Natural oils are the 'essential' ingredient

Clackamas firm brews up vats of exotic oils for use in personal care products

By Ellen Spitaleri

The Clackamas Review, Aug 24, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

photo by LAURA CRAIG / Clackamas Review

Kevin Lines, a cosmetic compounder for Essential Wholesale in Clackamas, checks on the gel in a 1,000-gallon tank.

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Essential Wholesale is tucked away in an unassuming warehouse just off 82nd Drive in Clackamas. When the door opens, however, you are transported to a different world.

The first thing that hits you is the aroma — something delicious is wafting its way towards you.

Don’t even try to identify what it is, because Essential Wholesale manufactures and supplies over 1,000 naturally-derived and organic personal-care product bases, so that lovely aroma could come from essential oils, such as lavender or tea tree, or from plant oils like jojoba, avocado or aloe vera.

Once into the environs of the warehouse, workers outfitted in scrubs and hairnets “cook” products, pour oils from drums into smaller containers or check the progress of gels in 1,000 gallon vats.

Essential Wholesale has “really hit a niche market,” noted Laura Craig, Essential Wholesale retail director and licensed esthetician.

She added that the use of naturally-derived products is “the fastest growing [segment] of the beauty industry.”

Craig said that co-owners Kayla and Dennis Fioravanti started the company after their young son came down with ringworm. They tried everything to make it go away, but nothing worked until Kayla Fioravanti, who was raised in Germany, remembered seeing tea tree oil used as a natural healer there.

“They put it on, and the ringworm disappeared in three days,” Craig said, adding that this spurred the couple’s interest in natural products and remedies.

They began making soap in their kitchen and giving it away to family members, but soon the demand grew so strongly, they “had to move out of the kitchen,” Craig explained.

“Kayla became a certified and registered aromatherapist and learned cosmetic formulating, and she started just going at it. She’s incredibly creative and incredibly passionate — that makes a huge difference. She really cares about the product, and that’s what makes it so fabulous,” Craig said.

Then the couple moved the business to a small building in SE Portland, outgrew that and moved to their current 25,000 square-foot site in Clackamas in 2003.

Why Clackamas?

The Fioravantis live in Happy Valley, and wanted to work near where they live, Craig said.

As for Craig herself, she said, “I work for this company because of their product.”

When the business was in SE Portland, Craig noted, the couple also ran a small spa called Spa vonNatur, which means “from nature, in German.”

Craig said, “I started working there and fell in love with the products. I was very ‘green’ when I first met them. I was using vinegar to clean my floors, for example. I loved this product so much I asked if I could work for them.”

A sales and marketing position opened up and Craig took it, and she does double duty as an in-house esthetician, offering advice on skin care.