Our In the business series follow five young business owners, looking at what works and what doesn’t. The advice from Martina Organics owner Marta Camara is to have a point of difference.
By taking her own values like healthy eating and exercise and pouring it into a business, Wellingtonian Marta Camara has managed to catapult her new organic skincare range Martina Organics into an already saturated organic skincare market.
She launched last year, but by next week she’ll have 22 stockists. “I’m surprised and stoked, I definitely didn’t see this happening so quickly.”
In April last year it was found the organic sector had experienced a steady eight per cent per annum growth from 2009 to 2012 – but Brendan Hoare, Chair of Organics Aotearoa New Zealand, said last year “the move from being a niche market into the mainstream is raising issues around how truthful some of the claims of being organic really are”.
Marta wants an honest standard of fresh products and quality. She says that others can market their products in a way that confuses consumers, with labels like natural, fair trade, organic, certified organic, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which products have one organic ingredient amongst other chemicals and which ones are 100 per cent organic. “If you wouldn’t eat horrible chemicals and toxins in your diet, then why would you put them on your skin (the largest organ of your body) to be soaked into your bloodstream?”
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