Necessity is often the Mother Of Invention so when mother of two, Sarah Josh, was pregnant with her third child, she went looking for natural skin care products that worked for her skin. Unable to find something suitable Sarah started making her own skincare products and sharing them with friends. Everybody loved them and, being keen to start a product-based business she could run from home, her skincare business – Liminal Elixirs – was born.
Sarah’s infant idea has now grown into a gang-buster business that averages 100 orders a day and employs six local women. Sarah was also named as the 2025 Young Business Person of the Year in WA’s Great Southern region.
I recently sat down with Sarah to learn how this mother of three, living on a rural property, managed to go from zero to hero in just under three years.
“Sharing the products with my friends and getting their feedback was the first step,” Sarah says.
“I then made an Instagram page and a couple of local beauty businesses reached out to me to try the products as they wanted a natural alternative that could sit alongside their clinical-grade skincare.”
Sales started trickling in from local customers and Sarah was soon personally dropping off products to people who were paying by bank transfer. All that running around was not sustainable so she then set up a customer collection point at a local petrol station.
As demand grew Sarah knew she needed to scale-up which meant hours of googling to source what she needed and teaching herself how to do things. It was a steep learning curve with loads of trial and error.
“It’s better to start imperfectly and just get started. I had no big budget behind me; just $100 in my account. I’d cold call people on Instagram that had some followers, people that I thought felt safe to contact because it’s quite scary. But they were all happy for me to send them samples.”
Online momentum began to build and Sarah says the willingness to offer samples has been one of the keys to her business success. Confidence and trusting herself have also been important especially as Sarah says she’s “normally quite a private and shy person”.
“I didn’t ever think it wasn’t going to work and all the support from friends and positive customer feedback really helped. I started by only ordering my product bottles in batches of 100. Now I order in batches of 5,000. The products were, and still are, handmade and when I started I was making them on the kitchen bench and the whole hallway was filled with racks of stock items.”
Running out of space meant Sarah needed to physically expand so she bought a small prefabricated studio. Within a week she realised she needed a second studio but even that didn’t provide enough space so she’s now built a large dedicated building to create a more cohesive production and distribution system.
Sarah is also very pragmatic and says while she and her husband were originally staying up late making and labelling samples, this no longer happens.
“I soon realised these were not jobs we needed to be doing ourselves and that there were capable young people out there that could be having these job opportunities. I’ve also reached the size where I can outsource other elements of the business like the management of advertising which is pretty time-consuming.
“I do feel bad sometimes when the kids are home and I’m having to respond to something or do something that takes my time from then. But then I remind myself that I’m not spending time driving to and from work and that I’m around if they need me so I just try to frame it in a more positive way. I also think of the bigger picture, of what I’m creating for our family, and the example I’m setting for my children. I show them what I’m doing and how I do it.”
Now with nearly a dozen different products in her range and more on the way, Sarah’s business shows just what someone is capable of if they have a good idea and put it into action. It also shows the power of a positive attitude and how rewarding it can be to work on something you’ve created from scratch.
For more information, stockists or online ordering go to https://liminalelixir.com.au/
You can also find Liminal Elixirs on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
