Dealing with this year’s flu and cold season is going to get a little easier soon, thanks to one Saratoga County business. Galway-based company The Sick-Kit creates boxes full of curative goodies (soups, cough drops and over-the-counter medications) to treat everything from the common cold to a particularly head-splitting hangover. Best of all, The Sick-Kit offers same-day shipping on all its kit options (free shipping when purchased from Etsy), so there are no long waits or having to drive to the store nursing a head cold involved.
“It took my wife and me about a year to find out what we were going to put in the kits,” says Scott Eastwood, who co-founded the company with his wife, Teri, in March 2018. “[Sick-Kits are] based on what we were bringing to our families, and it’s just something that everybody needs.” Indeed, it’s impressive just how much is packed inside one Sick-Kit. Priced at $20 per box, The Sick-Kit “Original Box of Wellness” (i.e. the original “recipe” of items) holds everything from over-the-counter medicines such as Advil, Vicks VapoDrops and Tylenol to under-the-weather sundries such as disposable gloves, lip balm, Gatorade and even a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup (with oyster crackers). Each kit has a shelf-life of about three to six months, doesn’t need to be refrigerated and can even be left in a car or camper. “A lot of people buy it [as a] gift, and a bunch of people send them to their kids in college,” says Eastwood. To that point, the company currently offers three different editions of The Sick-Kit—Original, Hangover and PMS—and is currently working on a fourth, a miniature edition, which will be lighter and cheaper to ship.
The Sick-Kit isn’t the Eastwoods first rodeo. In addition to their latest invention, they’re the founders and owners of The Plant Keeper, an organic gardening service (also out of Galway) that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. “We love gardening, but we thought we needed to do something else, because that’s just our entrepreneurial way,” says Eastwood. “My wife and I were always giving chicken soup and ginger ale to our loved ones when they were sick, and Teri thought it would be a great idea to give [the kits] to everyone.”
It turns out, Teri was onto something. Just a few months shy of its third-year anniversary, The Sick-Kit has already enjoyed impressive success, regularly being shipped to the sick and sniffly throughout the Northeast and even as far away as California. The next step, according to Scott, is to take The Sick-Kit international by selling it on Amazon, where the locally packed medicinal parcel should be available later this year or by early next year. “We’d really like to take it global,” says Eastwood. “The response has been so positive so far that we’re just keeping going with it, and [we’ll] see what happens.”