Karen's Body Beautiful
by Mia Narell
"OCTYLDODECANOL, Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Isopropyl Stearate, Myristyl Myristate, Cetyl Alcohol": these are just the first few ingredients in the hand lotion I was given by my doctor last week. I only thought to check the ingredients list (lengthy thing that it is) after recently interviewing Karen Tappin Saunderson of Karen's Body Beautiful. No one is a bigger advocate for reading ingredients lists than Karen, who makes her own line of soaps and body products for her store on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill. She has good reason to be: the back of the bottle of her hand lotion makes for pretty easy reading: "Purified Water, Olive Oil, Vegetable Glycerin, Vegetable Wax, Aloe Vera Fragrance and/or Essential Oil & Vitamin E."
Karen's career has been a winding one, although she's a life-long entrepreneur. She started her first business at the age of 17 during her freshman year of college. Under the name "Karen's Delicious Deliveries," she started a mail-order business selling college care packages. After graduation, she took a job on Wall Street, but kept Delicious Deliveries going on the side, with Deliveries evolving into upscale food products. Unhappy on Wall Street, she later became a teacher in the New York Public Schools. "I loved teaching, but I always thought I'd like to be an entrepreneur full-time, eventually," she told me.
On Mother's Day of 2003 she decided to start including pampering products for skin and body in the Delicious packages. It was intended as a special gift targeted to people who wanted to give their mothers' a little something special. But branching into those products for skin and body made Karen realize that a lot of the products on the market weren't good for you, in fact, some were even carcinogenic. Karen and her husband, also a teacher, decided to take the summer of 2003 to experiment with making their own soaps and body products, with natural ingredients, and by the time they went back to school in the fall, they felt they had some great products to sell. In November of 2003, they signed a lease on their first shop on the corner of Clinton and Myrtle. That store opened in February of 2004 and Karen has been a full-time entrepreneur ever since.
Karen's products now include items for hair, face and body; and she carries products for women and men. She makes all the products in the kitchen on the premises of the store, and everything is made of 94-100% natural ingredients. She does a large part of her business on the internet, but the shelves of the Myrtle Ave. store are well-stocked with things like olive oil body lotion and hibiscus hair nectar.
When I asked Karen why she chose to open her store in Clinton Hill (she lives nearby in Bed Stuy), she responded by praising the community for taking an active role in its health and environment. "The customers appreciate my products," she said. "This is not a neighborhood where people just sit back and let things happen. People are educated and informed and take responsibility." When I asked her what challenges she sees to our community's mental and physical health, Karen left me (and Hill readers) with a reminder to continue to read labels: "We can't trust that everything being sold is good for our bodies. That applies to the food we eat and the products we put on our skin."