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

Jenna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

Entrepreneurship runs deep in my family. From my great grandparents and each generation following, it seems we can hardly help ourselves from sharing our passions and skills with others in a way that eventually becomes a business.

Our small business is unique in that it richly involves our children and my husband in the day-to-day. We are in this together. The emphasis and main goals of our work and lifestyle are not revenue driven, but rather, values driven. We aim to teach our children life lessons in the hard work it takes to build and maintain a homestead, to live a healthier, more natural lifestyle, to daily connect with creation, and to ultimately recoup the cost of doing so by simultaneously sharing our passion & handcrafted, natural goods with others.

I don’t necessarily hope that my children take over or join the family business when older, but rather that they take what they’ve gleaned about hard work, faith, success & failures, setting goals, and even life & death and are able to apply those lessons and character development to wherever their passions and skills lead them.

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?

Lavenwell is our small homestead & business located in the middle of the Dallas, Fort Worth metroplex. I’m Jenna, the small business owner and homesteader doing the majority of the behind-the-scenes work. From our herb garden and herd of Nubian dairy goats, we focus on creating small batches of natural skin-care products such as goat-milk soaps, goat-milk lotions and herbal balms/salves.

As a Registered Nurse, I have a deep desire instilled in me to care for others in a wholistic way. As a mother of three younger children, the reality of the continuous exposure to unhealthy chemicals in our environment and food became a topic I wanted to know more about. Furthermore, having two of my children with dietary challenges related to cow’s milk protein lead me to discover they could tolerate goat’s milk without any problem. It was then a rabbit-hole of the very best kind as we learned more about how I could better provide for the health of my own family with the additional of dairy goats.

We were stationed in England with the US Air Force during the season of our lives when we began exploring what it would take to dive into having a homestead of our own. Our 86-year-old neighbor, “Ms. T.”, graciously shared her magical back-yard garden with us and taught us how to garden. Each day, my young children and I would tend to her garden with her expert instruction. It was the gift of a lifetime to learn in a hands-on way from such an incredible woman and friend.

We took what we’d learned and jumped head-first into homesteading after returning to the US. We quickly had an excess of goat’s milk and learned how to make soaps and lotions that are particularly beneficial for those who struggle with sensitive skin. It’s a joy to be able to provide a nourishing, wholesome product made with such natural ingredients and to see how much others enjoy them.

We are a young business and are very much learning along the way. One of the ways that we’ve been able to best connect with our community is by taking part in our town’s farmers market. It has provided opportunities to share our homestead with those closest in proximity to us. We were even able to bring extra smiles to many people’s day at a recent market when we brought one of our baby goats along for the day. We love teaching others and sharing more about our products in a visual, hands-on way!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

While the famers markets and pop-up events are very helpful to reaching new customers, word-of-mouth has been key in finding loyal customers who just can’t help but share their love for our products, purchase them over-and-over again, and be our biggest supporters. We are so grateful for each and every customer!

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Each and every item is handcrafted and labeled here on our homestead. Crafting cold process soap and getting our recipe right took many, many months, and many fails. A few books, a class, and many experiments later brought me to the perfect recipe that utilizes the most wholesome of ingredients for the biggest organ in your body- your skin! Making soap and lotion from ingredients yielded from our farm really brings everything full circle and gives us the opportunity to give a little bit of Lavenwell to others. Making the handcrafted soap and lotion from our goat’s milk is both an art and a science. It gives me the opportunity to express creativity in the various natural colorants and natural additives. Choosing soothing or energizing scents is also a delightful process.

Everything that we make is done in very small batches. But this is part of what makes Lavenwell special- no machines… just our hands, lots of love, and care.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lavenwell.com
• Instagram: @lavenwell_

Image Credits

Amanda Webb of Footsteps Photography (credit for the portrait of Jenna).
All other images were taken by myself.