We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ariel Rolfe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ariel below.
Ariel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
My business mission is to get folks excited about going outside! I have been developing this business/side-hustle for around three years now. The impetus was mostly for me to earn enough money back to pay for all the different things I like to make. I truly love drawing and crafting things with plants. From researching and foraging to salve-making and games, I just can’t help myself. However, over the years, I have been trying to be more intentional about how and what I want to harvest as well as how I want to share these things. Foraging and living with nature should ultimately be FUN and the pressure of making money was taking away from that. Not only that, but there are plants that I don’t feel right selling so I give them away when it feels appropriate. Besides that, Tlingit people have been living on this land (Tlingit Aaní) since time immemorial and I’m still navigating what that means for my own plant journey in a capitalist world. I want to be respectful to the gifts the land offers and to the ancient knowledge that I benefit from. So, this newest adaptation of my business has become less about foraging to sell and more about sharing the passion for foraging.
Ariel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was born and raised in Alaska, where I live today. I grew up going to our family’s cabin on a remote island in the summer and fall for fishing, hunting, tide-pooling, and all those fun things. I guess that’s where my love for this land began. As an adult, I got two degrees to become a museum exhibition planner & designer. I spent the last 15 years as mainly an exhibit fabricator, doing everything from welding to carpentry to painting. I have worked on museums, heritage centers, and various other exhibits all over Alaska and, for two years, in California. As an exhibit designer/fabricator I was tasked at times to create interactives for the exhibits, which really tapped into the concept of “gamifying”. Generally in museum exhibit interactives, you take the “big idea” of the exhibit and find a way for the visitor to engage with it – either through a fun game, some type of conversational provocation, or by making something. Anyway, I really enjoy doing this – thinking of ways to communicate complex and nuanced ideas in really straight-forward and powerful ways. So, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do with my business now. I have learned so much about the plants here, not only as a child growing up in the woods, but as a professional in my museum work, too. Additionally, for the last five years, I’ve lived mostly off-grid (without stable electricity and usually without plumbing/water) in a variety of unusual structures in rural areas. I’ve lived in a boat, van, shipping container, and several tiny cabins. Living this way has not been easy in many ways. It challenges me to discover where my edges are, pushing me to ever-broadening limits of the homesteading life (chopping wood, repairing structures, learning how to be my own mechanic) and my self awareness.
As a do-it-yourselfer and as a person who lives in remote places, I make a lot of things from scratch. I have always loved making things so this was a natural progression. Foraging began as a berry-picking and mushroom-hunting endeavor but expanded when my partner and I moved to my family’s cabin and needed fresh greens. We love harvesting and processing everything from fish to kelp salsa and stocking our shelves with food to live off of. For the business, I make all sorts of things from plants, including: salves, tea blends, tinctures, ice cream, ferments, chocolates, and art. Art is where I am finding my rhythm for the business. It’s impossible to forage enough to sell AND to keep for my own uses. Not to mention the amount of time that goes into harvesting and processing things – it is just not profitable. However, I have drawn plants for a long time, as a hobby, and lately I’ve been taking my drawings and transforming them. My biggest and I think most exciting product is a plant matching card game, similar to “Memory”. You have to match a plant in spring to the same plant later in the year. I drew and painted lots of regional plants in different stages that I then digitized for the cards. The idea is to teach the player to know the plant in different seasons. It was a lot of work, but really fun. I have more game ideas in the works for this winter, too.
I am proud of the work I am doing as both a wannabe naturalist and as a person. It’s really f*cking hard at times to live this way and I can feel desperate for some stability, but I know that route is not easy either. This is where plants can teach so much – I love living in the seasonality of nature. Plants are particularly potent at certain times of the year and even day-to-day, much in the same way I am. I tend to jump from job to job because of my seasonal lifestyle and it’s incompatibility with most careers. The things I make in this business is what keeps me grounded through both seasonal and life transitions.
In summary, I guess what I’m trying to really get at is this: I want to contribute to a culture of curiosity about where someone lives and enough love for that place to not want to destroy it – or each other. I don’t think I’m special or unique in this, but maybe where I am different is that I want to maintain a lightheartedness around this idea because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of living in the woods it is that we have to laugh and play to get through dark times.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
I think this is a really important question! I had no capital to start my business and have been mostly living on a prayer – loving what I’m making and hoping others do too. I started completely out of pocket, which wasn’t much but I scraped enough together to pay for supplies, classes, books, etc. I took the time to just focus on learning and making, experimenting, spending time getting to know my plant-neighbors. Then, I was offered a seasonal job at my current museum that I couldn’t turn down because I definitely wasn’t paying the bills on the sales of salves. But, I had been working all last year on the plant matching game and I was really set on getting it printed. My brother offered to help me pay for my first printing and they sold out within 48 hours! I couldn’t believe it. I had to reorder immediately! Things are slowly growing now and I am hopeful about this new iteration of the business. I’m having a lot more fun with it, anyway.
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
I don’t sell on any of those platforms. I tried on Etsy (and still have a store “open”) but it takes a lot of time and work to market yourself effectively. It’s very competitive! I am focusing on local right now, word of mouth is powerful – especially in small communities. And folks here have been extremely supportive. I also sell on an online farmer’s market called Salt & Soil Marketplace, which is an amazing resource for the isolated communities in our region of Southeast Alaska.
The cons are that it is a limited population here and my channels are a very small piece of that puzzle. It’s hard to get retail stores to respond to my wholesale inquiries because they are so busy trying to run their own businesses and already have their distribution network figured out. The pros are that I get to have a personal connection with many of my customers. I get to tell them about how I made the artwork or other products and I get to share with them what I know about the plants. Probably not a model for a big business but it’s been nice now. Another pro is that I have been noticing that a lot of teachers – both in public school and in home-schools – have been the most interested in my work. That feels pretty darn on point to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://fireside-herbs.square.site
- Instagram: FiresideHerbs
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariel-rolfe/