Episode 5: How Emily Silverstein Built an Organic Skincare Company
Welcome back to We Built This Life. This week’s episode is about Emily Silverstein, the owner of Urban Oreganics, which is an organic, vegan, sustainable skincare and body care company. And they also sell some products from like-minded brands who are similarly focused on the environment and sustainability. Emily started her business shortly after having her first son, Milo, who is now probably about 5 years old or so, and she got her start on Etsy. Her very first product was her cleansing grains, which is an oat-based dry facial cleanser that is mixed with water or toner or some kind of liquid to make a fresh face wash and that was one of the products she listed on Etsy. She made one sale her first day. Today, six years later, the business has grown to include many more products—Emily makes cleansing bars and face masks, body oil, dry shampoo, deodorant, and more—and to include another employee: Emily’s husband, Cory, who left his job in banking last year to join Urban Oreganics. The business is now the sole income for the Silverstein family, which along with Emily, Cory, and Milo, includes their second son, Max, who I believe is around age 3.
I am a customer of Emily’s. The first product I bought from her is Urban Oreganics facial cream, which Emily says is her top-selling product. It’s a very soothing cream—the first ingredient is aloe vera gel, so that makes sense—and there aren’t any essential oils in it, but it has a really fresh, natural scent. Emily says that this is the product she is most proud of because it took her abut 10 to 12 batches to get the formula to be what she wanted it to be, and that’s double or triple the amount of batches she has had to make for her other products before nailing down the formula. I also have a few more of her products: her brush cleaner, her rosewater toner, her lip balms are really nice; they’re thick and chunky so you feel like they cover the whole surface of your lip in one swipe, which I like.
So as a customer and as someone who follows Emily on social media, I have been really impressed with how accessible she is to her customers. She’s always answering questions on Instagram. She shares pieces of her life, she’s really into meal planning so she shares tours of refrigerator and what her family is eating for the week. She also goes Live on Facebook and maybe Instagram, too, at least once a quarter. Many of her products have scents that change seasonally and she also is always bringing in new items from other brands to add to the shop so she has quarterly launches, so she’ll go Live on social media and she’ll walk through all the products. She just is absolutely the face of her brand. And Emily has said that she has never spent money on a marketing campaign so I have to wonder if being this accessible to her community—along with making products that her community just really enjoys—if that has been a part of helping her business grow as much as it has.
So let’s get into Emily’s story.
Getting Her Start
Emily Silverstein didn’t have aspirations to start a skincare business. She studied business marketing and interior architecture at the University of Oregon, then worked at an interior design firm for a few months after college. But she wasn’t at this position for long because she was employed there during the last recession.
Emily Silverstein: “I graduated college, I got a fancy job and got a new car and got an apartment and thought I was living the dream and a few months later, everything hit the fan. It was 2008 so the market was pretty awful and everything was crashing. Thankfully the firm I worked for was focused more on remodeling instead of initial construction design kind of stuff. I think maybe that’s the only reason why they actually lasted a little bit longer then some of the other design firms that went under. So after a few months at that company, their firm did go under. So I was out of a job. We lived next door to a Starbucks at the time and one of my friends had told me about how they give great benefits and all that kind of stuff and you only have to work 20 hours a week. So I was bartending part-time and then working part-time at Starbucks to get benefits, like health benefits for myself, because I lost that when I lost my fancy job, too.”
Emily stayed at Starbucks for six years, working her way up to a management position. And she was a store manager when she got pregnant with Milo, her first child. She gave birth and went on maternity leave and then began thinking about whether being a store manager was going to work for her now that she had become a parent.
Emily: “Just knew that going back to that position and the demand that it required just wasn’t really right for us and wasn’t going to work. There were quite a few times when I’d get a phone call at 3:00 in the morning because somebody couldn’t show up for their shifts and I’d have to go in. And I Just kept thinking, how the heck am I supposed to do this when I have a baby? I’m not going to call a babysitter at 3:00 a.m. I did go back to Starbucks for a little bit after that part-time just as a barista. So I stepped back down to the lowest, entry level position and just worked my 20 hours to keep the benefits for my family again. I went back as a part-time barista and just worked the super early morning shifts so we would only need an hour of a babysitter between that overlap when I got home from work vs. when my husband would have to leave for work in the morning. Because I was working 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. 4 days a week. Then I’d come home and take a nap with the baby and start my day.”
Building a Skincare Business
During her second round at Starbucks after her maternity leave, Emily stayed on as a barista for about six months. During that time, and even sooner while Emily was pregnant, the very beginning stages of Urban Oreganics were beginning to take shape, even though Emily didn’t know that at the time. Emily began making skincare products when she was pregnant, just for herself to use.
Emily: “A lot of them I started making when I was still pregnant because that’s when I got really interested in that stuff, just like putting clean products on my body. I feel like when you’re pregnant, you start to do all this crazy research and then your head goes in all these weird ways. So that’s when I kind of starting being more aware of what I was putting on my body b/c all the sudden it affected another person as well. So I started making a lot of the stuff then. So I Had a lot of time to play around with it and that kind of stuff. Usually it takes 3, 4, 5-ish batches before I get everything nailed down. In the beginning, when I was making it for myself, I was just going on Pinterest and looking up random recipes for that stuff. And then as I became more familiar with ingredients and knew more about the benefits I wanted in the products and that kind of thing when I was actually going to be selling them. I was able to play around with hose formulas and really figure out my own version of things based on what I had made before.”
So after their son was born, Emily and Cory were talking a lot about how they were going to make things work: who was going to work when and what would they do about daycare. And that was when Emily first thought about starting a skincare business and putting her products on Etsy.
Emily: “When we were trying to figure out after my son was born how we were going to make daycare work and figure out, okay, I have to work these days and you work these days and then we’ll only need daycare these days. It felt like this big Tetris puzzle we were trying to piece together. It just didn’t feel right and it was stressing me out. I can’t remember how we actually decided to go with it, but at some point, some crazy idea came to me and I said, what if we just bottled up these things that I’m making for myself anyway and sold them online. So we just kind of went for it. I got an order the first day that I put everything on Etsy, which was awesome. Apparently that’s not normal, but I fully expected to have an order right away because I needed like instant validation. I was like, okay, this needs to do well, I need to get an order today, and I did. It was only one order that first day. But it was nice. And then, so yeah, I just kind of went from there. And the second year, it fully replaced my full-time income.”
Urban Oreganics Becomes a Family Business
So Emily was selling her products on Etsy and she also continued to work elsewhere for a while. After she left Starbucks, she took a part-time with G Diapers. They make cloth diapers that you wash, but with disposable inserts that you dispose of, so they are environmentally minded, very in line with Emily’s interests and priorities and passions. She stayed there for two years. Then, by Urban Oreganics’ second year, which she was still selling on Etsy at the time, Emily’s business had replaced her full-time income. Cory left his full-time job to join the business about a year and a half ago, which was a big decision for them and one that they thought about and talked about for a while.
Emily: “We talked about it actually for probably a couple years before we actually did it. And then for about a year very seriously considered it before finally taking the leap. Ultimately at the time we were getting all of our health care insurance coverage through his work. So that was our main factor, what held us back from this decision for quite a while. It’s like $1,000 a month for us now to pay for our private healthcare insurance for our family of 4. So that is a big expense. So not only were we getting rid of an income, we were adding a pretty major expense every month as well. We talked about it and talked about it for, gosh, a good year. I don’t even know what finally made him take the plunge. I think he just got tired of missing out on things and feeling like he was going to regret it if he didn’t do it and that kind of thing. Finally one day he was just like, I’m giving my two weeks today. I’m doing it. It wasn’t just sporadic like that because we’d been talking about it for years. But he’s much more cautious then I am, which is good b/c you need one of those in a relationship probably. So it was surprising to hear that he had finally done it b/c I kind of just figured we’d just talk about it forever and never actually do it. But it’s been great. Our kids are still little so they’re home all day. Our oldest is starting kindergarten this fall so that will be our first experience with one kid gone all day most of the week kind of thing. So it’s nice that he had a year, that last year, where our oldest was in preschool half days and then our youngest was still home with us all day. So he really got to experience that at-home parent life, which was more of a culture shock for him then I think it was for me. It’s a lot when you’re not used to it. And for me, I started it as when they were babies and working my way up and he just came into toddlers around him all the time, which is a lot. But it’s been great. The boys love it, I love it. We sit down to breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day. And we work here and there. I wish that we were a little more efficient because there’s definitely a lot of things that pull us away from work during the day. I think maybe by the end of the day, I end up working 8 hours, but it’s 2 hours here and an hour there and then 45 minute here and that kind of thing, all pieced together.”
The Business of Urban Oreganics
Throughout these six years since Emily has started her business, Urban Oreganics has grown organically.
Emily: “As frustrating as it can be, it’s kind of fun to just kind of let it happen naturally. I’ve never pushed a paid campaign marketing thing or anything like that. Everything has been regular social media posts, word of mouth, that kind of stuff. So I love that it grows slowly. I say slowly, but now my husband has quit his job and he is home with us and he works with us too. Because it did grow quickly. I think back over all the days and I’m like, wow, that was really slow. Then I think, well 6 years ago, I wasn’t doing any of this and now it’s our whole household income and it pays for us to have bought a new house and renovate a new house and buy a new car, all these things that I think wouldn’t have happened if this hadn’t happened. So. I like that it happened slowly but quickly.”
One of the great aspects of starting your own business is that you get to choose your company work environment and your culture. For Emily, her decisions around this were influenced by her first experience with entrepreneurship, which was as a daughter to a father who had his own business. And having seen what her father’s business looked like—and the challenges that came with that for her as his daughter—helped inform what Emily wanted her own company to look like, for herself and her husband, but also her kids.
Emily: “My dad had has own business when I was a kid and I saw how time consuming and how stressful it was. He actually owned, I don’t know how to fully describe it in that industry, but it was a machine shop kind of thing. So he manufactured metal repair parts for large machines. So he would sell the repair parts to his customers.” But I think what I remember, like I said, just him being gone a lot. He worked probably 80 or more hours a week and we rarely took vacations, we rarely saw him, it was just like dad has to work, like that’s just how it is kind of thing. It took him away from our family quite a bit, so that was never anything on my radar. If anything, I think I wanted the opposite. But it’s funny how things turn out. So I’m definitely doing my best to make sure that my kids don’t see it from the same perspective I saw it from, having a parent that owns a business. I work from home so it’s a little bit different. They’re here with me all the time anyway vs. like my dad worked outside of the home. So while I might work a crazy amount of hours, at least my kids are always in the house with me while it happens. I feel like that helps.”
On Building a Business With Little Kids at Home
One of the things I find so fascinating about Emily is that she has built this business while being home with her kids. IF you’re listening and you have kids, I’m sure you can imagine how challenging this must be at times. I can barely compose an email when all of my kids are home. But Emily has found a way to make this work, and she has been making it work pretty much since her kids were born, so they have only known this lifestyle and they have built this independence as a result.
Emily: “I think it helps that this is all they’ve ever known. I’ve worked from home their entire lives. My first son especially has just always been super independent. He was fine even as a baby. I’d set him on the floor with a blanket and some toys and he would just stay there all day. NO big deal. It was amazing. That was a very unrealistic expectation that he set when we had our second one, who was kind of the exact opposite. But even then I hear from my friends that when I complain about it or think that he’s being difficult, they’re like, you have no idea. Our kids did not just hang out while we worked all day. So I think that the fact that I’ve done it their whole lives. Like I said, it’s all they know and they’ve gotten so used to it. They’re very independent and can entertain themselves and each other. They let me know when they need a snack and when they need their bottoms wiped and that’s about it. It’s funny because I feel like a lot of the time I feel so guilty about having them play by themselves, but I do hear that other side of that from a lot of people where they’re like my kids wouldn’t be able to play by themselves, they wouldn’t know how to, and I would have to play with them and this and that, and I’m like, okay, maybe I did an okay thing. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty about it.”
A Commitment to the Environment and to Minimalism
Another priority that has informed Emily’s business is her commitment to the environment and to minimalism and to producing less waste. Her family of four produces about a bag of trash a month, which is amazing, and, on Urban Oreganics social media accounts, she is very open about sharing how she does this. So first let’s talk a little bit about how Emily’s family reduces waste. A big source of waste, at least in my household, is the grocery store and all the packaging that comes with our food. Emily and her family have had to be very intentional about how they deal with that.
Emily: “As a child, we always recycled in our household, but I think it was looked at as recycling is the solution instead of just buying less stuff that needs to even be recycled. Which I feel like is now more of the mentality we’ve gotten into as parents and in our own household. Instead of looking at recycling as the solution, it’s now the last resort. So we’ve really really been trying to just limit our spending and purchasing on things that are packaging in general. So just buying everything package free as much as you can and if you can’t buy package free, then purchasing it in glass or cardboard, things like that that can be recycled. So we’ve been using the bulk bins at grocery stores a lot and I’ll just bring my own jars in instead of using their plastic bags and that’s how we get almost all of our dry, pantry items. And then like purchasing your produce without, either don’t use the plastic bag at all, just stick the produce in your cart because you’re going to wash it when you get home anyway because it already has been handled by a bunch of people. So sticking it in your cart or putting it on the conveyer belt at the check in stand isn’t going to make it any dirtier then it already was. Either not using a bag at all or reuseable product bags are an awesome alternative too. WE bought a pack on Amazon, gosh, probably 3 or 4 years ago, and we’re still using the same ones. Those have been super helpful. I think really making as much of your own stuff as you can. We still, I think chips are our hardest thing right now that we just can’t give up. So we ususally have 1, maybe2 bags of chips a week that goes in the trash. And then I did just find out that we have a place locally where I can purchase tofu that isn’t packaged so I’m definitely going to check that out because that’s a little bit of our waste now is tofu packaging. Otherwise, it definitely takes, you have to be intentional about it, you have to want to change and care to change, and it does mean saying no to a lot of foods that we love and we miss and we’re not perfect, sometimes I definitely will give in to them, but it’s not anywhere near as much as I did before.”
Going along with producing less food waste, Emily and her family also just have fewer things, for example fewer items of clothing.
Emily: “I probably have maybe 30 pieces of clothing total. And that would probably be the same for my husband and then my kids probably have even less each. I have 4 pairs of shoes. My husband probably has 3 or 4 pairs of shoes also. My kids each have one pair of tennis shoes and one pair of rain boots and one pair of sandals, depending on the season for which shoes they need. I used to buy everything I could and I would have this closet full of clothes and it’s like, how much do you actually wear? And how much do you love? Are you just holding on to it because it might fit again or you have some emotional tie to it because something amazing happened while you were wearing it. There’s so many reasons why people buy things or holds on to things, things like that. Every once in a while, I’ll just go through my closet and look at things and I say, if I were shopping today, would I buy this again? And if I wouldn’t, then there’s no reason for me to keep it. If it’s in good condition, you can sell it or donate it, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of clothing recycling options, too for like taking fabric basically to be reused. Our local Goodwill has a separate clothing recycling area where some clothes that are too worn for them to sell, you can put them there and they’ll recycle the fabric so it doesn’t just go into the landfill. I’ve heard a lot of companies are starting to offer that and even give you a discount in the store if you turn them in, that kind of stuff.”
For anyone who is interested in clothing recycling programs, I have seen bins for recycling clothing at H&M, and Madewell and J. Crew do denim/jeans recycling, so those are good places to check out. So we have grocery store waste and packaging in general, we have clothing, and then the last one in the trifecta, at least in my mind, is kids’ toys. Emily’s kids each have a few toys, along with Legos, and they try to get toys that are made with minimal plastic as much as possible.
Emily: “My oldest is currently obsessed with Legos, so there’s not really a way around that at the moment. But I did read that Lego brand is—I can’t remember if they already made it or they’re working on it—but they’re working on a new biodegradable, no plastic Lego alternative, which would be super cool. I would love that. Legos are the one place we are crazy with. But other then Legos, our kids probably have 3 toys each maybe. Or four. We have a Nugget and it’s like a deconstructed couch basically. Because they were always taking my couch cushions and building forts with them and it was driving me crazy. So they make ones that are already taken apart. So you can set it up like a couch if you want to. So it is a couch in our living room now, it’s an extra seating area, but it comes all apart and it bends and has these different shapes and stuff so you can make forts with it or tents. We’ve used it when the little one wants to have a sleepover in his big brother’s room, we’ll just lay it on the floor in there and use it as a mattress kind of thing. So that’s been a great way to let their creativity go. It’s a functional piece in our house also b/c it adds extra seating if we need it. But they build forts with it, gosh, probably almost every day. They’re favorite thing to do is look up the Nugget companies Instagram and then they see what other people are building on there and they like me to recreate those for them. They really like seeing what other people are doing and then playing off of that. So the latest one we are going to try is a big circle out of all their cushions and then you put a fitted sheet over top of it and you have a little tent almost. That’s the next thing that they want me to do for them. They are so creative and they honestly don’t get bored at all either. You would think that we less things, they would get bored more often. And I keep reading about it, how kids with less toys are less bored b/c they’re forced to be creative. WE do a lot of art stuff too. They have an art drawer in our little buffet in our dining room. So they have their crayons and paints and that kind of thing. And we’re renovating our backyard right now so we’re so excited to have it for them so that we can start spending more time out there. WE have a big glass sliding door off of our office that goes right out to the backyard. So it would just be awesome to let them go play out there, we can work inside, we can watch them and listen to them, that kind of thing. So we really just try to use less things and let them use their imaginations a lot more.”
So naturally when she started Urban Oreganics, Emily thought about how her commitment to the environment was going to play into her business.
Emily: “We package all of our products in glass instead of plastic, so that is very important to me. And then we ship in cardboard boxes with paper shred instead of bubble wrap. And on our website, we have a bunch of ideas of what you can do with your glass jars when they’re empty. I mean obviously you can always just recycle them. Unfortunately more and more cities are starting to not except glass recycling at all. And then even when they do, recycling shouldn’t be the first solution, it should be the last result. I think that recycling, you shouldn’t just rely on it as a solution for everything. It should be like, well, if I can’t get this package-free and I can’t use this packaging up in any other way then I’m going to recycle it instead. So we have a lot of ideas for using those jars. We even sell little kits on our website to help you repurchase those jars. So we sell like a kit that you can make a candle in your jar when it’s empty and another kit with the little labels so you can turn them into spice jars, things like that. So we’re always trying to come up with ideas for our customers, reuse those little things without it being like, oh, I have a ton of glass jars I’m holding on to for no reason because I don’t want to do anything with them, that kind of thing.”
Emily is a great example of how our priorities and the social causes we are committed to can become interwoven in our businesses. When you create your own business, you have control of that and you can make sure that your business 100% reflects who you are, which is one of the coolest things about entrepreneurship. But along with that also comes some big decisions and Emily was in the process of making one of those over the summer, when I interviewed her. At the time, she was thinking about hiring a company to help actually make her products. This was taking up a lot of her time so it would be great for her to free up some of that time to work on other aspects of her business, but it’s also an added expense. Now Emily likely has made a decision about this because it’s now months later, but I don’t think the actual decision is as important as is the thought process she went through to get there. This is something that so many of us have to weigh in our businesses, whether added costs are worth freeing up our time for other things, so here are Emily’s ideas on this subject.
Emily: “Right now production is our biggest hold up with everything. It takes a lot of time, it takes up a lot of space, it makes a mess. So it would be awesome to delegate that elsewhere. IT’s hard for me to give up that control, but we definitely have some more conversations to have with this company. But they seem like a really good fit and like a certified organic facility so all of our products, if they were made there, they would be certified organic through the USDA. Which right now they’re not because that certification process is so expensive for us, as a small business, to acquire. But if we had this company making the stuff, because they are already a certified facility, anything that goes through their facility is automatically certified and we can have that fancy little logo on our jars. It’s definitely going to be a bigger cost. But to me, I look at cost as more then just money. My time is a cost. My kids happiness is a cost, all that kind of thing. So I really try to look at things besides the monetary cost. And I think that that, although it’s going to monetarily cost us more to do it this way, like you said, it’s going to free up so much time and I’m hoping make us less stressed and happier and all that stuff, so it will be worth it.”
I’m going to put a link in the shownotes for the Urban Oreganics VIP group in Facebook or you can just search for it on there. That’s where Emily does her launch videos and there is also a special section on the website where she discounts some of her products for VIPs. So if you’re interested in Urban Oreganics, I recommend looking into that group. I’m so grateful to Emily for taking the time to talk with me for this episode.
So this is my third podcast episode telling stories about people who have built their own creative businesses and there are themes that are starting to emerge. One of them that is sticking out to me is that these three women started with an idea but they don’t know where that idea was going to take them. Mercedes Lyson in Episode 3 put up her first video on YouTube not knowing that it would leave to her having this thriving Patreon community today. Ashley Shelly Trotier in Episode 4 made her budget notebook for herself and added it to her baby shower invitation Etsy shop just to see what would happen, and now she sells several other products and the Ashley Shelly brand is her full-time business. And now Emily Silverstein, on maternity leave and wondering how she is going to balance being a mom with a crazy schedule as a store manager, just decides one day to put these skincare products that she’s been making on Etsy; now it’s her family’s sole income. They all started with that first thing not knowing where it would leave, not necessarily having a business plan in mind, but just having the faith in their products or their content and wanting to share that with others. Even if you just have inkling of a business idea and you can’t necessarily see where it’s going to lead, it might be worth it to take a chance, put yourself out there, and try. You never know where that first step might lead.
Thanks so much for listening today, and I’ll be back soon with another story.