Robin Barr Buzz

Born in New Jersey, my parents moved to Southern California when I was three years old and where I’ve lived ever since – in Covina, the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles;  then to Orange County, first in Laguna Niguel, and now Mission Viejo.

I love dogs and cats and compassionate about all living creatures, even humans. I occasionally volunteer for various pet rescue events, and donate to rescue groups, including the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, the nation’s largest natural habitat refuge developed specifically to meet the needs of old, sick or needy elephants who have been retired from zoos and circuses, often under abusive conditions.  I hope they have a stall available for me when I retire.

What do I do for a living?  I invent problem solvers. Have you seen Cold Sores Begone™ or Canker Sores Begone™ in health food stores or online?  Mine.  I like using stuff that doesn’t kill me later so both remedies are non-toxic, safe enough for small children, and topical.

Just a bit about my creations before I tell my story…..

Cold Sores Begone™ prevents the entire eruption from materializing by applying it at the early warning symptom, the dreaded ‘tingle’ sensation on the lip.  It’s a life saver since cold sores are notorious for occurring at the worst times.

Canker sores are the burning, painful ulceration that develop inside the mouth due to stress, fatigue, dental procedures or cancer treatments.  Applying a few drops of Canker Sores Begone™ 3-4 times a day super-accelerates healing from one or more weeks to 1-4 days.  It varies for different people.

I was elated when PREVENTION and NATURAL HEALTH magazines told the world they tested both remedies and they worked as promised.  After all, I was only an accidental entrepreneur.

My story — how a lifelong employee in her mid-forties became an accidental entrepreneur.

I was born in 1951, on October 29th, the date the stock market crashed in 1929 starting the Great Depression.  You’d be surprised how this reference helps people remember my birthday, whether they want to or not.  My parents moved to southern California in 1954, where I’ve lived since.

I had a typical suburban upbringing — my dad, an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, my mother, a housewife, and little brother, Steve, who was born 3 months after we hit the golden land of California.  There were family vacations, PTA, Brownies and Girl Scouts, my brother was in little league.  in 1963, my parents divorced and it was bitter.  Even though both remarried within a couple of years, the vitriol continued, forever affecting my brother and I.

It was during those years around their divorce that I started to develop cold sores several times a year.  No surprise since they’re commonly triggered by stress and fatigue.

Worse than the physical pain of the eruption was the monumental embarrassment I would endure for two weeks until the unsightly sore healed on my lip.  I quickly was able to recognize the dreaded early warning symptom signaling an impending eruption – a tingling sensation on the lip.

Cold sore eruptions had become a part of my life. They occurred several times a year, and I was never able to just roll with it.

Years later, in the early 1990’s, I had been working in a non-clinical department of a major teaching medical center in Los Angeles. At that time, medical centers and hospitals throughout the United States were going through difficult times due to Medicare reimbursement changes. All had massive layoffs, all hospital employees worried about their jobs, yet acquired additional responsibilities due to those who had been layed off.

Like everyone else, I was on tenterhooks, but I had additional worries. A long time relationship ended, and one of my dearest friends, Peter West, was terminally ill. I was the one that was there to help him through it all. The extraordinary stress was triggering even more cold sore infections than usual. On a few of occasions, with a fever and flu-like symptoms, I called in sick. By the end of the day, all flu symptoms were gone, replaced by a painful, swollen lower lip where a cold sore was erupting.

I was concerned the stress I was under would continue to trigger similar infections necessitating having to call in sick. This was a real concern because my boss, at the time, had a long standing history of being a bully, and I was a favorite target.

Inspired to solve the problem, I researched herbs and healing methods that might shorten cold sore infections. There was a German clinical study involving herbs that held promise in the early treatment of a herpes simplex infection. I purchased the herbs, and at home in my kitchen, created a topical mixture ready to use for when I next felt the tingling sensation on my lip.

When that day arrived, without optimism, I applied a small amount of the herbal mixture. Typically, the eruption would start 20-30 minutes after the tingle. I waited, and waited. Hours passed, and no eruption. Did I rejoice? No. I couldn’t accept I might have invented a preventative, and concluded what I thought to be an early warning symptom was nothing more than a fleeting, meaningless sensation. Yet, each subsequent episode produced the same result.

There were a few episodes where I neglected to apply it in time, and like clock work,  a cold sore started with a swollen lip. I applied the herbal mixture several times a day and found it reduced the duration from two weeks to 3-7 days (it varied) and the sore was less severe. Good — but nothing’s better than prevention.

In 1994, at 43, and after 14 years at the medical center, I was layed off. The Medical Center was where I ‘grew up’, acquired confidence, established many friendships. It was the comfortable, familiar place from where I was going to retire. I was devastated by this and that I was still raw from Peter’s passing three weeks earlier in the Medical Center’s emergency room.

With money Peter left to me and the severance from the Medical Center, I made the decision to use it to seed marketing efforts to bring my herbal home remedy to the natural products industry.

With no experience or knowledge about manufacturing or starting a business, certain events came together to start things rolling. A couple of weeks after leaving the medical center, I was at home working at my desk.

The phone rang. It was a woman who dialed a wrong number, but for some reason, we started to chat.  She was a member of a trade organization of small business owners in the cosmetics industry. We spoke for 45 minutes when she invited me to be her guest at that night’s meeting taking place 3o minutes from my home.  I was reluctant, but accepted.

There I met suppliers I would need for labels, product displays, bottles and containers, and graphic artists. There was the owner of a contract lab in southern California who accepted small minimum orders, important for a start-up, with whom I still work with today. The lab’s product development staff maintained the ingredients in my “recipe”, but improved the taste, and assured compliance with the FDA monograph for over-the-counter cold sore products. I was on my way!

I still had to decide upon a product name that I wanted to honor and memorialize Peter. He was highly intelligent, hilarious sense of humor, amazingly creative and did things in unique, meaningful ways.

He was grounded, his advice always right, and he loved summer time and baseball games. He believed in absolute self-responsibility, was patriotic, ingenious, magical, and generous. One year for my birthday, he gave me a book entitled “Attracting Wealth”. Upon opening it, I found a $100 bill tucked in at the beginning of each chapter.

He was quite the extraordinary fellow, an opinion that we both shared . There was a time he printed business cards that simply read “Peter West, Extraordinaire.”

He collected pewter wizards because they symbolized his uncanny ability to make things happen, sometimes, as if by magic.

And there it was, a product icon to memorialize Peter – a wizard with a magic wand. Soon after, at a small dinner party, a friend jokingly threw out a name “Cold Sores Begone!”, and it clicked. My product now had a name, and it was perfect.

When the first commercially produced product was available, I took it to a few neighborhood health food stores, who agreed to try it on consignment.

Nervous no one would buy, I drove to each of the stores daily for weeks, counting how many bottles remained.  After a moderate amount of time, all bottles had sold. It was a huge day when the largest of those health food stores, Erewhon Natural Foods Market in Los Angeles, made a permanent shelf tag for the item and changed the terms from consignment to Net 30 days.

Eventually, I recognized the need to have Cold Sores Begone™ available through a trade distributor serving the natural products industry. Most health food stores prefer to purchase from a distributor rather than the manufacturer. Through a distributor, stores receive quantity discounts, the ability to place orders electronically, and minimize the number of suppliers they must pay directly.

I made a presentation by mail to a major natural health  distributor on the east coast, and after subsequent follow up calls and letters over the following year, there was no response. As the buyer told me later, one day, she felt a cold sore coming on. She remembered the sample I had sent, now collecting dust on the top of her file cabinet. She applied it, and became excited when the cold never erupted. She approved Cold Sores Begone™ on the spot, and placed an order immediately. With this particular distributor now a customer, it opened doors, and became easier to obtain product approval from other major distributors throughout the country.

Store buyers started mentioning that customers were asking for a canker sore remedy for the painful ulcerations on the tongue or elsewhere inside the mouth that make eating, drinking, and talking difficult. I was also a canker sore sufferer, and had noticed a pattern that when I developed one, there had been stress, fatigue, or the pain and irritation of a dental procedure.

When I began to learn that many canker sore sufferers experienced the same triggers prior to an outbreak, I had an idea for a new formulation, and went to work. In 2001, Canker Sores Begone™ was launched. The remedy contained herbs well known for their antibacterial and antiviral properties.

I began to receive phone calls and email from an unexpected population – those undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. They were reporting it was the only product or prescription drug that relieved the pain and healed the sore. Of those reports, the length of time for pain relief varied, but all said it worked like nothing else. Like most people, my life has been touched more than once by cancer.  In 2005, I lost my only sibling, my brother Steve, to lymphoma.  I’m acutely sensitive to cancer related pain having endured it through Steve and a few others close to me.  The reality was difficult to wrap my mind around — something I created helps promote relief from pain, and improves the quality of life for certain individuals. I’ve made a difference.

In 2003, the alternative health editor at PREVENTION Magazine, also a cold sore sufferer, prevented an outbreak using Cold Sores Begone™. She contacted me to advise she was writing an article about her experience in an upcoming issue. My first retail website was created to provide their readers with information, and ability to order online or by phone. This was a major event for my company and led to other articles in health oriented publications, each of which published rave reviews.

Today, still a small company, and without the advertising budget of the bigger guys, Cold Sores Begone™ and Canker Sores Begone™ have now sold in the hundreds of thousands due to word of mouth, website exposure, store placement, and magazine product articles and reviews.

I’m quietly overwhelmed with gratitude when I hear from customers that Cold Sores Begone ™ or Canker Sores Begone™ has made a difference for them.  If I should accomplish nothing else in this life, I’m satisfied.

Peter West, 1956-1994