Palermo Body’s Jessica Morelli Celebrates The Holidays By Joining Forces With Fellow Founders

Palermo Body founder Jessica Morelli isn’t spending the holidays alone. She’s in the company of fellow entrepreneurs, who she’s teamed up with to create gifts.

Morelli assembled three kits — Pure Rituals Kit, Coffee Culture Kit and Me-Time Kit — containing Palermo Body’s offerings coupled with those from nail polish purveyor Sundays, candle maker Simply Curated, coffee supplier Brooklyn Roasting Co., ceramicist Recreation Center, chocolatier Haute Chocolate and Meraki Nomad, a handmade goods specialist that sells herb bundles and incense. Priced at $68, the kits are selling on Palermo Body’s website under a Mindful Shop tab, where the individual items from the collaborating brands can also be purchased.

“I’m so fortunate here in Brooklyn to have a wonderful community of mostly female makers. We admire each other and support what each other are doing. I’m of the school of thought that there’s no limit to the amount of people who can be successful, and I really love to encourage people and share,” says Morelli. “As a person, I’m such a loudmouth. When I love something, I tell everybody about it. This brings together many of the things I love.”

Several of the brands providing products for the kits have longstanding relationships with Palermo Body. For instance, the brand uses coffee from Brooklyn Roasting Co. in its Coffee Body Scrub. Morelli is a huge fan of Recreation Center’s Josephine Heilpern. She drinks daily from mugs Heilpern shaped and has given them out as staff presents in the past.

Morelli suggests the connections she has with the items in the kits and the care taken to craft them resonate with shoppers seeking holiday gifts that aren’t disposable. “We are calling them Mindful Kits because they’re really great ways to give thoughtful, curated gifts. They go with this notion of bringing a mindful quality to what you are giving to someone,” she says. “The kits come with postcards that talk about why I created them and a bit about each of the makers.”

The idea for the kits popped into Morelli’s head in July, and they came to fruition in November. She assembled less than 1,000 of the kits split roughly evenly between the kit choices. Morelli described the total as a guesstimate because she didn’t have an exact understanding of how to forecast demand since the Mindful Kit initiative is completely new.

In putting together the kits, she had to consider the turnaround times for products in industries very different from the beauty industry. “You need to educate yourself on the mediums if you don’t know about them,” says Morelli. “I’m familiar with what it takes to make a ceramic. I know it literally takes weeks to make one piece of pottery. Knowing that in advance, I made that one of the first things I ordered because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to reorder it.”

To get the word out about the kits, Palermo Body produced a short video featuring Morelli discussing the reason behind them. The video is posted on the brand’s site and was divided into three even shorter segments – intention, curation and purpose – that were posted on its Instagram account. Palermo Body sent out emails to its customers about the kits, too.

The Mindful Kits were intended only for the holiday season, but Morelli is probably prolonging their availability. “They’ve been well-received, and I’ve been looking at the kits in a different way. They’re not holiday-specific at all. They could be for anything,” she says, adding, “There are so many makers doing their own things and working hard to do what they love for a living. There’s a sense I have that I want to help people get to the places they want to go, and I want to bring them along with me on my ride.”