The idea first came to Gerald Crosby in 2009, while he was living out of his car and recovering from a spine injury. Faced with many trials during two years of homelessness, some good luck enabled him to start his personal cleanser brand, Body Detailer, in 2015.

What led you to develop Body Detailer? One night while taking a shower I was thinking about ways to overcome my disposition. Having a spinal injury makes it difficult to walk and being homeless was very challenging; life was 1,000 times harder all of a sudden. The more I thought about different kinds of businesses to start, I wanted a business that had recurring revenue based on the same customers needing something on a regular basis. I also thought about the type of products I couldn’t live without even while homeless, and soap was the one thing I cherished most at this time. Without soap and a shower, I wasn’t able to sleep comfortably.  During my 25-year career living and working in mansions as a servant to wealthy people, one of my responsibilities at each home was either detailing the cars everyday or hiring car detailers to come to the house and do it on a regular basis. So, it made sense to me that as I took a shower each day, I was in fact detailing my body. It was this thought process that led me to name my brand Body Detailer. The business didn’t happen immediately but I kept the idea brewing on the back burner until the time was right…

Was it easy to find a partner (contract manufacturer) to work with? No, it was extremely difficult and I find it to be a very secretive industry—one of which if you desire to be part of, I recommend going to trade shows and learn all you can, but only if you can qualify to get in them.

Is there a hero in the line? Clean Sheets, Mega Mint and Milk Froth moisturizing bath soap bars. They earn that status because they are a very high quality soaps with interesting packaging design and fragrances. I suppose it also has a lot to do with the fact we all need soap no matter what. A CVS executive and SCORE counselor once told me that CVS determined consumers need three things to survive. Food for nutrition, drugs to overcome sickness and personal care products for hygiene.

What has been the biggest challenge in getting your brand off the ground? The biggest challenge was coming up with creative packaging design. Before that, I thought that every other aspect of the business was hard, but packaging design has been the most difficult. I learned that no matter how much money I spent hiring a graphic designer, I was merely hiring their vision in addition to their ability to use graphic design software. None of the initial designs-for-hire ever made the cut. One day my wife told me I would need to design the packaging myself, so I brainstormed for months drawing different concepts on paper. Once I had my own vision, I hired another graphic designer to bring my concepts to life. After back and forth revisions and a whole lot of patience from the designer, the concepts, which are the packaging today, were finalized and I knew I had something that would sell.

Mila Juristovski Bosnic & Ada Juristovski, founders of Nala (August 2019 Indie Inc) want to know how you deal with negative feedback or reviews? I have to say that due to my perfectionist way of doing things, a trait I learned working in mansions, I have not had to deal with this as the feedback we get about our products is positive. I think the reason for that is that after using prestige quality bath products for 25 years while working in mansions, I was spoiled by the quality of those products. It’s for that reason I only wanted to develop superior products which can be more expensive to make but hard to not like. I always put quality over profit to launch the brand no matter if I made money or not, it’s how bad I wanted to get the brand out there.

Where do your hope Body Detailer will be a year from now, and five years from now? In thousands of more homes and in five years millions of homes is the best I can hope for. It took me 10 years to get the brand where it’s currently at, so as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter really because the brand is here to stay. Grow is the only thing it can do at this point.