The Beeswax that got away

Join us as ENSC founder Tommy Crooks shares anecdotes from his long and winding road building the company from kitchen table experiments to today's global natural skincare brand.

When we started selling decent quantities of handcream bars and lip balms it became a challenge to source beeswax, and I soon found myself driving all over the Scottish countryside, in rain, hail, or snow, to meet Beekeepers and buy unrefined wax from them.

I phoned an old Beekeeper one day who lived in Pitlochry, which is a beautiful town in the highlands of Scotland and agreed to buy his stock of wax. I was excited about this as he told me he had around fifteen kilos, which was a huge amount for me back in those days. It was probably around 2011.

Anyway, I drove up two days later, only to be told that he’s sold it earlier in the day to a young woman who was using it for some task which escapes my mind. When I’m writing this, the emotions, the sense of dread, come flooding back to me. Challenges like this flew at me from all angles on a daily basis. He was an old man and had simply forgotten that I’d arranged to drive up.