From Burnout to Be the Revolution: How Tanissa Smith Built Lotusbtr. Body Care
Sometimes, entrepreneurship begins with a business plan. Sometimes, it begins with a friend making a suggestion at exactly the right moment.
For Tanissa Smith, it began with soap.
Today, Tanissa is the founder of Lotusbtr. Body Care, a vibrant vegan self-care brand that encourages people to slow down, rest, and make wellness part of their everyday lives. Through handcrafted body care products, including bar soaps and body butter, Lotusbtr. Body Care combines aromatherapy and color therapy to create experiences centered on restoration and self-care.
But Tanissa never set out to become an entrepreneur.
In fact, she was convinced she never would.
A Business She Never Planned to Build
The idea came from a friend who suggested Tanissa make and sell soap. At first, she thought the idea was a little silly.
Making things had always been part of her creative nature, but she viewed it as a fun side project, not the beginning of a business. And the idea of selling something as basic as body care didn’t immediately make sense to her.
To Tanissa, soap and personal care should be a natural part of life. Something everyone should have access to. Not necessarily something people should have to think about buying.
But at the time, she wasn’t working. So she decided to see where the recommendation might lead.
Entrepreneurship wasn’t entirely foreign to her. Growing up, she watched her aunt build a clientele as a Mary Kay consultant, traveling from place to place and connecting with people through the products she sold. Tanissa didn’t fully understand the business behind it then.
Years later, when she became a Mary Kay consultant herself, she understood.
It wasn’t just about selling products.
It was about relationships.
It was about building community.
Those early experiences would eventually become part of how Tanissa understood entrepreneurship, and how she would approach building Lotusbtr. Body Care.
Rising From the Mud
The business wasn’t always called Lotusbtr. Body Care.
It began as Honey Butter, a name that eventually no longer represented what Tanissa wanted the brand to become. As she developed the company into a vegan body care line, she didn’t want its identity associated with animal-derived ingredients.
So Honey Butter had to evolve.
Lotusbtr. Body Care rose from the ashes.
The lotus flower became the inspiration for the new name. Every day, the lotus rises from the mud, transforming what surrounds it into something beautiful.
For Tanissa, the symbolism was personal.
She was navigating a period of uncertainty, challenging herself to face each day with prosperity, optimism, and what she describes as a rare zest for life. The lotus represented her determination to keep rising, regardless of what was happening around her.
Then came BTR.
Pronounced like “butter,” the letters also stand for “Be the Revolution.”
That idea became central to the brand.
In an oversaturated body care industry, Tanissa wanted Lotusbtr to challenge conventional ideas about what people put on their bodies and create products rooted in wellness, intention, and self-care.
When Slowing Down Became the Work
Before Lotusbtr. Body Care, Tanissa spent years working as a flight attendant and traveling around the world.
It was a career filled with movement, people, and constant demands. Eventually, however, the pace began to take its toll. An in-flight incident resulted in a shoulder injury, and Tanissa was told she needed surgery.
Suddenly, the woman who was accustomed to always being useful couldn’t work.
For someone who had tied much of her self-worth to what she could accomplish and provide, being forced to stop was difficult.
She felt like she was at the end of her rope.
But the pause also gave her something she hadn’t realized she needed: time to breathe.
For once, she didn’t have to feel like a robot moving from one responsibility to the next. She had an opportunity to think about what she wanted and what might come next.
Lotusbtr emerged from that space.
Ironically, the brand was born from a need to slow down while requiring Tanissa to become very active. Creating products gave her a therapeutic process—something she could make with her hands while exploring what wellness meant to her and how she could help others find moments to pause.
Wellness in Every Color and Scent
At the time she started developing Lotusbtr. Body Care, Tanissa was also vegan.
Her own lifestyle had already pushed her to become creative about what she prepared and consumed. As she researched veganism more deeply, she discovered something that surprised her: many products marketed as natural or nourishing still contained animal-derived ingredients, including tallow.
That discovery strengthened her commitment to creating a truly vegan body care line.
But Lotusbtr. Body Care isn’t only about what’s left out of the products.
It’s about what the products are designed to make people feel.
Tanissa incorporates aromatherapy and color therapy into the brand, drawing on research around how different scents and colors can influence mood and support wellness.
The result is body care that invites people to engage more intentionally with their daily routines.
For Tanissa, self-care isn’t simply about purchasing a product.
It’s about creating a moment.
A breath.
A pause.
A chance to reconnect with yourself.
Learning How to Build
The early days weren’t always peaceful.
Despite creating a brand centered on rest and wellness, Tanissa spent plenty of sleepless nights worrying about whether Lotusbtr. Body Care would succeed.
She became focused on making the business work rather than making sure the message reached the right people.
Entrepreneurship could feel lonely, especially because many people around her weren’t familiar with the mindset required to build something from nothing.
There was no clear roadmap.
No guarantee.
Just the decision to keep going.
Over time, however, Tanissa built something she didn’t have in the beginning: a village.
She developed friendships with other entrepreneurs who understood the grind, the uncertainty, and the emotional weight that comes with building a business.
The work became more fulfilling because she no longer felt like she was doing it alone.
Living on Both Sides of Entrepreneurship
Tanissa’s connection to ProsperUs is unique because she has experienced the organization from both sides.
She first encountered ProsperUs as a job seeker, bringing with her 13 years of nonprofit experience. She joined the organization as a Program Coordinator in 2024.
That same year, she became a participant in the ProsperUs Entrepreneur Training Program.
She initially enrolled because she wanted to understand ProsperUs better and become better at her job. She wanted to learn what the organization was doing, understand its approach to entrepreneurship, and identify ways she could improve her work.
Instead, she walked away with something much more personal.
The training reinvigorated her as an entrepreneur and gave her an opportunity to reset the foundational structure of her own business.
She entered thinking she was there to become better at her job.
She left feeling like she had become a better business owner, too.
The following year, Tanissa’s role grew. She became Business and Alumni Services Manager, where she manages industry-specific programming. In 2025, she also spearheaded ProsperUs’ inaugural beauty accelerator, Branded and Bankable.
And once again, she became a participant.
This time, she was looking at her own systems and processes and asking how she could make them stronger.
Turning One Opportunity Into Another
ProsperUs also expanded Tanissa’s entrepreneurial network beyond the organization itself.
The more she learned, the more she sought out opportunities to deepen her education and build relationships throughout Detroit’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In 2025, she participated in TechTown Detroit’s Retail Bootcamp—Ecommerce Edition.
The opportunity felt especially meaningful because she had applied the year before and wasn’t accepted.
But she didn’t view that rejection as the end of the story.
Instead, the education and experience she gained through ProsperUs helped position her for the opportunity when the timing was right.
For Tanissa, that experience reinforced an important lesson: sometimes a “no” isn’t a closed door. It may simply mean there is more preparation to do before the right door opens.
Seeing the Whole Entrepreneur
Being both a ProsperUs team member and an entrepreneur has fundamentally changed how Tanissa sees business.
On the job side, she approaches her work with an entrepreneurial mindset. She thinks about how programming and technical assistance can better serve people and how to address the person behind the business.
Because she knows firsthand that entrepreneurs are carrying more than their businesses.
They’re carrying families.
Jobs.
Responsibilities.
Dreams.
Uncertainty.
Life.
Tanissa believes support should account for the whole person, not simply the business owner expected to carry everything alone.
On the business side, her experience at ProsperUs has made her more process-minded. She thinks differently about systems, structure, and how the pieces of a business need to work together to create something sustainable.
Living on both sides of the entrepreneurship equation has given her a perspective few people have.
She’s not simply supporting entrepreneurs.
She’s one of them.
A Detroit Story
Tanissa has lived and worked in different places and has seen different communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Still, Detroit stands apart.
For her, there’s something about the city’s entrepreneurial community that she hasn’t encountered anywhere else.
The relationships.
The resilience.
The willingness to share knowledge.
The opportunities to connect.
The sense that people genuinely want to see one another succeed.
Tanissa is proud to be part of that ecosystem—not only as a business owner, but as someone helping other entrepreneurs navigate it.
And perhaps that is the most fitting evolution of her story.
A woman who once didn’t see herself as an entrepreneur became one.
A woman who built a business around slowing down learned how to keep moving with intention.
And someone who once thought making soap was simply a creative side project discovered that the small things we create can become something much bigger.
Lotusbtr. Body Care is more than a body care brand. It’s a reflection of Tanissa’s own journey: rising from difficult circumstances, choosing wellness, embracing reinvention, and becoming the revolution she wanted to see.
Because sometimes, becoming your best self begins with something as simple as giving yourself permission to pause.
Shop all Lotusbtr products at www.lotusbtr.com and follow them on Instagram.
