Sweethearts for sale

BY COLLEEN LUTOLF
Staff Writer

The Sweetheart Pouch allows owners to carry around the scent of someone they love by spraying perfume on a tiny foam heart. A notecard can be used to hold a loved one’s words and photo. BRICK — Some people believe our sense of smell determines with whom we fall in love.

Sisters Gina Natalewicz and Shelly Nieves are more concerned with what the olfactory sense can do when love between two people already exists. In fact, they founded a homegrown business based on it.

Natalewicz and Nieves created the “Sweetheart Pouch,” a satcheled keepsake that allows its owners to take a loved one’s scent, photograph and words wherever they go.

“The power of scent is endless,” Nieves said holding the 4-inch organza pouch that contains the siblings’ invention. “People don’t have to use it only when they miss someone, they can hold onto the scent of someone they live with and carry a part of them with them everyday.”

Inside the pouch is a notecard about 1-inch-square (folded) that can hold a loved one’s photograph on the outside and his or her handwritten words on the inside.

PHOTOS BY SCOTT PILLING staff Sisters Gina Natalewicz (l) and Shelly Nieves explain how they thought of the concept behind the Sweetheart Pouch. But what makes the pouch unique is the small heart it holds. Inside a small, round, air tight plastic container is a heart made of foam which will — for at least a year, Natalewicz promises — hold the scent of someone you love.

Natalewicz’s friend and neighbor, Betty Carbone, chose Estée Lauder’s Pleasures — the perfume she has worn for years — for the hearts in the Sweetheart Pouches she gave her five children after she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.

“My youngest daughter had a very hard time with what was going on so she was one of the first ones to get one,” Carbone said. “I sprayed on my perfume and wrote them each a little note, ‘Something to remind you of me. Wherever you go, I will always be with you.’”

After surgery and chemotherapy, Carbone is now in remission, but her daughter continues to keep the Sweetheart Pouch with her wherever she goes.

The Sweetheart Pouch comes in seven colors and costs $7.95 each. They can be ordered on www.sweetheartpouch.com. “I asked her how often she takes it out and she said, ‘Mom, you don’t want to know,’” said Carbone.

Carbone’s granddaughter, a college freshman, also has a Sweetheart Pouch that contains the picture and scent of her mother. She keeps it by her bedside.

It’s uses like these that Natalewicz and Nieves never expected.

“It’s surprising,” Natalewicz said. “We were gearing this toward teenage boys and girls but we’re getting people buying them for people we didn’t even anticipate.”

A little more than a year ago, the only thing the sisters had anticipated was going into business together.

“We were racking our brain about what we wanted to do,” Natalewicz said.

Inspiration struck Natalewicz outside Lake Riviera Middle School. She was sitting in her Dodge Intrepid waiting to give her eighth- grade daughter a ride home.

“As I saw the boys and girls coming out of the school, I was thinking something for a boyfriend/girlfriend,” she said. “If they could have the scent of the other person and hold onto it.”

Natalewicz drove home and started searching the Internet for the materials she would need for the product.

Once she assembled them, she presented her idea to Shelly.

“All of a sudden, she shows me this finished product and says, ‘Here it is,’” Nieves said. “I said, ‘You could do this alone.’”

But the sisters expect big things to come from the Sweetheart Pouch.

“I said, ‘I can’t do this alone because you have to come with me on Oprah,’” Natalewicz said. “We’ll give one to Oprah for Steadman.”

Once the sisters knew what they wanted to sell, they drafted their brother Kenny to design their Web site, and another brother, Tommy, to design the Sweetheart Pouch’s packaging.

The siblings just needed a name for their corporation before they could begin selling their product online.

The experience led to what the sisters now call “Marie Adele moments.”

“We were trying to come up with a name and we were thinking of trying to tie it in with our family,” Natalewicz said.

Natalewicz and Nieves were 2 years old and 7 years old, respectively, when their mother, Marie Adele, passed away.

“We were thinking of names in Italian, or ‘sorelle’ which means ‘sisters’ in Italian,” Natalewicz said.

“Then Shelly looks at me and says, ‘What about mommy’s name?’ ” Natal-ewicz said as she and Nieves re-created their first “Marie Adele moment.”

“We started grabbing each other and jumping up and down and crying, ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ So whenever we get a great idea it’s a Marie Adele moment,” Natal-ewicz said.

“We feel like she’s watching over us,” Natalewicz said.

The Sweetheart Pouch comes in seven colors and sell for $7.95 each.

Not only are they good for sweethearts, children and grandparents, but the relatives of servicemen and women stationed overseas, said Natalewicz.

“Our father was a Marine sergeant,” she said. “He really helped us realize how soldiers would appreciate this.”

The sisters have customers who have used the Sweetheart Pouch as gifts for teachers, husbands and wives who are away on business trips and one customer who ordered the satchels to use as party favors for her wedding shower.

Aside from their Web site, www.sweetheartpouch.com, the sisters’ creation can also be found at the Country Store Jeweler in Brick Mall. Natalewicz and Nieves hope to soon have the Sweetheart Pouch available at Ocean County Mall.