The Sligo firm has begun selling a range of seaweedbased cosmetic products, including face creams, home seaweed bath kits and exfoliants, just in time to appeal to the healthy intentions that abound among fatigued festive revellers at the start of every New Year.

"We're going to be the first company, I believe in the world, to bring out a range of seaweed-based cosmetic products, " says Mark Walton, who runs Celtic Seaweed Baths with his brother Neil.

The brothers started the baths five years ago on the site of a former bathhouse destroyed by Hurricane Debbie in 1962 and rebuilt partly with local authority funding.

Walton says the business has built up a strong customer base and is now operating at near 100% capacity.

He refuses to disclose sales or turnover figures, but accounts filed for the company show it made a profit of 146,000 in 2004.

The Waltons have applied for permission to build a 500,000 expansion to the bathhouse.

While they are building up the core business, they also hope to expose their key resource, seaweed harvested by the brothers themselves in Strandhill, to an audience far beyond the company's Sligo base.

Mark Walton says the idea for a range of cosmetics has been a pet project for some time. Seaweed is an ingredient in many other cosmetic products, he says, since it contains natural oils and minerals that are good for the skin.

Celtic Seaweed hopes to build on the expertise gained in harvesting the seaweed and running the baths, and transfer that into the potentially lucrative cosmetic market. Knowing about seaweed was only one small step on the way, however, according to Walton.

"It's been a very steep learning curve, " he says. Developing processes to preserve the seaweed and blend it to create face-masks and other products was hard enough, but Walton says the marketing challenge was particularly difficult.

"I don't think there's an analogy you could use to describe just how out of depth we are, " he says. The realisation that the product has to compete for retailers' attention and shelf-space with brands created by multibillion euro corporations such as Lancome and Clarins was daunting.

Walton says the company got some helpful pointers on branding and marketing, and made some good contacts, during an appearance on the RTE television series The Mentor. Other than that, Celtic Seaweed has had to make things up as it went along.

It hasn't been easy, says Walton. He points to the fact that the company decided to manufacture and source all its packaging in Ireland as one challenge: it was hard to find packaging and design companies with the necessary experience in cosmetics.

Manufacturing and packaging in Ireland adds to the cost of producing the range, he says, but the company has stuck to its principles. "We're doing all our manufacturing in Ireland and we don't want to go out of Ireland."

Final retail pricing has not yet been decided, but Walton says the products will be "premium priced". He says he is confident that consumers will be willing to pay a premium for an all-natural, Irish-made cosmetic product. "If the company fails, it fails, but it's not going to be for lack of quality of the product."

If Celtic Seaweed can establish its brand and gain a foothold in the Irish cosmetic market, the next plan is to market its products to other seaweed baths and health spas around the country.

The as-yet unanswered question, though, is how easy it will be to sell both retailers and consumers on seaweed.

The "flip-side" to any misgivings people may have about seaweed as a cosmetic product, says Walton, is that the products will have a certain novelty value.

Walton says the company is confident, based on its experience with the seaweed baths, that the products they will prove a hit once they can get people to sample them.

"Most people, once they've tried it once, they'll be sold for life, " he says.