Honey Pot Founder Merged Spirituality Of Her Company With Business

Source: Photo Courtesy of Honey Pot Co. / Honey Pot Co.

With feminine hygiene companies increasingly in the news for dangerous chemicals in their products, childbirth, fibroids, and fertility issues being of particular concern for Black women, we need to be more vigilant about what we put in and on our bodies. MadameNoire spoke to Beatrice Feliu-Espada, the founder of the all natural feminine care company Honey Pot, about the origins of her products, the challenges of doing business and remarkable testimonies from women and girls whose lives have been made better because of Honey Pot. 

MN: What inspired you to launch Honey Pot?

Beatrice Feliu-Espada: Back in 2012, I suffered from an almost year-long bacterial vaginosis infection and literally nothing that I could do or would do would make it go away because my pH was just all the way off. And around the same time, I had just initiated into my religion. I practice Santeria. And a lot’s going on when all those things happen. One night, a couple months after I got back from Cuba, I was sleeping and I had a dream. You know how you have a dream right before you wake up in the morning. It was ultra fresh and it was real. I was sitting down with one of my ancestors and we were talking about my problems and she was like ‘I have a list of ingredients for you.’ She said, ‘I’m going to make sure you remember this when you wake up. So don’t worry about it.’ And she starts spatting off these ingredients. And literally, I woke up, I remembered it, I wrote it down,  I made it and it worked.

I felt like it was a gift from the other side.  Somebody gifts you your life’s work, you don’t just walk away from it.

MN: She gave you the ingredients for the wash?

BFE: She gave me the ingredients for this wash. And since then, we’ve added a few things, we’ve taken some things out but the base of it is the same, it’s from that dream. And as we grew the line and expanded it, I realized that the mission needed to change from just being a clean wash company to being a clean feminine hygiene company. So that’s why you see us doing all these amazing things. We’ve got a lot launching by the end of the year. So it’s a really beautiful time and things are growing and escalating.

We are also launching probiotics which are vaginal focused. We have one called habitual-which is for everyday use, if you don’t have issues. One will be called “Back on Tract,” which will be for UTI health and then we’ll have one called “Resistance” which will have garlic as the yeast fighter. We also have a deodorant spray.

MN: This product line came from a very spiritual place and then you had to incorporate the business aspect of it, have there been challenges merging the two?

BFE: There are always challenges merging the two but it means a lot to me that I develop products that are clean. I was just in Israel seeing how tampons are made. How do you process your cotton? I want to see the machines? The cotton is chlorine free, pesticide free. Later, I go to Taiwan. Same thing with the manufacturers there. When I’m bringing on a new line, the process means a lot to me. Keeping the ingredient decks clean is the spiritual element for me. Even if it costs us more to make it, I don’t give a sh*t. All I care about is that when you put it on your body or in your body or near your body, my products are not going to affect you negatively.

And these things can’t work for everybody. Everything isn’t for everybody. Some women are going to use this and they’re going to get irritated and I’m fully aware of that but it’s few and far between. There will always be a spiritual element to this product line because it came from nothing. I didn’t come from companies that went through acquisitions. I came from a place where this came from nothing and now it’s turning into something. And for me, I never forget that. As long as I own this company, there’s always going to be a spiritual element to it.

MN: Can you tell me about the process of getting into Target?

BFE: Yeah that was dope. We had been in Whole Foods, just kind of cruising along. We were doing our online business. And one day an email just pops up from the Target buyer, at that time. And she said, ‘I heard about your products and I’d love to talk to you.’ I’ve been in the world of food brokers and I’ve also been a sales manager. I’ve been in the world of consumer packaged goods. So I know those things don’t happen every day. Typically, it’s the other way around. I got back to her and she said, she was at her hairdresser, she has locs, and she had just gotten the job at Target and she was talking about how she wanted to clean up the feminine hygiene aisle. And she really did, she did a beautiful job. She’s since moved on from being that buyer but she did an amazing job championing for the natural brands that are on that shelf. So she hit us up. We had a meeting and she said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re a young company and the things I’m going to ask you to do are going to be really hard.’ And she was not lying. The easy part is getting the yes from a retailer. The hard part is ‘Ok, I’ve got the yes, now I’ve got to go find a million dollars out of nowhere.’ And that’s not even an exaggeration.

MN: That’s surprising.

BFE: Why?

MN: Well, I would think that they would just take care of that.

BFE: No. That’s not how retail works. Which nobody tells you this sh*t. Retail doesn’t work that way. The retailer is only there to say ‘Yes, you can put your four skews on my shelf.’ But typically when you’re going to go into retail, you’ve actually done the work, you’ve raised your capital, you know what stores you’re going to go into. You know how to do projection planning. You’ve hired the brokers. For us, it didn’t work like that. It went the other way around. Like she told me, ‘I’m going to ask you to do things that you cannot do. The average person is not going to be able to do this.’

But I looked her in the face and I said, ‘Just tell me what you need and I’m going to get it done.’ Because I’m just crazy. Getting into Target, that was the most desperate place that I have ever been in my entire life. At that time, we were still making Honey Pot in our kitchen at our office. But when you go into a big retailer, you can’t do that anymore. So when you go from making it yourself to going into contract manufacturing, it’s literally night and day. You can’t just go to a contract manufacturer and say make me 5,000 bottles. That’s going to cost you $8 a bottle. You have to go to them and at minimum order 50,000 bottles. So Target took four skews, which meant that I had to order at least 200,000 bottles in order for me to get to dollar amount so I could be able to make money. If I’m buying this for $3, I have to sell it to Target for $6 and Target’s got to sell it for $9. If I was just selling it on my website, I could buy it for $3 and sell it for $9. But you can’t do that when you go into retail. It’s a margins game. Pennies f*cking matter. So you set up these deals with contract manufacturers and they’re like, ‘B*tch, I don’t know you. You can’t have a deal. You’ve got to pay for this before it ships.’ That’s the way it is. You have to find the money because you have to put down a deposit. But you’re talking about over half a million dollars and this sh*t has to come from nowhere. I was lucky because my business partner, brother Simon Gray, used to have his own accounting practice, so he had connections to people with money. But just because you have connections to people with money doesn’t mean those people are going to give you that money. Simon put in money. My family put in money. We had three or four investors. But every time we had to put down a deposit, I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat because we didn’t know where it was going to come from.

MN: And if you don’t get it done in a certain time frame, then it’s just done?

BFE: If you don’t get it done in a certain time frame because when you’re dealing with manufacturers, what are you dealing with? You’re dealing with Chinese manufacturers. And in Asian cultures, they have holidays. And their holiday is not like our holiday. Nobody works in February. These cultures take their holiday seriously. Manufacturing does not happen in the month of February. It was crazy. It was very humbling and I will never forget that ever. Raising money is hard, working with contract manufacturers is hard and I was still working a full-time job. I’ve only done Honey Pot full time for almost two years.

MN: So you started in 2012, when did Target reach out?

BFE: We started in 2012, but we didn’t launch until 2014, at the Bronner Brothers’ hair show in February. We’ve been around for four years but not to the general public. Those first two years were just testing on friends. Like, ‘Hey can you try this? Can you put this on your vagina? It’s in a pickle jar but it’ll be fine.’ Seriously, that was the vibe. I still have the first jar of Honey Pot and it’s in a salsa jar. I swear to you. So Target reached out in 2016. We launched in Target in 2017 and we got our pads in at the end of 2017, in like Q4 and our panty liners are our best sellers. They sell too fast. They’re like gold.

Source: Honey Pot Co. / Honey Pot Co.

MN: What do you think it is about the panty liners specifically?

BFE: It’s the herbs. Because you can wear panty liners any day. You put it on and it’s like an air conditioner for your vagina. You feel the mint and you feel the lavender. It’s amazing.

We started with the wash because that’s the most important thing. You do that every day or I hope you do. And it’s the same as using beautiful skincare on your face or eating well. And then the wipes, in support of that and the menstrual pads because you’re bleeding every month. I just want to develop products for whatever the scenario is. So tampons are a big deal for us. The reason I started off with pads is because I’m still a wholehearted believer in free bleeding. Because women don’t necessarily know how to use a tampon properly. I meet so many women who go to sleep with a tampon in. It’s like, ‘B*tch, your arms might need to be cut off.’ Like, seriously. There is a high fashion model. She has these beautiful gold titanium legs now but she kept her tampon in too long. And the way that toxic shock works is it feels like cold symptoms. So you think you have a cold. ‘You’re like let me just lay down, eat some soup. See what happens.’ But by that time two, three days later your blood is toxic and you can die. They check your blood, it’s probably very acidic when it’s supposed to be alkaline. And they say, ‘We’re going to have to cut off your arms and legs or you’re going to die.’

So for that reason, I believe in free bleeding and a tampon in scenarios when you just need a tampon. I’m not in this business just for the money. The money is a f*cking byproduct of what I do. If I am successful financially that means that  I am a success. But for me, if I am successful making products that work, that people can give a testimony to, that is success. And there’s not enough education and know how around using tampons. So that is why I did not want to launch tampons first. I would have made a f*ck ton more money by now but it wasn’t true to what I believed in.

MN: Also, cultural. Black women…tampons are for when you’re like grown grown.

BFE: Listen! Our moms are like, ‘You’re putting something in your vagina? No ma’am. You’re not putting anything up there. Nothing goes up there.’ We couldn’t even put red lipstick on or nail polish. So you’re not putting a tampon in. But that’s a cultural thing for us.

Black women buy my products 220 percent more than anybody else. But that’s because we’re in the wash and wipe world. Black and Latina women use feminine wash 220 percent more in America. We’ve been taught that you shouldn’t use anything to wash your vagina. Which goes into the conversation about your vagina being a self-cleaning oven. And it is but that’s inside your body. That’s not the vulva. So culturally, we were taught to wash ourselves.

MN: In some dangerous ways sometimes.

BFE: My mother even thought that she should douche.

MN: Mine too.

BFE: We’re a Black-owned company and so that’s coming out in the forefront. You’d be surprised how I get questions. I had a big known brand, huge brand that I was talking to and he asks me, ‘Is this product only for Black women?’ It was seriously a real question.

MN: Can you speak to the other challenges of operating as a Black business?

BFE: Hell yeah. Raising money. To walk into a room and sit down with a man or woman that does not look like you, you’re already three steps back. Then you’re talking to a man because most investors are men–I mean, I had investors that I had pitched to that found out that Richelieu Dennis was investing in Honey Pot, they had told me a year before, ‘Nah, you guys aren’t where we need you to be.’ Then I get to the threshold and I go back and I’m like ‘Boom. Made it. What are we doing?’ And they’ll say, ‘Now, we’ve raised that threshold.’ But then they heard I was a part of the New Voices Fund and they’ll say, ‘We really want to come in on this round.’ So there are a lot of challenges and it’s not just color driven or the fact that you’re a woman. It’s the fact of numbers and business. It’s just a hard business to be in because all that you’ll ever need is money because all you’re doing is buying products to sell products. You can’t sit down with an investor unless you can speak their language. That’s something that Black women or women who are in business and need to raise capital need to know. If you can’t sit down and build an investor deck. If you can’t say, I need to get to x amount of dollars, you need to level up.

Source: Honey Pot Co. / Honey Pot Co.

MN: What are some of the benefits of using Honey Pot products?

A lot of women say that our pads lessen their menstrual cramps. Your vagina is a mucous membrane so it’s almost like you took herbs by mouth. Your vagina is like another mouth when you think about it. The herbs are being absorbed by that mouth and going into your body. And then, my period used to be seven days, my period is now four. Which is what it’s supposed to be. We’re not supposed to bleed like that.

MN: So I know you’ve probably heard the conversation about Black women and fibroids. Are you talking or thinking about anything to address that because there are a lot of women who don’t want to have surgery.

BFE: I feel like Honey Pot pads are addressing that. When you’re talking about fibroids. A lot goes into fibroids. I’ll give you a perfect example. I was in a relationship that I did not want to be in and I was living with an untruth inside of me. When I went to the doctor, they said, ‘Your thyroid’s messed up.’ Your thyroid’s messed up because you’re not speaking your truth. You’re holding it in. Because there’s something you need to say that you’re not saying. Fibroids are like that too. There are the emotional things. There are the things that we eat. If you’re eating chicken every day, you’re eating out all the time and drinking milk–and look, I’m vegetarian/vegan most of my life and then there are some days when I’m like, ‘Hmm, I’m in another country and that looks good.’ So I’m not being judgmental but we as women have to be conscientious of what we eat of what we allow inside our body, what you allow on your brain. The happiness or unhappiness that you allow in your life, all of that when you’re talking about fibroids. There are levels to that sh*t. But if I develop beautiful products for you to use on your vagina, that’s helping because these herbs are going inside your body every time you use them. So that’s my way of helping. Also, we’re developing ways to educate the consumer. We’re working on a podcast and things for IGTV and YouTube so that’s going to be a part of the conversation. I’m thinking about herbs and supplements that I can create but those things will take time.

MN: What are some of the best testimonials that have stood out to you from people who use your product?

BFE: One of the best testimonials I got, the lady wrote a letter. She had BV for years for like 5 years. And she said literally within a week into using Honey Pot, she never got it again. I’ve had women who use the pads say they had these terrible, terrible cramps and to the point where they can’t go to work. The herbs in the pads have helped them so much that they don’t have to do that. When we first got started, I had developed a line for kids, it was a wash for young girls. (I made the sensitive wash that same formula so a baby could still use it.) But one of the ladies I got to try my products, every time she would go to wash her daughter’s vagina, she wouldn’t want her to do it because she was like, ‘Mommy, it itches. It hurts.’ And so she started using Honey Pot and she would be happy for her mom to use it.

Have you heard of vaginismus? It’s when your vagina is at risk of closing. I had a young girl, she couldn’t have been any more than four. She had that and her mom found Honey Pot. She found it at Bronner’s. And she went to the doctor and the doctor said, ‘I don’t know what you’re using but whatever you’re using, her hole is opening up.’ And the only thing she was using was Honey Pot. So it’s been some beautiful stories over the years.

You can learn more about the Honey Pot Co., here.