We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelsea Wallace. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelsea below.
Alright, Chelsea thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?
Even though owning a business is accompanied by its own set of frustrations and stressors, I am certainly happier overall as a small business owner. It is a life I very carefully and intentionally chose for myself and my family. All my “regular” jobs in the past suited me adequately at the time because I wasn’t ready to be a business owner then, but as I grew and as life changed I needed to find happiness elsewhere. I needed to build a life that could incorporate all the day to day joys with family that I wanted to experience.
When I got married at 31 and then became pregnant with my first child shortly after, my priorities drastically shifted. I’ve never been someone who wanted to climb corporate ladders or gain recognition within a career, but it took having my little one and starting our farm to not feel such societal guilt over wanting to prioritize my own personal aspirations over these mainstream goals. Building a farm from the ground up (quite literally) enabled my husband and I split the responsibilities of owning our business into the tasks that we each enjoyed most and were consequently the most suited for. While he builds infrastructure, plants our crops, and manages the more scientific aspects of crafting salves and soaps, I am able to care for our daughter while maintaining finances, designing marketing and packaging, and managing our social/online presence. It is a ton of work, but our days are predominantly our own to balance.
Sometimes I wonder if explaining this desire for the freedom to plan my life on a very day to day basis sounds selfish or like I’m trying to escape something. But I think it is incredibly important to make life work for you while also contributing towards community. A happy and fulfilled individual will always been more likely to have the space to give outwardly. We own a farm so we can make and offer our community products that will enhance and support their lives. The joy we find in our work hopefully shines through in the integrity of what we create.
And truly at the heart of all this stems the understanding of how beautiful yet fleeting life is. Sounds incredibly corny, I know! But both my husband and I lost our fathers to their own battles with disease (cancer and Alzheimer’s) within the past three years and both devastating losses securely settled us into this path of living life with as much intention as possible. Life is so incredibly short. Even if our current business doesn’t work out and it proves to no longer serve our family, we will be grateful for the time it has given us to spend long days farming together in the sun. And we will move on to find another venture that suits us and conforms to how we want to spend our life in a slow, joyful way.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Well, my name is Chelsea Wallace and I’m an creative, introverted Maine native who enjoyed many years of education, travel, and directionless experiences before becoming a wife and mom who simply wanted to spend my days tending to the “little things” in life. Except I’ve come to learn that these “little things” really are the backbone of my happiness; tending to a garden, baking good food, nurturing my family, and managing the small business that works toward supporting it all.
I will always remember the day when I found a newspaper article on one of the first hemp farmers here in Maine. I pointed to the article’s headline and asked my husband, “Can we do that?” I had been gifted seven acres of land by my mother, land that I grew up on as a child, and we knew we wanted to tend to it in a way that could eventually support our family. We wanted to grow something, to farm the land and harvest a crop that would be valued. We knew nothing about hemp. But my husband has experience in farming and a proficiency in the make-it-work skillset. And I was determined to put all my random tech, design, and social media skills as a Millennial to good use towards the business related aspects of the undertaking. And it has predominately all worked well!
We grow several acres of industrial hemp each summer, all by hand and from seed to full grown, flowering plant. Harvesting is a painstaking undertaking due to our quality standards. Our limited number of plants out in the field enables us to tend to each plant throughout the growing season and when it comes time to harvest, only the grade-a flower is snipped from each plant. We built our own barn to dry the plant matter in and then store it. This dried and cured hemp flower is then used towards handcrafting small batches of our salve, body oil, facial serum, soap, and other value added products. Without getting too into the chemistry behind it all, hemp contains cannabinoids that work with our body’s natural endocannabinoid system. Our products take advantage of hemp’s naturally occurring CBDA (the acid or the original form of what is heated to create CBD) to support the body’s anti-inflamatory functions. Your body reacting to a bee sting, a sunburn, a bruised knee, aching hands, or an old injury all counts as reasons why a well made CBDA product could be just the thing your body could use to find relief.
We originally planned on crafting CBD products for our customers and their aches and pains. Our first test batches to friends and family all came back with glowing reviews and we were thrilled with the success! But when we received that original salve’s first lab tests and they showed only CBDA within the product and no CBD, we had a choice to make. Should we stick with the formula we had and what was working, knowing that we would have to work towards educating consumers of this less popular hemp product? Or should we make what everyone else was making because it was trending? Well, we went with what we felt good about. Our product was working well and was the most full-spectrum, natural version that we could create. Education would just have to be a part of our business plan.
So, here we are today. We’ve gone from having only one amazing product on our website to being able to offer nearly ten, depending on the season. We work with local retail business we love in wholesale capacities and have enjoyed several white label opportunities. Vending events and markets are always such a blast and provide fruitful new connections. And while we still have many goals we haven’t yet achieved, we are making it work for us and are enjoying the journey enough to push forward towards those goals. We’ve hit quite a few personal hurdles along the way, so we give ourselves some grace and move on. And if the day comes when its not fun anymore or it provides more stress than its all worth, then we thank our little business, Headland Homestead, for its joys and leave it behind us.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
The most common comment I receive when I meet someone in public who discovers that they follow us on social media is always something like, “Your content is so natural and real!” Everyone really seems to appreciate the lack of staged moments and insistent advertising. They mention their enjoyment in getting to see the little day to day moments and the reality of working on a farm, raising a child, running a business, and trying to remain sane. Hearing these comments and seeing that a large percentage of our followers are young to middle aged women lead me to believe that social media is, at its core, about connecting to the heart of your followers. I want everyone to see what our lives are like outside of shipping orders, making products, and planning our growing season. While that content is interesting and also provides a peak into our lives, it isn’t always relatable. I certainly include it here and there, but I don’t put it at the forefront.
I’ve also come to learn that there are tried and true ways of growing a social media following, the tips and tricks that trigger those tricky algorithms. My following does grow when I post every day at a high traffic time consistently for several weeks. It grows when I use Reels more or when I always keep content up in Stories. There are so many little actions I know to work well. However, I hate it. Truly. It feels forced and it is never as authentic. So while I could certainly give advice here for how to consistently build an audience, it also feels a bit misleading.
The advice I would offer as both a friend and a business owner, is that you decide how important for you and your business it is that you have a steadily increasing audience. If it is clearly leading to new customers, then the next step is to find a way to be consistent that works for you. Maybe its finding a way to make social media enjoyable for yourself or a setting time of day to devote to regular content creation. I know many people create multiple days worth of content in one or two days for the week, but I personally don’t think I could maintain the “personal touch” our account is appreciated for with such a schedule. There are all sorts of options for finding inspiration and organizing weekly content. And there are literally thousands of accounts solely dedicated towards trending posts and how to beat the algorithm, so I’d recommend finding a source you trust.
However, remember that social media burnout is real. It’s okay to take breaks, post when it works best for you, and gain an audience a little more naturally. If it doesn’t serve you and your business in the way you really want it to, that perhaps rapid growth isn’t the right fit. Or maybe you have the resources to hire a Social Media Manager for this aspect of your business. All this to say, I know all too well that social media can feel like a big cause of anxiety and stress. So, the underlying advice is to guard your mental wellbeing in any direction that you take with it. Check in with yourself regularly to see how it’s impacting you.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
From the very start we have chosen to manufacture all of our products ourselves in house. When we asked friends, family, and acquaintances what hemp products they had used before, the answer was generally a little disconcerting. Most had only ever tried some mass produced topical made with an isolate that had no direct connection to the source of the hemp and the originating farm. As mid-coast Mainers, so much of our community values transparency from their small businesses and farmers, so it was surprising to hear that so many individuals had been desperate enough to try something they knew so little about.
So, not only did we not want to waste time and resources finding the perfect manufacturer for us, but we wanted to be able to sell a product that never left our hands. It certainly wasn’t the easiest route, but it meant that we would know exactly what went into our plants as they grew, how they were handled during harvest, the quality of storage before production, and every detail about how our value added products were crafted. We knew we wanted a straightforward topical that would utilize the amazing properties of hemp to the fullest. And we certainly didn’t want a product that would hide behind a long list of additional ingredients.
We established our own production methods and packaging techniques. My husband would often manufacture new tools to make a process more streamlined or efficient. And we’ve reached out to other fabricators for the machinery we couldn’t make ourselves. But at the heart of it all remained our control over every aspect of production. This means that our batches are small, but for products that have a varying shelf life, this works well for us and can be utilized as a selling point for consumers.
The other important part of manufacturing our own product was the ability to control our environmental footprint so easily. We’ve been able to minimize our waste output and find many ways to upcycle products that may have otherwise been discarded as trash. Again, we have a direct hand on everything, so no step of the process isn’t carefully chosen.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.headlandhomestead.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/headlandhomestead/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/headlandhomestead
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