Lesli from Avital's Apiaries shares how she transitioned from hobby to thriving honeybee skincare business using Craftybase for materials management, recipes, and multi-channel sales tracking.
Meet Lesli.
Lesli is the owner of Avital's Apiaries, a honeybee-centric skincare company based in Newfield, NY. But before she was making soaps, bath bombs, and lotions, she was a system administrator at a college—the only woman in her department—spending long hours in a windowless office keeping email servers running and courseware humming for thousands of students.
Then she found a book called Keeping Bees by John Vivian, and everything changed. The author described bees with such love and practical detail that Lesli was immediately captivated. She ordered her first hives through the mail (yes, that's a thing!) and fell in love with beekeeping from the start.
A few years later, she was invited to sell honey at a local fair. Almost as an afterthought, she made some lotion bars alongside her candles and jarred honey. The honey sold. The candles sold. The lotion bars? They sold out completely—someone even wanted to buy the tester. That was the start of understanding that everything honey bees make is good for our hair and skin.
That was over 12 years ago. Today, Avital's Apiaries is a thriving six-figure business with a solar-powered workshop on 30 acres of wildflowers and forest. Lesli and her team of two employees create wonderful things using products from their own hives and those of other local beekeepers.
And Lesli has an ambitious vision for the future. Inspired by King Arthur Baking Company, she dreams of building Avital's Apiaries into a business sustainable enough to eventually sell to her employees—creating a legacy that doesn't just benefit her, but the people who helped build it.
When business got serious, I got serious about Craftybase.
Before Craftybase, Lesli was using SoapMaker—a Windows-only desktop program that didn't work in the cloud. As someone who wasn't a Windows user, this meant running a dual-boot machine and constantly switching between operating systems just to update her inventory.
She knew she needed something better: a cloud-based solution that could hold her formulas, track her inventory, and work from anywhere. The problem? There wasn't much out there designed specifically for small makers.
When she found Craftybase through a combination of Google searches and soap-making forums on Facebook, it checked all the boxes: recipe management, materials tracking, cloud-based access, and a clean interface that didn't require specialized knowledge to get started.
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Try Craftybase free for 14 days →Today, Lesli and her small team generate six figures worth of soaps and bath products every year—with just two part-time employees. Craftybase has become the backbone of their production workflow.
When they manufacture a batch of soap, they print the formula from Craftybase, make notes during production if anything needs adjusting, then log the manufacture back in the system. They even use the barcode tags Craftybase generates to track which batch each product came from.
My two employees are part-time and we are generating six figures worth of soaps and bath bombs every year. We don't have oodles of time to count things, so time is really valuable.
One of the biggest wins for Lesli has been consolidating her multi-channel sales. She runs a retail Shopify store, a wholesale Shopify store, and an Amazon store—and all of them feed directly into Craftybase through the Shopify and Amazon integrations.
The integrations even import tax information and sales-associated expenses automatically. For a business dealing with New York's complex destination-based sales tax, this automation has been a massive time-saver.
I really love that I can look at sales in one place and I don't have to shop around all my integrations and storefronts. It's nice to have everything dumped into one place.
For Lesli, two features stand out above all others: materials management and recipe management. These capabilities were incredibly hard to find in other software at a price point that made sense for a small maker.
She also appreciates the clean interface—something that doesn't require specialized knowledge to use day-to-day—and the responsive support when questions come up.
Craftybase is a good way of keeping track of your material and manufacturing inventory if you put the work into it. It's a great way to do inventory management and get good visibility on your sales and expenses.
For makers like Lesli who are ready to transition from hobby to serious business, Craftybase provides the foundation to track materials, manage recipes, and consolidate sales across multiple channels—all without the enterprise price tag.
Today, Lesli, Kathi, and Joey work together in their solar-powered workshop, committed to living wages, flexible hours, and minimal environmental impact. They use glass, tins, and paperboard whenever possible, and every item has a special ingredient—because every ingredient matters.
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