Smooth Move

The customary practice on the Gulf Coast to offer tax breaks and cash incentives to lure companies to the region is primed for a new wrinkle with Cherylyn Van Kirk.

In fact, Van Kirk plans to move her growing $1.5 million organic skincare manufacturing company, Austin, Texas-based Starflower Essentials, to Sarasota flat out just because she wants to. Just like a page from a chamber of commerce brochure, Van Kirk cites the area's arts, beaches and warmth — in people and in climate.

Van Kirk chose Sarasota this past summer after she toured several Florida cities in search of a new home. She intends to buy or lease a facility between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet early next year. Van Kirk also might hire a few more employees after she opens the facility, to add to the seven positions she already has.

“People want to embrace organic products, ” she says. “They want to eat organic and they don't want to put chemicals on their skin.”

And Van Kirk is confident Sarasota is the right spot to deliver those products. Starflower, which Van Kirk founded in 1994, manufactures and sells more than 100 varieties of skincare products to spas and boutiques. She also sells products to consumers individually online.

The products are made from food-grade ingredients grown in a specially designed garden in Colorado, says Van Kirk, which she says helps preserve the potency of the creams and lotions. It's all processed and packaged in a 5,000-square-foot facility in Austin.

Van Kirk says a key element of the production process is the company's glass-over-plastic philosophy: Starflower packages its skincare products in glass to prevent oxidization, a costlier move some competitors don't do.

Starflower, meanwhile, received a recession-era boost from the go-green trend of the last few years. Sales passed $1.3 million in 2009, up 10% from 2008. Van Kirk says sales are up 7% so far in 2010, not including the fourth quarter, which tends to be her busiest. “I'm not only trying to capitalize on the trend,” says Van Kirk. “I've been doing this my whole life.”

Indeed, Van Kirk studied aromatherapy and how to make herbs, both in the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, long before it became trendy. “Making herbal formulas for the skin became a hobby for me,” says Van Kirk. “I loved making tinctures and extracts for my family's medicine cabinet when I was the mother of young children.”

Van Kirk and her family settled in Boulder, Colo. in the early 1990s. She found a job with Hanna Kroeger, the founder of one of the country's first health food stores.

Van Kirk launched Starflower in 1994 after she discovered no one else in the industry made skincare products specifically for spas. An operations manager in Kroeger's company gave Van Kirk a $500 line of credit to order wholesale supplies from Hanna's Herb Shop. The business grew through word of mouth.

“I quickly realized the product was the right quality for spas,” says Van Kirk. “I was creating facial protocols and a professional workbook for estheticians.”