Bringing the Beach Home: Sunshine + Saltwater + Yes, We're Local

by Lily Burbage

For Michelle Moser, the beach is more than a destination. It is a feeling, a memory, and ultimately, the inspiration behind Sunshine + Saltwater, a coastal fragrance brand that has found its first home in Rehoboth Beach.

The business began with a simple love of the coast. Michelle initially started Sunshine + Saltwater as a T-shirt business, but it eventually evolved into a fragrance company rooted in her own experiences growing up in Hawaii. She had struggled to find scents that authentically reminded her of the Hawaiian flowers she knew from home, and she wanted to recreate the unmistakable scent of Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion but could not find anything that captured what she remembered.

“So, I was like, ‘I’m gonna make my own,'” she said.

That decision became the beginning of Sunshine + Saltwater’s fragrance collection. What started with car diffusers grew into a full line of coastal scents designed to evoke the feeling of a beach or tropical vacation, even when customers are miles from the shore. The car diffusers remain a consistent favorite, but last year Michelle introduced body scents, which have quickly become some of the company’s most popular products and, at times, hard to keep in stock.

For home and car fragrances, Beach House is the company’s best-selling scent. For body fragrances, customers gravitate toward Beach Day and Sunshine + Saltwater. The popularity is hardly surprising to anyone who walks through the door. One of the first things customers often say is how good the store smells. The second is usually a variation of, “I don’t know how I’m going to pick just one.” That is why the store offers sample packs, allowing customers to try several scents before settling on a favorite.

Sunshine + Saltwater founder Michelle Moser.

Michelle describes the business as a brand that happens to have a retail store, rather than simply a shop selling products. She creates the scents herself, while her team handles mixing, filling, labeling and shipping in-house. The store also carries a curated selection of gifts that complement its coastal aesthetic, but the fragrances remain the heart of the brand. Sustainability runs through that mission too, with glass containers, minimal plastic and mindful, low-waste production, a natural fit for a brand inspired by the ocean.

That connection to the coast is also what drew Michelle to Rehoboth Beach. Although she has a home in the area as well as one in Annapolis, she wanted to become more deeply involved in the community after years of going back and forth.

“I just feel at home, at ease, comfortable,” she said when speaking about Rehoboth. “I love everything about it, not just the beach, it’s the people, the restaurants, bars, shops, everything about it.”

Sunshine + Saltwater had been in business for about three years through online and wholesale sales before opening its first brick-and-mortar location in Rehoboth Beach. The beach cottage that became the store immediately felt right for the brand.

“As soon as I walked in, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I can see it,'” Michelle said.

Michelle wants customers to feel as though they have walked into a friend’s beach house for the best party they have ever attended, with bright colors, lively music, and a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. Most importantly, she wants customers to feel like friends rather than shoppers. She and her team ask visitors where they are from, whether they have been to the beach, and what brought them into the store, building relationships rather than simply completing transactions. One customer captured that experience in a review, writing that shopping at Sunshine + Saltwater with Michelle was like shopping with a friend.

The personal nature of fragrance makes those relationships especially important. A scent one customer loves may not appeal to another, and fragrances can smell entirely different once applied to the skin, something no online description can replicate. Sunshine + Saltwater even offers a happiness guarantee: if a customer does not like a fragrance, they can return it and exchange it for another.

For Michelle, the work is ultimately about more than fragrance. Sunshine + Saltwater gives her an opportunity to be part of a community she loves and to support the small businesses and people who make Rehoboth Beach special. She is involved with the local chamber, Rehoboth Beach Main Street, and has spent years supporting Surfrider Foundation Delaware.

“Small businesses and people are what make a community,” she said.

That belief is also at the center of what customers support when they shop locally at Sunshine + Saltwater. They are supporting Michelle, her close-knit team, and a small business built around a shared love of the beach.

Whether it is a car diffuser, body mist or one of the brand’s signature fragrances, Sunshine + Saltwater is designed to bring customers back to the feeling that started it all, the feeling of being at the beach, where Michelle says she is happiest. The hope is that customers leave feeling happy, excited about what they have discovered, and eager to tell someone else about it.

After all, Sunshine + Saltwater was created to bottle up that feeling and bring a little piece of the beach home.