Interview with Elissa Klaver, happiness and inspiration creator
Q: How did you get involved in this business?
A: When our second son passed away, my husband, Jerell, and I took a deep look at our family and covered our entire basement with paper. We wrote down what we loved, what we disliked, what we wanted to do, didn’t want to do and our dreams. We knew that we couldn’t go back to our previous jobs. So out of much love and hard work, we began our concept for Salus. We built our entire business from just the two of us with a lot of love and support to more than 30 employees learning as we grow.
Q: What distinguishes you from other businesses in your category?
A: Half of our stores can best be described as Build-A-Bear meets Bath & Body Works meets Lush. It’s pretty awesome, as we handcrafted our own products with an innovative approach to natural body care. Our customers select from a wide variety of unscented natural body care products and choose how they want them to be scented with our extensive line of more than 200 premium fragrances and essential oils. Then customers watch our Suds Team whip up their body care fresh to order. The other half of our stores are devoted to Bath Bombs and Shower Bombs. We make more than 200 types of Bath Bombs alone. We like to joke about how we are the biggest Bath Bomb company you have never heard of, and we are working to get our name and products out everywhere.
Q: What do you like best about your line of work?
A: We truly love and are thankful for Salus and what we do. Our success is because we have wonderful employees who take pride in making all of our bath goodies and customers who love our products. It’s really simple: What we do is make people smell great and their skin soft.
Q: What is your business’ biggest challenge?
A: We like to think of us having four businesses: retail stores, Internet, wholesale, and private label. So we get pulled in a lot of different business directions and we have a hard time keeping up with product demands. We have a backlog of more than 500,000 Bath Bombs to make, and we are expecting this to at least double. So it’s the old catch-22 for a small business as we have to get creative to meet production demands, while paying for business growth.
Q: Something people might be surprised to learn about you or your business:
A: Our new customers are always surprised just how many Bath Bombs we make at Salus, that we actually make our own products, and that we strive to source our ingredients locally. We like to joke how once you try our bath goodies, you will be hooked for life, because it’s true!
Profile
Business: Salus Bath & Body
Address: 9325 Dorchester St., Suite F-123, Highlands Ranch
Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday through Sunday
Founded: 2005
Contact: 720-465-9455,
Employees: 30
