Why Small Businesses Matter
Shop small, do big things for your community
Why Small Businesses Matter puts a spotlight on the local merchants who donate their time, talent, goods, and services for the betterment of our community. The shop local movement spreads virally as local businesses who are “tagged” have the opportunity to share their story!
You're IT Wilton Field Club!
Four questions with Courtney Kilcoyne from Wilton Field Club.
Why did you start your business?
We have been making all-natural bug repellent balm for friends and family for close to a decade and decided to turn it into a business in 2018. One of the founders had recently left a corporate job, and both felt that it was challenging to find all-natural alternatives in the mainstream marketplace. It really came to life when I needed a last-minute bug repellent (as we were out of ours), ran to a national retailer, and realized that nothing on the shelf was something that I would put on my child. From there, we took our other formulations for skincare through testing and brought our bug repellent balm and skin care products to market.
We split the company into Wilton Field Club (our “field” line of bug repellent balm and lip balm) and Green Girl USA (our skincare line). While there are other really good all-natural skincare solutions on the market, many of our competing products sell for 2-3 times as much as our products do.
What is your best selling product/service?
On the Wilton Field Club side, our best seller is our BUG all-natural bug repellent. This was how our business started and there are very few products that truly compete. This balm is rubbed in strategic locations of the ankles, back of knees, elbows, and back of the neck and does a phenomenal job of repelling the worst of bugs, such as mosquitos and ticks. It doesn’t sweat off like other natural repellents and we have had rave reviews all along the bug-infested east coast that it works like nothing they have tried before. Our other best seller is our Eyelash and Brow Serum. After a few weeks of use, people rave about how lush their eyelashes appear and the product is all-natural (and under $20 so no reason not to try!).
How many local businesses do you use to support your business (products and services) and can you name them?
Today, we sell to regional stores all over Fairfield County and Connecticut as well as New York, and nationally across a number of local retailers. While we sell online, the lifeblood of our business is our small business retailer. We also realize that if we can help educate people about the benefits of all-natural products for the skin and then make them affordable and accessible, more people will make a natural choice. To this end, our philanthropic mission is to increase child literacy and for every one of our products sold, we donate a book to a children’s literacy organization. To date, we have made large donations to Read To Grow in Fairfield County, but also accept nominations for organizations in need and have spread books to organizations farther south as well (and if any organizations out there are in need, contact us!!).
Have you "reimagined" your small business?
Before 2020, all of our retailers were local/regional. In 2020, we expanded that into “environments” for retailers, such as Abound and Mable, to broader our reach to local retailers across the country. We have also driven much more to social media and tagged many of our local retailers to support their sales and efforts (even if it had nothing to do with our product) so that our followers could gain awareness of stores and options for them from their homes.
Wilton Field Club nominates Village Market in Wilton!
HamletHub thanks Fairfield County Bank for making our Why Small Businesses Matter series possible!