Aimee Shaw
Rangitoto College student William Cole, 17, co-founder of skincare brand Clearfree, talks to
What does your business do?
We’re a small healthcare business we started in February 2017. It was founded by myself, Max Lawton and Josef Morgan. We had the goal to produce as many natural products as we could and mainly using manuka oils as a key ingredient that we source from the Hawke’s Bay region. Since then we started a Manuka oil facial spray that helps with skin problems such as acne and eczema. From that we made 800 sales last year, about $15,000 profit. We’re about to release our manuka oil foaming cleanser.
What was the motivation?
A gap in the market for teens to have more natural skincare products because a lot are chemical-based and we researched the effects of these on the skin and they can lead to negative long-term problems such as dry skin, which is a contradiction to the purpose of product. Originally it started just with school and then we went into the Youth Enterprise, and so we’ve been mostly running it through Youth Enterprise. We settled on skincare because we suffer skin problems and stats show 80 per cent of teenagers do. We thought it would be cool to create something natural to deal with.
How long did it take to design and come up with your first product?
For the first product, we went through a few choices. We were initially
thinking about moisturisers and lotions but went for the facial spray because it was more unique and, because it’s a little spray, there’s actually no other manuka oil sprays on the market like it.
We did some research and chose the manuka oil because it is shown to be more effective than other more commonly used, such as tea tree, so
we picked that to push into the market as a unique selling point. At the rate we’re going now, in the future we might have the ability to expand to an international scale. We’ve talked to some people who work for international companies and they seem to be quite interested, especially for the Asian markets. It’s been received well, a lot better than we expected. We do a lot of Facebook marketing, we have a large social media presence which helps us a lot, Facebook and Instagram are very key in helping us with that. We sell our products through our website so try to link our website from social media as much as we can.
A lot of buyers seem to be mums and females aged 35 to 45 or a bit older and a lot come back with reviews on effects it has had on their children. The biggest challenge is the fact that we’re teenagers running a business. Some people don’t take us as seriously as they would take us if we were 10 years older. At first it was hard to push it out there. In a lab by the Millennium in the North Shore. One of the team members, Max, his dad has a healthcare business and so he has a big office and lab downstairs that we use to make all of our products. It’s probably one of the best things I have decided to do. I’m now looking to do an international business course at university and carry on from there. One hundred per cent do it because it is truly life-changing and will help you towards your goals in the future, especially as the world is changing and employers are looking for people who are different.