We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ericka Mabrie. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ericka below.

Ericka, appreciate you joining us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

First, I have to acknowledge that I am a legacy — the culmination of many ancestors’ wildest hopes and dreams. So, any mark that I’m able to make is largely due to the gifts and values I’ve inherited from them, while leaning into the traits that feel the most “me”. Personally, it feels premature to think about my own legacy right now because in many ways I feel like I’m just beginning to fully show up in my work after years of baking, returning to Earth stewardship and spiritual herbalism, and nearly a decade in marketing. I feel immensely proud to continue a legacy of Earth reverence and stewardship from my grandfathers, and to embody the love, care and resilience of my grandmothers. I’d love to be known for my sense of whimsy and wonder, dependability, creativity, kindness and grit.

Ericka, 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?

My name is Ericka Mabrie and I’m a baker, spiritual herbalist, Earth steward and marketing strategist for female-founded brands generally in the beauty, food, and wellness spaces. I’ve always had a multi-hyphenate nature and feel thrilled to weave it together with my latest venture, Faery Good.

Faery Good is an Earth-rooted microbakery and herbal practice for whimsical living. Every offering is intended to help cultivate resilience and heart centeredness to foster more connected and joyful relationships with ourselves, others and the green and unseen realms of Mother Earth. I craft delicious and beautiful, herb-forward cookies, cakes and breads made with stone-milled flours, as well as small-batch, seasonal herbal remedies. You can also find me teaching workshops mostly around baking and introductory herbalism.

I’m incredibly proud of the high quality and intention behind all my baked goods, herbal remedies and workshops. It’s really important to me to center the Earth, Spirit and my ancestors in this work and to create a business that embodies a new paradigm of entrepreneurship that honors my heart and embraces the triple bottom line.

My belief in the power of whimsy and care as agents of change fuels everything I do. Seeking out joy in our trials, feeling resilient in the face of anguish and change, and tapping into sacred playfulness are our birthrights. It’s my deep hope that my work helps wake people up to these truths so we can all live more courageously and harmoniously with each other and our planet.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Faery Good is the result of many threads I’ve been weaving together throughout my life. As a child, I’d get into my mom’s and Nana’s vanities and mix all their perfumes together, earning the title of The Concocter. It was also my Nana, Eula, who taught me how to bake when I was little. She’d let me shadow her behind the stand mixer and I remember loving how all the ingredients would come together for something that smelled and tasted so delicious. Growing up, I also spent a lot of time outside. Both of my grandfathers, Herman and Van, had these lush, verdant gardens where I’d help them plant flowers and make mud pies. Some of my earliest memories are of my Grandmommy, Imelda, carrying me around the backyard through a series of greenhouses that were overflowing with tropical plants while placing flowers behind my ears.

Once they passed away, I really stopped spending as much time outside and didn’t bake as often either. Over the course of 10 years, I moved to NYC to work at L’Oréal after graduating from college, then spent a few years at a holistic and herbal spa company before I started baking regularly again — a pandemic silver lining. I focused on cookies and would do pop-ups in my neighborhood, this was before the project even had a name. Fast forward to summer 2022, I’d started getting involved in and doing marketing for some crypto-affiliated non-profits and my friend Erica, a technologist, reached out to me about collaborating on a booth at Afropunk. The installation was a VR art gallery highlighting the work of Afro-Cuban artists, and she wanted to offer cookies and herbal teas, which is where I came in. So in about a week, Faery Good was officially born and I made my debut at Afropunk in Brooklyn selling out 400 cookies over the weekend with rave reviews for both the Curry Chocolate Chip and Hibiscus & Ginger Shortbread. With the crypto connection too, I set up a wallet and someone even paid for cookies and tea with ETH — a very cool moment for me.

From there, Faery Good has been steadily growing and evolving, expanding from a seasonal microbakery to now include a blossoming, Earth and Spirit-rooted herbal practice. After joining the Hattie Carthan Community Garden almost four years ago, immersing in ancestral technologies and becoming an Earth steward, then beginning a spiritual herbalism apprenticeship with Sacred Vibes Apothecary in Spring 2023, I feel grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to learn and grow under the guidance of two phenomenal Black female elders, Farmer Yonnette Fleming and Empress Karen Rose.

As my connection with the Earth, my ancestors, and my own spirit has deepened, Faery Good’s progression has felt both natural and imperative. Some of the most memorable milestones last year were making my first wedding cake – vanilla bean cake with plum rosemary jam and vanilla bean buttercream – for two dear friends, taking the plunge to offer my first herbalism workshops and launching my first herbal remedy, The Faery Garden Oxymel, which is a lovely ally that supports the nervous system, the heart and healthy digestion. This year, I’m really looking forward to more commissions, workshops and dreaming up additional herbal remedies.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned through my entrepreneurship journey has been to give myself permission to define my own metrics of success. As a teenager, I always felt very entrepreneurial but never had a clear idea for a business. I graduated from Georgetown with a degree in Economics, then ended up in the beauty industry for a few years before becoming a marketing consultant and project manager.

At that time in the mid-to-late 2010’s, the inside out beauty movement was taking off and people were turning to herbs and supplements instead of just serums and sunscreen. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I was unceremoniously laid off, extremely burnt out and going through an unexpected divorce. Everything was falling apart.

A few months later, while hanging out in a Bushwick park with a colleague turned close friend named Alexa, we were discussing all the functional snacks and drinks we were seeing enter the market that needed help with discovery and storytelling. From there, we launched our startup Zippy Pantry in the fall of 2020 as a destination for fun and functional foods.

We ran it for several years until deciding to pause in 2023 after changing online consumer behaviors and the rapidly rising cost of ads made it difficult to continue. I remember feeling crestfallen thinking about closing down Zippy, like I’d failed and wasn’t cut out to be a business owner. One day I was reflecting on some of the skills I learned as a first-time founder: how to make compelling emails, plan memorable events, become a more confident speaker, trust my decision-making skills, to do a lot with a little, but mostly how much artifice is embedded in startup culture. Even with investment, plenty of startups fold because the marketing and management costs in today’s landscape make most companies unprofitable, and infinite, exponential profits are only possible through manipulation and exploitation, whether that’s of people or resources.

Through my personal process of Earth reconnection, I’ve become more in tune with a truer rhythm. Seasons for growth and expansion, seasons for stability and even contraction. As I found myself embracing slower living in the fastest city in the world, I realized that I could prioritize my own metrics for success without being made to feel naïve: schedule flexibility, a relationship with place and my community, and sustainable income. This is all part of the triple bottom line: looking beyond just profit as a measure of success and centering people and place first and foremost.

A new paradigm for entrepreneurship is here, and no one is beholden to old, extractive ways of doing business or identifying with anyone else’s measure of success. Each of us has the power to tune into our hearts and discover how simple and accessible success is meant to feel — if only we’re willing to see through the illusions.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://faerygood.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericka.mabrie/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558134204626
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickamabrie/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FaeryGood
• Other: Substack: https://erickamabrie.substack.com/

Image Credits

“Rolling dough” and “Sifting” photographed by Olivia Hewitt.