Gritty gold infuses skincare

What started as a messy kitchen experiment has grown into a Marlborough-made skincare brand with a sustainable twist, supplied by your morning café pitstop.

After Josh Gwynne and partner Megan Berlin finished their Business degrees at Lander University in South Carolina and moved back to Josh’s hometown of Blenheim, they found a business opportunity in the region’s thriving café culture - creating Caffeine Crazy Coffee Scrub natural skincare.

“We are huge coffee drinkers, and we observed so many coffee grounds being thrown away — sometimes at a cost to cafés at the tip – so we’re reclaiming them and building a business from it”, says Josh.

“The grounds are the most expensive raw ingredient by far, and it’s a win situation for us as we get it for free while taking stress off cafés.

“Caffeine Crazy started from trialling a homemade coffee scrub at home using grounds we had, and my skin just loved it even in Marlborough’s dry, sunny climate to moisturise and remove dead skin”, says Megan.

“A lot of skincare products are full of ingredient names we don’t know, so we really wanted to have straight forward, all natural, cruelty free ingredients that people would understand what’s going on their skin.”

The range includes the original Coconut Coffee Scrub, and a selection infused with lavender, lime or geranium added to a base of coffee grounds coconut oil, shea butter, sea salt and vitamin E, with a newly launched accompanying gua sha body sculpt tool for lymphatic drainage

“Our kitchen was a mess after a good few months of creating batches, and we didn’t know about the ratios of products especially as we scaled up the batches in size,” says Josh.

“But we’ve found a recipe that worked thanks to friends and family giving critical feedback.”

Upon finding their formula, Megan and Josh sought out local business mentoring from Brian Dawson and Colin Stobie, who connected them with Blenheim’s Designer Skincare for production.

“Colin and Brian gave us the idea to look for scaled up manufacturing first, as well as connecting us with the professional knowhow and certifications we needed, like ensuring shelf stability through an incubator”, says Josh.

“We have had this grand idea for a fun healthy skincare with self-designed packaging and branding since school, but scaling up from kitchen batches to factory production was a big learning curve”, Megan adds.

“However the community assistance we’ve had from so many helpful people, from trying the first scrub to Colin and Brian using their contacts for us, to the Designer Skincare team, it’s been incredible.

“We hope people find the resulting product works just as incredibly.”

Caffeine Crazy products are available at Milk and Honey, Angel Nails and Beauty, local markets or at caffeinecrazycoffeescrub.co.nz