Rest & Heal in Chatham focuses on women wellness packages - Albany Times Union

cara-untuksehat.blogspot.com

Anna White’s new business couldn’t have come at a better moment. Designed to help women recuperate from a tough time, Rest & Heal in Chatham offers curated care packages. The recommended packages include feel-good indulgences like an alpaca wrap, a robe, a candle, a personal note and a helpful book themed to ease someone through grief, heartbreak, illness or the challenges of being a new mother. White launched this business hoping to use what she learned through her own illness to help others.

“So far, most of the business has been gifts,” she said in a phone interview. “There has been some self-care. I think the idea is that when people are going through a hardship, a lot of times you just don’t know what to do for them. Flowers can be a lovely gesture but a message of hope can be even better. We wanted to take the guess work out of how to support people and to just provide a simple and meaningful show of support.”

White is from Tennessee and North Carolina, where she also went to business school. She moved to New York City and worked in finance on Wall Street, specializing in apparel and footwear stocks, as well as personal care and household products. But her own retail business has been in the back of her mind, especially after she and her family headed north to their weekend house in Austerlitz in Columbia County at the beginning of the pandemic.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and it was inspired by these health struggles I’ve had. But when we moved upstate for the pandemic, we were kind of going a little bit crazy in our little small weekend house so we started to look for office space in town. And this retail space was open and I just absolutely fell in love with it. I had originally envisioned the business to be a sleepwear business, but I had read a series of books going through my health struggles that really, really helped me and I wanted to find a way to sort of share that knowledge and so I pivoted to this care package idea and it all just kind of came together during the pandemic,” she said. “So I just kind of mapped the space and have built out the retail presence as well as the online business.”

White’s own health struggles lasted nearly two decades. “In 2003, I was just kind of hit with this fatigue. It was pretty acute. I recovered to some degree. I’ve never actually been 100 percent.” During that time, she heard Elizabeth Lesser, the author of “Broken Open,” speak during a work retreat and read her book.

“This book changed everything for me. It changed the way I thought about hardship.” The book is included in the Rest & Heal curated package for illness. The other books offered include Brené Brown’s “Rising Strong” for the heartbreak package; Eben Alexander’s “Proof of Heaven” for the grief selection; and Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell’s “Parenting from the Inside Out” for the new mother gift.

All items are also offered individually or you can build your own package that can be shipped nationally. Hand cream and bath salts are among the products offered.

Part of her goal was to support women-owned businesses and eco-friendly products. “I just went on a search for small batch wellness products that met my sort of idea of a lovely aesthetic.”

The store is on 25 Hudson Ave. in Chatham and is open by appointment and most weekend days due to the pandemic. Online shopping is also available at restandheal.com. The store walls are painted a soft pink and antique-style furniture displays products. A basket offers locally grown lavender for sale and art for sale hangs on the walls. Post-pandemic, White plans in-store classes and wellness speakers.

“I really want to do regular meditation classes and also invite speakers in to talk about various wellness topics, different healing modalities, just anything related to health and wellness. The shop has come together really, really nicely. It’s got a very peaceful vibe so I’m hopeful that people will just come here and feel that sense of peace.”

Rest & Heal

25 Hudson Ave., Chatham

restandheal.com; info@restandheal.com

Let's block ads! (Why?)