Apotheke's Founder Story: Soap, Struggle, and Scale

When and how did your brand launch?

I like to say Apotheke found me, not the other way around. It started in 2010, in my kitchen in Brooklyn, no business plan, no funding, no co-founder on paper. My dad was sick, I'd just lost my job and I didn't have health insurance. A friend told me, "You need therapy or a hobby", I couldn't afford the first one, so I ordered a soap-making kit instead.

I sold my first bars at the Brooklyn Flea. That flea market was my workplace before I had a real one, and those vendors were my coworkers. My husband, Sebastian, was there with me almost from the start, and by 2014 he came on full-time to run production. 

What was the motivation behind starting the brand?

Honestly, it wasn't a market gap I'd spotted or a whitespace I'd mapped out, it was personal. I needed a way to cope that didn't cost anything, and soap-making gave me that. What kept me going was realizing how much scent means to people. It's tied to memory in a way almost nothing else is; the smell of your childhood kitchen, a candle burning during a hard year. I wanted to make that kind of self-care accessible, not the version where it's an all-day spa retreat you can't afford the time for. Lighting a candle, using a nice bar of soap, those small moments add up, and I wanted to be the one making them possible for people who don't think they have room for anything bigger.

What challenges did you face early on, and how did you overcome them?

The biggest one arrived before I was ready for it. An executive from West Elm found my booth at the Brooklyn Flea and placed a big wholesale order and I had no factory, no staff, nothing to fill it with. I said yes anyway and figured it out after. That became the pattern for years: say yes, then build the plane while flying it.

There was also a moment that scared me straight. We were at a festival and saw an older woman selling soap at a folding table, and Sebastian said, half-joking, "If you don't do this right, that'll be you in thirty years." It landed hard. I didn't want to still be at a flea market table decades later, I wanted a business. That's when I got serious about wholesaling, about testing everything properly, about treating this like a company instead of a side hustle.

The other real challenge, one that took longer to work through, was learning to manage people. Dreaming up new products and figuring things out myself has always come naturally to me. Leading a team; setting boundaries, communicating clearly, not taking things personally and that was a real learning curve, and honestly still is some days.

What was the first major breakthrough or milestone in your brand's journey?

Getting into the Brooklyn Flea in the first place was huge! It was notoriously hard to crack. But the real turning point was that West Elm order. The person who placed it turned out to be Jim Brett, the former CEO of West Elm, who'd been opening a concept store and wanted makers involved. Within about a week I had a purchase order that made me think, "I might actually need QuickBooks now." That was the moment Apotheke stopped being something I did on the side and became a company.

Have you ever pivoted or changed direction?

A few times, and each one grew out of what customers actually asked for rather than a plan I set out to execute. Soap turned into candles because people kept asking, and candles became the heart of the business, soap is the story of who we are, but candles are what we actually make hundreds of thousands of now. We also pivoted from being a single-channel maker to a genuinely diversified company: direct-to-consumer, wholesale to over 500 retailers, restaurant and hospitality programs, private label, brand collaborations, influencer partnerships. And physically, we outgrew space after space; a 400-square-foot former notebook factory in Bed-Stuy, then Coffey Street in Red Hook, then our current 16,000-square-foot factory on Van Brunt Street. Each move forced us to rethink how we operated, not just where.

What does your brand look like today?

We're an eight-figure business, still fully bootstrapped, still founder-owned, still handmade and small-batch even at this scale. We wholesale to more than 500 retail doors; Nordstrom, J.Crew, Macy's, bluemercury, Crate & Barrel, and Target among them, alongside our own direct-to-consumer site. We operate out of our 16,000-square-foot factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with two retail stores: our original flagship built right into the factory, and a second location we opened in Rockefeller Center in October 2022. We also run APOTHEKE Studio, where people come pour their own candles or blend their own fragrance, which has become a real part of who we are beyond the product itself.

What personal story or value has been central to your brand's success?

That moment with Sebastian at the festival never left me, it's the reason I stopped treating this as a hobby and started treating it as a business worth protecting. And the belief that self-care doesn't have to be a luxury reserved for people with time and money to spare has shaped every product decision since. I'm also self-taught in all of this and never worked in fragrance before I started mixing oils in my kitchen, and I think that's exactly why I've never been afraid to say yes to something before I knew how to do it. I learned early that growth doesn't happen alone, either. Outsourcing the parts of the job I'm not good at, and leaning on people who are, has made me a better leader than trying to hold onto everything myself ever did.

Is there anything else that sets your brand apart or makes your journey unique?

We've built a business model that's genuinely diverse rather than betting on one channel; D2C, wholesale, hospitality, private label, collaborations. Some of our collaborations have taught me the most: we spent 18 months developing a Shake Shack candle that captured the actual smell of their original Madison Square Park location, sold out in 24 hours, and proved that an "elevated luxury fragrance company" could also have a sense of humor. We've built a signature scent for J.Crew, partnered with Plant Shed and the New York Botanical Garden, and given back consistently; donating thousands of pounds of soap to the Bowery Mission, and partnering with the Red Hook Art Project, Autism Tomorrow, Your Mom Cares, and Cora Dance. And this has always been a family business in the truest sense: Sebastian runs production, my kids grew up around the factory, and the name itself came from a note an essential oils supplier used to write to me, "to my little Brooklyn apothecary."