In just a few short years, Adina Grigore has taken her own line of skin care products—S.W. Basics of Brooklyn—from her kitchen sink to independent retailers and now, the hippest big box retailer in the US. This Spring, seven S.W. Basics products will be offered in Target’s new Made To Matter Collection, a curated arrangement of natural, organic and sustainable products.

Seeing her wares on store shelves at Target is a far cry from how Grigore thought she would be active in the world of skin care; her journey began by concocting products for her sensitive skin. And when she created a cream that worked, this personal trainer and nutritionist would tell clients about what she was using.

“I would teach people the recipes for them to make themselves and started talking about skin care in general,” Grigore said.
Later, Grigore started teaching classes on how to make her formulations, including her signature moisturizer, which features just three ingredients: shea butter, organic extra-virgin coconut oil and organic extra-virgin olive oil.

And while the adage is: “teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for lifetime,”—you can’t make actually force him to pick up the rod and reel, no matter how easy it may be. Student would tell Grigore that the class was fun, but they wanted to buy her products.
“It was mind blowing because I thought it was so D-I-Y,” Grigore said. “But people are barely cooking, I realized they wouldn’t make their own skin care.”

So in 2009, Grigore began selling S.W. Basics at markets in Brooklyn and opened up a shop on Etsy—all while she was still working full time as a personal trainer. Two years later, she quit her day job, and began focus solely on building S.W. Basics. She hired designers and went to her first trade show.

Between 2011 and 2012, S.W. Basics grew “400%,” Grigore told Happi, although she wouldn’t reveal sales figures. And each year since then, sales have doubled. The new Target deal, should keep the company on a similar trajectory.

In addition to the line’s best-selling cream, S.W. Basics offers cleanser, toner, makeup remover, exfoliant, body scrub and body oil—all of which are formulated with five ingredients or less. The newest SKU, which just rolled out in March, is an oil serum. Like the other products in the range, it follows suit with Grigore’s principles: an extremely limited list of recognizable ingredients: avocado oil, geranium oil, coffee oil and turmeric oil.     

“They are super potent, but ingredients you recognize,” she said.

Grigore likens her products to farmer’s market bread and believes the limited ingredient, no preservatives, approach is the brand’s point of differentiation from the multitude of products in the beauty sector, including other eco/natural/organic brands.

“For our audience, it has to do with the transparency in general,” she said.

Not only natural and organic, all of S.W. Basics' ingredients are either certified organic, Fair Trade, or sourced from small, family farms.

Happi spoke with Grigore just as the Made To Matter collection was unveiled, and as her book “Skin Cleanse” was hitting bookstores.
Publisher Harper Collins calls it a comprehensive guide to switching to an all-natural skin care regime; Grigore dispenses information on how diet and lifestyle factors affect skin and she helps readers diagnose and understand the underlying causes of their skin problems. And she’s still pushing the DIY approach: the book also includes recipes that can be made using ingredients found the grocery store.

Grigore said, “In a sense, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and bringing in this idea that having good skin is holistic.”