Billy Taylor (co-founder of Pacifica) recounts the company's 15-year history: starting in their kitchen as a candle and fragrance business, expanding into perfumes, bath & body, color cosmetics and skin care. He describes an early success at gift trade shows that returned $100,000 in orders and emphasizes the brand's commitment to natural ingredients, environmental values, and family-oriented motivations. He also notes the SBA credit facility was essential for obtaining growth and working capital.
Chapters
Pacifica has been around for 15 years. We started as a candle company, as a fragrance company, gradually moved those concepts into personal perfumes, bath and body products, and now color cosmetics and skin care. We started Pacifica in the kitchen, took the concepts to a gift trade show in Seattle, San Francisco, came home with $100,000 worth of orders, and then had to figure out how to manufacture the products. We put a very strong emphasis on making fragrance products that are decent and don't utilize a lot of bad chemicals that are commonly utilized in that industry. And as we've moved into skin care and cosmetics and more personal items, we're very intense about the quality of the ingredients and utilizing natural ingredients to achieve the best possible you can with makeup. We couldn't have accomplished what we've accomplished over the last few years, which is essentially taking the Pacifica brand into new categories like beauty. Without the SBA credit facility, it was absolutely essential. It was also a very secure credit facility for Brooke and I to get growth capital, get working capital, and continue to grow our company. We started Pacifica because we loved ideas, and we loved being able to just do whatever our ideas were in the purest way and getting them out to consumers in the simplest, purest way. Today, that's still the best part of Pacifica for me, is the ideas, the concepts behind the brand, the names that we come up with for the products. Brooke is really the visionary for what Pacifica can be and can possibly be. I usually kind of help her with the architecture of building that out a little bit, but that's the best part, is working together creatively with my wife and driving the company from that creative point of view. But what's really important to Brooke and I about anything that we do is kind of why we're doing it. Our values and our values are really founded in taking care of the environment, taking good care of your kids, taking good care of the place where you live. So when we do Pacifica, everything that we do in Pacifica, we take those values into consideration. Sa. Sam.
