History Business: A Guide to Being a Historian for Hire

Season 1, Episode 2: Selling History (with guest host Alicia Schult)

History Business: A Guide to Being a Historian for Hire Season 1 Episode 2

Lucy & Laura are joined by the extremely talented Alicia Schult to  delve into the world of bringing history to life and by that we mean bringing it right to your dressing table…

From recreations of 18th century face wash to vintage compact mirrors - piece by piece, the business of selling history is an intriguing one so who better to enlighten us than mind behind LBCC Historical...

A massive thank you to our wonderful guest Alicia, the owner of Little Bits Clothing Company, a historical apothecary, which you can find selling products on platforms like Etsy as LBCC Historical

Fear not, there is a website on the way but in the meantime you can find Alicia and her products at: 

Instagram: @LBCCHistorical
Blog: http://lbcchistorical.blogspot.com
Twitter: LBCC_Historical
Fanpage: www.facebook.com/LBCC.at.the.Mayfly Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/LbccHistorical- Helpful Videos

As for us you can find us on:

Twitter: @HistBizAGuide
Instagram: @historybusinessaguide

For Laura:

Twitter: & @laurafitzach
IG:   @seekthehistoric
Tik Tok: @seekthehistoric

For Lucy:

Twitter: @lucyjanesantos_ 
IG: @lucyjanesantos_   
YouTube: @lucyjanesantos_

Until next time!

00:00:00  Lucy Jane Santos

Welcome to History business, a guide to being a historian for hire and new podcast taking an honest look at building a freelance or portfolio career in the field of history.

So I suppose we should introduce ourselves first, so my name is Lucy James Santos and I am a historical consultant, researcher, writer and presenter specialising in examining the historic crossroads of health, leisure and beauty with science and technology.

And this week I've been working on a chapter on the topic of selling healthy lifestyles, with food, in particular the advance of the electric restaurant in the early 1900s.

And for that I've been reading three great chap books by Lila Cassia on the J Lyons company.

00:00:45 Laura Fitzachary

And I'm Laura. I'm an art historian and museum educator turned to circle consultant. I'm a writer, researcher, and presenter whose background lies in mediaeval art, museum cities and 18th century social history. In particular, the history of fashion. This week I have been working on a chapter of my book looking at the use of cosmetics and how they were supplied - and of course made -  during a neutral wartime Ireland in the 1940s. And I've been reading Mistresses: sex and scandal at the court of Charles the second by Linda Porter, purely for the crack and nothing else. In this week's episode of History Business, we will be delving into the world of bringing history to life. And by that we mean bringing it right to your dressing table, from recreations of 18th century face wash to vintage compact mirrors. Piece by piece, the business of selling history is such an intriguing one, and who better to enlighten us than Alicia Schult?

Alicia Schult is the owner of Little Bits Clothing Company, a historical Apothecary, which you can find selling products and platforms like Etsy as LBCC historical. Specialising in authentically reproduced historical, cosmetic and apothecary products - she also drapes and hand sews historical clothing.

With a primary goal being to educate and live history, it's not surprising that her work has gained its own fan page with nearly 10,000 dedicated followers. Armed with a BA in Arts and the wonderful slogan myriad of ‘ Be beautiful, be natural, live historical.’ - Fear not there is a website on the way. To view these amazing products and the work that Alicia has done. 

Instagram: @LBCCHistorical

Blog: http://lbcchistorical.blogspot.com

Twitter: LBCC_Historical

Fanpage: www.facebook.com/LBCC.at.the.Mayfly 

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/LbccHistorical- Helpful Videos

We will give you all these contracts again at the end of the show and of course, link them to the episode.

Welcome to the show, Alicia.

00:02:57 Alicia Schult

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited about this. This is wonderful.

00:03:01 Laura Fitzachary

Could not wait for this one. It's 100% up my street. When you're pouring over recipes, whether it's cooking, cosmetics or skin care, when you're researching you, you would think it would be amazing to have them physically and having a tangible product to either show an audience who are wanting to know what you're researching but also to use yourself, I remember when I was working in the museum sector I had bottles of rose water just to give the idea of what these women would have smelled like in some way or another when we were researching them.

The only experience I have though directly with selling history is with the vintage pieces. I research pieces and I buy and I sell them at antique fairs, but on a very, very small scale, so nothing that generates income, just more of a side interest really.

00:03:50 Alicia Schult

That is exactly what we are about in our missions, bringing it tangibly to the audience, to the customers, bridging that gap from history to our modern world, and hoping that somewhere everybody can meet in the middle and find exactly what they're missing, whether it's stories. Or just making the world a better place through the love of history and the new information that's coming forward that you know, some of these things, science maybe could take a look at and maybe it can help us in the future.

So there's so much to unpack in the historical beauty regime, and even in just selling it. I'm fascinated about the whole history of selling cosmetics, so yeah, I'm really excited.

00:04:37 Lucy Jane Santos

I had thought I was going to say that I've had no experience of this, but actually I do have a sort of confession to make because one of my first kind of, not jobs. When I first started off in the historical world, I set myself up as someone called the Glamourologist.  So that was my blog, so that was like, I don't know, 2010 when I was a glamourologist- beauty historian. And I got together with some other girls who lived near me and we became the Historical Sauces.  And sauces were spelled as in saucy. So we were we were all tight skirts and little jumpers and lots of makeup, and we posed for lots of pictures, you know, little sort of pin up girl pictures. But then what we did is we went round vintage fairs and sold things. But also did demonstrations or taught people had to do eyeliner and red lips and do their hair and do their nails.

And I was the resident historian, so we'd do like these hen parties and people would be having fun. And I'd stop and tell them all the history behind it. So, I would bore everyone. And all they wanted to do was do nice hair and makeup and have fun. And I was like ohh, did you know the history of this lipstick? So I have a little bit …have a history. I have experience of boring the pants off people on this one. So I was really excited by this episode because I mean, obviously not only do you do this historical beautiful, historically accurate products, but you're also really engaging when you tell people about it. I was really, really excited to hear from someone who does it so well. So that's my confession. And that's what I want to learn about today. How do you do this so, so interestingly?

00:06:24 Alicia Schult

I was gonna say you and I have something in common,  but thank you. That's a very nice compliment. I actually before I answer your question, I actually did vintage modelling. When I in my younger years and travelled around. We live in Wisconsin, but I travelled around Wisconsin and so I was able to experience with the clothing and I collected vintage clothing myself. But it was always.

This the cosmetics and the hair that was missing, like I felt like I would look amazing in this outfit, but something just wasn't quite right to tie everything together. And so that wasn't my first foray into it, but I was really interested in watching a lot of videos, not for the information but just to see how people interact with the public and when we would be out at events or I would be doing vintage modelling like interacting with the public was so important and learning to make that connexion with them to something that they could understand. And I started really early because I grew up in theatre, so I don't know if that had anything to do with it. But as far as historical cosmetics and all of the cool old stuff to talk about, I really try to make a bridge and I'll probably mention this a lot, but it's really important to me where they can relate it to their modern world because I think all of us in the historical community, we have so many interesting facts, but if we just rattle off facts, we can lose the audience very easily.

But if it's something tangible that they can relate either to their modern life or their family life or something that is important to them. Then it opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and then they become interested in it.

And I think that's part of the issue where in history class? I don't know if you guys experienced this as well, but I absolutely adored history except in some of the classes I had a really hard time because the professors and the teachers would just be rambling off facts and they didn't make it something that I could latch on to and understand in a way that I needed to understand it. And so I never wanted that to happen with those people that I wanted to share information with or that wanted information from me and so that's where that comes from, I think.

00:08:47 Laura Fitzachary

You've absolutely hit the nail 100% on the head there about having something that people can relate to and having that and especially when it's a physical product. Our first question for you was how did you first get interested in creating historical based cosmetics and perfumes?

But I think actually if it's if it's, if you don't mind, I might just ask you what was the turning point, what was the catalyst for you to go I want to make a physical product of what I of what I know. So how did you first get interested in creating historical based cosmetics and what was that spark that that turning point to create the first physical product for you?

00:09:26 Alicia Schult

I was always interested in the healing ability of herbs and knowing what was growing outside or on a walk with my grandmother, she was really integral in helping me love history and then my great grandmother was the one who was all herbal. And so my father would have all these great stories about, you know, the choke cherries that they would go and do all these things with. And that was really my first opening to the idea of historical products. When I was younger, I made my dad some like dill aftershave, like this Victorian dill aftershave recipe. He never used it, but I was doing it when I was younger and then, as life would have it down the line, I had moved and I was in a new city and I had to make a decision what I was gonna do was I gonna apply see if the museums were accepting applicants. Or was I gonna continue with the sewing business or start something else? And I had a wrist crush injury in the theatre. So my sewing my hand sewing had to be put on the side for a while. And I went to take a nap and I had this dream. So this is going to get really crazy. I had this dream where my ancestors came to me and they're like, we know that you're looking for your next route or path to take in life and we're going to tell you what you're going to do. You're going to open a historical apothecary. And teach people all about this lost information and these recipes. And I said. It's never gonna work. No one is gonna wanna do this. No one's gonna wanna put fat in their hair.

It's this is ridiculous. I'm absolutely just making this up and they said no, no, no. You'll see. Like we're gonna be with you. It's gonna be exciting. It's gonna change the world, and it's going to help a lot of people. And I was like, OK.

So I woke up and fast forward and here we are.

00:11:22 Laura Fitzachary

That is an incredible story, and as somebody from Ireland, it makes complete sense to me. I'm like, Oh yes, visited by people. Yeah, that makes sense to us. So you hear those kind of stories here all the time. But but I think that that's a brilliant way of as you said there when you were, when you when you had this dream. It was probably subconsciously residing within you to have this this ability to kind of physically and or I suppose tangibly create a connexion to the past. So I think it's fantastic that you're able to manifest that into actual products that we can all use today.

00:11:57 Lucy Jane Santos

Thank you. So you've talked about bridging the past to the modern. So I was just wondering how do you ensure that the products that you're making are safe and suitable for modern use?

00:12:09 Alicia Schult

Well, first and foremost, in case people aren't familiar with our business, we would never produce anything with lead or mercury or any such substance as those historical ingredients that were used. So that's number one. Number two, when we're looking at recipes, we're very careful about our knowledge of herbs, how it's compounded because a lot of times, recipes, they just say, especially the really old ones, they're like you need this, this, this, this. I don't know. Put it in and put whatever. Macerate it four days and and there you go. So it's a matter of really understanding how ingredients were prepped and historical recipes prepared, so we make sure all of that is done really meticulously and then when it comes to R&D with the prepping of.. does this work in the historical way it's meant to or do we need to preservation wise add something a little more modern in the preservation.

So we're always making double things and using the modern preservatives and the historical preservatives and oddly enough as long as the recipe is very, very natural, meaning that it's like post 1930s, the historical preservation system, whether it's, you know, alcohol or gum of Benjamin or it works really, really well, another thing is obviously cleanliness in our labs and such, we have to make sure everything is clean. And it's just …itt's from the beginning to the end, we have to test the products. We can't just like I would love to be able to pull a book out of our library and just say, oh, we're gonna make this today and we're just gonna send it off.

But unfortunately that's not how it goes. We have to work in both worlds of the modern world and the historical world. So historically labels didn’t necessarily have ingredients on them. We have to put ingredients on ours. We have to put the weights on them. And even when we're working the lab, I have two really young apprentices that have been with for three years now, one is 21 and one is, I think, like 14 and they have to label everything, even the pots that they're working with. They have to label everything and like oil concentrations, it's amazing when you look at it at historical recipes. So for example, we have this foot powder that we've been working on from 1912 and the concentrations for our modern world are like ¼ to 2%  percent of essential oil concentration. Historically, it was all over the board, so this specific foot powder from 1918 is absolutely off the charts. So we know why it works, because it's got a lot of essential oil in. So we have to take those down to a level that is acceptable for today, which will will go with the 2%.

00:15:06 Lucy Jane Santos

That's really interesting. I mean as as I was thinking about it. As you were talking, I was thinking about some of the research, so I was doing some work on Kora Lubin who used  thallium in Kormelu hair removal, and there's a description of her in 19… well, the late 1920s making up these batches of just getting thallium salts, getting a handful of them, and shoving them in another pot of moisturiser and just doing them with a stick and then trying it and saying, oh, that doesn't quite get rid of the hair. Well, get another. Yeah. And you just? Yeah. So it sounds like you're a lot more thorough than than the historical.

00:15:45 Alicia Schult

Yes. And even when we have. Especially 18th century, they don't like to measure in the 18th century. It's like a handful or some of this or whatever. We make sure, OK, so if we're going to do like 3 handfuls with the recipe. Says well, what is 3 handfuls and we weigh it out. So yeah, we try to keep everything all organised and updated a little bit. Now there's certain things that like, for example, spermaceti, it's it comes from a whale. If you guys don't know it comes from a sperm sperm whale and it is illegal. And a lot of recipes call for it. It's like this, this waxy oily substance that was used for candles and used in products. And so we have to substitute. And in those circumstances we try to be very careful, preferably that we either want something historical that we could substitute it with that we know was used historically, or we want to go chemically. So in our case, Jojoba Oil is actually very similar structure wise and chemically to the Spermaceti and the only thing that's missing is like a few bits of waxiness, so we can just up the beeswax in that case.

So while we there's a lot of them, a lot of recipes, we can do 100% a OK, there's some that we have to make a few substitutions for.

00:17:04 Laura Fitzachary

Yeah, I have been up to my eyeballs in whale pieces the last few weeks. It's been spermaceti and it's been ambergris central here for the last for the last couple of weeks so I can actually imagine. And that actually leads us beautifully on to what the next question, what are some of the differences between historical cosmetics and modern cosmetics apart from the, I suppose the the modifications you might make to some of the some of the ingredients is there huge differences, kind of fundamentally, between modern cosmetics and historical cosmetics.

00:17:38 Alicia Schult

There is and ,people might be surprised, but there's actually a lot of vegan recipes out there. Historically pomades and things that's hard to be vegan because animal fats just work so well, but there are some. We had … a we have a castor oil homemade recipe from around the Civil War era that is vegan - doesn't use beeswax and things so, but there are a lot of differences and at the same time there aren't, so this could be a whole book in itself where, you know, when we have lipsticks and eye shadows tested today, people aren't aware that there's lead and there's so many things that a lot of people say : well we live in modern times and these things don’t happen. 

00:18:27 

And you say, well, wait a minute. Now, like, it's not necessarily the case. Let's just strip everything down. And so, interestingly enough, at least I think it's interesting in the 18th century. They were already aware that lead was really bad and so you would have this push towards natural ingredients. But does that mean that it was always adhered to? No, and really you can't get a decent red well, a decent red unless you have, you know lead or mercury or these elements in that are harmful. And so people today they even even when they get the historical cosmetics, sometimes they say ohh well like it, it's not as red as I thought it was going to be or it looks different in the pot than what it is on me.

And you know my red lipstick or my red blush, it's really, really pigmented. Well, there's a reason for that. #1, the pigments today are completely different than what they were historically, and even historically, if we wanted to get a true red, we would have to put either mercury or lead or you know, whatever into the red pigment that we were using. And so those who were using natural pigments -the pigmentation just isn't as deep or as bright as one would think it would be.

And so there was still, regulations and such, but we have regulations now. It's just this weird thing. I mean, I could talk about this for days, but in some cases, the regulations they are very helpful, but in other cases there's really no regulations on cosmetics in in a lot of the world, so you can just make cosmetics out of whatever and you don't even necessarily have to list it, which is scary, but that's also very historical. So there's a lot of similarities there as well. Some of the things that are a little different, I guess with the fats like today, we have so many different types of fats that are that are like in little flakes and that goes in like with the, although the talc is a little different, but you know, like we have the talc issue too. And so that's one of the things we've had to edit out of our products. Before the whole talc thing happened. We had it in one product and the product was flying off the shelves because face powder wise I think it was -I don't know if it was like a 1922 product or a Victorian product -but it said that it the customers would say well it is the best blemish cover and like to reduce the pores and blur everything together and they would say oh, I can't believe I'm getting these amazing pictures without this filter and it was all about the face powder but since then we have changed it as soon as the new regulations came out. So...

00:21:26 Lucy Jane Santos

And that actually probably does lead on, kind of, on to the next question.

Which is about favourites, so maybe that's not your not favourite product if you had to change.

00:21:35 Alicia Schult

That is not one of my favourite products.

00:21:37 Laura Fitzachary

Do you have a personal favourite product or recipe that you sell?

00:21:42 Alicia Schult

They're all my babies, so it's really hard to choose what is my favourite. I would say if I had to pick something in the cosmetic genre or the hairdressing genre, I would probably pick the cold creams. I think,  historically speaking, if you're making a cold cream without an emulsifier -without something to like, get the oil and the water to stick together and stay together, if you can do that without new scientific ingredients then you're a master of magic.

It's hard. It's not easy to do. It can be done. It's not easy to do and that would be one of my favourite products only because it was difficult in the beginning to think, OK, well, there must have been a way that they did this in, in a natural method without adding some new product. And I figured it out. But historically it would just take a lot of time and a lot of whipping and mixing where today we have mixers to do that, but it's not an easy product to make without modern conveniences of ingredients. And so aside from the fact that everybody should have cold cream because you need cold cream in your life as a moisturiser and to remove makeup and what better than to have a historical cold cream that only has a few ingredients and you know exactly what the ingredients.

So I would say cold creams are definitely #1 and #2 would be this 1930s curl set they call it. And the reason I like that one is because my sister, she had this hair issue when she was younger in high school and when she went into the beauty parlour to get it figured out what it was, they had to cut her hair and like strip it because the hairspray she was using was so bad that it just coated the hair follicles and it wouldn't come off.

And so I think about that every time I use this – and that is essentially what it is. It's a curl set, but it's a hairspray, but it's an all natural hairspray and so not only is it like the only way to set your curls for like a real experience with vintage setting products or that vintage wave or the vintage curl set, but also in a modern way. Now that my hair is really short, it just works really great for texture and it washes out and it holds all day and I find those small things really interesting. That there are some products I think that we could learn a lot from historically and then the most important one because apothecary products and healing. That's my passion. I love the beauty, I love the cosmetics, but when it comes to what is my real passion in the apothecary, it's the healing products, and it would be the Hastings ointment. And this one is my favourite because it took me a year to figure out the recipe. It it's a recipe from very early 18th century. It was found in a grimoire in Scotland and grimoire seemed very scary, but really a lot of times they were just herbal. They were herbal remedies, herbal recipes. And every little area, every town, every city, every family had their own name for herbs. So to try to decode what the recipe was and then put it together and then test it. It was just a really big moment, especially because my grandpa, he's like, 90 some years old. He had these lesions on the top of his head that the salves the doctors were getting weren't helping, and he is. He's so open and willing and excited about these old products, more so than my parents. And he tried it and took it into the doctor in a couple days his little lesions on his head were gone and he was so amazed. And I think that was the first time my parents really took me seriously as this is a business that she's really passionate about and that is actually working and now we can see how or we can see what she's attempting to do with it and why it's important. Versus you know, being those type of parents who we're like, oh, well, you go to college, you find a husband, you get a job, you settle down, and you have kids. And that's great for those who want to do that. But it was never in. It was never in me to do that, and my mom would often call and say well, you don't have a job, so you can be you should be able to just stop. Whatever you're doing and like go do this cause you don't have a job and it was difficult to get her to understand that.

00:26:36 

This is something that hasn't been done before, as far as as far as I'm aware of, making a historical apothecary and reproducing the recipes, but despite what you think, Mother, it's a job and I'm working very, very hard, long hours, get up early and then work long hours to make it all work and so that was really important to me because that was like the first time she actually took me seriously.

00:27:00 Laura Fitzachary

In a way that actually, kind of, feeds quite well then into our next question for you, which would be that have you ever faced any challenges in creating or selling historical based items?

Has there been any kind of very big blockage or obstacle in the way of getting these products out there?

00:27:16 Alicia Schult

Yeah, the parents were a really big one. But at that time I had moved away and kind of started my own life, which was really helpful. Right, but just the idea of how are we’re going to structure this this. Something that was never done before. Today if you go on the Internet and you look up 18th century hair powder or how to style 18th century hair. You have all these videos on it and all these examples and documentation from history. But when I started this there was none of it. So for me, it wasn't just about sitting there and figuring out, OK, so we're gonna do this product. We're gonna do pomade and hair power. It was also about how are we going to get people to put fat in their hair and then once we do that, how are we going to educate people in the proper historical method on how to do this? They can use it however they want, but to me it's really important that they understand how it was used historically. And there was a lot of hurdles in that because even though I grew up in theatre, I had to be OK with being on screen, if you go to our YouTube page, there's a lot of old videos and that's that was really the push to get the products out there and then show them and speak about them in a historical way so that people could do it historically and then now there's some books and things where other people have been researching it as well.

00:28:42 

But that was a really big hurdle to come over and then you know that first e-mail you get where someone says. You know, this pomade has really helped my hair I can see that my hair texture has improved or you know, those were really happy moments because to think you're doing something completely different than what the world actually wants you to do and then worry if you're going to be accepted and then realise that because it's so new, you really have to have all of your ducks in a row. You have to have the documentation you have to be able to. If someone says well where did you get this? Well you should be able to just pull it up and say OK, this is it, this is where it is, you know.

00:29:26 

So I think that was a major challenge. The other one is like I talked about before not only finding the recipes and collecting them. But then after we make them to bridge that gap between the historical world and the modern world. So, people ask me all the time. So can I use this as a Toner? And then I have to say well, historically, we didn't really have those words as toners, but let me explain how this was used and then how we can use it today. And so it's worked out really, really well and everybody has been so receptive to that. And really, I think most people really enjoy learning that today they want us to put all these things on our face. We have like four or five products, but historically we had one product to take care of it. And it makes them think and open their their pathways to different thought processes too. Where do I have to do everything that is in vogue, where everything that everybody expects me to do? Just because these are the commercials that they're pushing at us or this is what they, you know, there's other options there and if we can make that bridge, then you know we're a success. 

00:30:45

This is history done right, isn't it? So what do you hope people will take away from using your historical based products?

The first and foremost mission of us is to educate the customers. So we know that not everybody is a fan of history. But if they can get a product or at least- not even buy a product, but just look at our website and read a bit about a product and learn something new. It doesn't have to be plastic, but just learn that maybe not everybody was dying from cosmetics back then, that would be great if we could squash that myth. Then that’s perfect. That would be the very minimum, but then also that they understand it's not that -as they were taught- but cosmetic and apothecary is completely different throughout history. And so again, I'm going to repeat myself but just because they want you to do something one way today doesn't mean that's the only way to do it and then I think along with the connexion to the product. If they can feel connected to history and we kind of spoke about this earlier, but if it helps them relive childhood moments, we have people messaging us about perfume scent or the scent of a product and how it brought back happy family memories, I mean  - that's wonderful. You know, it's something that we kind of miss, I think, in today's society, where everything is so fast-paced that we don't necessarily sit down for family meals anymore. And so to be able to just slow down and remember that ohh, this triggered a really happy memory of my grandma. Or my great grandma or my parents that is another wonderful takeaway from what we do.

00:32:34 

And I think for me it's a combination of all of these, but the healing portion of our products, if our products can do #1 and #2 and do it well, and then heal whatever it is, or help them healing is like a bad word these days, but if they can help them heal a portion of whatever it was that they were using the product for, I mean that's amazing. And if they can use that to open new understandings of how our ancestors were in history, how we are today in our modern world and if our products can bridge that gap, then that's an absolutely beautiful thing. I think we really hope that our products spark conversations and allow past stories to be shared, whether it's just family history or, you know, getting a good feeling from reading our descriptions, we don't want this knowledge lost and that's the problem with things like all the regulations going on today -not saying that regulations are good or bad. Because there's always good or bad in them. But saying that if we can't talk about historical healing, then that information is lost and so it becomes difficult to share parts of the historical record that really, really need to be talked about. And if we aren't able to do that, how many of us are going to sit there and keep notes for our future? And it just becomes this whole connected line of events where we really need to preserve history and we need to remember where we all came from. So we can do better and then we can look ahead as a collective not as separate groups going forward, but as a collective, and we need to understand and realise that whether it's as simple as a historical apothecary product, or even just a thought process, that this one piece of the puzzle pulls it together from the historical history, our modern world and whatever happens in the future.

00:34:49 

It's all about beauty, healing and love, and that those are the pieces that every culture shares. Those are the three things that if we can bring forward and connect to the past, we have a chance to heal our future together. And this is what the world needs right now. We need this love and we need this compassion to understand that we're not all different. We may have different colour skin or we may have different colour, different thoughts, ideas. But at the basis of it, it's all about love, beauty and healing. That's what we want. And so, we have to use that and come together. And if we can do that, then LBCC historical is a success.

00:35:40 Laura Fitzachary

It sounds like though it absolutely might already be, it sounds like it absolutely already is, but interestingly, a kind of a thread of that has kind of popped up and I don't know if you'd agree with there Lucy, but in other episodes of …there's this thread of of making sure we we've always had like the right history getting out there and and you you did you kind of touched upon that when you were talking about how cosmetics didn't always kill everybody.

So that the right history getting out there I think was really, really interesting. Then I know you kind of touched upon it briefly, but that that thread has kind of come through nearly nearly every episode we've done so far.

00:36:17 Alicia Schult

Right. And I think it's important to point out that in, in every, in every century, there's going to be people for or against something, even in the cosmetic world. So for example, in the 18th century, even in the 19th century but in the 18th century, there were people for - they called it like the white and red. There were people for the white and red. There were people for hair powder. There were people against it. And so you're going to always have this combination of forces. And so history isn't as straightforward as saying, you know, everybody wore white face paint. Everybody wore rouge like I think our society wants to dumb it down to make it easy, but in making it easy, a lot of misinformation comes forward and also we're losing the actual dynamics of what the true history was. We need to look into both sides of all the topics and the aspects that people can fight about hair powder. And we can have all these variations and ideologies of why hair powder is good, why hair powder is bad, there's a lot to be learned, and a lot of ideas that are probably in the middle somewhere that can shed light onto our current world, even in hair powder.

00:37:39 Lucy Jane Santos

Especially in hair powder. 

There's a lot of me and Laura are both in the same network for cosmetic history and makeup studies network and we talk a lot about the importance of situating beauty, history, or cosmetic history in history and, and I think your response is something that I'm just going to write down and steal for that, because it was brilliant. Next time someone asks me. I'll be like, hang on, I've got someone 

it is just perfect and it does go to show… one of the things that when you started talking about the smell as well, I was thinking, you know, there's so much around reminiscence and I there was some work I did a few years ago on working with people with dementia or the beginnings of Alzheimer’s and using cosmetics using that smell to stimulate memory so it would be me going somewhere with a pile of old, I don't know,  Max factor powders or you know something that had quite a particular smell, a cold cream or something and using that to trigger memories as well. So cosmetics can be incredibly powerful just on a personal basis, let alone on a revolutionise the world basis.

00:38:52 Alicia Schult

Well, I completely agree.

00:38:53 Lucy Jane Santos

You use Etsy as your main platform for selling products. So how do you find it? And are there other platforms that you've tried as well?

00:39:02 Alicia Schult

So up until recently, Etsy was the only place that we had sold as far as online goes. We had been with Etsy, I believe, I opened the shop for bespoke historical clothing and working with museums in.2006 or 2008. I can't remember. But I have been with them ror a very, very long time.

As far as the anti platform goes in selling products, I think there is obviously some really good reasons to use Etsy and we've had a lot of success with them. But I also see now as things progress, that there's some things that they could maybe do better on or that maybe aren't for us and we've moved on and we need a different platform.

So at first, the pros of Etsy are they're extremely affordable, and I know people are gonna poo poo this, and they're gonna say ohh no, they're they're really, really expensive. But I had to. I'm in the process of making our own website and so I'm realising that all of these separate apps that I have to purchase in order to get everything up and running with sale tax and keeping track of everything, they all cost money, which is fine, but at Etsy I'm paying $10 a month and they take care of all of that.

In fact, Etsy takes care of the sales tax as well, and so for living in the states -every state has different sales tax and you have to remit that all.

And it's one thing to do the the cosmetics and the apothecary and research the recipes. The whole business side is a completely different animal and so. I don't know. Etsy is great. They're easy platforms to work with, especially for beginners. They have order help. I have only had good experiences with a customer needing to reach out because it's been lost in the mail or something?

00:41:03 

That now the cons of Etsy are that they have rules, so there's some things that you aren't able to list, and if they add something to the list and you don't know what it is - the next morning, you could wake up and you could have deactivated listings and they don't really explain these things. By the time they send the letter out. This has already gone through their platform. I've heard a lot of stories where people have lost their whole shops where they could have changed something up. Had they just been discussed ahead of time.

The other thing is that if you need help as a seller, it's becoming very, very difficult to get help. When we needed help with our most recent issue, I spent about a day researching and I had  to research how to find help on Etsy and find YouTube videos. And when I finally got to that point of figuring out where I can send this e-mail. It took them forever to respond. They did respond, but that's another story. And then their ingredients. Some of their ingredients are banned. Obviously we have some good banned ingredients and some of the ingredients, I think are a little overkill because it depends on really how you compound them and how they're used. So those ingredients. But there's at least three of them that we can't have historical recipes in the shop because of that so it's fine. It's dandy when we move to our own platform then you know, if we want to bring those. So the the other thing is with our current issue with them. I in making assumptions here but what you type out in your description you we have these big long descriptions, if you've ever been on our on our Etsy store. And we talk about the historical significance and the historical healing and things like that. They now have bots. I'm assuming they're bots that go through and look for specific words. So even if you're talking about historical aspect or the historical thought process back then - the bot will deactivate your listing because they see the word as relief or they deactivated a a face powder of ours because I said historically the face powder was used for whitening the skin and I didn't mean it as like a bleach, but it was like it was just what was done historically. They deactivated it cuz it said whitening the skin so there's certain issues there as a historical apothecary. It may not be beneficial anymore if we want to stick with the historical like. To me, that's really important. That's why we're doing this. It's all about the historical information. So obviously for us, there's an issue. So we are working on our own website, which is going to be www.lbcchistorical.com

And I think the whole education issue again of … Etsy is great for starting. It's is great if you're just, I guess, selling something that's not historical that you don't want to give the historical healing information up then Etsy is perfect and I would say in Etsy, as long as I possibly could, but also again in our reality it becomes an issue if we're as a society banning words like healing. So now we're not able to learn the history of these products.

00:44:23 

And I could talk and talk and talk on this, but there's this quote from Aristotle and I've been thinking about this for days now, so I just. I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to tell you what the quote is. And I'm gonna leave it at that, because I think this whole education. Is so important, and I think history is so important and it's said that Aristotle once was quoted by saying it is by education that I learned to do by choice what other men do by constraint of fear. 

So I think I'll just leave it there with that.

00:44:58 Lucy Jane Santos

Brilliant. Thank you.

00:44:59 Laura Fitzachary

I think it's a great way to end your answer. Thank you. I was just going to mention there that there's a big vintage scene on sites like Etsy and as a vintage collector myself. Can the research element cause you mentioned your your historic descriptions there too. Can the research element be quite time consuming is?

Is it hard to find that balance between creating the products, selling the products and then providing this article research. There's an added, I suppose level, of of work involved when you're a historian. When you're creating these products and can are you able to find a balance? I suppose with that?

00:45:37 Alicia Schult

That's always the question about finding that balance. I hope I find that balance, but sometimes I just find myself giving so much historical information that I have to come back a couple days later and just pair everything down, because when it really comes to it, every single product that we make in the apothecary, I could probably write a small book about all of the documentation that we've looked at, all of the recipes that we've actually tried that are very similar and what you know what time period they came from and why and then when it comes down to it, first of all, listing things is a chore all in itself, regardless if you're doing extra research to give the information.

Just listing something takes a long time, and that extra research is hours and hours. Because you always find a new rabbit hole, and that rabbit hole always leads to something interesting.

And so by the time you actually get to to write down that description, it's really about is it a good balance between the history that's important for the customer to make a good decision whether or not that product is going to help them. Versus giving some historical information so they understand it, making it, modernising it. And then also having them feel like -this is something that they can totally get behind and feel comfortable with.

So yes, it takes an extremely long time, but I'm also really passionate about that. I'm one of those nerds that just give me a library and I will be happy for the rest of my life.

00:47:15 Laura Fitzachary

I think we'd all join you there. Yeah, absolutely. You just stick us in a room with our favourite thing to research would be. If we didn't have to work. I'd be like great, I'll just do this all the time and I was like, do other bits for it should be great finally. Then are there any upcoming products or projects that you are excited about?

00:47:34 Alicia Schult

I am excited about this Marechale hair powder. I never took French. If I could go back to my high school college years, I definitely would have taken French because not that Spanish isn't helpful in the historical realm. But there's a lot of beauty and apothecary books and manuscripts and things that are in French.

So I don't know if I'm pronouncing that quite right. But it's Marechale hair powder and…we weren't going to put this in the shop because there's recipes out there ready for do-it-yourself for 18th century.

And so for us, I finally broke down and after we had so many emails that requested us to have it. And that's one thing that I really try to do is if somebody wants something. I have notebooks, tonnes and tonnes of notebooks, and I'll put it in the notebook and then if we get another one, I'll flip to that page and put it in the notebook so.

Eventually, after we get enough people requesting things, then we'll talk about it and we'll possibly make it. And this was one of those products.

And so I wanted to do something really different with it. I didn't just want to say ohh here's the 1772 recipe. So I spent months searching for Marechale hair powder. I found out that it has a really long history actually like people think 18th century is a hair powder thing? No, no. No, hair powder goes throughout history. It's just became popular in the 18th century. Versus like you could go to an apothecary in you know, the 19th century, the 20th century, and purchase hair powder too. It was just a little different. And then finally it became this dry shampoo, but I digress. Anyway, so we took all these recipes 1 from 1789, one from 1784 one from 1848 and one from 1772. And we combined them and took the best of the best and realised what was similar, what was different, and this is one of the products or one of the projects that I gave one of my apprentices. And I said here it is -I've taught you well, hopefully. So how would you put this together? And then we worked through it and it's really been her baby. And so I'm really, really excited. She just finished it and we're going to have it out soon. I've been kind of promising customers that it would be middle of March, end of March, so I think we're going to meet that deadline and this beautiful hair coloured powder that won't dye your hair, but it is more of a natural colour versus like a white. And it smells kind of like Chai. I think it smells like Chai. So it's a really fun hair powder. I'm really excited about that. And then the next one that we have coming out is the foot powder I talked about. We're still working on that one. But then we also have some more history scented historical waters. Historical waters were such a big thing. People mistake them for perfume. I mean, they weren't quite like perfume, but they were the more economical choice than perfume doesn't mean that they last as long as perfume.

00:50:41 

But we do have some more historical waters coming out. We have two recipes from 1890 for perfumes. We don't do tonnes of perfumes, but I couldn't resist. One is called Banquet Royale and one is called Spring Flower.

And so those will be coming out soon and I'm trying to think - ohh we also have ointment pots, so if you're familiar with the way like creams and salves and things came historically, a lot of apothecaries you could walk in and it was by price. So, if you didn't have the money or have the means to splurge on like a little porcelain cute little jar you could get like a paper, a paper jar, or even bring your own container and they could fill it. But a lot of times you see tooth powders and cold creams in these, in these porcelain pots, and so we have really tiny ones, like for lip saves and stuff, and we're going to be putting those up on the website as well. So those are a few things to look forward to we always have stuff in the works. We also have a, now that I'm thinking about it, we also have a really, really cute label bug spray it. It came from the 1930s recipe, and it's historically would be considered a water. It's pretty much … it's pretty much water, but the ingredients in it, the essential oils in it, are to keep bugs away and the original labelling of it was so adorable. It's got this woman in a bathing suit. And it's just like it's just yellow and these bugs are like flying away from her and it's something like Bug… Bug Off or Bug Be Gone and it says ‘a scent beautiful to humans but terrible to bugs.’ And I just thought, I can't resist. I just can't resist. So that'll be coming out as well.

00:52:31 Laura Fitzachary

That's my favourite. The buy spray sounds great. I love that.

00:52:38 Lucy Jane Santos

They always had the best names for things, especially in the 30s.

00:52:40 Alicia Schult

No, I know.

00:52:43 Lucy Jane Santos

Every episode we run a little business clinic focusing on topics raised by people. We've been speaking to that relate to the theme.

So today, obviously we're gonna be pulling from our … mail bag… as it were questions on selling history - in terms of products.

So the first question we have here is. 

so, I'm really interested in the idea of selling products as a way of getting people to engage in the historical time period I research, but I'm really struggling to come up with a niche.

Do you have any advice on what to choose? 

That question does relate to the question that we asked you right from the beginning, what made you choose this?

You know what was the spark and I …this seems like a bit of a non answer on my part, but I would say for this one you need that spark and I'm not seeing hearing a spark from this person yet they haven't found…

It's not giving advice on a niche for it. They need to find their spark. I mean, that certainly seems to have worked for you, Alicia anyway.

00:53:48 Alicia Schult

I completely agree. I think it's really important. It's not... It's something I think that's very easily overlooked. But I think it can make or break what …it doesn't even have to be in the cosmetic business or the history business. It can make it break what you want to do, and if you are the type to be a natural born leader and do something in a niche that hasn't been really delved into completely, yet you really really need passion and you really, really need a spark because that's what people are going to see. They're going to before you can even sell product you have to get people interested in that and they will radiate. If you radiate the passion, so it's all about the love. It's all about the excitement. So whatever you are excited about, that's what I would go to I mean… in my experience with other sellers who are essentially doing the same thing, they're pulling historical recipes. I think this is really great. This is something that when I started the business, I didn't know how it would be received or that people would even want to be doing this like making their own business out of it and I'm really pleased to see that that's happening. What I have noticed though is that until people find their feet, they're really relying on what we have done. So they will look up where our recipes come from and then they will have that same cold cream that they will put out and while that's fine and dandy.

The thing that I wanna reiterate is that you don't need to do that. We have so many historical recipes that are natural, that are good, that you can make from organic and sustainable ingredients that you don't have to worry about taking something that someone else has already done. The main point is that you know whether you just focus on historical eau de toilette or I know there's a company in Etsy now who is focusing just on historical perfumes. And that's amazing because as passionate as I am and as many manuscripts and books and products that we have in our archives in our library, I will never be able to get through everything.

So for those of you who are interested, find something you like. If it's perfumes, work on the perfumes. If it's pomades, mates work on the pomades. Just start there and I think that will help you find your passion and lead you in to wider scopes of avenues for what you're looking for.

00:56:35 Laura Fitzachary

Fantastic answer. The second person. We've got two in the mailbag, they say, but I think it's because the the topic of our conversation this week is so interesting and someone asked:

I have created a product inspired by history, but I'm not sure if I should be selling it first and then building a brand on socials later or the opposite way -so generating interest for a product that is yet to be available.

Any tips? I think that's probably to do a branding though in that sense. But kind of is it generator first and then build later or build it first since I was there?

00:57:08 Lucy Jane Santos

It's a really interesting question, isn't it? And I'm not sure it's one that anyone's ever really completely defined because there's so many variables, isn't there? The idea that you'd go to a place and sell the product. I mean the branding there, do you have a tent? Do you have a table with a lovely tablecloth on it? Where's what signage do you have? I mean, that's we talk a lot of online stuff, but actually physically going to places and selling. I know, Alicia said. That's not something that you've been doing very recently, but something you've certainly done in the past.

00:57:44 Laura Fitzachary

It's a really tough one because as you said we, we've mentioned branding a lot before and maybe in that case and I think it might be quite similar to the first person - the idea is there that they want to do it, but as opposed to LBCC, the why might be missing. Why are you doing it? Which I think is what you've been answering so beautifully throughout this episode is the why you are creating these products. I mean, everybody has… Everyone should have an idea and everyone definitely has to have a niche they want to pursue but also question why do you wanna do this? Do you wanna do it just to make money? Or do you wanna do it because you genuinely believe in bringing history to life and connecting and having this much wider agenda at play, which is that you want to unite everyone through love and connexion and and beauty being that bridge because we can all we can all relate to it in some way, shape or form. So maybe the why is missing? That's just my theory as to maybe why this kind of question might have been asked.

00:58:42 Alicia Schult

Yeah, I completely agree. I think there's definitely room like, if that's what this person wants to do they wanna …They're in it for the money then. To me, that's a different avenue than if they're in it for the teaching of the historical process, or if they're in it to help people. That was one thing that I was very adamant on when I started this business. Now we haven't really talked much about what all happened before I just kind of glanced over that and with good reason, but I can tell you that when we started this business and I had that dream. I was at the lowest of the low. I had just gotten enough money to move into an apartment with my now husband and I had we had technically been homeless and we were living on a guy's floor. And it was, even though like, we didn't have money - it was never about the money. For me it never crossed my mind and I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing or it's a good thing. It's just for me personally. It never crossed my mind. It was always about history and bridging this gap and spreading love and spreading healing, it was always about that. And so I think for the question the author of the question should probably first think about what is behind it. For them, what drove their passion to make this product and there is probably where your answer is if it's how the product was made,  if it's what the product can do, if it's the history behind where they were selling the product, I mean that's going to give you some of the answers, I think, that are needed because let's face it, we have two selling platforms. We have the brick and mortar stores we have online. Well for us historical people we also have like the travelling events that we go to but for us, that's kind of our brick and mortar. So if you are going to sell at a brick and mortar, it's very, very different than if you're gonna sell online. If you're gonna sell online these days you need to put yourself out there, you have to take those risks and you have to show people that you're the one behind this. And what made you so passionate about creating this and really get people to understand you or understand the product or understand that part of history and once the people genuinely feel that they have a connexion with you or with the product - that's how the product sells. The whole idea of like pushing the product towards somebody that we have now in this modern world in the early 19th century and in the early 1800s, that whole idea kind of went by the wayside, especially for the apothecaries, where now they really understood the idea of customer relationships and this was the first time in history that they really published information in magazines, so the women could come in or the men could come in, they say, ohh, I read this in a magazine: Can you explain more about this and regardless if the product was good or not, good or healthy or not healthy - the pharmaceutical person behind the counter, or the apothecary person behind the counter they would take the time to explain exactly what was going on or like answer the questions, and that was really the first time in history that I'm aware of.

01:02:20 

Where you have this customer connexion to not only the product but to the person making the product. If you just push this product like so many people do in your face constantly time after time saying you need this product, you need this product. Well, yeah, that'll work too. But in the end, when all is said and done it's not benefiting anybody except the person who pockets the money. So, I think there's a lot to be said about that. That's how I would answer the question.

01:02:52 Laura Fitzachary

And beautifully so. Thank you. I think aggressively, I think aggressive marketing is might, might have, have had its day I think people are getting a bit too clever for it now.

01:02:59 Alicia Schult

I agree. I completely agree.

01:03:02 Laura Fitzachary

And it also it also links well into the idea of the historical videos that I mean, Laura, I know establishing herself on TikTok recently with doing your beautiful videos and things like that and it is interesting to think about how you present yourself. You know you're not presenting a product, you're presenting yourself. You're engaging with people as yourself as well. Branding yourself, it's it's a scary world out there, I would say. But again, both of you do it very elegantly and very beautifully as well.

That's not. That's not good …I'm just chatting you both up! Right. So we've got the end and we've got one final question, but it's more of a fun one.

Whether it's researching a new product, deciding on how to market it, or recording a YouTube video, the life of a freelance historian selling history is very varied indeed. But before we let you go, Alicia, we always ask our guests, one final question. So, if you could choose a dream office where and when would it be?

01:04:08 Alicia Schult

Oh, wow. Oh, that's a great question.

It would be a very unique office. First off, that would have a little bit of maybe sci-fi mixed in there because there would be portals where I could go back into history and discuss and discuss this information with those who made the product or those who came up with the product. And then be able to come back to my office, which would be the most amazing library full of unpublished manuscripts and saving all of the knowledge that I'm so passionate about saving and that would be my perfect office. Of course, with cats we would need cats there as well, but, I think that would be my perfect office, yeah.

01:04:56 Laura Fitzachary

I love it. Every single, every single episode the answers have been fantastic. We haven't had portals yet, so I really like it.

01:05:05 Lucy Jane Santos

Every single office always sounds really, really good as well, like I buy into all of them. So thank you so much to our wonderful guest, Alicia.

And you can find her on her forthcoming website www.lbcchistorical.com

 

Instagram: @LBCCHistorical

Twitter: LBCC_Historical

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/LbccHistorical- Helpful Videos

And as for us, you can find us on Twitter @HistBizAGuide

And for me, Laura, you can find me on 

Twitter: & @laurafitzach

Instagram:   @seekthehistoric

Tik Tok: @seekthehistoric

And of course, for Lucy, 

Twitter: @lucyjanesantos_ 

Instagram: @lucyjanesantos_   

YouTube: @lucyjanesantos_