When Shantaria Richardson launched Saprivah at the end of April, the company
was new. The products behind it were not.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Richardson about the Loudoun-based personal-care business she had been building for roughly four months. What interested me was that she was already thinking about a problem many businesses encounter much later: how much of the company should continue to depend on the founder?
That question emerged only after years spent solving a much more personal problem.
“All through my life, I have really, really dry skin,” Richardson told me. Store-bought lotions rarely provided the lasting moisture she wanted, so about a decade ago she began researching how to make body butter herself.
One experiment led to another. Eventually, Richardson was making much of what she used on her own skin and hair. Friends repeatedly suggested that she sell the products, and earlier this year, she decided to find out whether there was a business there.
The first customer was the founder
Richardson has spent 30 years working in government and currently works as an IT leader. Saprivah is a business she is building alongside that career, but the product development started long before there was a company.
Her body butters grew from her search for moisture that lasted without leaving her skin feeling excessively greasy.
“The body butters are moisturizing but not greasy,” she said.
Richardson also began experimenting with what she calls functional scents, essential-oil combinations intended to serve a purpose beyond fragrance. Later, after locking her hair, she encountered another problem: conventional shampoos and conditioners could leave residue that was difficult to rinse away. She developed a scalp polish using ingredients including brown sugar, rosemary, mint and lavender.
“Every single product that I have developed was originally developed for me,” Richardson said.
Richardson was not initially searching for an industry in which to start a company. She was repeatedly encountering problems in her own routines and experimenting with solutions.
That does not mean experiencing a problem automatically creates a viable business. The next question is whether enough other people recognize the same problem strongly enough to pay for a solution.
For Saprivah, Richardson is still learning the answer.
Meeting customers in person solves a problem that returns online
One advantage Richardson has had in these early months is the opportunity to meet customers face-to-face.
She has sold through farmers markets, pop-ups, social media and local retail placement, including the EatLoco market at Ashbrook and Handmade by LMAC at One Loudoun.
Those settings give a personal-care business something an ecommerce page cannot easily reproduce. A customer can smell a product, feel its texture, ask Richardson questions and meet the person who made it.
Then the experience changes when the customer encounters Saprivah online.
There is no scent or texture. There may be no prior familiarity with the company. The shopper has to decide whether to trust an unfamiliar brand based largely on what appears on a screen.
Richardson identified that transition from in-person confidence to online trust as one of Saprivah’s early challenges.
One response has been to pursue more customer reviews. She described offering returning-purchase discounts of 15 percent for a written review, 20 percent for a review with a photograph and 25 percent for a video review.
I kept thinking about the timing of that request.
For Saprivah, some of the strongest evidence of customer confidence may appear while Richardson is physically standing in front of a customer who has touched, smelled or purchased a product. For another small business, that moment might be an enthusiastic email after a project, a compliment following a service call or a customer immediately agreeing to work together again.
The industries are different, but the underlying question may be worth considering: When are customers most enthusiastic about what happened, and is there a simple way to capture some evidence of that experience while it is still fresh?
Eventually, memory needs support from a system
As Richardson described Saprivah’s first few months, the conversation moved from products and customers to something less visible: operations.
There is product development, but there is also production, inventory, ordering, packaging, labeling, marketing, selling and customer service. Richardson is handling much of that while maintaining a full-time career and the rest of her life outside the company.
By July, she had begun thinking more deliberately about how all of that work was organized.
“I sat down and I said, I need to come up with some operations, some SOPs, some different ways so that I can streamline,” she said.
Richardson began separating recurring activities into specific parts of the week. Friday became an inventory day. She created a sheet for checking both finished products and the ingredients needed for upcoming production, then began looking ahead to what she expected to sell and what would need to be replenished.
Social-media work could be batched separately. Production could have its own scheduled time.
These are not elaborate corporate systems. That may be precisely what makes them relevant at this stage of the company.
A very small business does not necessarily need departments, layers of management or complicated software to begin separating responsibilities. Sometimes the smaller-scale version is simply moving a recurring activity from the founder’s memory into a spreadsheet, checklist, calendar or documented process.
What Richardson is beginning to create is a business in which fewer tasks exist only because she remembers to do them.
The next question is not whether she can do the work
One of the more interesting parts of our conversation came when Richardson discussed labeling.
She currently prints and manages product labels herself using Avery products. It works, but it consumes time, and she said the labels are not waterproof.
Her next version will be outsourced.
The change is relatively small, but I thought it captured an important transition in the life of a young business. Richardson is no longer asking only whether she can perform a task. She is beginning to decide whether performing it herself remains the best use of her limited time.
Production may eventually create the same question.
Over the next year, Richardson wants to continue developing Saprivah’s scalp-care line, introduce facial products and increase production. She described a longer-term target of approximately 250 to 300 units per month.
At that volume, she does not expect to manufacture everything herself indefinitely. Richardson said she eventually wants to identify a manufacturing partner she trusts and move more production outside the company.
She is also exploring financing, including the possibility of SBA-backed borrowing, as she considers how growth might be funded without relying entirely on her personal money.
Those decisions are still ahead of her. Saprivah is only months old, and Richardson is not describing a completed transition.
But the questions have already changed.
The early question was: Can I make this?
Now another is appearing beside it: Which parts of making this business work will eventually stop requiring me?
Loudoun is also part of how she is learning
Richardson has lived in Loudoun County since 2009, which means she did not start Saprivah in a community where she had to build every relationship from zero.
“I have a foundation here of friends,” she told me. “Having a launch where I'm comfortable and where I have a network has really helped me because I learn about different things.”
She has become involved with the Loudoun Chamber of Commerce and continues using farmers markets, pop-ups and other community settings to meet people and hear how they respond to the products.
That made me think about local networks as something more than customer-acquisition channels.
For a very young business, those relationships can also become information networks. Conversations reveal events, retailers, organizations, service providers and opportunities the founder may not have discovered alone.
Richardson is still figuring out which of those relationships will matter most to Saprivah. But she is doing that work in a place where she already has some roots.
Five questions I took away from the conversation
Saprivah is too young to serve as anyone’s blueprint, and Richardson is still working through many of the decisions described here.
That is part of what makes this stage interesting to me.
Her experience raises several questions that may also be familiar to solopreneurs, independent professionals and owners of very small businesses:
- What problem did the business originally exist to solve, and is that problem still clear to customers?
- At what moment do customers appear most confident or satisfied, and what happens to that evidence afterward?
- Which recurring activities currently depend on the founder remembering to do them?
- What work genuinely requires the founder’s judgment or expertise, and what work simply happens to be done by the founder today?
- If demand doubled, which part of the current way of working would become difficult first?
There is no single answer to those questions, and what makes sense for a product company may look very different for a consultant, accountant, designer, contractor or technology professional.
But the distinction underneath them seems useful: doing the work and building a way for the work to get done are not quite the same job.
The less visible product Saprivah is building
Richardson is still formulating products. She is still selling them, talking with customers and learning what people respond to.
Four months into Saprivah, it would be premature to know what the business will become.
But alongside the body butter, scalp polish and other products customers can see, Richardson has started building something less visible: inventory routines, scheduled production, documented processes, outside suppliers and eventually, perhaps, manufacturing capacity that does not depend entirely on her own hands.
That may be one of the more revealing transitions to watch in an early business.
The products were developed because Richardson learned how to solve problems for herself.
The company will have to develop by answering a different problem: how much of Saprivah can eventually work without requiring Richardson to personally do everything?
About Saprivah
Saprivah is a Loudoun-based personal-care company founded by Shantaria Richardson. Its plant-focused products include body butters, scalp-care products and other skin and hair-care items developed from problems Richardson first encountered in her own routines.
Learn more at saprivah.com.