We were lucky to catch up with Daniela Honegger recently and have shared our conversation below.

Daniela , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Created with a passion for nature and a love for family. Hello. My name is Daniela Honegger and I am the owner of Queen of the Meadow. I was born and raised in Switzerland and immigrated to the U.S. in the summer of 2004. Since I was a little girl I have loved being outside in nature, gathering plants, and herbs to create my own magic potions. It was later, while I was living in the rural Truchas Mountains of Northern New Mexico, that I started to realize processing herbs is my passion. An important part of my journey was working at Artemisia Herbs in Dixon, New Mexico.The amazing herbalist, Susan Feavearyear, taught me an incredible amount about medicinal plants, how to develop products with them, and how to bring a final product to the shelf. My time with her was invaluable! After moving to La Porte, Colorado, in the fall of 2006, I was ready to start my own business. I wanted to create a business that would include both my passion for natural ingredients, and my three children; Jocelyn, Gene, and Janis.

My mission became to create an all natural, organic line of skin care products with 100% plant-based ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. While flipping through pages of herb books, I came up with a name “Queen of the Meadow”. I loved the beautiful vision I had of this queen and her meadow. I was also drawn to the name, because “Queen of the Meadow” is a real herb. With this name and my mission I was ready to begin this adventure.

After much research into ingredients, plants and sources I was ready to create my own unique formula. My products were well received by my community, and everything seemed to be falling into place. I started with my plant based skin care line, and was selling at the local Farmers’ Markets in our region. Later, as my product line expanded, I created a website to sell online as well as in the market. Slowly, I began to move to the wholesale market and began seeing my products in local as well as national shops. All the while I was able to remain true to my mission, and include my children in the lessons of growing your own business.

Today, as I look back, although it was a lot of time and energy to get where we are now, it was a great learning process and very rewarding. In 2011 we were able to purchase 35 acres of land north of Fort Collins and built an earth friendly home and sustainable workshop. For more information and pictures of the building process and home please visit: nestledwithin.wordpress.com

More About Our Namesake Herb
“Queen of the Meadow” came to us as the name for our business not only because of the beautiful image those words present but also because this is an herb found in nature. An herbaceous perennial plant that is native to the Eastern and Central United States, its latin name is Eupatorium purpureum. It blooms in the late summer and fall, and sports beautiful lavender-purple flowers on purple stems which butterflies enjoy. The plants grow quite tall, up to eight feet in height.

Working and living off the grid.
Queen of the Meadow strives to be sustainable and to leave a small carbon foot print on our planet. To accomplish this, we built our home in 2011 that closely resembles an earthship. An earthship is tucked in a hill and built out of reusable materials and materials that would otherwise be recycled or end up in the landfill. The main structure of our home is made out of recycled items; tires, glass bottles, cans, and plastic containers.

When we built our home we also included a large workshop in the home where our products could be made, packaged and shipped – as well as space for paperwork, inventory, and daily business operations.

Integrating our home and business space into this earthship structure allowed us to fully operate off the grid. This means, we are not hooked on to the city for water, electricity, or gas. An earthship functions as its own system. Our electricity is solar and wind powered and we use the sun to heat the house (passive solar). We do not have a well, and instead all our water is harvested off the roof into cisterns that hold a total capacity of 8500 gallons. Additionally, the entire building works as a greenhouse, and we integrated indoor growing space for organic herbs that we then process into our products.

For more information on the building process please visit our website:
www.nestledwithin.wordpress.com

Reduce – Reuse – Recycle
Our products do not contain any petrochemicals and are free of aggressive detergents and petroleum based preservatives that could harm you or our environment. We create our recipes only with ingredients that are kept in their most natural, authentic way, so nothing harmful gets into your blood stream. Because we are dedicated to sourcing the purest ingredients to handcraft the highest quality product, we want to make sure our packaging reflects these same values.

We source our packaging to represent the same level of quality, and purity as the products they hold. We use recycled glass jars, recycled paper bags, and recyclable plastic bottles. Some of our products are zero waste. We finish each product off with a locally printed label that includes every ingredient, as well as suggestions on how to use the product.

Daniela , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Created with a passion for nature and a love for family. Hello. My name is Daniela Honegger and I am the owner of Queen of the Meadow. I was born and raised in Switzerland and immigrated to the U.S. in the summer of 2004. Since I was a little girl I have loved being outside in nature, gathering plants, and herbs to create my own magic potions. It was later, while I was living in the rural Truchas Mountains of Northern New Mexico, that I started to realize processing herbs is my passion. An important part of my journey was working at Artemisia Herbs in Dixon, New Mexico.The amazing herbalist, Susan Feavearyear, taught me an incredible amount about medicinal plants, how to develop products with them, and how to bring a final product to the shelf. My time with her was invaluable! After moving to La Porte, Colorado, in the fall of 2006, I was ready to start my own business. I wanted to create a business that would include both my passion for natural ingredients, and my three children; Jocelyn, Gene, and Janis.

My mission became to create an all natural, organic line of skin care products with 100% plant-based ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. While flipping through pages of herb books, I came up with a name “Queen of the Meadow”. I loved the beautiful vision I had of this queen and her meadow. I was also drawn to the name, because “Queen of the Meadow” is a real herb. With this name and my mission I was ready to begin this adventure.

After much research into ingredients, plants and sources I was ready to create my own unique formula. My products were well received by my community, and everything seemed to be falling into place. I started with my plant based skin care line, and was selling at the local Farmers’ Markets in our region. Later, as my product line expanded, I created a website to sell online as well as in the market. Slowly, I began to move to the wholesale market and began seeing my products in local as well as national shops. All the while I was able to remain true to my mission, and include my children in the lessons of growing your own business.

Today, as I look back, although it was a lot of time and energy to get where we are now, it was a great learning process and very rewarding. In 2011 we were able to purchase 35 acres of land north of Fort Collins and built an earth friendly home and sustainable workshop. For more information and pictures of the building process and home please visit: nestledwithin.wordpress.com

More About Our Namesake Herb
“Queen of the Meadow” came to us as the name for our business not only because of the beautiful image those words present but also because this is an herb found in nature. An herbaceous perennial plant that is native to the Eastern and Central United States, its latin name is Eupatorium purpureum. It blooms in the late summer and fall, and sports beautiful lavender-purple flowers on purple stems which butterflies enjoy. The plants grow quite tall, up to eight feet in height.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process./

Created with a passion for nature and a love for family. Hello. My name is Daniela Honegger and I am the owner of Queen of the Meadow. I was born and raised in Switzerland and immigrated to the U.S. in the summer of 2004. Since I was a little girl I have loved being outside in nature, gathering plants, and herbs to create my own magic potions. It was later, while I was living in the rural Truchas Mountains of Northern New Mexico, that I started to realize processing herbs is my passion. An important part of my journey was working at Artemisia Herbs in Dixon, New Mexico.The amazing herbalist, Susan Feavearyear, taught me an incredible amount about medicinal plants, how to develop products with them, and how to bring a final product to the shelf. My time with her was invaluable! After moving to La Porte, Colorado, in the fall of 2006, I was ready to start my own business. I wanted to create a business that would include both my passion for natural ingredients, and my three children; Jocelyn, Gene, and Janis.

My mission became to create an all natural, organic line of skin care products with 100% plant-based ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. While flipping through pages of herb books, I came up with a name “Queen of the Meadow”. I loved the beautiful vision I had of this queen and her meadow. I was also drawn to the name, because “Queen of the Meadow” is a real herb. With this name and my mission I was ready to begin this adventure.

After much research into ingredients, plants and sources I was ready to create my own unique formula. My products were well received by my community, and everything seemed to be falling into place. I started with my plant based skin care line, and was selling at the local Farmers’ Markets in our region. Later, as my product line expanded, I created a website to sell online as well as in the market. Slowly, I began to move to the wholesale market and began seeing my products in local as well as national shops. All the while I was able to remain true to my mission, and include my children in the lessons of growing your own business.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

It really helped selling our products at our local Farmers’ Markets and other events. Simply, being seen in our community and engage with each individual customer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://queenofthemeadow.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queenofthemeadowskincare/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lotionbar