YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – BrookeLynn Cohol’s plans when she returned to the Mahoning Valley three years ago didn’t necessarily include launching her own personal care products company.

Now, her e-commerce company, Ella Vatoür, recently launched its latest product line, the Evolütion Series, a collection of essential oils.

“Ella Vatoür is really about helping people feel good in their own skin. It starts with recognizing the beauty you already have and pairing that with simple, all-natural products that are safe and actually work,” she said. “Everything Ella Vatoür is built around that message. When you feel good on the inside and take care of the outside, you show up differently – you glow a little more. My products are designed to support that.”

U.S. sales of personal care products and cosmetics reached $210.6 billion in 2022, up 11.7% from 2018, according to a report produced in 2024 for the Personal Care Products Council, an industry trade group. In Ohio, the industry supported 209,090 jobs and represented 2% of the state’s total gross domestic product that year.   

Business Takes Shape

Cohol, who was raised in Canfield and lives two doors down from the house where she grew up, launched the self-care products brand a year and a half ago, she said. She had been working around the country, including in Los Angeles, New York City and “a quick stint in Florida” for businesses that included “a skin care and gemstones kind of company” when the opportunity arose to return to the area, where she could be closer to family.    

It was a request from a member of her family that started Cohol on the path to starting her company. A cousin whose son was getting married asked her to make something to help with her under-eye circles.

She relied on her hands-on experience developing self-care products at one of her past employers, where she had been involved in formulating more than 500 perfumes.     

She conducted additional research and formulated the eye serum that became her first product, Enchant. That was followed by a request from her mother to help her with a dry skin issue, leading to the creation of another product, Harmonize, a solid tallow body lotion.

“The development of this thing wasn’t anything I was really seeking,” she remarked. “Friends and family were asking me to make them stuff, and then their friends and their additional acquaintances and whatnot started asking me for it as well.” That spurred her to begin developing packaging and launching a website for the brand.

The name came from a deliberate malapropism of the word “elevator” as she and her partner were preparing to leave California. In the hotel they were staying at, he said, “Let’s board the ‘ella vatour’ and let’s go up into the unknown.” They decided it was “a name for something” and set it aside for future use.

The brand’s tagline is “Discover the Beauty of You,” she said. “It’s a modern approach to beauty – not about chasing perfection but about nurturing what you already have and growing into the version of yourself that feels true, inside and out.”    

Ella Vatoür offers an array of self-care items that also includes facial mist and clay mask products. Every product she makes uses natural ingredients – no chemical stabilizers, she emphasized. She currently is focused on formulas for men and women age 40 and older.       

“You can allow Mother Nature to help you when you’re looking to soothe out fine lines,” she said. Aging is an honor, and while everyone tries to chase youth, doing so is “kind of a silly game that you’re never going to win.”

Growth and Future Plans

The company has been shipping across the country and into Canada for the past couple years, she said. The biggest demand is from Ohio and California, but she also is seeing a bigger uptick in other parts of the Midwest, including Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Among her local customers is Lisa Resnick, founder and CEO of Dandelion-Inc., who has used Enchant. For someone like her, who naturally has dark circles under her eyes, the product “has been a game changer,” she remarked.

The Evolütion Series, which Cohol just launched, is a series of five different scents that draw on major life shifts she had experienced over the years as she worked in different jobs and lived in different places.

“There’s different phases you go through, when you’re having a big life shift,” she said. “You’ve got to learn how to let things go. You’ve got to learn when to take a pause and stop and slow down. You have to learn when it’s time to get things done. There’s also a time, too, when you are just in a consistent momentum and just building and building and building and just working really hard toward your goal, and then also imagining what life is like when you actually hit it. So each one of these has different scent notes that reflect upon that.”

A self-described “bit of a science geek” for olfactory science, she said this isn’t “woo woo stuff” but is based in actual science, where certain essential oils can slow down brain waves and other oils, when first smelled, can charge people up.

“Citruses do that, for example – like when you smell citrus, it wakes you up. That’s why you’ll see like eucalyptus in soap, or you’ll see citrus and that sort of thing, because it … sharpens you up real quick,” she said.

Cohol said she has plans beyond her online store and wants to establish a brick-and-mortar presence to house both her production operation and retail. Her packaging already includes Universal Price Code barcoding for eventual retail sales, and she has her eye on a downtown Youngstown building. She would like to be in a building in the next 12 months.

She also plans to launch a soap line and is working with a local masseur to develop a massage oil.   

“My biggest dream is to have Ella Vatoür become huge and to have it all manufactured right here in town. I would love to be a part of bringing jobs to the community. I would love such a beautiful brand to be right here,” she said.

Resnick said the Mahoning Valley is lucky to have Cohol back.

“She’s definitely a positive highlight that we have in our area. … She’s a phenomenal human being with extraordinary talents,” she said.  

“There’s something about this town. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, but the talent pool in this town is crazy amazing,” Cohol said. “There’s just something really special about the idea of taking all the knowledge and everything I’ve ever accumulated through the years and bringing it back here.”

Pictured at top: BrookeLynn Cohol, founder of Ella Vatoür.