A Hack Wiped Out All Her Facebook Followers – But Now 1,954 People Are on a List She Actually Owns

Who: Meredith Moseley-Bennett
What: All-Natural Body Products
Format: physical product · United States – English
Started: February 2017
Audience: 1,954 active email subscribers
Payers: 509 buyers (website only – does not include in-person sales)
Promotion budget: more than $100
Income: yes, a side income
Status: active and growing
Channels: your own newsletter, text social media, offline & word of mouth, collabs & shoutouts, search & AI traffic

What worked: In-person shows combined with her own website – about 79% of her website traffic is direct, meaning customers come straight to her rather than through search or social media.
The result: 30 shows in 2024 and 42 in 2025, her best year yet; 509 buyers through the website alone, plus hundreds more sold in person.
The catch: Etsy suspended her account over a policy dispute it later admitted was a mistake; shows are physically brutal; her first business partnership ended after resentment over an uneven workload.

Before Oh My Balm, I spent years working in costume design for film, television, and theatre. I was even Tony Danza's wardrobe supervisor for a couple of seasons, although he was “a handful,” as my mother used to say. After moving to New York, I designed for off-Broadway productions. I loved the creativity, but the work didn't reliably pay the rent.

I was recruited by a nonprofit organization that certifies entertainment riggers and electricians, where I remained for 14 years. About ten years into that job, I realized how deeply I missed making things. Oh My Balm began in 2017 as a creative outlet alongside my full-time work – not exactly as an established hobby, but as a way to reclaim the part of myself that loved designing, experimenting, and creating something tangible.

I taught myself every part of the business: developing and testing recipes, infusing the oils, designing the labels, staging and photographing the products, creating the social media content, and building the online store myself. My background in costume design shaped the visual side of the brand, while the products gave me an entirely new form of creative work.

In 2021, I was laid off from the nonprofit, and Oh My Balm became my full-time business. What began because I missed being creative became the work that carried me into the next chapter of my life. Today, I still make the products and handle nearly every part of the company myself.

My very first customer was my mother-in-law. From there, my earliest audience came largely from people in Texas, where I grew up. When I created the Oh My Balm Facebook page, that personal network helped it reach 125 followers in just over 24 hours – my first real base of potential customers.

In April 2017, we sold at our first in-person show in the town next to ours and made $800 in one day. That convinced me that selling face-to-face could work. By December, we had a $3,000 day at our hometown holiday show.

My own website and the direct customer relationships I've built through in-person shows have driven the most growth. At shows, customers can smell, sample, and learn about the products directly from me. If I could keep only one channel, it would be this combination of face-to-face connection and my independently owned website.

In-person shows have been my strongest growth channel. I did 30 shows in 2024 and 42 in 2025, in addition to running my website, and 2025 was my best year yet. It also left me thoroughly cooked by January. The events that look impressive on paper are not always the most profitable; sometimes an unassuming show at an Elks Lodge will surprise you. I scout shows carefully and keep a color-coded spreadsheet tracking sales, weather, location, and notes from the day. It helps me identify what works – and, perhaps more importantly, keeps me from paying to make the same mistake twice.

Customers meet the person who developed and made the products, which creates a level of trust that is difficult to reproduce through a screen. I offer a free lip balm to anyone who joins my email list at a show, helping me turn a one-day interaction into an ongoing relationship. That list now has about 1,954 active subscribers and is one of the most valuable things I have built because it is an audience I actually own.

My website analytics reflect that relationship: approximately 79% of my traffic is direct, compared with roughly 11% from search, 8% from email, and 2% from social media. Some email and other untracked links may be counted as “direct,” but the pattern is clear: my strongest channel is the direct relationship between my customers, my website, and me – though I am always depressed by how many people land on the site and never go beyond the home page.

Facebook was enormously important at the beginning. The Oh My Balm Facebook page eventually grew to about 900 followers. In 2021, my account was hacked, and I lost everything – years of posts, followers, photographs, and work. I had to push hard to rebuild and am now back to more than 700 followers across that audience. It was a painful lesson: you can spend years building on someone else's platform and still lose the whole thing overnight. The assets I truly control are my website and my email list. Email lists are golden; algorithms are more like moody landlords.

Product names have also helped attract attention. I love puns, alliteration, and innuendo, so names such as Mosquito Minder and Tickety Split make people stop, laugh, and ask questions. Cleverness can occasionally paint you into a corner – Etsy will not allow me to list Oh My Roids, for example – but memorable names have helped customers remember the products and tell other people about them.

The outdoor products helped lead customers to my healing line. The first was Bruise Banner, an arnica cream I created because my mother had Alzheimer's disease and kept falling. I researched arnica, bilberry, and bromelain and developed a formula intended to support bruised, sore skin. Back when I was a baby herbalist, I understood arnica primarily as something that helped the appearance of bruising; I did not yet appreciate all the reasons customers would reach for it. Bruise Banner is now my bestselling product. It has loyal repeat customers, and I regularly sell out of it at shows.

I also tried traditional retail consignment. For about seven years, my products were carried in a Montclair store that charged $25 a month for two shelves and retained 40% of each sale. Because my handmade products have a shelf life, the time required to monitor, refresh, and restock the inventory eventually outweighed what the placement brought in. I withdrew a couple of years ago, and the store closed recently. It gave me visibility, but it was not a sustainable channel.

Wholesale has been more promising when the relationship is right. Nicole, the owner of Jersey Girl Chocolate, and I happened to be vendors at a craft fair with almost no customers. Since neither of us was exactly overwhelmed with business, we had an entire afternoon to talk. That slow show led to a wholesale account. The first day she placed six travel-size Mosquito Minders on her shelf, one customer bought all six, leading to an immediate reorder. Sometimes the show itself is a dud, but the person in the booth next to you changes what happens next.

Etsy brought me more than 900 sales, particularly earlier in the business, but it has become a much smaller channel. My remedies are now my bestselling product line, and Etsy's rules concerning health-related language limit what I can list and how I can describe it. More recently, Etsy permanently suspended my account for alleged policy violations and then acknowledged during my appeal that the suspension was a mistake. For a period, I could neither buy nor sell there. Once again, I was extremely grateful that I had built my own website instead of depending entirely on a marketplace I do not control.

Search currently accounts for roughly 11% of my website visits. I do not yet have reliable reporting that separates Google from AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, so I cannot honestly assign each one a number. I have, however, seen a major impact from AI on the amount of marketing I can accomplish. Over the years, I spent an extraordinary amount of time writing website copy, emails, product descriptions, and social posts. I am marketing-savvy, but writing everything alone was slow and frustrating.

ChatGPT changed that so dramatically that I named him Gary. I can give Gary a half-formed funny idea, show him a graphic, or explain what I want a post to convey, and – bam – I have a useful draft that still sounds like me. I then use Pallyy to schedule promotional posts for upcoming shows in advance. AI has not replaced my voice or my marketing judgment; it has helped me get that voice out of my head and into the world without losing half a day to every caption.

Earned media helped, too. Oh My Balm was featured in Episode 213 of Side Hustle School, which introduced the business to an audience well beyond my own circle and brought a noticeable burst of website traffic and sales. We were also featured in the “Pamper Me” section of Your Best Self magazine. The interview told our early story, while Stephanie Francis of Handsome Cupcakes Photography styled and photographed the products beautifully. The magazine exposure was harder to measure in direct sales, but it gave the young brand credibility and made our products look polished, established, and frankly much fancier than they normally looked while being made in my basement.

My first mistake – if we want to call it that – was starting a business with a good friend, a credit card, and a shared sense of, “Hey, we can do this.” What we did not have was a serious conversation about who would do what, what each of us wanted from the business, or how we would handle the parts that were neither fun nor glamorous.

I named the company, created the logo, and built the website. Because I already anticipated doing more of the work, I proposed a 60/40 ownership split. The resentment started there and never really went away. Eventually, I created an Excel spreadsheet called “Everything We Need to Run OMB,” which was less a business document and more an itemized record of why I was tired. It showed that I was handling about 75% of the work. I either already had the necessary skills or taught myself – website maintenance, photography, packaging, labels, marketing, copywriting, bookkeeping, inventory, and all the other tasks that happen when no one is standing at a show or making product.

To be fair, my partner kept Oh My Balm on life support for several months while I traveled back and forth to Texas to care for my parents. Shortly after they both died, she asked me to buy her out because she no longer wanted to continue. She was teaching full-time and felt overwhelmed. She also lives two doors away from me, and we no longer speak. It was an expensive and painful lesson in choosing a business partner carefully: friendship does not automatically mean that your skills, expectations, work habits, or goals are compatible.

At that point, grief was sitting on me like a house, and I had to decide whether I truly wanted to keep Oh My Balm going alone. The answer was yes – but I could not continue managing more than 100 products by myself. I pared the line down to what I could reasonably make, sell, and support. For about six months, I operated in extremely small batches while I figured out what the business would look like without a partner. Eventually, I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to give it everything I had. We had built an entire production kitchen and storage area in our basement, after all. It seemed a shame to waste a perfectly good basement takeover.

COVID arrived at almost exactly the same time and put the kibosh on craft fairs. When I returned to shows at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, it felt like starting the business over again. I had years of events recorded in my old spreadsheet, but some of those shows had not survived the pandemic. I spent an enormous amount of time researching new ones, and not every experiment paid off.

There have been shows where I did not even earn back the booth fee, travel expenses, or lodging. Occasionally, one of those failures led to a valuable contact or wholesale relationship, but sometimes a bad show is simply a bad show wearing a vendor badge.

My worst was a three-day crab festival in Highlands. It was nearly 100 degrees, and the crowd had come for crabs – not handmade skincare. I rented an Airbnb around the corner so I would not have to dismantle the booth every night, which sounded like a brilliant plan until I lost approximately $600. My daughter came with me, so at least I did not have to be hot, exhausted, and miserable alone. It became a family experience.

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In 2024 I really started to push my healers at shows, especially Bruise Banner. That is truly a “repeat customer” product, and sometimes I sell 15–20 a week. I created a magnesium balm (Zzzs Please) because magnesium was on trend and all-natural at the end of last year. It sells almost as well as Bruise Banner.

My audience is made up largely of people looking for practical, natural solutions to ordinary but frustrating problems: bruises, sore muscles, dry or irritated skin, bug bites, mosquitoes, ticks, and the occasional problem they would rather not announce loudly in a crowded room. They are not necessarily people who already consider themselves herbalists or experts in natural skincare. Often, they simply have a problem and are willing to try something thoughtfully made.

Many of my customers are also shopping for someone else – a parent who bruises easily, a child who reacts badly to mosquito bites, a spouse with sore feet, or a friend going through something uncomfortable. Several of my products began the same way; they are personal before they are commercial.

My customers care about ingredients, but they want them explained in ordinary language. They respond to the fact that I research the herbs, infuse many of the oils myself, and can tell them exactly why each ingredient is there. They also appreciate humor – a name like Mosquito Minder, Tickety Split, or Bruise Banner makes an awkward problem feel a little less grim.

I say this every year, but over the next year I genuinely want to work smarter, not add more work to an already full table. For the October-through-December season, I have scheduled 14 shows instead of the 20 I did in the same period last year. That is intentional. Shows remain important – they generate immediate sales, introduce people to products that benefit from explanation, and help grow my email list – but 42 shows in one year taught me that more is not automatically better.

My greatest opportunity is converting more website visitors into buyers. My current funnel shows 5,898 visits and 114 purchases, or a conversion rate of just under 2%. More than half of the visitors who place something in their cart complete the purchase, which tells me checkout is not the largest problem. The bigger drop happens earlier: too many people visit the site without reaching a product – or view a product without adding it to their cart.

Over the next year, I want to make the website behave more like I do at a show: identify the customer's problem quickly, guide them to the right product, explain the ingredients in plain language, and build trust without making them hunt. That means clearer paths from the homepage, stronger placement for bestsellers, more customer reviews, simpler explanations, and bundles that answer questions like “What do I need for mosquito season?” The website cannot smell as nice as my booth, but it can do a better job of selling.

Social media will remain useful, but I no longer see follower count as the goal. After losing my original Facebook account, I learned not to confuse a rented audience with one I own. I want social content to do a specific job: introduce a problem, show the person and process behind the product, make people laugh, and point them to my website or email list.

Email is especially promising because I already have about 1,954 subscribers who chose to hear from me. I want to use that list more consistently – product education, seasonal reminders, new releases, gift ideas, follow-up after shows – reaching people directly without hoping an algorithm is feeling generous.

Wholesale is the other channel I want to develop. My experiences with Jersey Girl Chocolate and the Creative Knot Knitting Store showed me what happens when the products reach the right store. I want to find more independent shops whose customers already appreciate locally made, giftable, problem-solving products. A few well-matched wholesale accounts could create steadier revenue without my having to erect a tent every time something sells.

The goal is not to make Oh My Balm bigger at any cost. It is to make the business more efficient, more resilient, and less dependent on how many boxes I can physically carry in a weekend.

One Mom, Two Hands, All-Natural

Website: ohmybalm.com

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