How a stranded theatre lover started a business from 'scratch'

Sunday 08 May 2022

Benjamin Martin was all set to start work on a cruise liner and was getting the last bits and pieces ready before his flight to Florida, when he found himself stranded by covid in March 2020.

Instead of a desert island in the Caribbean, the island he was cast away on turned out to be sunny Jersey.

“I was company manager for the Pirate Queen at the London Coliseum, and off the back of that I was very lucky to be offered theatre ops manager for Norwegian Cruise Lines,” he recalled.

“I was dropping my dog and car off, and the next day it was lockdown. So, I got stuck here with nothing, because all my stuff was packed in London ready to go, including all my skin care products. I have really sensitive skin, and I can’t just buy things online.”

Pictured: Benjamin Martin started Jersey Skin during lockdown.

He began ordering ingredients over the internet, watching videos online and experimenting with creams, while isolated from the rest of the household.

His mother bought him a hotplate and after trying a few ideas in his bedroom, he realised there might be a gap in the market for what he had in mind.

“We took lavender and verbena from the garden, bought an old-fashioned distillation kit, and spent a couple of weeks distilling to try and get the water correct. It’s quite difficult to distil, if the plant gets too hot. If it’s in contact with too much water it can produce iodine, and go bad very quickly,” he explained.

“It took a while to perfect, but we grew from there.”

Pictured: Martin began experimenting with ingredients from the garden.

Lockdown has been a catalyst for a number of businesses, including Jersey Skin.

From experimenting on a hot plate in his bedroom, Benjamin now owns the shop where he and his three employees make and sell their skin care, and other products. The plan had always been to start a business one day, but covid brought that forward.

“It’s being given the gift of time. Some people had been trying to start something but didn’t previously have the time or focus, but suddenly they had that during lockdown.

"We started with a stall at the Genuine Jersey market in St. Aubin and we sold out within a few hours. It was the first time, and I didn’t know what to expect, but we had feedback from people wanting to re-order products, so we had repeat customers straight away.” 

Pictured: Lockdown enabled Martin to kickstart his skincare business.

While the distilling process still takes place at his parents' house in Gorey - his dad Fraser oversees growing the plants he uses – manufacturing is carried out in a workshop behind the shop in the Parade. It is very much a family business. Benjamin’s mum, an Oxford chemistry graduate and lecturer at Highlands College, helped perfect the formula used to make the creams and other products.

“You can Google how to make a moisturiser and it will tell you what to order, how to make it and the process is very simple. But when you take out everything that’s artificial and add in natural ingredients and the distillates, it completely changes the temperatures you need, how you emulsify it, blend it and keep it smooth, and how you keep the goodness of the distillate without it evaporating. When I struggled to stop it from splitting, she sat down and did this Einstein drawing and figured out why it wasn't working, which ingredient we were missing and a temperature we were working out wrong. She’s been invaluable.”

In the space of under two years, Benjamin has set up a business from scratch that not only manufactures and sells the products he and his team make from locally-grown ingredients, but he is also carrying out R&D, marketing and brand development and keeping an eye on the budget. All of that, without taking out a loan. It sounds almost like a task that Lord Sugar might have set a group of candidates on The Apprentice. 

“I grew up in the era of the Apprentice, Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank and I’ve always been obsessed with those business programmes, imagining what I would do wrong. I was thinking, ‘One day I will have my own business, but what will I do and how will I do it?'

"I started following amazing local businesses and watched how they did it and how they grew. From the branding side, I come from a theatre background, and I have helped with theatre posters and social media, so I know what grabs the eye, how to keep it clean and what does and doesn’t need to be included. But it is still a learning process.”

Picture: "I just loved the environment of being in a theatre. There's something very special about it."

It is a remarkable achievement, but it doesn’t stop the sleepless nights, he says. With a permanent base in the island and a small team, Benjamin still manages to stay in touch with his other passion, the theatre.

When he can, he’ll pop back to London to work on a production. It’s been in his blood all his life but there was one occasion when he was eight or nine that he remembers. His dad was in a play called Waiting in the Wings at the Jersey Arts Centre.

“It was the last night and I remember crying in bed because I didn’t want to miss it even though I'd seen the show already. I just loved the environment of being in a theatre. There's something very special about it. I was crying and crying and couldn’t get to sleep and eventually my mum took me to the Arts Centre, and after the interval we went to the back to watch. I remember so vividly watching the last half of that show and just loving it. And it was from that moment I realised that even if I wasn’t performing on the stage, I wanted to do something in the theatre.”

After graduating from the Guildford School of Acting, where he trained to be a theatre actor, all the jobs were in TV or film. His favourite experience was a part in a scene that never made it into one of the Fantastic Beasts films, a three-day shoot that he described as mad, but great fun. But after a few years of going to auditions, getting work and then doing more auditions, he moved away from acting and into theatre management, something he still does when he has time.

“Theatre is still coming back to life after the pandemic. A lot of the big theatres are back up and running, but it’s the smaller ones and shows that were put on hold that I am helping with. I worked for almost ten years in the theatre scene in London and although this is my focus and I love my business, I’m not quite ready to completely leave that. I’m incredibly lucky that I have an amazing team here that look after the business when I’m not around.”

The business plan seems to be well on track, but Benjamin says he dips into it every now and then when he needs some reassurance. There is talk of further expansion, perhaps developing a model that can be used off-island. 

“I would like to encourage someone else to take the reins and have their own business using local ingredients to them rather than ones we’d use. Jerey is known for its seaweed and lavender but if you dropped this idea somewhere else that was known for its roses or its geraniums or herbs, these businesses could make all their products from their local environment, and there’s something exciting about that.”

This interview first appeared in Connect Magazine. You can read all previous editions HERE.