The buzz on Buzz-off Corinna woman creates, markets all-natural insect repellent

Alison Lewey is a mystic and a medicine woman, a self-professed believer in spirits and chakras, with an intuitive understanding of herbal remedies and natural healing.

Alison Lewey is a sharp-thinking businesswoman who researched her startup plan on the Internet and has parlayed her personal preference for natural remedies into a promising new product with local appeal and a growing international market.

And Alison Lewey is an American Indian, proud of her Passamaquoddy and Maliseet heritage, who hopes her fledgling product, Buzz-Off – an effective, safe, all-natural insect repellent – soon will provide jobs and opportunity for her people living on reservations in Maine and Canada.

“My mother used to go out into the woods and pick herbs; there were always bunches of herbs and plants drying in our house,” Lewey recalled Thursday at her home-based production facility in Corinna. “People thought she was a little crazy.”

But it was that early experience with herbalism that Lewey, 32, credits with her understanding of natural remedies, a knowledge she has used throughout her adult life.

In 1998, Lewey mixed up a nontoxic bug repellent for her baby son, Luke, relying on the natural qualities of soybean oil, peppermint and rosemary.

“No way was I going to put DEET on him,” she said, referring to the toxic active ingredient in many commercial repellents. She used it herself, and shared it with her friends.

The gentle potion proved so effective and pleasant to use that other young mothers began asking Lewey for their own supply. That’s when she realized she had created a salable product.

Buzz-Off is still 80 percent soybean oil, from beans grown in Aroostook County. To that base, Lewey now adds wheat germ oil and vitamin E, to lighten the texture and make it more easily absorbed and nourishing to the skin. Active ingredients – to scare off the bugs – include oils of lemon grass, peppermint, thyme, geranium and rosemary. Lewey purchases these ingredients from a warehouse in New Jersey.

The finished product is a thin, amber fluid that disappears into the skin quickly. The initial fragrance packs a powerful, one-two punch that within a few minutes mellows into a spicy, piney, citrusy tang. It has none of DEET’s inherent noxiousness and is less medicinal than the citronella many other “natural” products rely on.

Official tests of its effectiveness are pending at a Florida lab. Meanwhile, Lewey guarantees her stuff will keep away not only mosquitoes, but black flies, ticks, no-see-ums, fleas, gnats, horseflies, chiggers, ants and spiders as well, for up to three hours. A recent evening trial in a buggy Orono back yard enabled the shorts-and-T-shirt-wearing user to mow a large lawn unmolested and to sit outside until well after sundown without a single mosquito bite.

Already, the fresh-scented, appealingly packaged elixir has an enthusiastic local following, and a well-timed marketing campaign has ramped up visibility, interest and sales in eastern Canada, throughout New England and as far away as Kentucky and Oklahoma. In this, its second season, Buzz-Off is available in more than 700 stores in Maine alone and also is enjoying brisk mail-order and Internet sales.

Once it’s on the shelf, Lewey said, the product sells itself. Among her best locations are EBS in Ellsworth, which sold 69 bottles in a single day, and Bangor Hardware, which has moved 300 bottles so far this season.

Despite increased demand, production of Buzz-Off is still at the mom-and-pop stage. For the past two years, Lewey and her life-and-business partner, Fred Wessely, have brewed and bottled small batches in the unfinished first floor of their modest home at a rural crossroads in Corinna.

They mix the ingredients in a plastic 55-gallon drum, stirring with a long attachment on a power drill. A home equity loan allowed the recent purchase of an $8,000 bottling machine that draws the liquid from the drum and smoothly fills six 4-ounce bottles with the push of a button. Twelve bottles fill a cardboard case, which brings a wholesale price of $60, or $5 per bottle. The recommended retail price is $7.95, but Lewey said she has seen stores selling Buzz-Off for as low as $6.99 and as high as $11.95.

If they were ready to go into full-scale production, Wessely said, they conceivably could crank out 1,000 cases a day with the equipment they have, but so far this summer they’ve shipped a total of just 2,500 cases. That’s still a big increase over last year, when the product had very little shelf presence and the couple spent thousands of dollars on mail-order ads in magazines.

Sales last year netted less than the cost of the ads, Lewey said.

But this year, said Wessely, they’re “almost” making a living on their profits, even taking into account the continued expenses of advertising as well as patenting, testing and insuring their product.

Marketing firms have wanted to place Buzz-Off in major chains like Wal-Mart and Hannaford, Wessely said, but at this point it’s not realistic to think they could meet the sudden demand of that market. It’s important, he said, to retain control of pricing and production, to grow at a sustainable pace, and to get Buzz-Off in front of customers in as many venues as possible – garden centers, sports shops, health food stores, convenience markets and hardware stores.

“We don’t want to make this a specialty item,” he said. “This is a product anyone’s entitled to take a look at.”

Lewey hopes that within a year or two she can move production, marketing and distribution of Buzz-Off out of her downstairs and up to Princeton and to Perth-Andover, New Brunswick, providing jobs for residents of the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet reservations there.

Then she’ll be able to move her growing family out of the crowded upstairs apartment and into the rest of the house. Luke, now 6, has two sisters: Ruby, 3, and Rose, 4, and there are cats and kittens, dogs and birds, relatives and friends.

How confident is she of Buzz-Off’s success?

“I’m guided,” Lewey said earnestly. “God’s on my side. I’m going to do nothing but good with this.”