Nearly a decade ago, Nancy Bruns, CEO and Co-Founder of J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works and J.Q. Dickinson Appalachian Mercantile tapped into a unique resource, a 400 million-year-old ocean, as she revived her family’s business producing salt in Malden, WV. With two decades of experience in the food industry, Bruns, a seventh-generation salt maker, added a booming event venue and subscription box business to J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works. “I think our innovation lies with community partnerships and what that can bring to a company, and that’s why we started the Appalachian Mercantile. This is a shop and subscription box business where we partnered with other Appalachian makers. We want to share those items with the world because there’s so much quality craftsmanship here in Appalachia, which is really something no one else is doing. We want to take advantage of what we have here in the state and the region and share it with the world.” Innovators and Entrepreneurs is a bi-weekly segment of the daily304 that features discussions and wisdom from West Virginians who have built their companies and launched new ideas here in the Mountain State.