Kara Errickson won the AdvantageWest-VERVE business plan competition this spring. In six months, her company has taken off.

by Jess McCuan . photo by Matt Rose

In June, Kara Errickson’s startup, Skin Food Topical Nourishment, got one heck of a kickstart. She won our women’s business plan competition, sponsored by AdvantageWest and VERVE. That included a prize package of $10,000 in cash and services, with marketing help from Marilyn Ball of 12Twelve and business coaching from the Asheville nonprofit Mountain BizWorks. Errickson, whose product is an all-organic skin salve that comes in a novel recycled cardboard tube, was also our June cover girl. Her company got a publicity boost after the award and VERVE story, including a June write-up in the Asheville Citizen-Times.

And then the real work of running her startup began. Right away, local stores like the French Broad Food Co-op in downtown Asheville were on board. In her first week, she sold three cases of Skin Food there, and managers said customers were clamoring for more. Other local stores have signed up too, and now Skin Food is sold at Asheville shops like Black Dome Outfitters, Makeup at the Grove Arcade and Sensibilities Day Spa.

Errickson sponsored her brother in the Blue Ridge Breakaway, a Haywood County bike race, in August, and teamed up with Franzi Charen of Hip Replacements and the Asheville Grown Business Alliance to create special “Love Asheville” packaging for Skin Food.

Back in June, Kara and her husband Tyler Errickson drove to Atlanta to pitch Skin Food to Whole Foods Market. At first, the Erricksons were thrilled. Whole Foods agreed to sell her product at stores in the entire South region. They started gathering up cash to manufacture enough Skin Food to get thousands of tubes onto shelves by July.

But that relationship has proven complicated. After months of emails, phone calls and paperwork, Skin Food is still not sold at Whole Foods, though it was just accepted at Asheville’s Greenlife Grocery (bought by the chain last year). “We were finally admitted into the electronic accounting system and told that we are now allowed to have our reps contact the individual stores. Ha!,” Errickson wrote in an email this summer. “Of course, we don’t have reps…the entire intake process is bulky and inefficient.” She still has hope, but is disappointed that Whole Foods seems ill-equipped to deal with small, independent manufacturers.

Earth Fare to the rescue. The Asheville-based organic supermarket chain gave Errickson her first big opportunity, starting with four Asheville-area stores. In October, Earth Fare will sell Skin Food in all 25 of its locations in six states. That means the Erricksons, along with friend and investor Paul Heathman, will spend a lot more hours in the Blue Ridge Food Ventures natural products room, an AdvantageWest-sponsored space on the A-B Tech campus. Since the company hasn’t officially hired employees yet, the trio (and other friends they can rope in) will be rolling labels and filling tubes by hand.

By late September, Errickson had sold a grand total of around 1,000 tubes of Skin Food Topical Nourishment. She expects that number to balloon this month as the product rolls out regionally in Earth Fare. We hope she’s right.

For more info, check out www.skinfoodtopicalnourishment.com or follow Skin Food Topical Nourishment on Facebook.