By Andrea Harwood

Brooke McBride, a nurse practitioner moved to the area with her family from Vermont about a year ago. Upon arrival, she went to look for scrubs, a standard medical wear, for her new job.

“I did a quick Google search and discovered there was nothing anywhere around me closer of a 30-minute drive away,” said McBride. “I told my husband, ‘We should just open our own’. And so we just went for it.”

She opened The Scrub Shop, a medical apparel and accessory store at 462 Maple Ave. in Saratoga Springs on Aug. 19. She said business has been very good.

McBride positioned her retail space on  Maple Avenue close to Saratoga Hospital, in an area with over 20 different medical offices. She started a grassroots marketing campaign.

“I went to every office in the area that would let me through the doors and I passed out marketing materials,” she said. “We got a lot of customers that way. From there, our customer base grew from word-of-mouth and a strong social media presence.”

McBride works full-time in primary care as a nurse practitioner. Her husband and staff run the store when she is at work. This is McBride’s first business, though her husband has a degree in business.

By Christine Graf  

California native and Ballston Spa business owner Michelle Brandriss fell in love with Saratoga the first time she and her husband, David, visited the city during horse racing season. Their dream to settle in the area became a reality after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. 

They were living in New York City at the time, and David was working on the 23rd floor of the North Tower. He was among those who were able to evacuate the building before it collapsed.

While working in advertising, Michelle came up with the idea for Name Bubbles, a personalized name label company. At the time, she was a new mom and her son was enrolled in a Saratoga Springs day care program.

“In New York state, day cares require everything to be labeled. I was using Sharpie pens and masking tape to label his bottles. The labels would wear off, so I would redo it every few days,” said Brandriss. “Then I started noticing other women had really nice, fancy labels.”

After learning the women were ordering the labels online, she started researching label companies. She discovered that the biggest custom labels companies were located in Canada and Australia. Much to her surprise, there were no major players in the United States.

By Paul Post

While many people were at the beach or enjoying backyard barbecues, Rachel McDermott spent Fourth of July weekend harvesting barley for her new craft brewery.

Ninety percent of Dancing Grain Brewery’s ingredients are raised in fields surrounding the farm-based business, located at 180 Old West Road in Moreau, just south of Northway Exit 17.

“This is all hand-selected intentionally to give you something you can’t get somewhere else, from people who have painstakingly suffered all the trials and tribulations to make it possible,” McDermott said. “I want to grow really good crops. I want to share that story with people who come here to enjoy good beer. This is the first brewery I know of where a grain farm is taking on this production aspect of beer.”

Raised in Schaghticoke on her family’s West Wind Ag farm, McDermott studied applied economics and management at Cornell University en route to an exciting investment banker’s career with firms in Houston and New York City.

But upon turning 30, she took inventory of her life’s goals and gave it all up to come back home and help out on the farm.

By Susan Elise Campbell

If beauty were only skin deep, innovative professional aesthetician Denise Dubois would have had no need to evolve her day spa into Complexions Spa for Beauty and Wellness.

A 1984 graduate of Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics, Dubois opened Complexions Spa in 1987 when “a day spa was not really heard of,” she said. 

“The foundation of the business has always been skin care,” said Dubois. “Originally, Complexions occupied 1,200 square feet and had four facial rooms. Besides me there was one other employee who did make-up and answered the phone.”

Today Dubois and her licensed staff offer non-surgical cosmetic procedures, wellness and nutritional consultation and coaching in addition to facials, massage, hair color and design, manicures and pedicures, and more. 

Services are performed from two addresses, in Albany and Saratoga Springs, but  with one overarching holistic approach.

“Lifestyles impact how we look and feel,” said Dubois. “There is a range of medical spa services we can use once we understand what’s going on in the inside and what a client’s lifestyle is like.”