BRIGHT IDEAS
words by Camilla H. Tjellesen
a natural success
Danish businesswoman and former nurse Charlotte Vøhtz first started mixing up all-natural beauty products to cure her daughter’s painful skin allergies. Now 10 years and 100 products later, organic beauty is big news and her UK-based company Green People is hitting the supermarkets
Charlotte Vøhtz’s organic products worked
wonders on her daughter Sandra’s eczema
Want to know where to find the breaks, learn your first moves or just sink a few beers in Europe’s surf capital? We gathered the local lowdown from three surfers who know the territory
It was 1957 when Peter Viertel, an American film producer, brought the ancient sport of surfing to France. In Biarritz to make the movie of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, he couldn’t help but notice the perfect swell lines forming off the town beach. As the legend has it, Viertel immediately sent to California for his board and in the process changed the history of the resort town.
After Viertel’s discovery, surfers were quick to scout out the many surfable waves around Biarritz: from the mouth of the Gironde river to south of the Landes region. Fifty years on, Biarritz is the undisputed European capital of surf. Whether it’s slow wavelets for beginners or monstrous offshore reefs for the pros, the area has something for everyone. Here Sterling asks three surfers where to head when you’re in town with your board.
In a converted country barn in Billingshurst near London Gatwick, Charlotte Vøhtz’s 15 employees are busy packing parcels of organic beauty products. Deliveries of aloe vera shampoo, mineral lipsticks and Vøhtz’s best-selling mandarin, orange and myrrh toothpaste will soon be winging their way to addresses all over the UK and beyond. The atmosphere is relaxed although it’s clearly a busy day.
“We’re a bit like a family here. It’s very important for us to have fun and also to have a good workplace relationship with each other. I want everyone to be happy while they’re at work,” says Vøhtz. This very Danish attitude towards business is typical of the caring philosophy behind Green People, the company that Vøhtz began in an attempt to improve her own daughter’s eczema condition.
Vøhtz moved to England 13 years ago from the north of Zealand in Denmark, with her husband and daughter Sandra. They were looking for a change of scenery and to explore a different part of the world. At the time Sandra, then two years old, was suffering from a multitude of skin allergies and severe eczema. Vøhtz says she tried everything to stop Sandra’s itching, but the treatments always seemed to produce allergic reactions. Even the so-called natural products were no good.
"I’m from a family where organic products and alternative healthcare were on the agenda. My mother used seaweed as a body scrub and my grandmother had carrots and raisins on the table instead of cake"
“I met this professor in herbal medicine who thought that Sandra was a victim of our polluted world,” says Vøhtz. “Today there are man-made chemicals in everything and it’s really difficult to avoid them. He told me that that’s why so many children are born with allergies these days. So I tried to find natural and organic products that I could use on Sandra, but back then there wasn’t much of that sort of thing around.”
Vøhtz took matters into her own hands and
started making her own 100% natural and organic
products. With 11 years’ experience in nursing and
training in pharmacology, acupuncture and herbal
medicine, she had all the basic knowledge she
needed to be able to create such products. She also
went back to basics, drawing on the beauty tips of
her mother and grandmother. “I’m from a family
where organic products and alternative healthcare
were always on the women’s agenda. My mother
used seaweed as a body scrub and my grandmother
always had healthy grated carrot and raisins in
lemon juice on the table instead of cake.”
Vøhtz began treating Sandra with her own products. Among the early treatments she created, she had particular success with a hawthorne and artichoke formula containing some 16 herbs. At the same time, she eliminated all chemical-based products in their home. Finally Sandra stopped scratching and her allergies and eczema cleared up. Vøhtz’s experiment had worked, and she began to look at ways of marketing her xreatments.
She set up Green People from her home in Horsham, selling the products by mail order and later expanding to online sales. Next, after considerable perseverance, she managed to get her goods on the shelves of health shops across the UK. “I kept bringing my products into the local health store in Horsham to show the owner what I had to offer. One day, when I stopped by as usual, he promised that the next time I came in, he’d buy something. As he didn’t say when that next time had to be, I went for a walk around town and came back. And then he had to stand by his word,” she says with a big laugh. That first order was for £120 (€168).
The company has since gone from strength to strength and has now reached a turnover of £3m (€4.2m). Today, Vøhtz sells her products in more than 500 shops UK-wide, online and – a major coup – she’s also working with the upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose.
The majority of products made by Green People
include fairly-traded ingredients and are certified
organic. This is no mean feat, as the UK organic
certification standards are known to be among the
strictest in the world.
“A lot of products are described as natural
and organic without actually being so,” Vøhtz
explains. “A product can be called natural when in
fact it only has to contain 1% natural ingredients.
Most traditional beauty products contain up
to 70% water and are filled with chemicals and
synthetic ingredients. At Green People we have
worked very hard to find all the ingredients for
our products in an organic version.”
Charlotte Vøhtz is clearly passionate about
her business, having worked hard to create
products that don’t have anything to hide in their
list of ingredients. But she also stands up for
her faith in organic and ethical living in other
aspects of the business: “I try to run my company
in a green and ethical way, so that everything that
we use, from furniture and paint to the Microbanfree fridge are natural and eco-friendly. It can be
really difficult to live up to our organic lifestyle
ideals, but we love the challenge and we always try
our level best to do so.”
Charlotte Vøhtz’s new book Naturally Gorgeous: Essential Health and Beauty Secrets is out now on Ebury Press, £9.99 (approx. €14).
For more about the company and to order
products, see www.greenpeople.co.uk
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