Ever since her first trip to France in high school, founder of Louis Sel, Karen Pevenstein, “...fell in love with France” and the rest was history. From living there briefly in her 20’s to vacationing and falling in love with Brittany in 2014, Karen has always found herself drawn to the beautiful country and the amazing cuisine. 

Over ten years ago, Karen visited a food fair in Paris, France, filled with different vendors where she sampled everything you could imagine including jams and jellies, escargot, and salts. She left the fair with a tub of L’Atelier du Sel’s’s herb salt and sprinkled it on anything she could eat when she arrived home. 

Karen quickly fell in love with the salts and could never find a salt brand that compared to L’Atelier du Sel’s. During Karen’s travels to France, she discovered the food fair was still up and running, and everytime she travelled back to Paris, she tried the other types of salt and brought them back home for her friends, family, and colleagues to enjoy. Everyone was impressed with the quality and tastes of the salts- so much so that one of her friends recommended she import the salts to the United States.

“It became kind of a joke that I came back from France with like ten to 20 bags of salt,” Karen said.

Karen decided to research the idea and then approached the farmers to learn more about their craft and product.. Karen then travelled to Guerande in Brittany to spend an entire week with the salt farmers, learning all about the region, the salt making process, and the uniqueness of the salts.

“I fell in love with Brittany and the region and the salts even more… That’s how it really kind of started, and the rest was built from there,” she said.

Karen never envisioned opening a French sea salt business but found a unique product that she loved, and was extremely passionate about sharing.  She knew people would fall in love with the salts, just like she did. 

When she received her first shipment, she recalled having felt an “amazing sense of accomplishment.” Soon thereafter, sales began. “I will never forget  the first time I saw sales coming through and I thought ‘oh my gosh this is so exciting.’ It was right around Thanksgiving so it was fun to see  the immediate traction. 

Like any other entrepreneur and small business owner, Louis Sel has been a work in progress for Karen. When it first launched, Louis Sel started as a small, word-of-mouth online shop. Now, Karen has her own pop-up shop in Newton, Massachusetts that’s here open until December 31st.  Louis Sel has been featured in Forbes, The Boston Globe and Karen was honored to be awarded the Women in Business Award by the French Chamber of Commerce of New England (FACCNE). Karen has been rewarded by the “sense of achievement” that you can only experience when you follow your passion. 

“I tell people it's in the taste. Once you taste it on your food and you start cooking with it, using it as a finishing salt, you’ll never find anything else like it,” she said. “I think that’s what our customers have found and why they keep coming back to ordering more.”