We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Tice a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jennifer, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
Definitely my parents and grandparents. Both my Mother and Father were blue collar workers. My Dad worked in one of the last steel mills in NW PA, and my Mom was a nurse when I was a baby, and went on to work with the city in with the redevelopment of the older buildings. The both worked so hard, the typical 9-5 and then some. My brother and I were latch-key kids, so we came home to let ourselves in and do our homework before Mom would come home and start dinner. My grandparents were so inspirational too. My grandfather flew in WWII and never seemed to sit still. He was always making or tinkering with something. And my Grandmother, she taught me so much, and really inspired me the most. She owned her own business, and was an amazing herbalist. I spent half of my summers with her in her pet store and her garden. What she didn’t know about plants, you couldn’t fit on a fingernail. They all worked so hard.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I absolutely love what I do. What really gets me the most excited about my products is the collaborations with my local farmers. Getting to use local ingredients from our community, whether it’s local goatmilk from my farmer friend Mary (who I’ve worked with now for 18 years), or turmeric from Rodger’s Greens, or Cucumbers from McMullen Family Farms, and utilize them in our products, not only means we are using the best ingredients, but it means we are supporting real people in our local community. I means less big trucks on the road. It means a better product for our customers. And it means that the more bars of soap we sell, the more products we are buying from our farmers. It means so much to me that we can make such an impact in so many ways.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think one of the biggest ways that have made an impact or a difference in what I do is to not look at the way we do production in the way that a typical soap or candlemaker might look at things. Because I come from a lab/manufacturing background, I look at things in scale, and process. How to make things run bigger, run better. It’s allowed us to make more product with a smaller number of people than most companies of our size and space.
My best advice that I can give to people is to read. Read and experiment. Don’t just make 3 batches and start selling a product. Learn why something is doing what it’s doing. And fail. Understand why it’s failing. So that you know and how to fix it. And how to make it better.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I am ALWAYS looking for folks to partner or collaborate with. Nothing makes this business more fun than inspiration or collaboration with another brand or partner to create something special. Whether it’s a creator and a mood inspired soap/candle/bath bomb and a unique scent to go along with them, or a unique ingredient to utilize in our products, bring it on!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.evolvebotanica.com
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