Source: Bennett Raglin / Getty
Lovers of The Honey Pot were up in a frenzy after a the foaming wash hit the shelves with a new batch of ingredients that customers felt didn’t align with their organic promise. The CEO and founder, Beatrice Dixon, quickly took notice of the upset on social media among customers and re-assured everyone that The Honey Pot wasn’t straying too far from their plant-derived, paraben-free formula.
“We upgraded the preservative system to continue to protect from what’s inside and outside of the bottle. We’ve done robust testing to ensure these ingredients are safe and will be releasing clinical testing results soon,” one tweet on The Honey Pot’s Twitter read.
After seeing posts about the Honey Pot changing up the ingredients, I just went to check a new bottle & an old bottle and IM SICK😠we can’t have anything🥲 pic.twitter.com/RAdzMWxJuM
— Lele💎 (@coilele) May 15, 2022
Customers were in an uproar when they saw added chemicals and accused the brand of using a new formula that wasn’t healthy for the womb. But as Beatrice Dixon said in one of her video statements, the new ingredients are harmless and actually have enhanced the products. One of the added ingredients is Phenoxyethanol, which “has anti-microbial properties to keep products stable.” Another new ingredient, sodium benzoate “supports ingredients designed for pH balancing for a longer period of time.” Propylene Glycol has “antimicrobial properties” and “also functions as a humectant which can support the moisture profile of a product.”
When MADAMENOIRE spoke with Beatrice Dixon, she said through this “painful” experience she learned not only to communicate with her consumer base more but also how far she can “push the envelope.”
“I don’t think that we knew that if we removed words, that that would communicate that now, we were doing the opposite of what we’ve always promised that we would deliver.”
The changes in packaging, labels and ingredients are a result of regulation changes and the global supply chain not always having the necessary ingredients, Dixon says.
“Just because you don’t see it on the label doesn’t mean that it’s not [there]. We just changed our packaging and made a label change which is absolutely normal,” she continued. “Brands make label changes all the time, right? Nothing that we’ve done today has not been what is normal. The way that the global supply chain is set up certain ingredients were harder to get. So we had to think about [The Honey Pot] in different ways.”
1. We upgraded the preservative system to continue to protect from what's inside and outside of the bottle. We've done robust testing to ensure these ingredients are safe and will be releasing clinical testing results soon.
For more information visit https://t.co/tMOlw1josh.
— The Honey Pot Co (@thehoneypotcomp) May 16, 2022
Dixon understood why consumers weren’t happy with the changes and took responsibility for not informing them of the changes before the new products hit the shelves. While the feedback came with a “lack of understanding married to abuse,” she was able to see the silver lining in this mishap.
“It’s just that humans don’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of some of these things,” Dixon said. “They just love us a lot and so they’re just paying attention to everything that we’re doing, which is beautiful.”
There were also rumors floating around on Twitter that Dixon had sold The Honey Pot. While she doesn’t know where those false claims came from, selling the company in the future is not an unusual end goal. Dixon speaks about this openly because she wants to change the narrative around Black-owned businesses selling their companies to larger organizations. Selling a company is a common business practice for entrepreneurs and instead of being deemed a sell-out if you do this, Dixon said it should be more of a congratulatory moment.
“When you go through an acquisition, you are able to get wealth, but that does not mean that you sold out. One of the main reasons that [a business] aligned to a larger company and have a strategic acquisition is because you need to tap into other resources. When your company starts to scale and grow, all you ever need is more money. The bigger your company is, the more money it costs to run, the more humans you need, the more resources you need. If you want to expand and go global, you got to have a global network.”
She added that the founders of the companies continue to remain involved after the sale and when her day comes, she will ensure that The Honey Pot continues to be ran with integrity. Making this move is inevitable when you’re on the road to generational wealth.
“We are here to serve humanity. We are not here to just line our pockets. Lining pockets is just a side note of what happens….But if I’m going to serve humanity and be a slave to it, it should give me some generational wealth.”
Dixon remains apologetic to her beloved consumers, or humans as she calls them, and hopes to regain their trust.
“All that I want to know is what will it take for the humans that use our brand and enjoy it and love it that may have been rocked by this situation to trust us even more than you already do?”
The post EXCLUSIVE: Honey Pot Founder Beatrice Dixon Responds To Backlash Over New Formula appeared first on MadameNoire.
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