We caught up with the brilliant and insightful DK Crawford a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, DK thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

“The Quench Body Butter Story”

One of the craziest stories about Be Wyld Child centers around people eating my sumptuous Quench Body Butter!! It smells like fresh-squeezed oranges, feels buttery and looks tasty! It is my answer to the Santa Ana winds that make your skin feel like a lizard. Quench is terribly hydrating, (featuring seabuckthorn oil and cucumber seed oil) and turns from a body butter to an oil as you warm it in your hands. It keeps your skin hydrated and fluffy for up to 18 hours and is a great date night secret.

One market I decided to try making special samples of Quench. I took out one of our vintage blue willow plates and used an icing bag to pipe little dollop swirls of it that looked like buttery, sweet confections.

We had signs saying exactly what Quench was but no matter how many times we tried to clarify, “would you like to try a sample of Quench Body Butter?” people either only heard butter, or heard what they wanted to hear because several put it in their mouths! I was grabbing customers’ hands and following them with napkins asking them to spit it out.

“Can’t I eat it, it looks so good?” people would ask and I would say, “Well, you could… there isn’t anything in there that’s truly harmful to ingest as we make products safe for your skin but it probably won’t taste nearly as good as it works!”

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.

“From Food Critic to Botanical Beauty Brand Founder”

I’m DK Crawford, originally from Cajun country in southwestern Louisiana but now I live in a cottage in downtown Ojai, CA. I was raised spending much of my time in nature and since moving to Ojai, have become immersed in it again. Be Wyld Child has reignited the creative, free, wild child in me though now, instead of riding horses in the wetlands of the south, I am perfuming in Ojai’s sacred “valley of the moon”.

Be Wyld Child is a natural, sensorial, luxurious, botanical beauty world of products that not only works to capture the spirit of Ojai, but we have also begun capturing live scents in small batch, limited runs that further connect you to this mystical, healing valley. We work to keep our ingredients safer and our scents wyld. And we package those essences in zero-waste, plastic-free containers.

I was a food critic in my 20s, which combined two of my passions, (sensorial writing and flavors) and I also worked on cookbooks and developing recipes. I could often write recipes solely from smell memories. As a foodie, I began creating my own gardens that explored scent and taste that mixed vegetables, herbs, wildflowers, heirlooms and natives.
My life changed significantly when I suddenly developed reactions to synthetic chemicals. In an effort to regain my health, I began removing toxins from my life. I learned how chemicals in makeup, skincare and perfume are some of the most toxic of all, can disrupt your endocrine system and even be directly carcinogenic. So, my world became mostly scentless, (other than my gardens), and I cleaved to nature even more.

My life felt so austere at times as I struggled without enjoying the seemingly simple joy of lighting a candle or using a scented lotion. Perfume was absolutely off the table as even the ones that said “natural” often contain hidden, problematic ingredients.

“Our Philosophy: Safe, Sensory & Wyld”

In 2022 I created solid lotions with natural scents that healed my dry winter hands and smelled divine. That season, Be Wyld Child was born and people loved the idea of our tiny, luxurious-feeling individual solid travel lotions. Be Wyld Child became known for simple, safer hydration products with great natural smells and by April of 2023, our first botanical perfumes were released!!

One beautiful gift Be Wyld Child has given is helping others who have issues with chemical sensitivities, are terrified of smells and can be triggered so easily. I give them a very subtle scent to smell first like Pearblossom Hwy and let them choose how close they want to be to it. Usually, after that experience, they feel safe enough to smell our other products and often discover they can wear them. For some, this is the first time in 20 years they have purchased or enjoyed anything with a scent.

“Signature Scents: Gratitude and Beyond”

The thing I am most proud of is bringing Gratitude Perfume to the world! “It smells like Ojai!” It features sacred white sage that blooms on our trails, loam, dark orange, the sweet intoxicating smell of orange blossoms from our East End orchards and locally grown lavender. I worked years to collect the finest natural oils from all over the world that truly resonated just right.

On my sister’s birthday I began to blend them and as I did, the room was flooded with golden light and joyous tears streamed down my face and I saw images of people being helped. That day, this gorgeous golden oil perfume clearly named itself Gratitude and I receive weekly emails about how Gratitude Perfume has helped people get through so many hard things like loss, moving, divorce, turbulence on a plane, letting go of control, building their gratitude practice, or getting a new job. It is so heartwarming and many wear it as their signature scent saying they never want to live without it. I’m honored to steward this supportive scent that came through me.

This past year, we have begun a bigger push with live collecting scents in the valley like honeysuckle, magnolia, star jasmine rose and iris. I am harvesting orange blossoms and propolis and fig leaves from neighbors and the California Coastal Horse Rescue and using five different natural older perfuming methods to capture them. It is labor intensive, (especially as each plant requires a different process and tending) but it’s also connecting us to neighbors and the plants in our neighborhood. These essences, balms, perfumes and hydrosols will be limited edition items people who are on my email list will learn about first and each year of every plant and its captured essences will vary, much like a vintage of wine. These scents are so alive, coming literally from plants that are breathing out their essence nightly for 60 + days in order for me to capture them. Slow scents, patient gathering, alchemical magic!

As I spend time with the plants and trees I pay attention to what they seem to want to give people. I ask them to help people and let them guide me daily. I have made Magnolia Blossom, Honeysuckle and Orange Blossom hydrosols this year, enfleurage, and perfume essences from the local plants. When I’m out collecting blossoms under a new moon dark sky filled with bright stars I think about the magic of capturing live scents straight from the plants and how all that they experience is infused into that perfume, even the star and moonlight!

What I want people to know is that I live this wyld experience. I live near the plants I am harvesting and connect to all of the love here in the Ojai Valley. I believe if I have a certain safety net in place like choosing simple foundational ingredients to build upon and no chemicals that have been proven to damage your health, then literally, the sky is the limit and I can go scent-crazy from there!

Do I want you to smell like everyone else?
Not unless the world smells like Gratitude! (Perfume). :)

I want to be part of your secret rebellion where you choose yourself and your health but still celebrate joy and mystery. Maybe you’ll quietly choose to wear Tomato Pie on your hip bones and bearded iris on your navel and arabica and dark orange behind your earlobes and Gratitude over your heart, tucked in your decolletage and hairline and spray honeysuckle in your hair before you step outside for a special day… We want to soften your skin and adorn your body with natural things that make you swoon.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My company name, Be Wyld Child, speaks directly to this! I had to unlearn being afraid to take risks and to listen to that little voice inside that leads me toward joy and creative ideas like daring to make a crazy natural perfume called Tomato Pie that smells like the perfect summer meal or thinking how lovely it would be if there were little Sleepy Stars (solid lotion stars) that could help you fall asleep but also moisturized your lips and hands. Getting to see these unusual ideas become real is joyous.

I grew up in a conservative southern culture and was taught to be cautious and to respect intellect more than emotion, intuition or creative ideas. The name Be Wyld Child speaks to both celebrating the natural essences I use, but also to owning and even celebrating those parts of ourselves that we thought we had to put away in order to be successful or fit in. Sometimes those unusual parts of us are the path to happiness.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

A few books that changed my life were:

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown *I was fortunate enough to do a semester with Brene in which we read two of her books and they truly changed my life.

Daring Greatly taught me how to be deeply authentic without comparing myself to others and to take courageous steps. I was someone who was afraid to truly be my unusual self for a very long time and thought fitting in was so crucial that I used to suppress the ideas I had.

I learned from Brene that the power is in truly being yourself, without armor and I believe that has changed everything for me. One of Be Wyld Child’s core values is authenticity and part of the reason we are able to put unusual ideas out there is because we drop our armor and lead from the heart.

Mr Angelo’s Bakery by Marjory Schwalje was my favorite book at my grandmother’s house that I read over and over and is now out of print.

It is about a man who has an incredible gift with cooking but struggles to find a way to use his particularly wonderful talents in a way that intersects what the world needs. He tried various things and part of that was understanding what he loved or didn’t, what he was willing to sacrifice to be successful vs what sucked the life out of him.

With the help of an entrepreneurial young man, they discovered the exact formula that kept both Mr Angelo and his customers happy!! At the time I was obsessed over this book I had no idea I would end up creating Be Wyld Child! But the resilience of this problem-solving business model always intrigued me and I use it with Be Wyld Child.

How can I be the happiest creator because when I am, I give wyldly wonderful things to the world? And how can what I give naturally connect to the people who need and want it? All of that is in this tiny book as well as outrageously fantastic illustrations!!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bewyldchild.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bewyldchild/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bewyldchild/

Image Credits
The image of me in the black shirt looking up, top right with the sign above me in the booth was taken by my sister, Lys Martin Calire