Six months and six days after Ben and Polly Gorringe opened their “Martha’s Bath and Body” store in Alexandria, the building caught fire.
The blaze that sparked just before 1 p.m. on May 30, 2024, left the building uninhabitable for Martha’s Bath and Body, another local business and nearly a dozen residents in upstairs apartments.
Read more: Future uncertain for Alexandria residents, businesses displaced by fire in century-old building
The store had remained closed since last May, but the Gorringes didn’t put Martha’s Bath and Body on hold. Their organic, local skincare company has found a home in the renovated Newark Arcade, and is open on Fridays and Saturdays.
The Gorringes launched Martha’s Bath and Body about nine years ago when one of their goats, Martha, gave birth and began producing excessive amounts of milk.
The Gorringes began using that milk for cheese and ice cream, and eventually started creating soaps with it and other all-organic ingredients.
Launching the business, though, was almost an accident.
“When people have a business, it’s usually very intentional,” Polly Gorringe said. “They’re like, ‘I’m going to start a business,’ and they make a business plan. For us… we just fell into it.”
Over the span of Martha’s life, she had seven kids, producing an abundance of goat’s milk all the while. Today, the Gorringes don’t have any products with their goats’ milk in it. The two goats they have, Christina and Jessica, are retired and living their best lives, the Gorringes said.
Polly said that Ben has gotten creative with the products they make. They created body oil blends and sugar scrubs, and they figured out how to make foaming hand soap instead of just a bar.
“We keep it simple and clean, and use high-quality ingredients,” Ben Gorringe said. “We skip all the stuff that you don’t really want in it.”
Ben works in IT in addition to running Martha’s Bath and Body. The business has been two people – Ben and Polly – creating products in their basement until early March, when they hired a couple people to help.
In the early years, they sold their soaps and other skincare products at farmers markets and other local businesses, but late November 2023, the couple launched their shop on West Main Street in Alexandria. Polly said she loved the building – a place with a rich history and beautiful tin ceilings.
They weren’t sure if they would be able to find something like it again.
Ben and Polly designed and decorated the space in Alexandria themselves. They had refinished the ceiling with tiles, painted all the walls, added built-in shelves lined with handmade soap and had a sign painted by a local artist to hang inside.
“We did all of the physical renovations ourselves, so that made it that much harder to see it destroyed,” Polly said.
The fire left the couple heartbroken, Polly said.
Read more: Two-alarm fire in Alexandria displaces residents, businesses
Their friends and family rushed to Alexandria to help Ben and Polly clear out the store. Ben and Polly felt a sense of community from the people who came and helped them in their time of tragedy.
“There’s people that came and helped us and we had no idea who they even were,” Ben said. “It was nice to see the community come together, but it’s also sad.”
They don’t have a garage, so one of their family members let them keep some of the furniture from the store in their garage.
“I would say it was very humbling, but it was also very touching how caring people are,” Polly said.
Ben and Polly found their new space for Martha’s Bath and Body at the Newark Arcade. They still have their currently-shuttered storefront in Alexandria, and they hope to get their business there up and running once the building is repaired.
But the couple has to wait until construction and repairs happen in their building on West Main – which could be happening soon. Ben and Polly found out the building was structurally sound in November, but the rebuild process has been slow.
And the smell of smoke still filled the air when Polly last visited.
Currently, Martha’s Bath and Body in the Newark Arcade is open only on Fridays and Saturdays while while final touches on the arcade renovation continues and other businesses continue to move in. Their new store has three rooms: one for customers, another that will be open to customers after more displays are made, and the other room will be for making products.
Ben and Polly said it has been great to work with everyone at the Newark Arcade. Newark Development Partners, which owns the Arcade, brought in painters and hung chandeliers for them. Ben and Polly were pleased that they did not have to go through the manual labor of setting up a store again.
At their new spot in Newark, they are seeing new customers and some familiar faces. Polly said she wasn’t sure if their Alexandria customers would come to Newark. But she is glad to see returning customers from Gahanna, New Albany and Westerville in the shop.
Caroline Zollinger writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.