We recently connected with Jennifer Peck and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

Mother’s Organics is a family-owned business that currently has 4 generations of women working together. We grow and harvest medicinal botanicals to produce the very best in organic skincare and selfcare goods. As a family, It can be challenging at times to work closely with family, but the loss of loved ones that came with Covid really put things into perspective for our family. Before we opened for business in 2020, we sat down as a family and clearly defined each of our roles and responsibilities and really stuck to it. 100% of the business’s responsibilities were divided accordingly with the understanding that there would be disagreements and misunderstanding, but we knew how to work it out and stay in our lane. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities are a must weather working with family or not. Overall, it has been a joy to work with family. We have really enjoyed the experience of working together in a business that means so much to each of us.

Jennifer, 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?

Our family owns and operates an organic farm in Plano, Texas focused on growing medicinal herbs and flowers for skincare and self-care use. We come from a farming family that has worked the soil here in Texas together for over 100 years. Skills, plant knowledge and use were passed down generationally and improved upon with each new growing season. My sister, a licensed esthetician, and I knew that the hydrosols, creams, lotions and goods our family was growing and producing were superior to anything we had purchased over the counter. We began to form a plan so that one day we could share our harvest with others. We purchased a property is late 2013 and began making small improvements almost immediately. We had a very defined vision in mind and meticulously worked through each detail. The first place we started was our soil. Soil health is the foundation of any organic farm. If you want to produce potent plants that really pack a medicinal punch, it is important to control the entire growing and manufacturing process from seed to skin. By farming with such care, our harvest is achieved without the use of a single pesticide, GMO, chemical(s), growth hormone or synthetic additive. Consumers in general are becoming more critical of what they are putting in and on their bodies and looking closer than ever at both ingredients and manufacturing practices. When we opened our doors in November of 2020, we quickly garnered a following of wonderful clients looking to rid their self-care routines of fake fragrances, chemicals and seed oils. Many of these clients had health issues or allergies that required them to be very critical of products they were using and consuming. The feedback we received over and over that first year from new clients was, “OMG, I can actually use your products and they work!” At the end of the day, we love what we do and it absolutely shows.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Simply, we worked and saved everything we made to self-fund our business. It took us almost 20 years from setting the intention to start this business to actually selling product. There are many family members who started this process with us and did not live long enough to see this dream become a reality. It took time and sacrifice. Farming is not for the faint of heart and in Texas its almost considered an extreme sport between the drought, heat and pests. We knew from the beginning that it would take us 7-8 years once we began building our farm before we would even start producing and selling hydrosol and creams. We had to brace for the fact that we would have several years of investment in this property before we would ever turn a profit. My sister and I made a deal early on that we would not take on debt- we don’t come from family money and there was no one to ask for an initial loan. Plus, we had spent years watching other family businesses in our community being crushed by overhead and interest and ultimately failing before they ever had the opportunity to really get going. We knew we had one shot and that was it. The only way to launch this business and the initial investment was to pay cash for everything. It was slow. It took time. I can’t tell you how many times I was told to just “speed up the process and get investors or take on debt.” We wanted to do things our way without compromising on our values. We stuck to the plan, worked with intention and made it happen. It may not be the path everyone takes, but it is the path that worked for us.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Within Mother’s Organics, we control the entire process from seed to skin. We not only grow our own botanicals, but we also manufacture our own product. My sister and I grew up in Waco, Texas and spent a lot of time farming with our family as children before organic was ‘cool’. We watched our great grandmothers and grandmothers work the land with care and received so much of our knowledge from them directly. My sister and I worked beside them every chance we got growing up. This is really how we learned. From their harvest they would produce exquisite hydrosols, salves and balms for personal or family use. Many of the same manufacturing techniques they used at the time are still used by our team today. We have a sterile, dedicated production space on our farm to manufacture solely our products in small batches. This gives us a huge advantage in that we can closely control the process to ensure quality and consistency. The nature of our products do not lend themselves to mass production, so for us investing in our own space was the right move. This allowed is to grow at our own pace without sacrificing quality and ultimately helped us keep our overhead costs very low in the beginning.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.MothersOrganicsTX.com
• Instagram: @mothers_organics
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086682983311
• Other: Tic Tok: @jenpeck266

Image Credits

Ann Edwards