Balm maker expands

PORTLAND – Ghislaine Berube never planned to launch a business when she started mixing up a balm to help friends and family members deal with the dry, cracked skin caused by Maine’s harsh winters.

“It’s always been a hobby,” said Berube, who wanted to use her interest in natural botanicals to come up with a concoction to counteract the skin condition. “I’ve always loved botanicals. It’s such a girl thing – I love to make lotions and potions and such.”

Four years after she began producing Lobsterman’s Balm, Berube has expanded the product line to include a lip moisturizer and a soap-body wash-shampoo. The growth of her company might force her to move the operation from the basement of her South Portland home.

Berube was living in Washington, D.C., where her husband was working as a software consultant, when she first developed the balm. She sent it to relatives and acquaintances as she repeatedly adjusted the mix of ingredients, which includes sweet almond oil, shea butter, cocoa butter, beeswax, lavender, tea tree oils and vitamin E.

“You make a lot of mistakes and it doesn’t look right, but you fiddle around until [you say], ‘Yeah, this kind of holds together now.’ Then you give it away, whether they have a complaint [about dry skin] or not,” she said.

It worked so well, she said, that her “test animals” encouraged her to put it on the market. After running through dozens of possibilities, she came up with the name “Lobsterman’s Balm.”

“I was just homesick for good fish chowder and I thought, ‘What would be catchy?'” she said. “It just sort of came in the middle of the night. It was purely a 4 o’clock in the morning sort of thing.”

Berube began marketing the product by taking it to craft shows and the Northern New England Trade Show. She lined up a network of about 100 stores – in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York – eager to sell the balm.

But even though sales more than doubled last year, Berube said the business is just approaching the break-even point. And she’s in a highly competitive business that includes such industry giants as Johnson & Johnson and Estee Lauder, along with smaller but well-established manufacturers including Tom’s of Maine and Burt’s Bees.

To push her sales into the black, Berube hired a marketing and advertising firm to redesign the packaging and help market the line.

“This is really the first time when I’m marketing it,” Berube said. “I’ve got an actual client base now. What a surprise! It’s just a matter of persistence.”

Of course, a dramatic jump in sales could force her to make some changes, including her location.

“My production is in the basement, my shipping is in the basement and my warehouse is in the basement,” a space she shares with Terri Bruneau, who does the company’s books and handles shipping, and Lisa Maxwell, her lab assistant.

Berube said she would be able to take those changes in stride. Her company, Casco Bay Gardens, was incorporated by Berube through the Internet; she set up her bookkeeping program herself and wrote the copy for her first ads.

“It’s really been a matter of reinventing the wheel all the time,” she said.