Before I ever made a bar of soap, I took care of people — hospital floors, wound care, home health.

I’m a Southwest Florida native. I earned my LPN at Lorenzo Walker Technical College and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Barry University, then spent 15 years working in healthcare. I also spent years battling eczema and psoriasis — first my own, then my daughter’s. So I did what nurses do: I went looking for the cause. I detoxed my bathroom and cut out the harsh ingredients I came to call Badditives™.

In 2009 — in the teeth of the recession — I opened Naples Soap Company in 300 square feet in Tin City, Naples. The mission was simple: help people with chronic skin issues like eczema and psoriasis find higher-quality, clean-ingredient products. Store by store it grew into a Florida retail brand with 13 locations, a national e-commerce business, and more than 300 wholesale doors — and in 2021, I took the company public.

Then Hurricane Ian took almost half of it. Four of our ten stores were damaged — roughly 40% of our brick-and-mortar sales — and our Sanibel Island flagship was destroyed. We rebuilt. Sanibel reopened on January 31, 2026, and fiscal 2025 closed with $12.3 million in revenue, e-commerce up 15%, wholesale up 30%, and our net loss cut by 25%.

In 2026 the work got bigger than soap: we launched Celestii, stem-cell skincare developed with NASA zero-gravity bioreactor technology and tested by AMA Laboratories, and GROW BEAUTii, a clean line for the whole family — babies to 80s. All these years in, I’m still doing the job I had on the nursing floor: taking care of people’s skin.