BEE PURE PRODUCTS
I started keeping bees about four years ago after doing a beekeeping course with my husband. Always having had a love of animals and nature since I was a child this evolved into an awareness of our impact on the planet, ecology and the environment. I am old enough to have had grandparents who lived through rationing and I inherited a deep aversion of waste from them! (does anyone else remember putting the butter wrapper into the fridge to use that last smidgeon to grease a baking tray?)
When I found myself with a bit of surplus beeswax, I started experimenting with natural skin balms and soap-making. Fast-forward three years, a huge learning curve where I learned the legalities of selling skin products (an expensive minefield to navigate), brilliant friends and family (who all received homemade birthday and Christmas hampers) urging me to sell my products and lots of googling about how to run a website, here I am.
I started my Etsy shop on my phone during a girls weekend away in 2017 and I am still grateful to those wonderful girls for being my first customers and giving me honest feedback to enable me to improve.
I sell beeswax soaps, skin balms, lip balm, body butter, natural deodorants, conditioning shampoo bars, beeswax food wraps and furniture polish and sometimes, when I can be bothered to make them, bath bombs. Occasionally I sell honey but as novice beekeepers we mostly leave that for the bees as we’re never sure how much to take. I buy in my beeswax now as I don’t have the volume and it’s easier to stick with one supplier for safety testing and other regulations. Everything is beeswax-based and my ethos is all about nature, organic skin care and being plastic-free. Most of my products are presented in cosmetics-grade cardboard packaging which is compostable on any back garden wormery or compost, with the exception of the skin balms and furniture polish which are also available in glass jars with aluminium lids. I am a plastic-free business, using only compostable tape and packaging and carefully choose the companies I source my supplies from. For example, my beeswax wraps use only Fairtrade cotton and I reuse packaging wherever I can.
I still work full time in my day job, which makes it quite a challenge to keep up with expanding my hobby/business and keeping it manageable with all the other spinning plates in my life. I’m not of short ideas; just time! I love doing craft fairs because it gives me the opportunity to see people touching, smelling and testing the soaps and products and to chat about mutual interests. I’m often at The Mart in East Linton and the North Berwick Artisan Fair. Earlier this year, I was immensely proud and indescribably excited to win a ‘commended’ award in the 2020 Beauty Shortlist awards for my lip balm. It is my bestselling product and it was the year of eco-beauty so I thought I’d give it a try  Hopefully this year I will also attain Cruelty-Free International status: I’m in the latter stages of a reassuringly rigorous assessment process. My whole life I’ve been careful to check for the leaping bunny logo on products before I buy and it would just make my year to have that on mine!
Thank you for reading. You can find me here:

www.beepure.scot
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BeePureProducts
bee_pure_ (intagram/Twitter)