SHORE LINES
Hannah May and Richard Doggett’s natural skincare company in Cornwall began with a chance meeting with a stranger who was collecting seaweed from their local beach. They asked what he was doing, and he told them that his wife liked to bathe in seaweed – it was good for the skin, he said. This pricked the couple’s interest; they started to do some research and eventually to collect seaweed themselves. A hobby became a side-line and they began to earn a small income by supplying the Scarlet Hotel on the north Cornish coast where warm seaweed baths are a speciality.
‘We quickly started to develop other seaweed products,’ says Hannah. And their Penzance-based Cornish Seaweed Bath Company now makes a range of soaps, balms and lotions from native fucus serratus (or toothed wrack) hand-picked from the seashore. Both Richard (an acupuncturist) and Hannah (a silversmith) have now given up former careers to concentrate on their venture.
Meanwhile, when Annie Hanbury moved to Dorset, she knew she wanted to start a business but she wasn’t quite sure what. Annie and her husband had spent several years living in Singapore; they worked in finance and fashion but had no
