Helen Burch - Senior Health & Beauty Buyer for Safeway
"During my role as Senior Health & Beauty Buyer for Safeway Melinda Coss worked with my team in the design and manufacture of over 40, unique soap products for premium Soap Displays in our Megastore store format. Melinda also designed, produced and delivered a display stand carrying a dozen custom made soaps for our 12 Welsh stores and she created two handmade soaps which we stocked in 98 stores. Melinda was always a pleasure to work with and understood the pressures of the retail environment - she was always flexible and delivered within project timescales. Working with Melinda and the Handmade Soap Company was a great success for Safeway and a great pleasure for the team."
Adam Brett - Tropical Wholefoods
"Melinda Coss worked with Tropical Wholefoods in the development of our Clean Fair Trade Soap range providing excellent, valuable training & advice to our overseas partner in Tanzania in manufacturing techniques and quality control requirements ... she made significant improvements to our partners level of knowledge & understanding of the processes involved and developed a significantly improved soap product which we are now marketing in the UK ..."Click here to see the brief for this project.
Melinda has been instrumental in the journey that Elaine and I have travelled in the soap business since June 2002, and she didn't even know about it!
It actually started when we bought The Handmade Soap Book, which of course, Melinda authored.
We started with hard bar progressed quickly to liquid and shortly after that found ourselves talking to Melinda at her factory and showing her our liquid soap. She saw something in it and offered her services as a consultant in order to get the liquid soap onto the wider market.
That was in October 2004. As from September 2005 Red Star Natural Liquid Soaps will be in the catalogues of major UK distributors and from there in natural product stores around the UK. We are already getting interest from exporters to North and South America and also Europe.
Melinda has saved us thousands of pounds, not to mention the time, in avoiding a large factory set up by going direct to contract manufacture and then on to distributors. This been made possible by Melinda's knowledge, experience and expertise.
Melinda got involved and talked to us straight. We now regard her as a friend rather than a business acquaintance.
"We have always found Melinda Coss to be very knowlegeable with a great deal of expertise in her field. She successfully supported our business start up by providing us with new contacts & sourcing essential oils during our development. She has always been very supportive & encouraging in our endeavours. Melinda also provided invaluable technical advice regarding our legal responsibilities, without whose assistance business development could have been postponed. "
Ms Lindsey Hedges Managing Director of Akamuti Limited