Strauss History as told by Peter Strauss
In 1979 when I was fifteen years old, my dad had a heart attack and was hospitalized. It was left to me to look after our canopy shop that was a thriving business. When my dad finally returned home from the hospital, the did not have the strength to walk across our living room, which is only about 16 feet. He knew instinctively if he was to get better quickly he would have to go back to his roots which meant concocting and preparing herbal remedies which is what my great grandmother and grandmother were widely known for in the old country and had taught my dad the trade when he was a child, telling him that there would always be a need for natural health. My dad arranged for me to travel to Vancouver to pick up the herbs he would require to prepare a heart tincture that he could start taking to help him recover more quickly. At the time my dad was not thinking about starting a new business, but the Heartdrops he created worked so quickly and his health improved within weeks where he could not only walk across the living room but could walk around our block, and within months he was skiing again. Because he was so excited that this worked so quickly in healing him, he knew he could not keep this secret to himself. This is our humble beginning in herbal medicine.
My dad returned to work at the canopy shop within about three months of his heart attack. Many of his regular customers and friends could not believe how quickly his health had returned after his heart attack and were very curious as to what he had done. He informed them that he did not have any surgery or was not on any pharmaceutical drugs, but that when he returned home he went back to what he was taught as a child about herbs and had created Heartdrops, which he was taking regularly. His friends and customers were so impressed with how quickly he had recovered that they started requesting Heartdrops for family and friends that had heart conditions that the Heartdrops could work for. Within a year we had people from all walks of life and from all over western Canada and the northwestern States coming to our home to buy our heart drop tincture and to learn more about natural health. At this time, my dad was getting to be so busy meeting with people with health problems that he could no longer run the canopy shop and help people with the health concerns. This is when my dad made the big decision to sell the canopy shop and solely go into herbal medicine, at which time he said to me this will be our lives, I will teach you all that I have been taught and know and we will start a natural health business and we will be equal partners. In the beginning for about two years, we ran the business out of our home.
After I graduated in 1982, we had gotten too busy to run the business out of our home and we rented and set up a small shop locally. My dad started doing small seminars locally at first and then moving outwards into southern BC and beyond to discuss natural health remedies. Health stores were invited to these seminars and we requested that they set up a small booth with our product for sale; this is how we started getting our products into natural health stores for sale. Because of these seminars, my dad and I were now busier than ever doing more than Heartdrops as people were coming to us for a wide variety of health issues. We were now busy making several types of tinctures and teas which we were still making out of our home, but selling in our small
shop which is where my dad would meet and talk to clients. We realized this arrangement no longer worked for us and we would need to own our own shop rather than rent. We purchased our first little shop in 1989, as we needed to combine both manufacturing and meeting client under one roof.
By 2000, we had completely outgrown our little shop and this is when we made a huge move and purchased our last big shop. With this move, we were now trying new ways of getting our products known across the country and beyond, at this time we now had reps that took on territories to move our product we also had an in-house international rep who worked on our international sales.
