Small Business: Dulese is doing more with all natural personal care

Amelia Jory, founder of Dulese, wanted to create a personal care company focused on bringing natural products to the mainstream, starting with deodorant.

Amelia Jory, founder of Dulese, talks to Tom Raynel about entering the competitive deodorant market, and what sets her business apart. Each Monday, we interview a small business owner, which is now a regular feature of NZME’s editorial campaign On The Up, showcasing uplifting stories of success, inspiration and possibilities.

What is Dulese?

Dulese is a natural personal care company that is really focused around bringing natural and low-toxicity products to the mainstream. We’ve launched with our aluminium-free deodorant, which is all natural, including the fragrance.

What inspired you to start the business?

It really started, as all good business ideas do, out of a frustration for me. I found I was always getting upset and irritated armpits, and when I looked into what was on the back of my everyday antiperspirant, I was taken back by the cocktail of chemicals that was in it. It led me to ask the question, is this potentially harmful for us? I took it upon myself that natural deodorant would be the way forward.

Whenever I tried to find the right natural deodorant for me, I was always compromising on something, whether that was the efficacy, the smell, or they were in weird to use or unfriendly packaging. A lot of them you’d apply with your fingers or they had cardboard packaging that would disintegrate before you got a chance to use the product. There were just a few different gripes for me and nothing really ticked all the boxes.

So I thought, it’s time to go out there and give it a crack and see what I can do.

Dulese's all-natural deodorant is aluminium-free and was inspired by founder Amelia Jory's irritation with other brands.

How did you come up with the formula?

I tried so many natural deodorants and I’d use them for quite a long period of time to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and I created this unicorn brief of what I needed for my deodorant.

I had a couple of favourites that I took to our formulators who are here in New Zealand, and said these are the best ones out there, but I want these things changed about it. Then it was just a case of testing, reiterating, trialling, and sending it to a testing group and getting their feedback, which was amazing. It’s really scary putting a product out there because something might work for you but it doesn’t always work for others.

One of the big tests for me was that I really wanted it to work on men as well, so I’d send my partner to golf wearing the deodorant and he’d play 18 holes of golf. If he came back smelling like anything, I knew we had to go again.

The deodorant uses a few unique ingredients, could you explain what they do?

So Dermosoft is all about fighting odour and it works on demand. Your armpit has its own microbiome, and so what Dermosoft does is it eats away at the bad bacteria and keeps the good bacteria so that the microbiome stays nice and balanced. It’s a natural, gentle and very effective odour controller.

Greensil is for absorbing sweat. The difference that you’ll find between an antiperspirant and a deodorant is that an antiperspirant stops you sweating completely because the aluminium salts go into your pores. A deodorant, meanwhile, allows your body to detoxify naturally and gauge its temperature by still allowing you to sweat, but ensuring that you don’t smell. Greensil is added in there so that it mattifies your sweat and ensures you’re not feeling really moist all the time.

Dulese's first product is its all-natural deodorant, but the business has plans to expand into other personal care products.

The deodorant market is competitive, how do you stand out?

It’s definitely scary because deodorant is a very price-sensitive product and we’re going against ones that do typically use synthetic chemicals and therefore are extremely cheap to manufacture. I just knew that there had to be people out there like me who were either experiencing irritation or people that just knew that that natural deodorant was better for them.

Our first launch we sold out of completely. We had ordered enough stock for a whole year, and for us to have gone through that in a couple of months, it was just all we could have ever needed to know that the market’s there. It just shows that people are willing to pay a little bit more for a product that they know is better for them.

What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

Just follow your curiosity. I say that because you never know where it might lead. If I wasn’t curious enough a couple of years ago to look into it and ask why am I getting irritated armpits and how can this be better, I would have never landed down this path.

I think there are so many cool opportunities where people’s passions and curiosity can lead them to exactly where or what they need to be doing.

Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.