From a Dream Comes a Black-Owned Feminine Health Brand

The Honey Pot company founder Beatrice Dixon is a serial entrepreneur who has worked in varying industries like pharmacy and cleaning services. Her reason for starting a plant-based, cruelty-free feminine health-care brand that has been clinically tested and gynecologist is equal parts personal and professional.

“The mother of invention is necessity,” Dixon said.

After a year-long battle with bacterial vaginosis, Dixon had tried looking for answers in forums and chat rooms, and relief in home remedies. What she realized is, no one had a reliable and consistent solution. Dixon’s permanent fix came to her in a dream one night in late 2011.

“In the dream, my grandmother handed me a piece of paper that had a list of ingredients on it,” Dixon said. “And, she basically told me that this is what would solve my problem. In the dream, she made me kind of repeat those ingredients over and over again.”

Dixon woke from her dream still repeating the list of natural ingredients from her grandmother. With the list, she made her first cleanser, which completely treated her bacterial vaginosis in a few days.

Once she realized the product worked, Dixon was determined to share it with others.

“I think what I realized was that part of why I was having such issues was because of what I was using on a daily basis, and that’s what was throwing off my pH,” Dixon said. “Nobody had ever told me that and nor did they know, right, my mother didn’t know about clean, feminine care, you know what I mean? So that’s what led me to do it because I wanted to be able to provide solutions for humans who have vaginas, real solutions that actually work that are proactive.”

One of her co-founders, Dixon’s brother, gave her a credit card to allow her to buy ingredients to make batches of cleansers. Dixon would make the product to give it away, to see if it truly worked. After about a year and a half of making cleansers and giving them away, the women in her community began to insist on paying for the product instead of receiving it for free.

That was the beginning of The Honey Pot company.

Business began to kick off for Dixon when she decided to take $20,000 and invest that in bottles, labels and ingredients to make around 600 bottles of cleanser and take them to the Bronner Brothers Hair Show in Atlanta.

“It’s crazy, because we sold all 600 bottles,” Dixon said. “We sold out and that told us that we had something and then we just kept pushing, you know, we kept doing more shows. So we were doing all the hair shows that were coming to Atlanta, we were doing festivals, we were doing women’s expos- any opportunity that we got to get in front of thousands of people.’

What once started out as a product that was given away for no cost is now an expanding brand of feminine health products that are available in major retailers such as Walmart, Target and CVS. Dixon sees her experience with The Honey Pot Company as “beautiful,” and plans to continue its growth as a brand.

“My goal I’ve had every year [is to] produce new innovation,” Dixon said. “So my innovation spans between maybe eight to 15 products every year. And so, I just continue to see us growing that way.”