Laura Beohner, President & Co-Founder of The Healing Rose – Interview Series

Laura Beohner is the President & Co-Founder of The Healing Rose. Founded in 2016 and based in Newburyport, MA, The Healing Rose is a MDAR licensed processor handcrafting body care and oils using 100% USDA Certified Organic essential oils, carrier oils, butters, waxes, & herbs. The team believes in only using 100% natural ingredients that are cruelty free, paraben free, & GMO free.

You’ve always wanted to become an entrepreneur; at what age did you discover this about yourself and what gives you this entrepreneurial mindset?

I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur! I don’t remember an age when I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur. For example, when I was seven years old, I provided basketball lessons or roller skating lessons to other kids in the neighborhood where I lived. I also organized yard sales to make some money during the weekends.

I always wanted the freedom of being an entrepreneur, to be put in a position to improve people’s lives, and have a more important impact on the world. In my mind, the best way to make my mark on the world was to become an entrepreneur. Now I am able to share amazing products with people that help them heal and improve their quality of life.

Could you share the genesis story behind The Healing Rose and the origins of the name?

The Healing Rose is named after our rescue pit bull, Rose. She is an eight-year-old Staffordshire Terrier who was rescued from New Hampshire. She is such a sweet, emotionally supportive dog that is a very important member of our family. The reason we called the company The Healing Rose is because we wanted to make sure our customers knew what we wanted to do with the product and the company, which is to heal people. Roses also have the highest vibrational frequency compared to all other flowers. So the name came together really beautifully.

The Healing Rose was founded in 2016 after I dislocated my kneecap for a second time while playing basketball. In a way, the injury was somewhat of a blessing as it helped me to discover the power of topicals that are infused with a synergy of cannabinoids, herbs, and essential oils. As my fiancé and I had always wanted to be cannabis entrepreneurs – we decided to create a business that could help heal our customers with our favorite plant.

What types of product lines are currently offered?

The Healing Rose currently offers cannabinoid-infused tinctures, bath soaks, salves, massage oils, and lip balms. Soon, we are going to have a full line of suppositories and a facial skincare line.

You do a lot of research when it comes to offering new products, what do you look for in a product and what differentiates it for you?

We want to ensure all of our products are made with all USDA-certified organic ingredients. The quality of the ingredients is super important to us, as is the sourcing of them, and really drives how we develop new products for our customers. Each product we create and sell has to smell amazing and feel great on the customer’s skin.

Now, when it comes to ingestibles, you want to ensure the products are effective and safe. It is really important to make sure you are creating consistent, properly infused products that will create a positive experience for customers. The Healing Rose differentiates itself from our competitors in that we will always ensure our products use all organic ingredients. We do extensive third-party lab testing on both starting materials, as well as finished products, to ensure our products are dosed accurately and are safe for consumers.

Lastly, we want to ensure any product that we create and sell helps to relieve a challenge or problem for our customers. We want our customers to feel an emotional connection to our brand, leading customers to tell their friends and family about us and our products. It’s a big part of how we have grown organically as a company over the last five years.

Topical solutions are an important aspect of your business, how effective are these products for offering targeted relief?

I may be a little biased, but I think topicals are incredibly effective in helping people, and what is so amazing about them is that they work extremely quickly to relieve an issue that someone is having. Since our topicals do not create any psychoactive effects, they are a wonderful option for anyone looking for relief. We like to infuse the topicals with herbs to make products that are much more effective. They can be really effective at helping to relieve pain as topicals work directly with the Endocannabinoid System’s CB2 receptors. Consumers can feel the effects of the cannabinoids first hand, and it can quickly make anyone a believer in the healing powers of cannabis.

Could you discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic caused you pivot your business to sell directly to consumers?

Before the pandemic, our business model was 50 percent selling to businesses and 50 percent selling to consumers. Once the pandemic hit though, a lot of the retail businesses that we worked with closed or reduced the amount of product they needed to purchase from us. This change caused us to pivot immediately and we created an amazing direct-to-consumer experience to engage with our loyal followers. For example, we revamped our website and made it a point to provide amazing customer service to the consumers who we were working with. It was refreshing to see that we also had some customers who bought our products in stores in the past who now started to purchase directly from our website.

What are some of the banking or other business challenges that you have faced?

When we started our business in 2016, it was an extremely stressful time for us and different business challenges were something that we thought about every…single… day. This mainly included worrying about processing fees and banking issues. Luckily, processing fees have improved over the last couple of years. That being said, we still pay a significantly higher processing fee than normal businesses do.

The current bank we work with is one of the few banks in Massachusetts that will allow us to be a bank customer. There has definitely been a heightened level of stress when dealing with these business challenges as we continue to grow the company.

You’re known for being an activist in the cannabis industry, why do you feel so passionate about being in the industry and why is being an activist so important?

The whole reason that I work in this industry is due to my love and appreciation for the cannabis plant and for the healing powers that it has. I am so passionate about helping people by using the ingredients from this plant. This plant helped me after the injury to my knee, completely change my life, and the plant helped to make me a better person. I am so passionate about the plant and it fuels my fire for everything that I do in life.

If you are going to be in an industry that uses ingredients that are grown on the earth, it is essential to be an activist! In industries like hemp and cannabis, which are still growing and regulations are continuing to be updated, you need to be an activist to be part of the group creating solutions and enacting change so you can help move the industry forward.

I have been able to see first-hand that if you put in the energy to be an activist, meet with the local legislators, make your voice heard and get other people to have their voices heard, you can definitely make changes. Especially in the state where you live and work. People really underestimate the power they have to make a change as a citizen.

Is there anything else that you would like to share about The Healing Rose?

We continue to gain partnerships with dispensaries throughout Massachusetts and we look forward to making more in-roads with dispensaries in 2022.  You can find our products in more than 50 dispensaries around the state. Look forward to new products that will be on dispensary shelves later this year!

Thank you for the great interview, I look forward to following you progress, readers who wish to learn more should visit The Healing Rose.