Halifax entrepreneurs Ariel Gough and Edwina Govindsamy wanted to make it clear that women can be both fragrant and empowered.
So, the initial advertising campaign for their perfumes featured the first Black flight commander in the Canadian Armed Forces, a carpenter who has more than 15,000 followers on social media and a data analytics specialist at a Fortune 500 company.
“We’ve all seen those horrible perfume ads where there’s a girl riding on a horse in a ball gown. Whose life is that? That’s not my life,” Gough said.
“My co-founder and I, we always call ourselves beauty enthusiasts because we buy way too many skin-care products and makeup, and we buy it because it makes us feel good. We love ourselves. It’s not that we want to change who we are, it’s that it makes us feel even better on any given day.
“The message, often, that the beauty industry portrays is that you’re doing it for someone else, you’re doing it for the guy that you want to attract, or doing it for outer beauty, when that’s not at all the message we want to convey. It’s about feeling the best version of yourself and being able to achieve your dreams and change the world in some way.”
Gough and Govindsamy, who both live in Halifax, met in 2015 and bonded over a love of entrepreneurship. They knew they wanted to start a business together and, over weekly brainstorming sessions, considered coffee mugs, embroidered pillows and wireless charging, “but someone told us that we were about 10 years behind on that.”
“Finally, in a random conversation . . . Edwina said, ‘Why don’t we try fragrance?’ and I said, ‘Let’s do it. How hard can that be?’ Safe to say, it’s been challenging, but it’s been fun and a learning experience.”
Their company, called Bailly, was started in 2018, shipping through an e-commerce site and with placement at two Halifax salons.
Today, they’re in 20 salons across the country, launching on Well.ca and, as of Friday, their six scents will be in the Tantallon, Mill Cove, Russell Lake and Clayton Park locations of Sobeys.
“The great thing about a lot of the new Sobeys stores is they have new health and wellness concepts right in store, and they’re very distinct from the rest of the store. Sobeys is putting more of an emphasis on beauty, wellness and health products, so that’s why we think it’s such a great expansion . . . especially because of COVID. People are looking for safer products and they’re more conscious of their health,” Gough said.
“We were selling between 50 and 100 per month, and now we’re going to 500-700 per month.”
Bailly, named for an impact crater on the Moon — “a fitting metaphor for women who, one by one, are making a positive impact in their communities” — works with a woman-owned perfumer in New York who sends the fragrances to Halifax. Gough and Govindsamy evaluate them, and the ones chosen are subsequently bottled and packaged in Halifax.
“The biggest challenge for us was, after we dove into the fragrance industry, we quickly realized that a lot of ingredients in perfume can be irritants and they can trigger allergies, migraines, asthma symptoms,” said Gough.
“My mom has a severe fragrance sensitivity, so we knew we wanted to do it better because I saw what she went through when I was growing up, and I wanted to find a product that was healthier for people to use.”
COVID initially disrupted Bailly’s supply chains, making it difficult to get inventory into the country and delaying shipping from Halifax to customers across the country.
“But we’ve mostly ironed out our supply chain issues. We actually saw a slight increase in our business because people are more interested in purchasing online.”
With a revenue goal of $500,000 for fiscal 2021, the two businesswomen think they’ll be in a couple more Sobeys outlets within a month, hopefully providing a springboard into stores across Atlantic Canada and then the rest of the country.
“It’s our first step into grocery so we’re starting small to see how it goes. If it goes well, then I think the sky is the limit.”