Anointment Natural Skin Care: Moncton Times and Transcript – July 2011
Anointment specializes in handcrafted soaps and more, from pure ingredients
An article from today’s Moncton Times and Transcript: by Meg Edwards, a lovely reporter I met at the Sackville Farmer’s Market shortly after we arrived with our Anointment booth.
“April MacKinnon left Sackville after high school, going to Halifax for college and looking for a life that was “better, bigger and brighter.”
This spring April and her husband Jeff moved back to Sackville, settling into a spacious country home near her parents in Upper Sackville.
With plenty of room for her home-based business, Anointment, which is found at www.anointment.ca, April is busy making handcrafted soaps, baby oils, balms, toners and bath salts from pure ingredients.
You can find April with her three-month-old baby cuddled into his snugly, every Saturday at the Sackville Farmer’s Market, selling her soap that sounds good enough to eat, with names like calendula, lavender, lemon poppy seed and licorice.
Although they enjoyed aspects of city life, they decided to move so that their children did not think that stabbings and robberies were a normal part of life.
“We said to ourselves, our family needs us and we need them, so we thought it is now or never,” she says.
April and her husband met in college in 1998 while studying civil engineering and while many of their colleagues went out west for work they decided to tough it out in the east. They both found work in Halifax in their fields, but once the first baby Anna arrived in 2005, April decided to stay home with the baby and started an online business selling cloth diapers and baby supplies.
“The business got busier and busier,” says April, who obviously has multi-tasking down to an art, “and it got to the point where I couldn’t do it from home anymore so I opened a store,” called Nurtured on Robie Street in Halifax.
“I had actually purchased Anointment in 2009,” says April, “to complement the products I had at the store, because it was natural skin care and the lady who founded the company was a customer of mine and she was having a baby and decided she couldn’t do it anymore so I decided I don’t want to lose this product, I am just going to take it over.”
After being trained in the art of soap making, April trained her father and they now work together.
With instinctive business acumen, April jumped in to her new business, with her newborn baby, Andrew, in her arms. She updated the labeling with Health Canada, made sure it was bilingual, gave the labeling some colour and made it “boutique-ready” for sale in stores and wholesale.
April already has 16 wholesale accounts and is “working on growing that” with an e-commerce site so that she can sell online.
And now, surrounded by a huge garden overflowing with flowers, April is glad to be home. As her six-year-old daughter Anna pedals about in the driveway, and her husband Jeff arrives home with her four-year-old boy Cameron, April could be the symbol of home-based businesses and an answer to New Brunswick’s brain drain.”
