PORTLAND, OR—Provenance Hotels, an owner/operator of hotels primarily in the Pacific Northwest and headquartered here, has teamed up with Pasadena, CA-based apothecary Lather to create a collection of soaps in collaboration with locally based culinary artisans whose products are offered at the hospitality company’s properties.
The all-natural soaps are infused with mint essential oils from Yakima, WA; lavender essential oils from Clackamas County, OR.; peppermint tea leaves harvested in Oregon; honey made by bees in Portland; and hand-harvested sea salt from the Oregon coast infused with Willamette Valley pinot noir.
“We’re spoiled with creative food and beverage partners here in Portland, so the majority of our collaborations at the hotels tend to center around food,” said Zie Zie Senzaki, Provenance Hotels’ VP of sales & marketing. “We’ve worked with Bee Local, Smith Teamaker and Jacobsen Salt Company to install beehives on the rooftops, create custom tea blends and feature Oregon sea salt in our guestrooms, respectively. However we’ve always wanted to find ways to introduce new collaborations into the hotels that are lifestyle and travel oriented. We loved the idea of using salt, honey and tea leaves as all-natural ingredients to evolve these partnerships into artisanal body bars. Lather was the perfect partner to do this.”
Three soaps make up the new collection
Provenance Hotels and Lather have been partners for years, noted Senzaki. “Our Portland and Seattle hotels feature Lather’s aromatherapy bath collection,” she said, adding, “Their passion for wellness and dedication to using natural ingredients is something that we truly admire and also embody as a company. [The partnership] created a fun opportunity to collaborate with Lather on a local level and introduce a national partner to our Portland co-conspirators.”
For Lather, it was an opportunity to work with ingredients that were new to the company, noted Jennifer Johns, director of sales. “When determining how to incorporate local ingredients into Provenance’s in-room bath and body products, we had a handful of exciting options to select from,” she said. “The ingredients, all offering healing, soothing and cleansing properties within body and skincare, were added to Lather’s natural formulations. After several rounds of sampling and testing, and approval by the co-conspirators, [we came up with]beautifully crafted, natural, artisanal body bars. The final step was creating packaging that blends the brand partners together seamlessly with the playful voice that speaks to the Provenance experience.”
According to Provenance Hotels, all three soaps—Exfoliating Body Bar with Pink Salt, Exfoliating Honey-Oatmeal Body Bar and Exfoliating Peppermint Body Bar—also feature all-natural ingredients to moisturize and protect the skin like olive oil, shea butter, bamboo extract and Vitamin E.
Currently, the soaps are available at Hotel deLuxe, Hotel Lucia and Sentinel in Portland, and Hotel Max in Seattle. Hotel Theodore in Seattle will carry them when it opens this summer, noted Senzaki, who added, “For now, the soaps are exclusive to our properties in the Pacific Northwest. However, we’re keeping the door open for future collaborations at other hotels such as the Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery in New Orleans. New Orleans is teeming with artisans, and we’d love to bottle up some of our partners down south.” HB
