The NITMIX head lice
treatment story
Hi. We’re John and Jacquie Owen, founders and owners of NITMIX. Here’s the story of how we “accidentally” started NITMIX.
Jacquie was a registered nurse, having worked in pediatrics, orthopedics, and many other areas. After having two children four years apart, she grew tired of the shifts and the nights away from her family, and looked for another profession where she could use her healing skills.
She studied massage and aromatherapy and set up a practice from home, working normal family hours. People brought her all sorts of conditions and problems, most of which she was familiar with from experience or study. But one day a mother whose child came to the Toy Library that Jacquie ran inquired if Jacquie could treat a 5-year-old boy with head lice.
“What’s the problem?” she asked. To her surprise, the mother described all sorts of problems caused by the treatments, not the lice themselves. The poor child had been subjected to so many painful treatments, he was showing severe behavioral problems, and would literally run away screaming at the sight of a comb. The mother was understandably stressed, and was getting no help from her pediatrician or the school nurse. In fact, both of them were telling her to be tough on her son: treat the lice and ignore his protests.
Jacquie hesitated. She said that she would try, but had no ideas. There were some old stories in the aromatherapy books about certain essential oils useful in treating headlice. The books didn’t say how the oils worked, but implied that somehow they killed the lice.
When the boy arrived, Jacquie immediately noticed that the skin on his head was so sore, there was no way she could touch it without causing him great pain. First she had to soothe the skin, and only then worry about the headlice.
OK, she thought to herself. Lavender calms children. She gently rubbed sweet almond oil scented with lavender and a couple of other aromatherapy oils into his scalp, then was able to comb the boy’s hair for lice. She got out a lot of headlice in 15 minutes. They repeated this treatment three times over the next few days, and the mother carried on from there. We were totally surprised when the boy was pronounced louse-free within two weeks. We figured that the oils actually were killing the little buggers. (We later discovered that we weren’t, and that it wasn’t at all necessary to kill them. NITMIX makes it easy to remove them, and then makes the child’s hair into a place the lice just don’t recognize as home anymore. It’s that simple!)
There were a couple other inquiries from the same Toy Library group (to our non-British friends, that’s like a communal playgroup). Both cases were successful – Jacquie was able to end the infestation within a couple of weeks. Through word of mouth, Jacquie’s practice spread to include headlice cases from the whole south of England. All were treated successfully, and word of mouth spread even farther.
At this point we thought we were only treating headlice – we had no concept of prevention. But one case provided a surprising breakthrough. The elder daughter of a family friend had been plagued by headlice for months. They hadn’t come to us sooner because they believed so firmly in conventional medicine (the mother was a family practitioner). Finally they asked Jacquie for the aromatherapy mixture and started using it in sweet almond oil. Predictably, the lice went away quickly. The daughter much preferred the smell of the NITMIX (we had given it a name by now) to the pesticides she had been using, and liked very much that her hair was beautifully shiny.
A few months later, we heard a strange tale from this family. Despite additional outbreaks at their daughter’s school, the headlice hadn’t returned to her at all. It turned out that the girl enjoyed the look, feel, and smell of her hair with the NITMIX that she was secretly rinsing her hair with it, a few drops on her comb every day.
This was our first indication that NITMIX had long-term preventive effects.
At first we just supplied the NITMIX essential oil mixture and told people to get their own sweet almond oil. But we started hearing horror stories of bad almond oil that didn’t wash out. It turned out that some products sold as sweet almond oil actually contained mineral oil. Jacquie didn’t want to hear any more embarrassing stories of her clients having to scrub their children’s hair for a week to remove an oil slick. It was then that she decided to start manufacturing and selling NITMIX to the public, to assure the quality of the oils.
We used to bottle the NITMIX on the kitchen table every weekend. At first we just sold it to Jacquie’s aromatherapy students, since the quality of essential oils you can get from health food stores is sadly not very good.
The first time we bought 100 mls of oil, we looked at each other like we were crazy: Are we ever going to sell this? Then we started buying liters of essential oil, which looked like artillery shells. We opened the French windows as wide as they could go, otherwise we’d have been knocked out by the smell.
One day John was working in the office, reading the family section of a national newspaper, when he came upon an article about head lice treatments. It was full of scary information, but no alternative advice. John rang the paper, where nobody would speak to him. In a fit of pique, he rang the competition (The Daily Telegraph), and told the health editor that a competitor had printed a bad article on headlice.
We had no printed material at that point, so we sent a sample of the product. We got a short article – just 2 lines and a phone number. We were shocked when we received 75 inquiries. Then a woman’s magazine, called Woman, phoned up and did another small story. That led to 700 inquiries. We looked at each other, two complete amateurs who were accidentally running a consumer product business, and said, “Oh my God. We’d better do something about this.” We decided to let the business die a natural death – it was too much work to build it as big as it needed.
That was 5 years ago. When we moved from the south of England, we figured the business would just die on its own. But we had the phone redirected for 6 months. It kept ringing –people were reordering, or had heard about us from friends and were calling for more information. NITMIX wouldn’t go away. When we first heard about the Internet, we figured that one of those web page things would cut down on the phone calls. Then we figured that people could print out the order form and mail it in. We started getting inquiries and order from the US, from Canada, from Australia, from New Zealand.
We finally started listening to the testimonials we were receiving from our customers. We thought, maybe this product should be bigger than it is, because it makes a big benefit to people’s lives. And for every person we’ve helped, there are thousands more whom we haven’t.
So that’s where we are now. We’ve made the commitment to share NITMIX with the world, using the internet and word of mouth. We’re convinced that NITMIX has grown so tremendously not because we’re such great business people, but because it has inherent worth. It is a non-toxic, gentle, safe, effective, long-lasting, environmentally-friendly, and family-friendly method of solving the problem of headlice and avoiding the problem of pesticide-based headlice treatments.
Thank you for helping us spread the word.
Sincerely,
John and Jacquie Owen
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