If there’s one question we’ve been asked more than any other, it’s Why do we do it all by hand?
Depending on who’s asking, the question can mean different things…
• Why do we insist on wildcrafting ingredients and materials when we could save loads of time by just ordering everything online and having materials shipped right to our door?
• Isn’t it “dangerous” to handcraft body and skin products outside of a hyper sterilized lab, and where are all the pharmaceutical ingredients that make our products “safe”?
• How are we ever going to scale the business?
My last post contained a lot of reflections about the future of work after seeing the film titled The Future is Handmade, which begins to dispel the many myths out there regarding handmade items and craftspeople in general. I’ll be referencing that post here, but you can read that story in full here.
Wildcrafting
So why do we insist on wildcrafting our products?
If you aren’t sure what wildcrafting even is, Wikipedia defines it as “the practice of harvesting plants from their natural, or ‘wild’ habitat, primarily for food or medicinal purposes.”
In the spring, we harvest materials like wild yarrow, dandelions, stinging nettles, fresh spruce shoots, elderflowers, sweet violets, chickweed and more. The summer bounty is incredible, too many plants to begin listing! Some highlights for me each autumn are Sea Buckthorn, Juniper and Rowan berries, Rosehips, plus lots of various roots. By winter we rely mainly on conifers, or evergreens, and all the things we’ve preserved throughout the rest of the year.
I feel that it’s important for us to do this work ourselves in order to maintain the highest quality, most sustainable product. We take great care in taking only what we need and never taking in a way that harms the plant. The Honorable Harvest is something we strive for, and usually achieve. When we do the wildcrafting ourselves, we can ensure that the plants are not only harvested responsibly, but that they harvested from truly wild places – away from industrial farms, factories, traffic pollution and the like.
Doing the work ourselves also keeps us learning from nature everyday. Keeps us aware of any environmental changes. Keeps us striving toward excellence in every detail. And keeps us flowing with, rather than trying to override, the natural cycles of creativity and production. It’s a relationship that I deeply value.
Also, the sensory knowledge we’re gaining keeps us physically and intellectually connected – keeps our whole heart in this work.
These are things that can’t be traded for faster, cheaper production.
Also, I have to say that we don’t wildcraft every single ingredient in Wyld products, but we do wildcraft as many as possible. For ingredients and materials that we cannot access here in Sweden, we work with partners who share our values. It took years to find the right suppliers. And I’ll never forget the day, very early on, that I showed up at one of our supplier’s businesses and was totally shocked – in a bad way – by their production processes. It broke my heart, to the point where I began to doubt everything. But eventually I was able to find amazing suppliers who know far more than I, whose respect for nature and love for their product is so real. They make my work so much more fulfilling.
In a Studio, Not a Lab
It’s true that we do not operate a medical lab or have our products contracted out to factories or laboratories. It’s also true that we do not add preservatives, stabilizers, sulfates, synthetic fragrances, fillers or any other pharmaceutical ingredients to our products.
Our products are handcrafted to order. They are designed to be used, not to sit on stockroom shelves for years. They are filled with active substances of nature that have not been sterilized or processed or isolated.
If you read our article, How Lockdown Is Affecting Your Skin, you’ll remember that we discussed the role of microorganisms in our health. You’ll remember that we suggested looking for skincare products that don’t use preservatives. Why? Well, consider what preservatives do. They keep the product safe for a long time by killing all microbes that could potentially grow in them. Unfortunately this is exactly what they can do to your skin as well, over time compromising the skin microbiome (made up of microorganisms called commensals) that keeps your skin healthy.
Once, someone on Instagram contacted us about the lack of preservatives in Wyld products. She became very aggressive, even calling them “dangerous”. There is a lot of fear out there. I know that. I don’t really know where it all comes from, but it’s not just about skincare products. Too many people spend their days, and therefore our lives, in hyper clean indoor environments eating sterilized foods, spraying disinfectants in the air, sanitizing their bodies with anti-this and anti-that.
Of course it’s very important to be safe, but our concerns with safety can reach unhealthy levels when fear takes over. Not all microorganisms are bad! In fact, we need them.
Also, it’s not like we produce in a dirty workshop. Our tools are always sterilized. So are our bottles and jars. Our counters are regularly disinfected. We work in an extremely clean space, but it’s not a hospital or a lab environment, because that’s not the type of setting where our best discoveries are made. All of our best products have come into being through everyday experience and simply living.
While I love and respect the medical system, and I’m constantly learning from different branches of science, I believe there are other ways to gain knowledge. Personally, I need to involve my whole self while working. All of my senses and intuition. When I’m too much in my head and not enough in my body, very little creativity and very few deep insights come out of it.
Wyld products were not conceived as medical products, but as everyday life support. In fact, Wyld didn’t begin as just a skincare company either. Focusing on skincare was more of a business decision, which leads to the next question we get when people ask us why we continue to handcraft our products.
Scaling
I’ve always said, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. It’s not how things are normally done. We’re still operating according to the industrial model of work, and that’s fine for some!
I was hesitant to build scaling into my business model from the very beginning because it meant compromising on some things that we important to me (see above).
And if/when production and demand became an issue, I hoped there would other creative solutions for solving it. Maybe, maybe not. But why not stay open rather than closing lots of doors from the very beginning?
Other brands who offer handcrafted products have tackled business hurdles in clever ways – limited releases, going wholesale only, ditching wholesale all together, ready-made collections, bringing other passionate people in, working smarter instead of harder (I can admittedly push myself quite far, for better or worse), etc.
Instead of asking, how are things done today, I try to find a bigger perspective. How were things done before, and how will they be done in the future? Instead of asking, how can I prepare for growth issues, I look for perspective from Nature, the ultimate creative. I mean talk about productivity! What are her rhythms like? And I use the word rhythms instead of solutions, because I’m not certain she views them as problems at all.
Thanks for reading and much love!
xx Beth
