Lifelong friends Nicola Lyons and Elaine Crosse are the brains behind Bánór, a new skincare company with a twist. The twist is that the business’s raw materials are supplied by an obliging flock of specially bred sheep whose milk and wool form the basis of the products.
Lyons is a pharmacist with a background in dermatological skincare, specialising in the manufacture of medicated creams. Crosse is a food sector specialist who worked for Bord Bia and Danone before joining the Airfield estate farm and educational charity as head of advocacy.
“We both come from farming families and, during Covid, we were sitting around Elaine’s kitchen table with her brothers and father discussing the benefits of sheep milk,” Lyons says. “Elaine’s father mentioned how lanolin from sheep’s wool was really moisturising and that his hands always felt soft after shearing.
“From there it became a meeting of minds where farm met pharmacy and the idea took legs. We’ve taken a primary agricultural product – the sheep milk produced on Elaine’s family farm – and made it into a high-value secondary product: skincare.”
The founders spent two years on R&D and used an innovation voucher to tap into the expertise of the Centre for Applied Bioscience Research in Tralee.
“Milk has been used as a beauty and medicinal treatment for thousands of years and the centre’s research showed that our products provide antioxidant, anti-ageing and skin barrier protection as well as increasing collagen production,” Lyons says.
“Sheep’s milk is one of the most nutritious available and rich in the properties that help the skin to act as the body’s protective barrier. The milk’s naturally high fat content nourishes the skin and is a ready-made source of vitamins and minerals that preserve and improve the skin’s appearance.
“It also contains richer proteins and essential amino acids than cows' or goats' milk.”
Bánór’s range is suitable for all skin types (especially dry skin) and is safe to use for children and in pregnancy. The launch products are for hand and body and comprise a milk wash, a milk lotion, a butter scrub and a hair, beard and body oil.
The products are naturally scented with lavender, geranium and ylang-ylang.
“We decided to start with the hand and body products as they will have widest customer appeal and should drive early acceptance of the range,” Crosse says. “We have a pipeline of new products to come which will fall into the specialist skin and haircare category and our aim is to make Bánór a recognisable Irish brand in international markets.”
Investment in the business so far is running at about €100,000, between founder equity and support from Tipperary local enterprise office and Enterprise Ireland’s (EI) New Frontiers programme which Lyons recently completed at TU Dublin’s Tallaght campus. Crosse also took part in the Department of Agriculture’s Acorns programme for rural women in business.
The company’s products are available in 50 stores and online and are made by an Irish contract manufacturer, which Crosse says will make it easy to scale up as demand grows.
“Finding the right manufacturer took a lot of time as quality was really important to us and we also wanted to keep close to the production process.
“We’ve been doing the order fulfilment ourselves up to recently but now have help which frees us up to focus on business development. We’ve also hired in expertise – financial, commercial, online, social/digital – as needed.
“In March, we will be part of an EI delegation exhibiting at the Cosmoprof trade fair in Italy, which is one of the world’s biggest beauty shows. We hope to secure a European distributor while we’re there.
“We went to this show when we were looking at setting up Bánór and saw the popularity of cow, camel, goat and donkey skincare products which further proved to us the power of milk.”
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