Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jenn Tice. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jenn, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

We started our company over 21 years ago during 9/11, with the activation of my husband deploying. Our grassroots in our farmer’s markets developed our relationships with our farmers and artisans and really drove the partnerships. I wanted to build a company with a focus on community-supported ingredients from our local farming and artisan partners. We believe in not just good ingredients, but the importance of the impact within our community. Some of our farmers and partners we have worked with for nearly 18 years. Sourcing local for us means that as we grow, so does our purchasing within our community, and we have a featured ingredient from them in over 90% of our products.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in the rural farmlands of North West Pennsylvania. As a child, I was lucky enough to spend so much time with my grandmother, and incredible herbalist and horticulturalist. I absolutely thrived on her knowledge of plants, how they grow, how they help, what they do, and how to make the best things from them. Her knowledge never left me, and made such an impact on a growing mind. That developed into not just a fascination of plants, but the chemical world around us. I spent more time after school in the lab than I did with peers, to me, that was my extracurricular fun. Fast forward to the start of the company, I really wanted to make an effort to not just make the soap and skincare, but to pay as much attention to the chemical point and purpose behind them as possible, and to make our local ingredients shine within our products.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Our best exposure to customers and something that we still do today is our farmers markets. They allow us to get face to face with our customers. To not just about the products, but why we do what we do, the sustainability, the differences between commercial products vs artisan products, etc. An educated customer gains not only trust, but focuses them on what they may still be using at home that they could swap for a better product. Even if it’s not ours, its one more win for better skincare. Our markets are our grass roots of the company.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The past two years definitely made not just us, but I think every small business owner pivot and find out how to survive. Supply chain, the near doubling of ingredient prices, and challenges with packaging availability, have been near crippling. What normally would take 2-3 hours a week in restocking and ordering raw materials and packaging now take approximately 2 hours or more a day. Trying to revisit production to squeeze out every penny of operational budget without raising costs to our products. While I see big and small businesses reformulating products to incorporate cheaper and more readily available ingredients, we made the choice to stay true to our original formulations. Our soaps have every ingredient in them for a reason, and to take remove that ingredient for a cheaper one is changing the product that our customers expect and love. This meant our profit margins are less and less, so the challenge became how do we make that up in other places, like streamlining processes and utilizing in-flow production.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.evolvebotanica.com
• Instagram: @evolvebotanica
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/evolvebotanicaFB
• Twitter: @evolvebotanica

Image Credits
Hello Fancy Media Owl Eye Creative