Loading... Please wait....png)
For years Renee Harris lived with having dry, cracked hands. But she got tired of putting on Band-Aids just so she could work in her kitchen or make soap.
Using lotion and sleeping with gloves at night did little to solve her problem, so the mother of 8 turned to the Internet. Her Google search turned up several recipes for hard lotion bars.
Renee Harris turned her quest for healthy hands into a family business.
Being a do-it-yourselfer, she decided to try the simplest one with just three ingredients: coconut oil, shea butter and beeswax.
“I didn’t want to invest in something that wouldn’t work,” she said.
Her hands were dry and covered in cuts when she made her first lotion bar. Within a day, her hands were healed. She then decided to try the bar on her son’s seasonal eczema. After about a week, the bar had cleared that up, too.
“I found a solution to the problem of dry skin so I started making the bars and giving them to relatives and friends. I was getting lots of good feedback, so I decided to try it out as a business.”
She started small and took her bars to a farmers market near her home in Cottonwood, CA.
The MadeOn: Skin Care business grew quickly. She got the attention of some bloggers and used Facebook to promote the business. After her husband was laid off from Hewlett-Packard, he joined the company and helped it continue to thrive.
“We decided to go all out,” Harris said. “We knew it was make it or break it. For my husband to have to switch jobs would mean we’d have to move and we didn’t want to do that. We love where we live.”
In addition to her hard lotion bars, Harris also sells soap, hair butter, rash cream and a collection of e-books filled with simple recipes for skin care products. She’s also experimenting with creating a zit stick to fight pimples and a zinc stick to protect people from sunburn.
Agloves President Jennifer Spencer discovered Harris and the MadeOn hard lotion bars while looking for photos of dry hands for a project she was working on.
The women share a mission to keep busy hands happy and healthy. “It’s the job of the Beesilk bar to clear up cuts and wounds, and get your hands soft and ready to do the work you need to get done,” Harris wrote in her blog.
“But what the Beesilk bar can’t do is keep your hands warm while out in the cold. That’s when I recommend Agloves because they not only ward off the nip, but they keep you connected when using your iPhone or iPad.”
