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

Start with the patient.

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.

Nursing teaches you a habit you never lose: don’t treat the symptom, find the cause. Read the chart, look at the whole person, and ask what’s actually going on. That habit built everything that came after.

Detox the bathroom.

I also spent years battling eczema and psoriasis — first my own, then my daughter’s. Watching her struggle with the same skin I’d fought all my life was the moment the nurse in me took over.

So I did what nurses do: I went looking for the cause. I detoxed my bathroom, read every label, and cut out the harsh ingredients I came to call Badditives™ — the stuff that has no business on sensitive skin.

Open the doors — in a recession.

In 2009, in the teeth of the recession, I opened Naples Soap Company in 300 square feet in Tin City, Naples. Everyone has an opinion about starting a retail business in a downturn; I had a mission instead.

That mission was simple: help people with chronic skin issues like eczema and psoriasis find higher-quality, clean-ingredient products. It is still the company’s mission today.

Grow it store by store.

One shop became a Florida retail brand: 13 retail stores, a national e-commerce business, and more than 300 wholesale doors (counts per the company). Along the way came eight business awards between 2011 and 2024, from the Greater Naples Chamber’s Entrepreneurship Award to the Florida SBDC at FGCU Distinguished Entrepreneur Award.

You can see every honor and headline on the Press & Media page — all real, all sourced.

Take the company public.

In 2021, I took Naples Soap Company public. In May 2025 we uplisted to the OTCQB Venture Market, where the company trades as OTCQB: NASO.

Being public means audited disclosures and numbers you can’t massage. The company said it plainly in the uplisting announcement: the goal was to “increase NASO’s visibility among investors” and “enhance liquidity.” I wrote about the whole journey in What It Took to Take a Soap Company Public.

Rebuild what the storm took.

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian damaged four of our ten stores — roughly 40% of our brick-and-mortar sales at the time (company figures) — and destroyed our Sanibel Island flagship.

We rebuilt for more than three years. Sanibel reopened on January 31, 2026, and the company’s fiscal 2025 results release (March 31, 2026) reported $12.3 million in revenue, e-commerce up 15%, wholesale up 30%, and net loss cut by 25%. The full account is in Rebuilding After Hurricane Ian.

Carry the mission forward.

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 (per the company’s launch announcements).

I also host The Soap Dish with Deanna Wallin — conversations about skin health, wellness, and what it actually takes to build a clean-beauty brand from 300 square feet.

All these years in, I’m still doing the job I had on the nursing floor: taking care of people’s skin. The origin story, in my own words, is here: Why a Nurse Started a Soap Company.