the lavender and adding menthol and peppermint oil, and a combination of moisturizing hand soap, body wash and shampoo called Lobsterman’s 3-in-1 Clean. The soap is like Castile. The term “saponified” means sodium hydroxide, and when mixed with oil it forms soap. Lobsterman’s 3-in-1Clean is made of saponified coconut, olive and jojoba oils, lavender essential oils, aloe vera and rosemary extract. Her label reads “Healing aloe, soothing lavender, rejuvenating jojoba and pure natural soap combine for head-to-toe cleansing that will leave you happy as a clam.”
With these and other future products in mind, Bérubé incorporated her company by herself online in 2001. As she’s from Great Diamond Island, in Casco Bay, she chose as her corporate name Casco Bay Gardens.
A warm, attractive, stylish woman, Bérubé, seems at odds with the image of products for rough, cracked skin, but the lobstermen, carpenters, and others with sore fingers who have used her product couldn’t care less. It works, and they like it.
Lobsterman Leroy Bridges, of Sunshine Island off Deer Isle, tried Lobsterman’s Balm and found it to be “Excellent.” And when asked if he would shell out money for it said, “Yup. I honestly think I would.”
Donna Bridges, Leroy’s wife, works in the stern of his new boat and tried all three of Bérubé’s products. She said, “I especially like the lip stuff, the CoolKiss, because when you get like burning out on the water, it really gives your lips a smooth feeling.” She said, “The shampoo worked good, too, and hand stuff is excellent, too, if you’ve got hands and arms that are dry.”
Marjorie Mills, of Portland, the product tester, works at a garden center and has trouble with work-roughened hands. She found Lobsterman’s Balm, “Satiny smooth. It really softened my fingers.” She said, “I used the shampoo as soap. It didn’t lather up a lot, but our water is hard.”
Now, you must understand that everything about Lobsterman’s Balm — research and development, the factory, the corporate office, sales, shipping and handling, the works — is housed in Bérubé’s basement. She is the chemist, president, factory worker: you name it. She has one saleswoman in Maine and two others in New England. She has an accountant and a single part-time shipper, Lisa Maxwell, who works at night. Bérubé belongs to Advantage Payroll, for her one employee. She doesn’t take a salary, and her husband pays the electricity bill.
“I love coming down here,” she said of her basement laboratory, factory and office. “I can do what I’m in the mood to do. I can go in the lab if I have an idea, and nobody’s going to get mad. I can do it when I feel like it.”
Of course, there are times when it’s no fun: when she has to pay bills and doesn’t want to, and the business has not taken off like a rocket. But it’s growing. “I’m kind of excited,” she said. “I have the formulas in place for a couple of items that I would like to bring out this year.”
What’s stopping her? “I need the perfect container. I need the perfect label. I need the perfect name. What’s going to catch the eye?”
And that’s just one aspect of inventing her own product and starting her own business. Although she had taken chemistry in high school and college, her graduate degree was in social work, so she has since taken seminars and courses in New York to upgrade her chemistry. Her knowledge has come from chemistry books and courses, and, she said, “Talking to a million people” and adding, “you learn from salesmen.”
Thus far, Bérubé has done print advertising in The New Yorker and Yankee magazines. The very name Lobsterman’s Balm attracts attention. “The people in Maine and New England buy it because it really works,” Bérubé said. “The people from the city buy it because it’s interesting. It looks good on the shelf. It’s a conversation piece.”
For information call 207-773-9129 or go to www.lobstermans.com or e-mail sales@balm.com.