Two Sisters Naturals is among the national recipients of the FedEx Support Small grant initiative, a program which has awarded $5,000 to 30 Canadian small businesses that have been affected by COVID-19.
The e-commerce shop, which recently moved from Barrie to Midhurst, was founded by sisters Crystal and Jillian Anderson.
Crystal Mills spoke to BarrieToday about how the natural skin care and bath products company got its start.
“We’ve been around just over four years and we started off by making products and gifting it to friends and family,” said Mills. “They encouraged us to go further with it and we turned it into a business.”
Anderson said she started off with just a handful of products, but grew the inventory over time as she found more people who wanted natural care products like she did.
“The first product we had was deodorant, mainly because I had been looking for and had no luck finding one that worked,” Mills said. “Now we have bath bombs, lip balms and our popular whipped body butter.”
Anderson’s background is in accounting, something she says comes in handy at tax time. But her passion for healthy care and knowledge of social media has helped the business run successfully, even during COVID-19.
“These are healthy and natural products we fully believe in. I think our customers see that and are able to trust us more because of it,” said Mills. “We had our strong customer base before the pandemic hit, and I believe our use of social media has been key in attracting more people.”
The FedEx Support Small grant initiative will go toward growing the company’s online presence and helping them recuperate from a non-existent show season.
“Up until when COVID hit, the majority of our revenue was from doing in-person shows. We actually did our first show of 2020 last week when we likely would have done about 25 by now,” said Mills.
“We’ve had some loyal customers from those shows that helped us get through these trying times by purchasing off our website," she added. "This whole ordeal has made us see we needed to upgrade our website and online presence to continue some success.”
For more information on Two Sisters Naturals, visit their website by clicking here.
